Physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, etc. Sometimes I cheat and include engineering in here.
2009.11.2000:41:20 GMTFeynman's Messenger Lectures onlineJust found out something rather cool: Microsoft Research, through Project Tuva, is publishing videos of Richard Feynman's Messenger Lectures. Go watch.
2009.11.1518:19:32 GMTChicken soupChicken soup is not just good for the soul. It has been scientifically proven to mitigate inflammation. Maybe mommy's chicken soup was the reason that the same bug that took Pin out of commission for
2009.09.2814:42:39 BSTThe evolution debate as an illustration of speciationI was reading some article or another in Wired, which happens to be about dinosaurs. And of course, the religious kooks came out of the woodwork to attack evolution on the comment board. And it occurr
2009.07.0322:41:26 EDTValentine for the relativity geekThis just came randomly into my head (well, while I am trying to think up a T-shirt design). A (really geeky) valentine's day card for your favourite relativity geek: Rμν - ½ R gμν
2009.04.2919:46:57 EDTUnconventional Derivation of Kerr MetricI've posted one set of lecture notes on an unconventional derivation of the Kerr metric. This is a condensation of the lecture I gave on Apr 23 for MAT 451 in Princeton University.
2008.04.1420:50:07 EDTRIP: Johnny WheelerJohnny Wheeler was one of the last surviving giants of physics from the earlier half of last century. Besides being a great physicist, he was also a great mentor, and a bridge between the generations
2008.03.1012:04:06 EDTMyth of the underdogAn interesting article titled "Bad Science Journalism and the Myth of the Oppressed Underdog" was posted on ScientificBlogging. This got me thinking, the Myth of the Oppressed Underdog really isn't a
2008.03.0411:35:54 ESTLorenz v LorentzI'm not quite sure from where I first heard this: that the proper spelling is Lorenz gauge and Lorentz transformation. The former is named after a Dane by the name of Ludwig Valentin Lorenz, the latte
2008.02.1002:57:29 ESTWeights and measures: goldsmith editionStop me if you've heard this one... Which weighs more: a pound of gold or a pound of feathers? No, they don't weigh the same. And no, it is not because of buoyancy. Gold, like all precious metals or g
2007.11.0922:32:13 ESTPierre Auger Collaboration and Oh-My-God particlesThe New York Times has an article today on the new discovery regarding ultra-high energy cosmic rays. It is great that they have interest in science at all, even though they probably published the sto
2007.10.2517:23:59 EDTThe spirit of scienceHomer Jacobson retired from teaching chemistry at Brooklyn College twenty years ago. On a whim, he googled himself. He was rather shocked to see that a paper that he wrote for the American Scientist i
2007.10.1521:38:40 EDTMpemba effectSomething I found interesting: The Mpemba Effect. It is an observed phenomenon that under certain circumstances warmer water freezes quicker than cooler water. Its historical documentation goes all th
2007.08.2012:43:32 EDTPhilosophical musings on a Monday morningStarting from the Greeks Leucippus and Democritus, plenty of western philosophers and natural scientists alike have subscribed to a deterministic universe. Indeed, the precise laws of Newtonian mechan
2007.08.1811:04:12 EDTRIP: Ralph Alpher; Max RoachRalpha Alpher, 86, passed away August 12. He was an early proponent of Big Bang theory, and predicted the residual cosmic microwave background. For most students of physics, however, he is most famous
2007.06.1800:57:44 EDTStuff from American ScientistJust read some articles from the May-June issue of American Scientist. Two of them readlly stood out to me: 1. "The Most Dangerous Equation" by Howard Wainer. (If you have an American Scientist subscr
2007.02.2317:27:10 ESTThe first one-million-Scoville-unit pepperWith 1,001,304 Scoville Heat Units, the Bhut Jolokia cultivated at New Mexico State University is now certified as the hottest known chile pepper. Apparently the existence of the pepper has been publi
2006.09.1813:37:13 EDTDiscord, dwarf planetAwww! So Michael Brown decided not to call 2003 UB313 Xena afterall. The official name is Eris, the goddess of Discord. Brown gave the name partly referring to the controversy about how to define a pl
2006.09.1618:30:22 EDTHydrino talkAt the invitation of Eric Krieg, I spoke today to the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking on the subject of "Classical Quantum Mechanics", a "theory" by Randell Mills, MD, which purports to
2006.08.2417:12:18 EDTPluto demoted; press baffledTurns out we needn't worry about the use of the word "pluton" afterall. The IAU general assembly passed the following resolution: RESOLUTIONS Resolution 5A is the principal definition for the IAU usa
2006.08.2201:20:53 EDTMaybe they should call them "plutoids""This would be like if botanists had found something between trees and bushes and invented the word 'animal' to describe it." is what Allen Glazner, a geologist at UNC Chapel Hill, has to say about th
2006.07.2316:10:14 EDTUnder the messy hair, a messier personal lifeIn addition to the personal papers bequeathed to Hebrew University when he died in 1955, Albert Einstein had some personal correspondance that were kept by his step-daughter Margot Einstein. Those wer
2006.06.2418:42:43 EDTRIP: Harriet the TortoiseHarriet the Tortoise just passed away, at the estimated age of 176. She was housed in the Australia Zoo in southeast Queensland; she suffered a heart attack. Apparently she spent some time at the Bota
2006.02.2811:01:46 ESTPrinciple of Least Dog ActionAn article in ScienceNews reports that a mathematician at Hope College observed a curious phenomenon: his dog seems to know calculus. Tim Pennings (is/was) the chair of the math department at Hope Col
2006.01.2617:54:57 ESTH.M., a man who cannot form new memoryHenry M., referred to in the psychology community as "H.M.", was 27 in 1953 and suffered from epilepsy. He underwent an experimental treatment by Dr. William Scoville: to treat Henry's temporal lobe e
2006.01.1215:00:56 ESTMosquitoes rhymes with FritosS forward this link from Straight Dope to me: Schroedinger's Cat: the Epic Poem
2006.01.0312:11:17 ESTTropical Storm ZetaJust found out that Tropical Storm Zeta was the last named in 2005 and the 6th recorded in December. What a record breaking year.
2005.12.1701:28:07 ESTANL confirms Beethoven lead poisoningArgonne National Laboratory announced href="http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/News/2005/news051206.html">finding that Beethoven's illness was caused by lead poisoning. According to the press release, b
2005.12.1518:26:10 ESTPhysicist's Bill of RightsWe hold these postulates to be intuitively obvious, that all physicists are born equal, to a first approximation, and are endowed by their creator with certain discrete privileges, among them a mean r
2005.12.0920:30:11 ESTJournal: snow, library computer bug, pooh have you ever witnessed lightning and thunder during a blizzard? i have now! Says S. White seems to be blanketing Massachusetts. Her flight out of Logan tonight was delayed until tomorrow morning. M
2005.11.1521:35:51 ESTHow spaghetti breakScience News carries a report on How Spaghetti Breaks. The breaking of Spaghetti is a curious phenomenon. For a casual cook like me, the passing notice that the handful of spaghetti used to make dinne
2005.11.0721:43:25 ESTCow-tipping: Fact or myth?I smell an Ig Nobel in the making. Link to TimesOnline article. Apparently Margo Lillie, Ph.D. research associate of zoology at UBC (the same department that gave us a study of Herring Farts, which wo
2005.10.2823:56:21 EDTRIP: Richard E. SmalleyRichard Smalley (June 6, 1943 - October 28, 2005) was one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996, as a co-discoverer of Buckey-balls. He earned his Ph.D. at Princeton's Department o
2005.10.2811:21:00 EDTOn the stability of tablesThis is a problem I actually considered a couple years ago. It stemmed from a discussion I had with my suite-mates my second year at Argonne. Under what condition will a "table" be stable? The questio
2005.10.2015:38:18 EDTNoether's theorem and Lorentzian BoostA good question about Noether's theorem that most textbooks do not address: what is the conservation law corresponding to Lorentzian boost? We first start with some background material. We are intere
2005.10.0304:43:50 EDTbig, brown spiderCaught this big fellow about an hour ago. I tried to find some information on Google about what kind of spider it is, but it is hard to compare a picture of a spider to a real thing, and descriptions
2005.09.2116:59:00 EDTNaughtiness in the English LanguageAn article appeared in the New York Times titled Almost before we spoke, we swore. It reports on scientific inquiry to the social/linguistic/neurological significances of cursing. According to the art
2005.09.1201:22:05 EDTWhy science reporting tends to be rubbishAs if to affirm my assertions in this entry, The Guardian is carrying a story on why most science reporting are rubbish, which also included the very informational link to BadScience. To summarize: th
2005.09.0502:34:15 EDTWhy many published papers are not rubbishAs usual, science reporters exaggerate the findings of a particular researchers in order to make a more shocking headline. New Scientist, the self-proclaimed "World's No. 1 Science and Technology News
2005.09.0420:23:48 EDTThe Decline and Fall of TROnce we thought they were the ruthless rulers of the ancient world, chasing down cars and eating lawyers. Then we realized they might not be so terrorizing after all because of their short small forea
2005.08.2318:49:14 EDTThe decline of science in AmericaHarold Evans writes in the BBC about the decline of Science in the United States. If America were to continue on the present trend of catering to the lobbyists of large conglomerates, it will soon los
2005.08.2317:42:50 EDTHigh Speed Strobe PhotographyHigh Speed flash photography of Balloons Popping. At the FOO Camp recently, people demonstrated home-brew High Speed Flash Cameras. They invited people to pop balloons with a needle and caught the bal
2005.08.2301:14:21 EDTThe Booming DunesI just saw a program on NOVA about this, and it is extremely neat. In some places around the world, sand sings. Marco Polo heard it in the Gobi, Darwin heard it in the Chilean desert, and it has been
Anime/Manga (3) News, reviews, recent purchase, thoughts, and pretty much everything about Anime and Manga.
Books (7) Book reviews primarily. Sometimes recommendations of new publications or mentioning of books I really want.
Chinese (33) Posts written in Chinese, posts about the Chinese language or culture, or posts concerning my experience being of Chinese descent. (以中文寫作, 或是內容有關於中國語言及文化, 和我個人的華人經驗的文章.)
Creations (12) My creations, could be musical, literary, graphical, or in other formats, but generally fall under the category of Art.
German (1) Posts written in German. It will be empty for a while, until I become passable writing in German.
French (1) Posts written in French. (Les entreés écrivées en français.)
Religion (1) My thoughts about religion in general, specific news about the various religions.
Japanese (1) Posts written in Japanese. It will be sparse until my Japanese becomes better.
Linky! (55) Boing-boing-like entries which links to fun stuff I found on the web (many of them through boing-boing).
Linux (22) Things related to the Linux operating systems. Particularly prominent on things about Gentoo, my preferred flavor.
Mathematics (59) Posts about mathematics. Upcoming conferences, conference descriptions, papers I am reading, papers I am writing, pre-prints, all sorts of goodies. Also some of my thoughts about mathematical education and such.
Movies (1) Movies I saw recently. Reviews. Movies I plan to see in the future. Expectations.
Music (10) Posts about the music I listen to or the music I play. Things about the music industry usually don't go here (they end up, almost always, in the outrageous! category.
Politics (7) Things that, unfortunately, I have to deal with as an American in a democratic republic, but about which I really wish I could just stop caring.