Roger Penrose on Stuff

Roger Penrose talks about a bunch of stuff. I keep starting and failing to read his book The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. Maybe my New Year's resolution will be to finish it.  In related news, there's this.

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.

The Universe is a Cool Place

I'm glad I live here.

Root Bridges

Amazing!

I Did Not Know This

Funempoyment

Not to brag, but I really kind of invented this phenomena and should have been credited in the article.

Agent Smith Channels Carl Sagan

Godspeed to NASA's Littlest Astronaut

This new story brings us the tale of a bat with a dream: to slip the surly bonds of earth and soar with the comets. It probably didn't end well for him, though.

Nun Fight

Valley of Gwangi

It sounds like porn, but it's really cowboys! vs. dinosaurs!

Cinco de Mayo

From Nasa:

May 5, 1961

Forty-seven years ago today, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space. He launched aboard his Mercury-Redstone 3, named Freedom 7, to make an historic 15-minute suborbital flight.

This image shows Shepard in capsule before launch. After several delays and more than four hours in the capsule, Shepard was ready to go, and he famously urged mission controllers to 'fix your little problem and light this candle.'

Close Call

Apparently a Pac-man ghost sped by the planet Earth yesterday at a distance of about 334k miles, or about 1.4 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. It is about 250 meters across and was only discovered 3 months ago.

Mercury Flyby

The NASA space probe Messenger took this picture of the planet Mercury during a flyby last Monday. The probe was getting a gravity assist from the planet that will help it achieve its final orbit in 2011.

Missed It!

I forgot yesterday was perihelion day, or the Earth's closest approach to the sun this year. If it seemed a little warmer than usual in the Northern Hemisphere, that may have been why. Note that it was ass-cold in North Texas yesterday.

UFOs Key to Global Warming

This is the kind of outside the box thinking we need to save the penguins:

A former Canadian defense minister is demanding governments worldwide disclose and use secret alien technologies obtained in alleged UFO crashes to stem climate change, a local paper said Wednesday.

"I would like to see what (alien) technology there might be that could eliminate the burning of fossil fuels within a generation ... that could be a way to save our planet," Paul Hellyer, 83, told the Ottawa Citizen.

Awesome.