Winter’s Haven

There has been far too much religion and politics on this blog lately. Here are a few sciency links to freshen things up.

• Several groups have found different ways to use the Casimir effect to levitate objects. The New Scientist has a nice summary; specific papers can be found on arXiv.org.
• Mike Dunford, The Questionable Authority, gives us an almost poetic description of the formation of the moon. A beautiful example of how science opens our eyes to the wonders of the universe.
• If you know of any internet dating sites with female tyrannosaurs who like to dress up as Maxwellian demons, please send a link to T-Rex (of Dinosaur Comics). Otherwise, he’ll probably just take out all that sexual frustration by stomping more humans.
• Laurie Snell explains why, contrary to what you may have heard, Oscar winners do not live longer. Amusingly, the reader is given a homework problem at the end: using analogously bad statistics, develop a simple model which shows that “breaking your hip increases your life expectancy”.

That’s all for now. Maybe later I’ll add some sciency posts of my own.

This entry was posted 2007-Aug-9 and is filed under Mathematics, Natural Sciences. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.