Winter’s Haven

Apparently, some people really can’t tell the difference between a donut and a coffee mug, although I doubt this particular crackpot is any sort of professional topologist.
Hat tip to The Quantum Ponitiff for finding this hilarious video (or should that be a mitre tip?).

[Video from YouTube illustrating a crackpot "the earth is growing" theory, [...]

What. The. Fuck.
Police in Orlando, Florida claim “a typical prostitute that’s HIV-positive could potentially infect more than 18,000 people a year.”
Taking into account HIV transmission probabilities, Classically Liberal estimates that SuperProsti would have to serve at least “9 million customers [per year]. Disney World only manages 27 million.”

Some people think that scientists doing theoretical work can use mathematics to prove things about the real world a priori of any empirical investigation. This is wrong. Allow me to explain.
It is true that the results of pure mathematics do follow from whatever axioms one starts with a priori of any empirical observations. Indeed, empirical [...]

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 [...]

I recently discovered the comic strip Thad Guy, which might be described as a love child of Dinosaur Comics and xkcd. Thad Guy often takes a comically twisted look at substantive philosophical issues. Here’s one of my favorites:

…and that guy’s dangerous-looking goatee really ties the strip together.

A paper, “Determination of Inter-Phase Line Tension in Langmuir Films”, which I wrote with Lu Zou and our many colleagues will be in the next issue of Physical Reviews E! You can grab a non-gated copy here or from arXiv.org.

Two people at University of Minnesota made an excellent movie which elegantly explains Möbius Transformations. Check it out!
Hat tip to MarkCC for finding this.

…the question arises: When should you deflower each virgin so as to maximize your utility? Glen Whitman of Agoraphilia provides a detailed analysis of this important issue.

Ordinarily, small things must expend a lot of energy to swim. At small length scales, the the ratio of inertial to viscous forces (the Reynolds number) decreases, and friction becomes a big problem for small swimmers. If you were the size of a bacterium, moving through a fluid would feel more like burrowing than swimming. [...]