Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Blog Blog Blog Around, I Blog Around

The new New York City World Trade Center


Lots happening in ye olde blogosphere, let's start with some cool stuff from my two favorite weblogs:

At Not Even Wrong, Peter Woit hits two out of the park this week, the first one, here, is his review of Harvard Physicist Lisa Randall's new book.

The second one, here, titled "Imagine There's No God Particle," explores how the Physics community will react if, and if not, the Higgs boson is, or isn't found.

At BackReAction, theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder of NORDITA gives a wonderful review of her experiences aboard the very interdisciplinary conference on "Time" held recently aboard the National Geographic Explorer in the North Sea and Copenhagen.

Since this is National American Catharsis Week, Space.com gives a poignant clip of Nine Eleven Oh One as seen from the International Space Station, here. My wife and I are actually in that footage, our car was about 4 miles due west of the Twin Towers at the I-78/NJ Turnpike intersection at the time, but our car is too small to see. Or perhaps we're pulled over on the shoulder of the Turnpike up by Giants Stadium, where I got out of the car, looked 7 miles south and a bit east at the burning towers, yelled SON OF A BITCH! and wished I had a big frigging American Flag to wave, because I knew damn well who was behind it.

The "Impossible Star!" nonsense going around the blogs and blarticles in what passes for science "journalism" these days isn't worth mentioning, and I won't link to any of them. There is no such thing as an "impossible star," only our ignorant level of understanding. Some editor was bored, made a factually incorrect headline of an old story, and everyone jumped on the bandwagon. Ridiculous.


2 comments:

Neil Bates said...

9/11 ... Sigh. I had a strange dream the night before. I was looking at that kind of art kids make from cutting and pasting different colors of paper to a board. I saw a dark rectangle right in front of me, and then something ripped a big tear a bit above the middle. I felt bad enough the next day hearing what happened, but especially creepy to see that footage of the plane tipping sideways and leaving that gash in the tower (I suppose the second one, when more cameras were trained.)

It isn't the first time I had such dreams. The day Jacques Cousteau's son Philippe died in a crash, I dreamed about the helicopter crash that almost killed him (or another son) earlier.

Steven Colyer said...

Pretty scary how prescient you are Neil. Well, my dreams are even weirder, to whit:

I have this recurrent dream where I live on a planet that is a colony of Earth's, 5000 years from now, and 500 light years away. The planet is even WILDER than Earth's, as if such a thing is even possible. Their tech is 1800's, but peaceful. Not many humans, only a million, and they're confined to a 100 mile temperate strip around the equator. They know of Earthan ancestry, but the thing is Earth has extincted itself, of which they are unaware, and they are the ONLY humans left in the galaxy.

But they're ... happy, and that's what's important.