My previous post was a bit somber. So, to lighten the mood, I thought I’d bring up another Easter-related thread: how to properly decapitate a bunny. It’s for a good cause: peepshi. Directions include: “Execute six Peeps of your color choice by decapitation. Cut off more neck than you think is appropriate.”

(H/T to Don Lubach, via Kathleen Scott.)

Another year, another round of diverting April Fool’s submissions to the ArXiV.

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.

You never know where you’ll find it.

It’s walking cats that is truly problematic.

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

Feeling like Valentine’s Day is a little too cutesy for an intellectual heavyweight such as yourself? Nonsense; the heart may have its reasons, but reason can certainly figure them out, given sufficient grant funding and some diligent graduate students. Jennifer Ouellette points to a talk by Mary Roach that is safe for TED but arguably not safe for work, and shares some brain scans to prove that love is really blind.

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.

We haven’t forgotten (read — “I presume Daniel hasn’t forgotten”); we owe several very generous donors rewards from our Donors Choose Challenge. But while our appreciation knows no bounds, our imagination in coming up with incentives is somewhat impoverished. At least compared to Chad Orzel, who promised his readers a physics-themed puppet show if they hit a certain donation threshold. Which indeed they did, and the good news is that we all benefit. For your consideration: the Bohr-Einstein Debates, as told by dog puppets.

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.

Here’s what happens when you combine two icons from the 70′s:

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

I don’t think you can define a consistent arrow of time here, but clearly more investigation is warranted.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

It can’t be easy being the guy who has to introduce Albert Einstein. But it helps if you’re George Bernard Shaw.

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

The latest Twitter phenomenon is FakeAPStylebook, an amusing take on guidelines to proper journalistic writing. Some tips include:

• 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.