physics chalkboards

there is an art gallery of photographs of physics chalkboards...

http://boingboing.net/2012/11/19/photos-of-physicists-blackbo.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

http://www.alejandroguijarro.com/ongoing/blackboards/

cookbook

i have about 700 books, but i don't have a single cookbook...i think i found one that would be good for my collection if i could afford it...amazon has it for only $446...if you include the "home" version, the total would be about $550 for 6 books...

http://modernistcuisine.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_Cuisine

the cookbook was created by nathan myrhvold, a physicist and mathematician, who worked with stephen hawking and was cto of microsoft...he takes a scientific approach to cooking and explains the physics and chemistry behind it, coming up with new ways of cooking food

tevatron

tevatron was shut down for good a couple weeks back...i saw some of it on their live web feed but had to go back to work, so i couldn't watch when they pushed the button to shut it down...just another testament to the sad state of physics and scientific research in general in the us

http://boingboing.net/2011/10/04/sunset-on-the-tevatron-photos-and-memories-from-a-fermilab-physicist.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29

brian greene interview

decent interview with brian greene, author of the elegant universe and the fabric of the cosmos...he has a new book about parallel universes titled the hidden reality

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/helen-lewis-hasteley/2011/06/physics-theory-ideas-universe

free science books (pdf)

http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=06022011


The National Academies Press Makes All PDF Books Free to Download;More Than 4,000 Titles Now Available Free to All Readers
WASHINGTON -- As of today all PDF versions of books published by the National Academies Press will be downloadable to anyone free of charge.  This includes a current catalog of more than 4,000 books plus future reports produced by the Press.  The mission of the National Academies Press (NAP) -- publisher for the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council -- is to disseminate the institutions' content as widely as possible while maintaining financial sustainability.  To that end, NAP began offering free content online in 1994.  Before today’s announcement, all PDFs were free to download in developing countries, and 65 percent of them were available for free to any user.
"Our business model has evolved so that it is now financially viable to put this content out to the entire world for free," said Barbara Kline Pope, executive director for the National Academies Press.  "This is a wonderful opportunity to make a positive impact by more effectively sharing our knowledge and analyses."
Based on the performance of NAP’s current free PDFs, projections suggest that this change will enhance dissemination of PDF reports from about 700,000 downloads per year to more than 3 million by 2013.
Printed books will continue to be available for purchase through the NAP website and traditional channels.  The free PDFs are available exclusively from the NAP’s website, http://www.nap.edu/, and remain subject to copyright laws.  PDF versions exist for the vast majority of NAP books.  Exceptions include some books that were published before the advent of PDFs; books from the Joseph Henry Press imprint; and in cases where contractually prohibited, such as reference books in the Nutrient Requirements of Domestic Animals series.

quantum entanglement

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26837/

entanglement and non-locality are crazy non-intuitive ideas in quantum mechanics...amazing how people come up with this stuff

entanglement is pretty cool stuff, but i think entrapment is cooler

college degrees

http://lifehacker.com/5806924/what-your-college-major-is-worth

seems low for some...why are computers and mathematics lumped together?...computers isn't even a major

evolution

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/85489

the article has more pics, but i liked this one

business majors

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/education/edlife/edl-17business-t.html?pagewanted=all

article about lazy business major students and how the major allows students to get a degree without really doing anything...not much of a surprise here...these are the people who will go into business and step on the backs of people with real knowledge who do real work

a real education

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704101604576247143383496656.html?mod=googlenews_wsj#articleTabs%3Darticle

article by scott adams (dilbert) about education

soul of science

http://www.themillions.com/2011/04/the-soul-of-science-brian-greene%E2%80%99s-the-hidden-reality.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+themillionsblog%2Ffedw+%28The+Millions%29

good article on the millions about brian greene's book, the hidden reality...i am reading The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality right now and it is a pretty good book...he does a very good job of explaining very complex and abstract ideas in a way that is easy to understand and the book doesn't read like a technical manual

differentials

cool vid

smart kid

http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/26/12-year-old-genius-expands-einsteins-theory-of-relativity/

article about a physics/math prodigy...hope this kid stays with physics instead of being poached by financial institutions to find another way to make "mathematical models" to make short term money and crash the economy in the process

finance

good article about engineering/science grads going into finance


http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/26/friends-don%E2%80%99t-let-friends-get-into-finance/

After having been a tech executive for many years, I needed to take a break, and I wanted to give back to society. Duke University engineering dean Kristina Johnson gave me a great spiel about how the school’s Masters of Engineering Management program churns out great engineers, and how engineers solve the world’s problems. She said that I could make a big impact by teaching engineering students about the real world and encouraging them to become entrepreneurs. I felt so excited that I joined the university without even asking for a proper salary. That was in 2005.

I was shocked—and upset—when the majority of my students became investment bankers or management consultants after they graduated.  Hardly any became engineers. Why would they, when they had huge student loans, and Goldman Sachs was offering them twice as much as engineering companies did?

So when the investment banks tanked in 2008, I cheered because engineering had become sexy again for engineering grads (read my BusinessWeek column).

But thanks to the hundred-billion-dollar taxpayer bailouts, investment banks recovered and went back to their old, greedy ways.  And they began offering even more money to engineering grads (and themselves).

Kauffman Foundation’s Paul Kedrosky and Dane Stangler have just published a report that analyses the damage this has done to our economy.

They note that the finance sector today produces a greater percentage of GDP than at any time in history. In the mid-nineteenth century, its contribution was between 1 percent and 2.5 percent of GDP. It peaked at around six percent of GDP at the beginning of the Great Depression, and then fell sharply. Since 1945 it has been steadily increasing, to 8.4 percent over the last two years.

Historians will tell you that empires collapse when they become too dependent on finance, but I’m not so pessimistic. I do, though, share the concern that Kedrosky and Stangler expressed in their paper:

Fewer people are being added to industry employment, but they are coming from new and narrower places. The financial services industry used to consider it a point of pride to hire hungry and eager young high school and college graduates, planning to train them on the job in sales, trading, research, and investment banking. While that practice continues, even if in smaller numbers, the difference now is that most of the industry’s profits come from the creation, sales, and trading of complex products, like the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that played a central role in the recent financial crisis. These new products require significant financial engineering, often entailing the recruitment of master’s- and doctoral-level new graduates of science, engineering, math, and physics programs. Their talents have made them well-suited to the design of these complex instruments, in return for which they often make starting salaries five times or more what their salaries would have been had they stayed in their own fields and pursued employment with more tangible societal benefits.

An analysis of MIT’s graduate-employment data shows that the financial sector increased its hiring from 18 percent of its graduates in 2003 to 25 percent in 2006. So not only are the investment banks siphoning off hundreds of billions of dollars from our economy with financial gimmicks like CDOs; they are using our best engineering graduates to help them do it. This is the talent that our country has invested so much resource in producing.

When most sectors of the economy grow, new companies are created. The authors found, however, that the finance sector is not driving firm formation; it is cannibalizing entrepreneurship in the U.S. economy by offering wage and skill premiums to individuals who might otherwise have started companies. It is also causing far greater volatility among publicly traded firms and a reduction in the quality of businesses started.

The report concludes that a shrinking finance sector will likely lead to a higher entrepreneurship rate and the creation of companies with greater social value, and still provide the financial intermediation services that are most important to young companies. So that’s what we need in order to save this empire: to tame this beast.

Paul Kedrosky says that the virus that infects scientists and engineers and causes them to go to Wall Street rather than create something of societal value is “economic Ebola”. He wants to be an “economic virus hunter”. Let’s all help him. Let’s save the world by keeping our engineers out of finance. We need them to, instead, develop new types of medical devices, renewable energy sources,and  ways for sustaining the environment and purifying water, and to start companies that help America keep its innovative edge.

cutaways

large cutaways of nuclear plants

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2010/05/nuclear-reactor-cutaways.html

starman

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/03/21/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage

interesting article about the russian space program and the account of a cosmonaut's last seconds as he burned up in re-entry...

radiation chart

click on the pic to get the full size http://xkcd.com/radiation/

analog

series of us navy training programs from the 50's about mechanical computers and how they are used to solve problems...very cool