Swans on Tea

Phil Plait runs down the numbers about leap days, and why the Gregorian calendar has them every 4 years but skip every 100, except when we unskip every 400.
And if you find that confusing, you’re still probably not as confused as we Swedes are. The old Julian calendar didn’t have the rules [...]

Over at Skulls in the Stars, a good summary of anomalous dispersion (aka pulse reshaping). When a news article reports a laser experiment that supposedly shows superluminal behavior, the odds are pretty good that this is what’s going on.

So yesterday I linked to a couple of anti-relativity sites, and tearing down their arguments might be fun, as gg suggests in the comments. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg of people who have a beef with some part of physics. And the folks who think physics is in need of [...]

Over at Pharyngula there is a link to a talk summary (not surprisingly, related to evolution) that says
Evolution is the “greatest deception in the history of science”.
Wait. I thought Anthropogenic Global Warming was the greatest deception in the history of science
But, whither physics? Surely physics has foisted deception upon mankind, somehow. Ah, [...]

Trivia about time, to be precise. Prior to my current job, my knowledge of timekeeping was pretty much knowing how to read and adjust a clock, and because I’m a physicist, Einstein synchronization (basically accounting for propagation delay of light) and the effects of general and special relativity. All of the physics-related exercises [...]

A friend emailed me with a link about the LHC, and poses this question:
If one of their micro-black holes gets away from them, will the lab go “moob!”?
(Back when he and I were teaching nuclear stuff for the navy, it was standard practice to represent pair-production as going “foop!”)

It’s a mystery to me how tenaciously someone can hold on to a scientific proposal after it has been rigorously demolished, as happens with cranks, crackpots, woomeisters, quackademics, etc. Even after you separate out the charlatans who are trying to scam a few spacebucks out of somebody, and the ones driven by some ideology, [...]

Color memory on a greyscale image
via Daring Fireball

Patently Silly
Angular transformation of the fedora to JohnB

GPS turns 30 today

An essay on basic research and budgets and making a case for the necessity of funding.
In truth, fundamental research is a necessity, not a luxury. Most of the technological developments made in the past 100 years have been fuelled by fundamental research into science.
It’s mostly about “Big Physics” and there’s a lot that [...]