Click for the rest of the exciting story. Via Evolving Thoughts.

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!

(And if this makes no sense, please watch here, or, if you must, read about it on wikipedia)

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.

Since today is Casual Friday, I’d like to put science aside and do a review of Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom: A Novel. I am hampered in that goal by the fact that I haven’t read the book, and don’t plan to any time soon. (I think Franzen is a great writer, but I’m very behind in my reading list.)

So instead I’ll outsource this one to Washington Post book reviewer Ron Charles, who delivers his critique in video format. It gives me some ideas. (Hat tip to Ariel Kalil.)

Message to science journalists: if this actually happened, it would be pretty awesome.

The interviewer, sadly, is pretty clueless, and wears his cluelessness like a badge of honor. Carlin shows quite a bit of restraint.

(It continues; click.)

Tom Whyntie points out that the rabbit should really be more spherical.

Can you spot the astro-ph paper containing the following?

Calculation of the new figure of merit entails calculating elliptic integrals of the second kind, which makes the method more scientific;

If it helps, it’s the same paper which refers to:

Lorentz violating Chuck Norris in space, breathing aether and watching galaxies with his naked eyes.

The final line of the orthographic correlations paper was a nice slow burn of a joke as well.

Feel free to construct your own similes. (Via Cynical-C.)

If all that biology is a bit too squishy, Sarah Kavassalis does the math. Here you will find the right functions to use to draw hearts — my favorite is the fourth heart curve from Wolfram|Alpha, shown at right — and how to construct topologically nontrivial versions out of construction paper and scissors. Who says mathematicians aren’t practical? Nor are they above venturing into the realm of the literary.

Roses are red.
Violets are approximately blue.
A paracompact manifold with a Lorentzian metric,
can be a spacetime, if it has dimension greater than or equal to two.

Shakespeare, maybe not. But the course of true science never did run smooth.

The Bohr-Einstein Debates, With Puppets from Chad Orzel on Vimeo.

It seems clear that Einstein was wedded to a definition of “reality” that wasn’t flexible enough to cover the implications of quantum mechanics. But it’s even more clear to me now that he bore a spooky resemblance to a Bichon.

Just the right amount of levity for this Thanksgiving holiday weekend.  Thanks to the late Freddie Mercury and Jim Henson for being so creative.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

You have to love YouTube, although this is only an excerpt from a somewhat longer speech. Most of the text is here.

• STAR WARS Episodes IV-VI are to be referred to as “The Original Trilogy.” Episodes I-III are not to be referred to at all.
• Always capitalize Satan. You don’t want to get dead goats from those people.
• The correct spelling is “Rocktober,” not “Roctober,” which is the month of giant birds.
• Replace “situation deteriorated/worsened” with “shit [just] got real.” Ex: On day three of the hostage crisis, shit got real.

Amusing enough, but I have to admit that I originally read “Fake AP Stylebook” as “Fake APS Stylebook,” as if it were the (fake) American Physical Society rather than the (fake) Associated Press that was handing out advice. After all, the real APS is quite a bit quirkier than the AP; they insist that no article title begin with “The,” and for a while there they were insisting that “Lagrangian” be spelled “Lagrangean.” (Everyone has their quirks; Nature has banned the words “paradigm” and “scenario” from its pages entirely.)

So I’m sure we can do better. Any good suggestions for improved physics style? I promise to tweet anything sufficiently amusing.