Yep. Those words can be used in the same sentence. Don’t let them ever tell you otherwise….

So what do you do with a room full of physicists, from tender undergraduate to hardened graduate student to stone-chisled faculty?

Well, first you feed them…..

…And then you play physics-themed Pictionary of course!!

Random numbers picked themes, chapter headings, or words from a physics textbook. Then someone draws the concept (no equations or words allowed) and their team (which does not know the theme/word/etc) has to guess, to get a point on their turn.

The hardest one: “viscosity”. Easiest ones: “temperature”, “mass”.

The best one: “Electric field” (The player quickly drew a pylon carrying power lines… and then a football field. Brilliant.)

In case you were wondering, it was the USC Physics and Astronomy Department Holiday Party last night. I enjoyed it…Thanks Amy, Katie, Aditya, Thad and Ram, who organised it! (I also learned there that we have a number of readers of the blog from USC students…. Great! Hope you had fun too!)

-cvj

Via Pharyngula. The Star Tribune has an inspired editorial about a couple of renowned biologists who are moving overseas. The headline and sub-headline are

Bush science policies hurt U.S.

Loss of top geneticists is latest toll from religious corruption

I think the phrase “Religious Corruption” hits the nail right on the head.

You can read more about it from PZ. I’ll just give you the last paragraph here,

The United States is accustomed to being the beneficiary of brain drains, but in the biological sciences that has now been reversed because of the unreasonable restrictions imposed on the use of embryonic stem cells for research. The irony in this is staggering: To prevent researchers from using surplus embryos from fertility clinics — already slated for destruction — opponents will forgo willingly the promise of cures for cancers and assorted other diseases that afflict millions of human beings. There are ethical considerations in this research, but they can easily be answered, if opponents were willing to engage in a dialogue. But they’re not; despite their self-identification as “prolife,” they’d rather see the stem cells in surplus embryos killed than kept alive and used in scientific research that might help heal people in the future.

Maybe. An international theological commission is reportedly slated to advise Pope Benedict to abolish the notion of limbo – that place which is neither heaven nor hell, but has souls waiting in, well, limbo. Before his death, Pope John Paul asked the commission to consider the sticky issue of limbo, requesting “a more coherent and enlightened way” of describing the fate of innocents. I realize this is not the appropriate reaction, but I was highly amused after seeing this article.

Limbo is officialy designated for the poor souls of infants who die before being baptized, or the poor souls of others who die without grievous personal sin. They are not admitted to heaven, as they have never been forgiven for the original sin. This got me wondering – just what constitutes grievous personal sin anyway? Catholics are supposed to go to confession, reasonably often, to own up to their sins. Even if we don’t murder, rape, or pillage, we still commit sins. I would hope that normal everyday type of sins are not considered grievous, otherwise the poor souls of an awful lot of us are condemned to hell. Surely the poor soul of the Sherpa that lives on top of a mountain in Tibet and has never heard of Catholicism gets to go to limbo. I am showing my religious ignorance here, but I would bet the fate of such souls differs, depending on who is pondering the notion. Thanks to the teachings of the church, some people probably believe that unconfessed normal everyday sins are a direct passage to hell.

This begs more questions….If limbo disappears, what happens to all the poor souls that are already there? And while I’m asking, isn’t it up to “God” to decide where all the poor souls go? I really had no idea such a decision could be made by a committee. I can’t wait to see what they have come up with.

1. Perrier
2. Chardonnay
3. Snapple
4. Slim Fast

Via Chad Orzel, Scott Spiegelberg’s instructions on How To Sing the Blues.

If death occurs in a cheap motel or a shotgun shack, it’s a blues death. Stabbed in the back by a jealous lover is another blues way to die. So are the electric chair, substance abuse, and dying lonely on a broken-down cot. You can’t have a blues death if you die during a tennis match or while getting liposuction.

I’ve just heard* that there’s a 12-hour live webcast from CERN on Einstein’s theory of Relativity. There’s lots to see, and it is on now!

From the press release:

This unprecedented event will be broadcast live on the Internet from a webcast studio in the CERN Globe of Science and Innovation. Similar locations around the world are connected via Tandberg videoconference: the Telecom Future Centre (Venice), Imperial College London, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Chicago), the Exploratorium (San Francisco) hosting scientists from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the Bloomfield Science Museum (Jerusalem) and the National Science Education Centre (Taipei).

From the seven main platforms, internauts will be taken on a world tour to other physics laboratories and science museums visiting virtually all the time zones of the planet, from Europe to America, from Asia to Tasmania and as far south as Antarctica.

The programme includes subjects such as relativity, gravitational waves, mass and gravity, antimatter and neutrinos, along with the mysteries remaining in Einstein’s physics, and the technologies derived from it. A global audience will be able to discuss the impact of Einstein’s discoveries and look beyond them with top-level physicists such as Stephen Hawking and Paul Davies, and with physics Nobel laureates David Gross, Murray Gell-Mann and Gerard ‘t Hooft, connected from the 2005 Solvay physics Conference in Brussels (17:10 CET).

Einstein was also a refugee, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) will discuss the positive contribution refugees can make to their society of adoption.

Peter Kirstein from University College London, who was instrumental in the Internet’s early evolution, will be joined by fellow Internet pioneer Bob Kahn, and Robert Cailliau who played a key role at the birth of the Web, to explore the role that basic science plays in the evolution of information technology.

Nobel laureate Leon Lederman will host a show live from Fermilab, featuring interviews with young physicists, fun physics demonstrations and live music (21:00 CET).

Other highlights include the award ceremony of the Pirelli Relativity Challenge from the Telecom Future Centre in Venice (15:30 CET), and an online quiz for 15 to 19 year-olds. Based on three top mysteries stemming from Einstein’s theories, this competition will offer Apple iBook and Apple iPod prizes to the winners.

-cvj

(*Thanks Ed Copeland!)

(No, not a new element discovered. Just wanted to use that title.) What can I say? Black and white animals can be ridiculously cute. Especially if they’re baby ones. Spotted* in the LA Times was an article about Tai Shan (pictured in my lunchbox above), the four and a half month old Giant Panda cub (photo is from earlier) which gave its first official press conference to the national media yesterday in Washington DC.

The article’s nice and all, but the good stuff is the live pandacam (!) at the Zoo’s website on the Pandas where you can watch the mother and her cub hanging out! See also the collection of ridiculously cute baby Panda photos here, (this is where I got the photo from) and other photo galleries. (Oh, yes, and lots of valuable scientific information, and information on how to support the species, here.)

-cvj

(*Thanks Samantha!)

No, this isn’t another post about the Bush administration. Rather I’m pointing you to an exquisite rant by Dinos Chapman about how artists love to lie about their sex lives.

The rant is of the type that one can only find in a British newspaper (meaning that it is bile filled and has some inspired profanity) and was in part provoked by an article titled “Creative types have more sex”. Here’s a taster

What a pile of crap. Those responsible should be shot. Better still, they should be forced to have several thousand sexual partners. Preferably schizoid artists, bad, ugly, psychotic ones. Then shot.

Enjoy!