Swans on Tea

Making magnetic monopoles, and other exotica, in the lab
Physicist Shou-Cheng Zhang has proposed a way to physically realize the magnetic monopole. In a paper published online in the January 29 issue of Science Express, Zhang and post-doctoral collaborator Xiao-Liang Qi predict the existence of a real-world material that acts as a magic mirror, in which [...]

When You Watch These Ads, The Ads Check You Out
Watch an advertisement on a video screen in a mall, health club or grocery store and there’s a slim – but growing – chance the ad is watching you too.
Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at [...]

Movie Trivia: Stand By Me
Jerry O’Connell (Vern) had never really acted before – he had just one commercial under his belt. When he auditioned, he recognized Rob Reiner and said, “Aren’t you the guy on channel 5?” At the time, the local channel 5 had been airing reruns of All in the Family at the [...]

I’ll link to this before the day of the big game this time.
Buffalo Hot Wing Dip

Terrorists may use Google Earth, but fear is no reason to ban it
Criminals have used telephones and mobile phones since they were invented. Drug smugglers use airplanes and boats, radios and satellite phones. Bank robbers have long used cars and motorcycles as getaway vehicles, and horses before then. I haven’t seen it talked about yet, [...]

The Slaw of the Land: West Virginia Hot Dog Map
Cole slaw on hot dogs? Ugh.
[I]t has this to say about ketchup on hot dogs: “There are many reasons why one shouldn’t eat ketchup on a hot dog any hot dog.First, the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council’s Hot Dog Etiquette rules dictate that no [...]

As I was going up the stair
I saw a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away…
Hughes Mearns
Laser-cut art book by Olafur Eliasson
[A] laser-cut negative space rendering of his house in 85:1 scale
via

The Secret Lives of Photons

How do you measure the properties of something that’s really hard to detect? It turns out that because of the wonderful usefulness of conservation laws, you can infer what you can’t easily see by finding as much as you can from what you can detect, and then figuring out what’s left over. Somewhat [...]

The benefits of teaching the statistics of risk analysis.
Probability lessons may teach children how to weigh life’s odds and be winners
“You can tick off story after story that’s probably interesting to the people it happened to, but not statistically unusual at all. There was a recent story about a family in Gloucestershire with three children [...]

I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle
To test whether I was being paranoid, I ran a little experiment. On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhones embed geodata into photos that users upload to Flickr or Picasa, iPhone shots [...]

I am writing to request that you IMMEDIATELY contact your elected
representatives and let them know that the proposed Congressional
economic stimulus package must include a strong investment in
scientific infrastructure to ensure the future competitiveness of
our country. We also request that you contact House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi to thank her for her tremendous efforts in ensuring that
science [...]