Swans on Tea

Today’s xkcd is about quantum teleportation, but the problem isn’t that journalists write the “same disappointed story” whenever quantum teleportation is being reported. It’s that they still report that teleportation is somehow connected to moving matter around, whether they’ve been waved off about it or not; the latter would be because they didn’t vet [...]

Giving your new results away too soon
[W]here do you announce your results first: in the title? In the abstract? In the introduction? Or, in the results paragraph? If you wait to long your paper will become a whodunit and readers will get bored and stop reading your paper. If the clue of your paper is [...]

Phone conversation overheard in Hell’s IT department:
Sir, I have to get you to change your password to comply with the new protocols.
It’s to keep our servers safe, sir. We’re at risk. There are a lot of hackers out there.
Well, yes, sir, many of them are hellraisers, and ultimately that’s a good thing, but [...]

Using NMR to check the fitness of wines (Don’t bother with this, for multiple reasons, if they have a bottlecap instead of a cork)
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Makes Sure Wine is Fit For the Queen of England
When wine hits 1.4 grams of acetic acid per liter it is considered bad. Although the average bottle of [...]