Atheist could face a year in prison for disrupting school board's prayer

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We are quite literally at war, and the battle is nearly at my doorstep (Bartow, FL is two hours from where I grew up).

Scary stuff.

I Am a Zombie Filled with Love

I Am a Zombie Filled with Love is both a surprisingly poignant love story and a harrowing commentary on human sexuality and society. It's also a philosophical musing with undertones of both French existentialism and Buddhist anti-solipsism. Additionally, zombies.

Solar ejections falling back to the sun

Solar ejections fall back to the surface, reined in by the sun's powerful gravity. Since the material is ionized (i.e., charged), it follows the sun's magnetic field lines, like iron filings in a kid's toy. Awesome. See Bad Astronomy for a more detailed explanation.

If you can will it, it is no dream

I can't tell if this is morbid or adorable. Probably both.

A new kind of astronomy

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In the general theory of relativity, Einstein postulated that big gravitational disturbances - like two orbiting neutron stars or the destruction of a planet - would generate gravitational waves, propagating outward like ripples on a pond. This isn't a totally crazy idea: lots of things work this way, such as light, sound, and ripples on a pond. What's intriguing about this idea is that if gravity works by warping space, it will generate waves that can be measured, and those measurements can tell us interesting things about the massive objects creating the waves. Since all of astronomy thus far has been based on electromagnetic waves (things like light, x-rays, radio waves, and gamma radiation), discovering gravitational waves and learning to interpret their physical properties will constitute a new kind of astronomy. And these guys think they can do it. Awesome.

How does it work?

Researchers use two long tunnels set at right angles to one another. They split a laser beam in two, sending one beam down each of the two tunnels where they bounce off of mirrors and return to the starting point. Since the two tunnels are exactly the same length, the two beams recombine where they started out.

But if the contraption is hit by a gravitational wave, ONE OF THE TUNNELS WILL SHRINK BY HALF AN ANGSTROM. First of all, SHRINKING TUNNELS. Second of all, half an angstrom is really really tiny. Not as tiny as the article says, but we're talking atomic level tiny here. And these guys are trying to measure it.

To give you an idea of how sensitive that is:

"The coast is more than 100km away but we can see the effect of the waves pounding on the North Sea shore on our instruments very clearly," said Lück. "Fortunately it is a highly rhythmical signal that is easy to remove from the output of our machines."

Cool.

Cool quotation about embodied cognition

From Michael Spivey's 2004 book, The Continuity of Mind:


"Indulge me while I recount a little anecdote that epitomizes, for me, the intimate role that the body plays in cognition. One day, I spent much of the morning and afternoon mulling over in my head different versions of a few sentences for a manuscript I was working on. I was somewhat frustrated with trying to find the right wording. Later, while sitting in the audience for a visiting speaker's lecture, the phrasing for those sentences suddenly fell into place. I quickly grabbed a pen and the back of an envelope, and scribbled them down just legibly enough that as long as I transcribed them onto my computer within 24 hours, I could probably decipher the chicken scratchings. Then, a brief, inexplicable, unidentifiable motoric urge came over me. For about half a second, I felt a dire need to carry out some unspecified motor movement that would safely preserve these precious sentences that I had finally, after several hours, found a way to arrange that was likable. Then the feeling was gone. I folded the envelope, tucked it in my pocket, and then continued to ignore the visiting speaker's words while my mind uncontrollably wandered to try to explore what that weird urge had been. By running some kind of mental inventory of my body, asking what limbs had wanted to move, I gradually localized it to my left arm. i am right-handed, so this seemed slightly odd. Then I felt the remnants of the motoric urge continue to localize themselves further, down my arm to my left hand. I wiggled those fingers, and two of them seemed to want to wiggle more than the others. My thumb and middle finger seemed somehow potentiated for action. But why? Then it hit me: My thumb and middle finger had wanted to press the Command and S keys on my keyboard to save those prized sentences! My left thumb and middle finger had participated in my powerful desire to preserve those much-pondered phrasings. That, for me, is the embodiment of cognition."

...or does it?

1. Make a 2x2 table
2. Rows: whether or not a correlation was found
3. Columns: whether or not a causal mechanism was ever demonstrated
4. Fill in table with all of the science ever done
5. Do chi-squared test
6. What did we learn?