Dr. Dave:

Um . . . how big is your lab?

Oh for god's fucking sake can we please not enslave everything to the aesthetic sensibilities of a six year old?

We didn't "hunt them to extinction." We destroyed their habitat.

@Drunkenlobster: You guys need to lay off the bong.

Nothing with Jolene Blalok in it is without merit.

How can you write a post on this and not say anything at all about why it happens?

I got a lot of insight into entropy when, in a thermodynamics class, I tried to figure out the units it is measured in. Turns out to be energy units. That then leads to a sensible way of thinking about entropy as the portion of energy a system contains that cannot be used for doing work.

You forgot the Howard Finster Factor.

The problem with this book, great though it is, is that it ends in the middle of the story. Dick always intended it as in two parts and tried to write the second half a few times. The Ganymede Takeover and Radio Free Albemuth both started as sequels, but morphed in another direction. Dick always said that he couldn't…

There's nothing new about the thermoelectric effect, though this may be a new way of implementing it.

"As for the elementary particles, all the leptons and quarks have spin-1/2, and all the bosons have spin-1."

"According to Einstein, gravity isn't so much a fundamental force as it is something created by the curvature of spacetime. That flatly contradicts the existence of a graviton."

That's not what the principle of equivalence says. What it says is that a gravitational field is locally equivalent to a uniform acceleration. That says nothing at all about alpha since alpha is not a gravitational quantity. It is an electromagnetic quantity.

"we can't rule out string theory, either, based on experiment."

@dennis636223: Poor Steve.

Actually, according to Gerald Edelman, massive death of newly formed neurons is part of the memory formation process. He calls it neural Darwinism. See Bright Air, Brilliant Fire.

That's only 20,000 light years away. That means you're seeing it as it was 20,000 years ago. That is not the early universe. That's essentially now in cosmic time.

Gee! Wonder why scattering happens in the first place? Naming it "Mie Scattering" or "Rayleigh Scattering" doesn't explain anything. Jargon is not an explanation.

Saying "flutter" isn't an explanation. Naming something does not explain it. What causes the flutter? The best explanation is still the original one given by CalTech hydrodynamics expert Teodor von Karmann — vortex shedding at mid level Reynolds numbers. It has everything to do with the transition to turbulent flow.…