Swans on Tea

The 6 Cutest Animals That Can Still Destroy You
Pay special heed to #5.

10 effects you should have heard of, over at Backreaction.
Full disclosure: I don’t recall hearing of #10, and I didn’t know #9 by its “formal” name.
snark: But I have heard of the ending-your-sentence-with-a-preposition effect. (it’s a weakly forbidden phenomenon)

Don’t worry. Physics has its own version of the EXPELLED! garbage. Well, sort of: Einstein Wrong - The Miracle Year
You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video
Four and a half minutes of dreck, if you’re at rest with respect to your computer monitor.

Over at Cosmic Variance, a discussion about getting the message of science out, in the context of the recent EXPELLED! brouhaha.
To the Framers, what’s going on is an essentially political battle; a public-relations contest, pitting pro-science vs. anti-science, where the goal is to sway more people to your side. And there is no doubt [...]

A paper Enigma machine. No, it’s not just ROT13.
This machine is compatible with the original 3-rotor German Enigma used during World War II. For simplicity it omits the “ring settings” and plug board, but the primary workings of the machine are captured in this model. Great as an educational tool, or just [...]

Is it a problem if you have to use a dolly to lug your beverage supply in to your office?

Cut me some slack — there was a huge sale. It’ll take days to drink all this.

I propose we run science porn.
Thus spake a site admin, and so I shall. Of course, because of my particular fetish, there’s no porn like AMO porn:
Lab Porn: Plasma! and Lab Porn: Doomsday!
Shoot, a feller could have a pretty good time in Vegas with all that stuff!

I ran across this blog post on future energy concerns — Less heat, more light: solving the energy crisis, and while much of it seems solid and there are some very good points in it, there are some things that are very, very wrong. And there’s this whole problem with conclusions drawn from invalid [...]

I guess it’s a dog-day. No, not dogs as projectiles — what a horrible thought. (I used cats in my physics examples when I was teaching. Or smurfs, if I had blue chalk)
You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video
And a wiener dog, no less. Very Gary [...]

I’m no good at taking tests and the post “understanding” referenced within, over at the Blog of Doom.
I may not be able to see into their minds, but the problem I see is this: rather than learning the concepts and forming a mental model of how something works, students are learning (and are being taught) [...]

Sunday’s Speed Bump cartoon.
The caption is (concerning an alien “dog”) “She’s 3 … or 22 trillion in light-years.”
Light-year, as we all know, is a distance. (As is “parsec.” I’m looking at you, Han Solo!)

Over at Skulls in the Stars
Direct measurements from Aristotle to Galileo to Roemer to Fizeau (and Tinkers to Evers to Chance), and then the work of Michelson and Morely