Swans on Tea

Jennifer Ouellette has a new blog, not the same as the old blog, at Discovery. Check out Twisted Physics. She promises shorter posts than on Cocktail Party Physics, which isn’t going away.
Rest assured, Cocktail Party Physics isn’t going anywhere. It will continue much the same, staunchly independent and wheezily long-winded.

No word [...]

And that performance enhancing drugs are involved.
NY Times editorial. If Big Brown Wins, Racing Loses
This might sound obvious, but it’s worth stating: horse racing is nothing without the horse. And yet right now the horse’s best interests don’t seem to be paramount in racing.
[. . .]
No one has seriously accused him [current trainer, Richard [...]

via Respectful Insolence

Over at Science After Sunclipse, Blake discovers (among other things) a fine tradition: volunteering in absentia.
Do not oversleep and miss a meeting because the meeting announcement was sent to the e-mail address you don’t use because it’s continually broken, or else you too may draw the short straw in absentia and find yourself [...]

There’s a movement afoot to make the recent “Classic Papers Challenge” a regular event. Suggestions for naming of both the general effort and an alternative term for “carnival” are being solicited. Go on over to Skulls in the Stars and leave a suggestion.

The science of scriptwriting
McKee examines story-telling like a biologist dissecting a rat. But after taking it apart, he explains how to build a story yourself using rules that wouldn’t look out of place in a computer programming text book.
[. . .]
Using McKee’s rules they compare the script of the film Casablanca, a classic pre-McKee movie, [...]

The home of the future, from the perspective of 1939
Microwave ovens, electrical appliances, VCRs/DVRs, heat pumps . . .
The Precipitron, however, eliminates more than ninety-five per cent of such air-borne particles by charging them with electricity and then drawing them off to oppositely charged collector plates. Housewives will appreciate what this means in keeping rugs [...]