Swans on Tea

The official shotgun rules
There is no crime greater than calling Shotgun on Monday in reference to the ride to the concert on Friday. Some people choose to play this way, and they are fools.

Cosmic Variance: Fake Style
Discussion of journalistic guidelines for physics articles (mostly), some more tongue-in-cheek than others.
I think you have to start with avoiding the phrases that should be tossed over the event horizon.

How to Reject a Paper: Advice from a Chain Letter
You have to keep in mind that no matter how crappy the paper is, the authors are going to be pissed that it is rejected, and they are going to immediately begin wracking their brains to identify referees who might have done the dirty on them. [...]

Halloween math class.
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It’s Talk Like A Pirate Day 2009

Fewer paying speed-camera tickets in Arizona
[W]hen state Department of Public Safety officers served 37 unpaid photo-enforcement tickets to Vontesmar recently, he wasn’t fazed.
The photos all show the driver wearing a monkey mask.
“Not one of them there is a picture where you can identify the driver,” Vontesmar said. “The ball’s in their court. I sent [...]

*Too Much Time On Their Hands
Leave It to Beaver: 1958
Someone watched an episode from “Leave It to Beaver” and freeze-framed a note from the principal that got sent home with ‘the Beav.’

…
Lew Burdette just hit a home run and Milwaukee leads seven to one in the series.
This is the last line of [...]

No, probably not.
Scouts to no longer bring penknives on camping trips
Apparently the scouts are behind all of the knife-related trouble in the UK.

Physics Buzz: Six degrees of Paul Erdős
Some famous names have low Erdős numbers— Bill Gates has an Erdős number of 4, Steven Chu’s is 7, and Albert Einstein is 2.
If Chu’s is 7, mine is no greater than 10; I can trivially trace a path through my thesis advisor to his, to Chu. [...]

I have come to the conclusion that socks are fermions, and that this explains much of the behavior of disappearing socks. (There may be other factors at play, of course) Clearly they are not bosons; you cannot make two socks occupy the same space: Put two socks on the same foot and [...]

Stupid sports
A wife-carrying contest is actually a lot like it sounds. Men, carrying wives, race through an obstacle course that includes sand, water and fences. The prize for winning the race is the wife’s weight in beer.

Long day of driving yesterday, and at some point I’ll start wading through all of my RSS feeds, etc., but for now, here’s a sign from just outside of Ridgeway, PA (”Avoid carpal-tunnel: just keep your headlights turned on!”)