Bohemian Gravity

This is great, even if you don’t like Queen or string theory:

http://io9.com/so-this-physics-grad-student-made-a-mindblowing-bohemia-1333515132?autoplay=1

(For the YouTube version, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rjbtsX7twc&feature=c4-overview&list=UUTev4RNBiu6lqtx8z1e87fQ)

If you are a European graduate student in the US…

… you may want to check out this page offering advice for UK graduate students in the US. Clearly, the light-spirited advice will be useful not just to Brits!

30 Obscure Scholarships That Actually Exist

Because I don’t have the time to write up a more serious post (which I hope to do later this week), here’s a bit of humour: it lists 30 obscure scholarships that actually exist…

Thanks to Jasmine Hall for the pointer.

How people in science see each other

A little light humour over the summer:

A friend sent me this link–pretty funny, even though it’s a mystery to me why technicians see professors as Uncle Scrooges…

Discover Magazine Blog has interesting findings about verbal and math aptitude of philosophers and physicists…

Today, I have found a study on the verbal and mathematical aptitude of academics on the Gene Expression Blog run by Discover Magazine. It used the GRE scores by intended major of graduate education as proxies for these aptitudes. Most of its findings are rather unsurprising: mathematicians, physicists, and engineers have the highest quantitative scores, philosophers and english literature folks the highest verbal scores. It gets more interesting as correlations between different types of scores are compared for different intended majors.

What should be of utmost interest to readers of this blog is the following “observation” made nonchalantly towards the end of the post:

“Philosophers are the smartest humanists, physicists the smartest scientists, economists the smartest social scientists.”

Now what does this imply for philosophers of physics (or better still, for philosophers of econophysics)…??

First time traveller identified

For the first time, a time traveller has been identified: a woman in the 1928 film “The Circus” by Charlie Chaplin is holding a cell phone and appears to be in a conversation with someone at the other end. This is clear evidence not just for the consistency and physical possibility of time travel (which I have defended elsewhere, see this question at academia.edu for references), but for it occurring in the actual world. After the creation of artificial life, this is the second momentous breakthrough for science this year!

Sean Carroll on The Colbert Report

Caltech Cosmologist Sean Carroll was on The Colbert Report on Wednesday, 10 March. See here for Carroll’s report on his experience.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t manage to embed the video properly, so click here for a link to the segment with Carroll (4:45 or so long).

Hippocratic Oath for Philosophers

Based on Paul Willmott’s modeler’s version of a hippocratic oath:

I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and that it doesn’t conform to the simplistic ideas I have of it.

I recognize that what I find conceivable has no bearing on what is true.

Though I will use arguments boldly to grasp reality, I will not be overly impressed by intuition.

I vow not to corrupt the young, even if they have to take a class with me.

I will never sacrifice reality for elegance without at least three a priori justifications.

Nor will I give students who have to sit through my lectures false comfort about the scope of my ideas. Instead, I will make explicit their biases and oversights.

I understand that my work may not have any relevance to anyone’s life, and I humbly accept this fact.