Thursday, August 18, 2011

The Latest Blogstuff That Moves Me

Bob Park, U. Maryland, was on a roll last week. "The Crankiest Man in Physics", and thankfully so, weighs in on current American Physics issues here, specifically The Debt ceiling, the cancellation of the James Webb Telescope, Overpopulation, and Los Alamos' website being taken over by arXiv.

ANTI-Scientist Rick Perry, potentially the next US President, is being taken to the cleaners by Chris Mooney, with a second installment of incredibly ignorant Perryetic (rhymes with pathetic) commentary: here. Keep up the good work, Chris.

Mathematically speaking, Dave Richeson of Dickinson, author of Euler's Gem and the incredibly well-named "Division by Zero" weblog, has a nice quick guide overview of LaTex, here.

The Los Angeles Times has a nice interview with David Neyland, director of DARPA's Tactical Technology Office, regarding  the inspiration for the 100-Year Starship Study and what he expects it to accomplish, here. Thanks to  Jimmy Janow for alerting us to that piece.

Two quickies from the world of Biology before we return you to your regularly scheduled Physics. First up, 3 youngsters have died of brain eating amoebas, which thrive in stagnant ponds, here in the US; read about it, here. Pare nts! if your kids live in the Us south in the weather is hot, tell them to NOT swim in stagnant ponds. Please and thanks. What a horrible way to go.
"Sex, Death, Parasites, and Cats." Bet you'd never expected to hear those 4 words in a single sentence, hmm? Read about the parasite Toxoplasma, here.

Back to Physics!



Peter Woit at the most excellent weblog "Not Even Wrong" has two excellent updates this week on the latest regarding Multiverse Hype and the problems facing Supersymmetry.

Sabine "Bee" Hossenfelder of that other most excellent weblog BackReAction that she shares with her husband Stefan Scherer was kind enough a while back to direct me to a somewhat recent paper by 
J. AmbjornJ. JurkiewiczR. Loll, the triple parents of CDT aka Causal Dynamical Triangulations,  here.  Since CDT very much intrigues me and is one of the reasons I began this weblog, give it a go. CDT seeks to answer the question of why we live in a universe of 3 dimensions of Space and 1 of Time. 

Bee also has a nice article at BackReAction regarding the Blablameter, also called here in the States the Bullshitometer, here. I wonder what it would spit out if we inputted Rick Perrry's words: 

.




1 comment: