Swans on Tea

A Light Take On The Gravity-Time Relationship
Brian Greene explains the link between gravity and time.
Greene has written a short (less than 40 cardboard pages) new picture book called Icarus at the Edge of Time. It tells the story of a young boy who slips off in a space ship and cruises over to a black [...]

Credulous media will apparently never run out.
Blacklight Power bolsters its impossible claims of a new renewable energy source
It’s difficult to pay attention to these claims, because scientific history is littered with ambitious, revolutionary theories that turned out to be groundless. But Blacklight is an interesting case. Its “hydrino” theory isn’t put forth by a single [...]

In the 80s music videos link from the other day I noticed the unsurprising absence of BLOTTO, a favorite Albany (NY)-based band from my high school/ college days (along with Fear of Strangers, aka The Units). So I went and looked for them on YouTube.
I must protest what I found.
This has to [...]

What We Research at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Researchers at PI build on the two great revolutionary advances of 20th century physics – the relativity and quantum theories:
Einstein discovered that space and time are not separate entities, but are different aspects of a single geometrical entity called spacetime, which dynamically twists and warps as [...]

A Perspective on 3-D Visual Illusions
slideshow and article

more music charts
No, it should have been a Venn diagram. They’re all idiots.

It’s not as funny as the I Love Lucy episode with the chocolates, but it’s still pretty neat.
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What Shortage of Scientists and Engineers?
So why do we keep hearing complaints about a shortage? One recent reason is that it’s been harder for foreign scientists and engineers to get visas since the Sept. 11 attacks. But the quickest and cheapest way to deal with that problem is to increase the number of visas (as [...]

Corruption in textbook selection
A copy of the chapter in Richard Feyman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman in which he serves on a textbook selection committee, and some followup commentary.

Sticky tape generates X-rays
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have shown that simply peeling ordinary sticky tape in a vacuum can generate enough X-rays to take an image — of one of the scientists’ own fingers
Only when you do it in a vacuum, though. Not clear (the concept, not the tape) if [...]

A brief digression on lost time: John Hodgman on TED.com
Hodgman explains his hypothesis behind his contention that Enrico Fermi was an alien, and explains why he ended up eating alone. Plus all sorts of other stuff.

But we are fascinated. The Life of the Queen Bee: Superb Macrophotography