135 Shots That Will Restore Your Faith in Cinema on Vimeo
[vimeo width=”500″ height=”331″]http://vimeo.com/45944121[/vimeo] Stunning…watch on a big screen if possible.
The end of an email era
As of this week, for the first time since high school, I no longer pay for email. Yes, shocking as that may seem in the age of Gmail and free email access, I still had a [email protected] account that I actually paid for. I got it back around 1998 or so, and it was my […]
Feynman explains fire
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITpDrdtGAmo[/youtube] The always enjoyable Richard Feynman explains fire. His enthusiasm and facility for explaining things in simple terms always amazes me. I guess the clip is from an old BBC TV series called “Fun to Imagine.” Apparently BBC has some of the episodes available in higher quality on their website, but unfortunately the streaming video […]
Microscopia: A web game
The Friday Game: Microscopia – Edge Magazine. A quick little diversion, Microscopia was apparently created in just 48hrs. It sort of simulates what it’s like to look at bacteria under a microscope. A simplistic take on it, to be sure, but it’s an interesting idea given how simple the design is. Given that I did a […]
A depressing/cynical flowchart of the academic job search process
Related to my previous post on the Washington Post article, I came across a blogpost about the academic job search, with this depressing flowchart. It’s an interesting post that touches on some of the issues involved, but I can only hope things aren’t quite as bad as the flowchart indicates! (I like to think there’s […]
XKCD on physicists…
Cartoon from xkcd Several years ago, I had an Indian physicist tell me that “physicists don’t consider biology a real science,” so I couldn’t help but laugh at this cartoon. Of course, I know plenty of physicists who are perfectly willing to acknowledge the scientific value of biology, and some of them work on biophysics, […]
U.S. pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren’t there – The Washington Post
U.S. pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren’t there – The Washington Post. A nice article in the Washington Post by Brian Vastag, about what PhD students in most fields face in terms of job prospects. It’s the first time I’m seeing coverage in the mainstream media about what all my grad school classmates […]
Great essay about the discovery of the Higgs Boson: Natures Secrets Foretold
Tom Siegfried from Science News (where I was lucky enough to intern briefly) wrote a must-read essay about the Higgs Boson discovery. It’s the clearest and most engaging take I’ve seen on what the Higgs boson is and why finding it is such a big deal. It’s been a good day for science 🙂 Essay: […]
Photos
As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, as of last fall I’ve been enjoying having a modern camera (a Sony Nex5N). It had gotten to the point that my phone took better photos than my actual point-and-shoot digital camera…which was fine for snapshots, but it was disappointing going to really beautiful places, taking […]
Why DC is so confusing to get around in
I’ve always wondered why DC has such a confusing street layout, rather than the straightforward grids of most US cities–especially for a planned city, rather than one old enough that it just developed organically, like Boston. Now I know… If they’d just followed Thomas Jefferson’s plan, we’d have a nice grid (I snapped that picture […]