Exoplanets

Gallery of exoplanets: real pictures of alien worlds | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

We know of nearly 500 other planets orbiting other stars. However, the methods of finding these exoplanets are indirect. We measure their effect on their parent stars, but we didn't directly see the planets themselves... until 2005, when the first image of an actual world orbiting another star was announced.

The lovely lady that shares my life is a aficionado of all things exoplanet. Hope she likes the pics.

DNA seen through the eyes of a coder

DNA seen through the eyes of a coder

I'm not trying to force my view unto the DNA - each observation here is quite 'uncramped'. To see where I got all this from, head to the bibliography.

Quite clever

President Obama to be on Mythbusters!

Zandar Versus The Stupid

At the White House Science Fair today President Obama announced (and let's face it, like the last President would have ever had a White House Science Fair) that he'll be appearing on the December 8th episode of Mythbusters as he challenges Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage to revisit the myth of Archimedes' solar-powered boat-burning light beam and make it work.

So will that now make him our Geek-In-Chief?

Joe Miller: "Build that Wall"

Joe Miller: "If East Germany could [secure their border], we could" | Video Cafe

Miller replied: 'The first thing that has to be done is secure the border. . . East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow. Now, obviously, other things were involved. We have the capacity to, as a great nation, secure the border. If East Germany could, we could.'

Dork

Anonymous cowards buy the US mid-term elections - Boing Boing

Boing Boing

Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of right wing attack ads have been aired in this US mid-term election season, but for the most part, no one knows who is paying for these ads, as the payments are laundered through shadowy political organizations that are late (or negligent) in complying with disclosure rules.

I do love the name "Anonymous Coward"

Rich people and our lack of appreciation thereof

Balloon Juice

The problem in America isn’t that a simultaneously unknown and insufficient numbers of liberals are unwilling to internalize some nonsense about rich people that an Atlantic columnist made up on the spot. The problem, as far as I see it, is that too many privileged people can’t get it through their damned heads that most poor people aren’t lazy, drunk, or just living large on the welfare, but were born into far shittier situations that most of the wealthy people in America. I’m willing to agree that most rich and poor people work really hard for what they have. Just the rich have it a helluva lot better and their concept of “hard” is a little different. I’d also point out that the growth in income inequality and the stagnation of income mobility after the policies of the last 20-30 years would suggest that rich people, if they want their feelings catered to even more, should probably get a dog.

Quantum Chromodynamics

[1002.5032] Resource Letter: Quantum Chromodynamics

This Resource Letter provides a guide to the literature on Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the relativistic quantum field theory of the strong interactions. Journal articles, books, and other documents are cited for the following topics: quarks and color, the parton model, Yang-Mills theory, experimental evidence for color, QCD as a color gauge theory, asymptotic freedom, QCD for heavy hadrons, QCD on the lattice, the QCD vacuum, pictures of quark confinement, early and modern applications of perturbative QCD, the determination of the strong coupling and quark masses, QCD and the hadron spectrum, hadron decays, the quark-gluon plasma, the strong nuclear interaction, and QCD's role in nuclear physics.
The letter {E} after an item indicates elementary level or material of general interest to persons becoming informed in the field. The letter {I}, for intermediate level, indicates material of a somewhat more specialized nature, and the letter {A} indicates rather specialized or advanced material.

Because you can never know too much about this...