Swans on Tea

I’ve been summoned for jury duty. While I hope I get an interesting case, like one involving entropy cops arresting someone for violating the second law of thermodynamics, or the symmetry squad nailing someone on a CPT violation, I know I won’t. They always seem to plead those out.
UPDATE: Much ado about [...]

Lest you think that physics research is all about smashing shiny new large hadrons into each other (or even used economy or subcompact hadrons), or something to do with conductors (whether they be super, normal or semi), or the groupies — let’s not forget the groupies — there are folks out there studying the physics [...]

Scarcely able to believe his eyes, Ralph Mellish looked down. But one glance confirmed his suspicions. Behind a bush, on the side of the road, there was *no* severed arm. No dismembered trunk of a man in his late fifties. No head in a bag. Nothing. Not a sausage.
And [...]

Lightning and the Runaway Breakdown Theory at the At the Speed of Light! blog.
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Oh, and here’s another link, in case you were thinking the title was a reference to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
“The Barents sea heaved and churned like a tortured animal in pain, the howling wind tearing packets of icy green water from the [...]

Google “turned the lights out” for earth hour.

But if you have an LCD screen, a black pixel draws more current than a white one, because you have to energize the pixel. The low-energy state is “clear,” which lets the backlight through, and gives you white. So this thinking is very CRT, very yesterday. [...]

The engagement ring that floated away.
A $12,000 lesson in buoyancy. If only he’d paid attention in school.

Accelerator in a Bowl
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via physics and physicists

I was poking around the blogdom — with the rise of science-y, i.e. non-diary (and, I suppose non-dairy) blogs, surfing the web has become interesting again — and ran across a link to How to Build a Cloud Chamber, and that reminded of the person that built the cloud chamber using a Starbucks cup. [...]

The many-tentacled PZ over at Pharyngula explains why we need academic freedom…to question Newtonism
We’ve been lofting people into the sky for well over a hundred years, and quite often, they’ve fallen down. How many have died due to the tyranny of the gravity Newton put into the hands of conscienceless materialist scientists?
Oh, crap, he found [...]

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It took me more than a few seconds to be convinced that it wasn’t just two people with a box over their torsos.
Big Dog
Much less time to figure this one out
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(’twas the feet [...]

Physics conspiracy: LHC could kill us all
Conspiracy nuts have suggested that it might also inadvertently destroy the Earth (or maybe even the entire Universe)
…
[B]asically the cranks think that the collider will also cook up either an exotic particle or a tiny black hole that will suck up everything around it. It’s pretty much bunk, as [...]