Highlight of the conference so far: A one-hour plenary talk by this guy wherein he whizzed through the Standard Model of particle physics and explained why physicists keep making governments build them bigger and bigger particle accelerators, assisted by order-of-magnitude calculations, vast amounts of enthusiasm, and some charmingly hand-drawn ( Read more... )

Apparently CERN actually found something.
(h/t
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When I moved to New York, the Teaching Fellows packet contained a cute little fold-up promotional subway map, with Manhattan blown up large so I could see all the street names. It was my lifeline for the first year I lived in the city. Eventually, as I grew more ambitious, and the map disintegrated beyond the point where clear packing tape would ( Read more... )

I meant to link at some point to Anne-Marie Slaughter's Atlantic piece on why women still can't have it all, but I think I forgot. At the time it would have been a bare link, without any discussion. Now in the context of this Pixar movie - which is, at its heart, about women, power, relationships, and balance - I have a lot more thoughts. Most of ( Read more... )

Saw Brave yesterday afternoon with happyanya, msarcher, and
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God damn it, why did Dreamwidth autosave my six-page draft when it was only a paragraph long. Argh. It was so beautiful. And then I clicked "restore from saved draft" and it all vanished forever from Firefox's cache. WHY WHY WHY.

This entry has
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Am in NYC for the weekend. There is origami here. Apparently one of the guys here had his first (animation) film credit in Brave, which is awesome. Have some (unrelated to origami) links:

• The internet wants you to make glass potato chips, but it looks hard
• NY Times on the body's microbiome; xiphias on why this makes them skeptical about the Singularity
• 
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From
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Saw Hunger Games this afternoon. I know we are a little behind the curve here. I enjoyed it, and thought that a lot of things were handled really well - the book's cinematic focus, unsurprisingly, played out really well on the big screen - but I am curious how it seemed to someone who hadn't read the books. It seemed to handle narration and ( Read more... )

Apropos of I just managed to do two weeks of actually exercising 5/7 days for at least 20 minutes *, here are two things I found browsing NY Times's Wellness section.

Not overheating aids exercise, so the personal trainer who was worried I'd be too cold running in NYC and that would make me burn less calories was presumably wrong. Physics would ( Read more... )