My blood is a-buzz with good feeling today, dear readers. I’m back from a very relaxing and much needed vacation with the family, where I completely took advantage of my parents’ “I never get to buy you stuff anymore” attitude. And now a beautiful spring time weekend lies in front of me! Why have I not adopted this one-day work week before?!
I know some of you are probably so beat from the week that you are ready to punch my lights out, so I hope you’ll enjoy this little week-end round up of goodies. Take a breath and let the physics wash over you.
Lets check in with celebrity gossip:
Olivia Wilde likes science!
Jupiter (planets are celebrities here) poses naked!
The 3-D Carnival of Space!!!! (where do you get 3-D glasses these days?)
Poetry About Space on the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory website.
Did you know a lot of PhD physics students graduate and head straight to Wall Street? This isn’t a new phenomenon, but with the American public’s interest in physics and finance increasing, there’s more and more buzz about it. Here’s a neat blog post from Forbes about how searching for the Higgs Boson could be akin to searching for the cause of market dips. There’s also the writings of Emanuel Derman, one of the first particle physicists to migrate to Wall Street. His book “My Life as a Quant,” is out in hardback.
Live and learn! An Australian physicist found an error with the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word siphon. The definition, which has been there for 99 years, stated that siphons function due to atmospheric pressure, when in actuality they function due to on gravity.
Cool blog: My Efficient Planet.
If you’re craving something a little richer, I highly suggest indulging in this article by Ron Cowen at Science News about the most recent advances in the search for dark matter, and an argument that has arisen within the community. Putting aside the debate, Cowen’s article captures the mood that we are close, oh so close, to a breakthrough discovery.
And then there’s this thing. I guess I could try to connect the dots, but you guys get it. Power to women. Power to academics. Educate the youth. Laugh a lot. We do it all.