The Futile Cycle

My physics teacher tried to get this to work, but he never could. But Jay Leno has it down pat! Check out sulfur hexafluoride, a cool, pretty inert gas.

By tips, I mean pipette tips. Alex Palazzo has an amazing data set on the order of pipette tip usage in his lab.

Physicists have their “H-Bar” (the real one is at Caltech’s Faculty Club…I think astrophysicists could potentially make some awesome – but nerdy – drinks there, like a Supernova, Black Hole, or a Golden Nebula). But what about molecular and cellular biologists? We could also have a landmark with a geeky name: “Pub Med”, “The Exon Junction,” maybe the “Beta Barrel.” Or even just, “The Beagle.”

And what about chemists? “The Electron Cloud”? Or they could have a bunch of bars named “The Molecular Orbital”, with two bars awarded HOMO and LUMO status every year, and the singles scene could give SOMO ratings.

I see that Jorge Cham has drawn this conclusion:

But clearly, the formula is only true theoretically. In practical terms, the formula is more like Net Effect on Research Productivity N = log(R/P), where R is the Readily Available Information and P is the number of ways to procrastinate. Since P is much greater than R, we have N really, really negative.

This is an amazing book review that I find highly entertaining. Cosma Shalizi is an excellent writer:

There is the problem of conjectural conspiracy: an isolated hypothesis almost never leads to anything we can test observationally; it is only in combination with “auxiliary” hypotheses, sometimes very many of them indeed, that it gives us actionable predictions. But then if a prediction proves false, all we learn is that at least one of our hypotheses is wrong, not which ones are the saboteurs. So far as deductive rectitude is concerned, we are free to frame whichever auxiliaries we like least, and save our favorite hypothesis from execution at the hands of the Tribunal

From the BBC, real “Kryptonite” is found in a mine in Serbia, with the chemical name “sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide”. Apparently, in “Superman Returns,” that was the name of the rock with kryptonite that Lex Luthor stole.

Too bad it can’t officially be named “Kryptonite”, considering it has no krypton (the noble gas) in it.

I’ve decided that there are a few standard rules for making good titles for talks at small symposia:

1. The title must be short. No more than six or seven words. These can be exceedingly long, compound words, but please keep it to six or seven.
2. Use a colon.
3. It must not communicate anything concrete about the actual contents of the talk.
4. Don’t let the title pin you down; talk about whatever you feel like. Change the title/topic without prior notice, if you wish.
5. The title can be either grandiose and far-reaching or short and quirky, but keep in mind rule number 3.
6. Puns are optional.
7. Include some form of “new”, “novel”, “super-fantastically cool”, etc. This goes after the colon.

Any other rules that you all can think of?

“Glucose, Glucose”

Oh, glucose
Oh, sugar sugar
You are my favorite fuel
From the blood-borne substrate pool.

Oh, glucose!
Oh, sugar sugar
I used you up and you left me flat!
Now I’ll have to get my kicks from fat.
Oh, glucose, glucose, sugar, sugar,
The honeymoon is over now.
The honeymoon is over now!

Perhaps many of you have seen the xkcd comic for today, called “The Difference.” Now see PZ Meyers fill in the missing bit on the comic.

A wonderful pair of articles on archenemies and archnemeses: a blog post from Cosmic Variance on the value of having an academic archnemesis, the rules thereof and an article on how to tell the difference between an archenemy and an archnemesis. Wonderful stuff!