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Category: Humor
Time Travel via YouTube
Via everywhere on the internet, here’s Jeremiah McDonald, who used a 20-year-old videotape of his younger self to carry on a conversation across time. (Seems legit at a casual glance, but I suppose it could be faked.)
Sadly we can’t actually transfer information into the past. If we could, I would have started writing this book a bit earlier.
Hitler Learns the Tevatron Has Been Shut Down
I’m going to hop on a plane to Geneva. Have to see a man about a boson.
Here’s something to tide you over. A bit of friendly international-competition humor. [NSFW captions.]
“I should have gone into string theory!”
Quote of the Day
Hey, anyone remember the lawsuits that were trying to shut down the LHC? They were finally dismissed by a federal appeals court in 2010, with the following concise summary of the situation:
Accordingly, the alleged injury, destruction of the earth, is in no way attributable to the U.S. government’s failure to draft an environmental impact statement.
Of course, maybe we’re just lucky enough to live in the branch of the wave function where the disaster didn’t happen?
More Gradual Erosion in the Dignity of Humankind
The next obvious step in the robots’ scheme to take over the world: develop an unbeatable strategy for Rock-Paper-Scissors. (The robots are patient, their plan has a lot of steps.)
It didn’t bother me when computers became better than us at chess, but this is outrageous.
PhD Comics Explains the Higgs Boson
Jorge Cham visits CERN, and comes back with tales of particles and mass.
Calamities of SuperNature
Tony Piro, the artist behind the webcomic Calamities of Nature, explains the relationship between science and the supernatural better than I ever could.
Click for the rest of the exciting story. Via Evolving Thoughts.
Dark Matters
Jorge Cham, creator of the celebrated PhD Comics, sits down to talk with Daniel Whiteson and Jonathan Feng about dark matter (and visible matter!). But rather than a dry and boring video of the encounter, he cleverly illustrates the whole conversation.
Dark Matters from PHD Comics on Vimeo.
I think it’s an exaggeration to say we have “no idea” about dark energy — physicists like to say this to impress upon people how weird DE is, but it gives the wrong impression because we actually do know something about it. But not much!
I love my students
Of the thousands of these I’ve received, this is perhaps my favorite student evaluation ever. Thank you anonymous student, for your helpful feedback.
(And if this makes no sense, please watch here, or, if you must, read about it on wikipedia)
You Pinheads
Update: darn it, Phil beat me by minutes. Always check your RSS reader before posting something from elsewhere on the internets.
Found this video yesterday morning via Swans On Tea. It was so good I had to include it in the talk I gave yesterday afternoon at the Skeptics Society.
Backstory: Bill O’Reilly is very fond of using the tides as evidence that science doesn’t understand everything. Apparently some pinheads tried to point out that we actually do understand that.
At a slightly deeper level: this is a good example of a worldview that can only imagine ultimate explanations taking the form of reference to some person — a being, a kind of conscious agent, who does things for reasons. If you try to give explanations that simply refer to the laws of physics, they will never be satisfied.
In the real world, things happen, not always for (those kind of) reasons. The laws of physics might not have any deeper explanation.
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