How long does it take to heat a spherical cow?

ZapperZ points to this outreach question from the APS:
How long would you have to yell to heat a cup of coffee?
It’s a neat question. The idea is that sound transfers energy. That energy will hit the coffee and dissipate as heat, so by yelling at a cup of coffee you could heat it up. Except [...]

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A real stand-up scientist

I talked about how Neil deGrasse Tyson gave a performance that was close to a stand-up act. That isn’t quite what he was doing; he gave a very funny lecture about his experience with the Pluto controversy. There are, however, a few people around who do a science-fueled stand-up act.
Brian Malow is a San Francisco [...]

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NASA hearts voting

Having people vote on the names of missions seems to be the thing to do at NASA outreach.
There was the vote to name the next module on the International Space Sation, predictably bombed by Stephen Colbert. (Althought NASA may have given themselves a way out. I’d be more upset if I wasn’t so happy that [...]

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Unintended consequences

Have you ever wanted to be reminded of exactly how old you are every week or so? Then sign up for the Light Cone RSS feed. It tells you every time a star enters your personal light-cone — the sphere enclosing every part of the universe you could potentially have influenced — making sure to [...]

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Stand-up science

Cheers, laughs, heckling — drunken heckling. That’s right, it’s a science lecture.
Deep in The Bell House, near Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, the Secret Science Club meets. By “secret” and “club” they mean that several hundred people paid the cover and packed the converted warehouse to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson talk about the trials, tribulations, and triumphs [...]

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Video updates

I just noticed that The Atom Smashers is available for instant play on Netflix, so if you have an account there you can watch it now. Independent Lens (the PBS series that picked them up) also has several episodes available on Hulu, but not that one. I’m not sure if there’s a mechanism to bug [...]

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The Atom Smashers repost

My review of The Atom Smashers has been reposted at Talking Science. They blog about a variety of science topics; well worth checking out.

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Sadly it wasn’t me…

Brian Boyer managed an invitation to the United Nations panel on Battlestar Galactica. For those who are interested, he’ll be live blogging it here, starting at 7pm PDT.

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Sobering thought of the day

C. P. Snow writing in 1959 about the change brought about by the scientific revolution. (From The Two Cultures.)
The disparity between the rich and the poor [countries] has been noticed. It has been noticed, most acutely and not unnaturally, by the poor. Just because they have noticed it, it won’t last for long. Whatever else [...]

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I want an invitation!

I am, the internets will be shocked to learn, one of those people who will happily talk for hours about how fraking incredible Battlestar Galactica is. I could go on, e.g., about how deftly they subverted the sympathies of the viewers to place us on the “colonized” side of an exploration of Imperialism, and about [...]

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