When Bad Things Happen to Big Airplanes

Story.

RIP Leslie Nielsen

What Does That Mean?

Finally someone explains quantitative easing in terms even I can understand.

Great Understatements in Physics

From Cosmic Log:

Hawking and Mlodinow may make it sound as if M-theory has to be the theory of everything, but Krauss says it's too early to declare "M-Mission Accomplished." One big issue is that M-theory makes more than one prediction about the nature of the universe. In fact, the number of predictions it makes is somewhere around 10 to the 500th power. That's a 1 followed by 500 zeroes.

"On the surface, that sounds like a bad thing," Krauss said.

Ye cannae change the laws of physics

Is the fine-structure constant not so constant?  From the Economist :

RICHARD FEYNMAN, Nobel laureate and physicist extraordinaire, called it a “magic number” and its value “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics”. The number he was referring to, which goes by the symbol alpha and the rather more long-winded name of the fine-structure constant, is magic indeed. If it were a mere 4% bigger or smaller than it is, stars would not be able to sustain the nuclear reactions that synthesise carbon and oxygen. One consequence would be that squishy, carbon-based life would not exist.
...
What they found shocked them. The further back they looked with the VLT, the larger alpha seemed to be—in seeming contradiction to the result they had obtained with the Keck. They realised, however, that there was a crucial difference between the two telescopes: because they are in different hemispheres, they are pointing in opposite directions. Alpha, therefore, is not changing with time; it is varying through space. When they analysed the data from both telescopes in this way, they found a great arc across the sky. Along this arc, the value of alpha changes smoothly, being smaller in one direction and larger in the other.

Not A Spiral.

Interesting.