Swans on Tea

Over at Pharyngula, PZ Myers is complaining that all the cartoonists are making fun of him
It’s true.
Before I even knew he existed, I drew a cartoon depicting cephalopod torture. It was a promotion for a talk on superconducting quantum interference devices, or SQUIDs. (I got criticism that it’s more an octopus-looking thing in [...]

Over at the XKCD blag, Randall discusses solar sails and levitating squirrels. And he’s absolutely right — the Back-to-the-Futuresque 1.21 Gigawatts will levitate about a kg, assuming perfect reflection. Assuming absorption, you vaporize the squirrel in a couple of milliseconds.
(1 kg of water requires about 2.5 million Joules to boil away, starting at [...]

I’m shocked, shocked, to find that I’m getting shocked. My adventures with static electricity.
It’s winter, it’s dry and that makes for pretty good sparks. I haven’t been going to the gym the last few mornings (recovering from being unwell) but have been going to work, so that means peeling off some layers of [...]

Check out this illusion over at Cognitive Daily, along with all the explanation that goes with it.
I think illusions are pretty neat. They are also a reminder to not trust what you think you are seeing, since our vision is relative and we also see patterns because we impress them on data.

Lunar eclipse tonight
The entire event is visible from South America and most of North America (on Feb. 20) as well as Western Europe, Africa, and western Asia (on Feb. 21)
Unless your weather sucks, of course.
Snow showers in the morning will give way to a mixture of rain and snow for the afternoon. High [...]

The red flag proclaiming “I don’t understand science” goes up when the story sounds something like this:
The panel includes the word “evolution” in state science standards for the first time, but it is relegated to a place among a host of ideas, including Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Relegated? To the “lowly” place that includes [...]

I fucking opt out already.
I buy stuff for my lab. I get email. I don’t care if your widgets are on sale — if we don’t need one, I won’t be buying any. I don’t make any “OMG, those 100 microfarad capacitors are to die for” impulse purchases for the lab. [...]

Over at Uncertain principles, Chad talks about how Nobody Expects Bose-Einstein Condensation, i.e. while the phenomenon had been predicted, the enabling technology was serendipitous.
What really made [magneto-optic trapping] take off, though, was that people figured out you could get the laser cooling wavelength for rubidium from diode lasers. And diode lasers are manufactured in mass [...]

Nanotechnology isn’t morally acceptable to a lot of people.
My immediate reaction, after playing “what the?” is that this is a reaction from ignorance. I mentioned before that many people get visions of nanobots taking over the world dancing in their heads when you mention the word “nanotechnology” so I suspect this is [...]

Came across a great post entitled “The Pre-history of Einstein’s Relativity” over at Skulls in the Stars.
It starts with Galileo and the notions he had to overturn, and progresses through Newton and through to about 1900 1880.
Regarding Newton and relativity,
The first excerpt observes that understandings of space, time and motion that arise [...]

So tachyons enter the conversation at SFN once again, and I was looking over the wikipedia article
And it says, in part, “the same formulae that apply to regular slower-than-light particles (”bradyons”) also apply to tachyons”
Bradyons? That’s a new one on me.
Obviously there are two types, or genders. They show bunching behavior. [...]

The first law of thermodynamics: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Pretty straightforward. No loopholes.
So why does a press release from Los Alamos sound like it’s ignoring the first law of thermodynamics after painting the room green?
Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a low-risk, transformational concept, called Green Freedom™, [...]