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"Writers are people, and they were people before they were writers. They change light bulbs and buy groceries just like everyone else. Really. Because they’re people, they vary. Some of them are jerks, but many of them are very interesting people to talk to."
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I don’t know, but I expect a panicky Gregg Easterbrook column about it any day now.
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"Now I’m going to tell you a terrible secret. Every year for the last 10 years Victor and I have given my parents the same present. We buy a bunch of toys, take pictures of them, caption them in somewhat offensive ways (like making the Barbies all discuss their bulemia tips) and tape the pictures into a home-made book. Then we give all the toys to Toy for Tots and give the book to my parents as their Christmas present. "
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Interesting stuff in condensed matter physics
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"Ever since I heard that opponents of Proposition 8 had filed suit to invalidate all the gay marriages that have taken place in California, I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the fact that someone, somewhere had to actually initiate this process. That means that someone, somewhere must have decided that the best use of his or her time was not to perform some act of kindness or generosity, not to stand up for justice or to comfort the afflicted, not even to try to turn a profit, but to decide to get together a lawsuit in order to break thousands of people’s marriages apart. "
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"When the term quantum is used in English it often means large as in the TV show Quantum Leap. The recent James Bond Movie Quantum of Solace seems to use the word quantum to mean small (also the name of a bad guy organization). What should it mean to better reflect what it is in Physics?"
2 thoughts on “links for 2008-12-22”
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Ugh, that last one is awful! A cursory web search will reveal a lot, as his commenters quickly reveal…and then there’s the typos…
“Quantum” isn’t either big or small, but means having a discrete unit or change in a case where it wasn’t supposed to have made sense. IOW, electromagnetic waves seems to be continuous and without any specific connection to units of energy (other than arbitrary units used to measure them) but then we found out that light could only be emitted or absorbed in units proportional to energy E = h nu. You all know this, I wanted to make a nice wrap of the term.