You go, Lenovo!

This funny video I got from FSJ's blog summarizes really well the point I made last month about Apple's new MacBook Air: it's kinda hem... crappy. However, what the Lenovo ad totally fails to address is all the crap you have to deal with while using Windows... well nothing's perfect I suppose! Meanwhile, I can't wait until someone with lots of time of their hands pastes a BSoD on the supposed MacBook competitor's screen in a remake of the above video. That'll make it more truthful.

Free Radicals (Len Lye, 1958)

This is perhaps one of the coolest animations of all time: Len Lye's Free Radicals. Brilliant by its simplicity.

Snap! - Cult of Snap!

A cool video of one of my favorite dance bands from the 90's, Snap! these two German DJ's had that awesome sense of rhythm served with great energy by M.C. Turbo. And don't forget to watch such other great hits as 'Rhythm is a Dancer,' 'The World in my Hands' and of course, 'The Power.'

R.I.P., John Wheeler and Edward Lorenz

I know this past week I've been rather caught up in other business so now I'd like to make up for it and finally comment on the passing last week of two of the 20th century's physics giants: John Wheeler and Edward Lorenz.

John A. Wheeler passed away on Sunday, April 13th at the respectable age of 96. Dr Wheeler, a professor of physics at Princeton became famous for his considerable body of work in theoretical physics, which in particular led him to coin the term 'black hole' to describe the singular solutions to Einstein's equation of general relativity. During the war, Wheeler was a major contributor to the Manhattan project and later on did some design work on the hydrogen bomb. But more importantly, John Wheeler was the PhD advisor of none other than Richard P. Feynman, who said of him, "Some people think he's gotten crazy in his later years, but he's always been crazy."

At the opposite end of the physics spectrum, Edward Lorenz was the classic example of a very practical-minded experimental scientist, whose great sense of observation led him to the realization that a great sensitivity to initial conditions in a numerical weather simulation model he was working on at MIT was not just a bug in his program but an essential feature of the dynamics of the atmosphere itself and many other physical systems. Lorenz subsequently published an article entitled 'Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?', which gave the chaotic nature of the weather its nickname of 'Butterfly Effect.' Chaos theory was born, setting off what was qualified as the third revolution of twentieth century physics, after relativity and quantum physics.

May both of you gentlemen find peace in the Nirvana of physics!

Deal or no deal

The Economist's brilliant cartoonist Kal has just produced this animated version of the debate between the two democrats-well his version anyway. The conclusion is: they're both losers!

XOS exoskeleton

After reading an article on the BBC's website, I dug up this awesome video showing a demonstration of this amazing exoskeleton currently being developed by Sarcos-Raytheon in the U.S.. To be honest, I was quite surprised to see how far along this technology is, so much so it really does look like science-fiction come true.

World's smallest BSOD

Speaking of cell phones, here's the latest from Chinese gadget manufacturer Epoq: the EGP-98B wristwatch phone. Best of all, it runs Windows Crappy Edition. It also features quad-band GSM, wifi and bluetooth and you can admire the Blue Screen of Death on its gorgeous 1.4-inch OLED screen. Now if the phone hangs up when your mother-in-law calls, you can blame it on Windows!

Phone addicts

I instantly started laughing my a** off when I saw this on c|net this morning: a couple of porcelain wedding cake figurines glued to their cell phones. Actually, they're already looking kinda outdated. I mean the girl should be texting, not talking on her phone.

And now that the EU has just allowed the use of cell phones on board domestic airplanes, this is definitely not going to get any better. That said, cell phones are awesome. Like, how else would you ever be able to watch The Colbert Report during a boring meeting?

Measuring the fine constant with graphene

Physicists at the University of Manchester in the UK have carried out a new and extremely interesting series of experiments to measure the fine-structure constant of quantum mechanics. This dimensionless number (meaning it has no unit), denoted by alpha, describes the intensity of the electromagnetic interaction between electrons and photons in quantum mechanics. Its exact value is close to 1/137.

So far the most accurate way of measuring alpha involved measuring the quantum Hall effect on electrons in a cyclotron-a very sophisticated technique. Now the researchers from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Manchester, led by Professor Andre Geim, have suggested using graphene, a chemical state of carbon recently discovered, to measure the strength of the electromagnetic interaction between electrons and photons in a very direct manner. Graphene is a new variety of nanomaterial in the same family as the fullerenes, which consists of single layers of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal mesh.

Professor Geim and his team, who first discovered graphene in 2004, have now come up with a method for easily obtaining large sheets of graphene. Furthermore, they have realized that these one-atom thick sheets are not clear; they absorb about 2.3% of the light that passes through them. Their models and calculations then show that this percentage divided by Pi gives exactly the fine-structure constant alpha.

This experiment is indeed truly exceptional for its simplicity: a digital camera suffices to measure the amount of light that passes through the graphene sheets and a pocket calculator can be used to derive the final value for alpha!

Boycotting the Olympics?

Boycotting the Olympics? but when else would we get a chance to pole-vault over the Great Wall? asks Stephen Colbert.

Snakelike robot for heart surgery

This article I just read in MIT's Technology Review magazine describes a fantastic new robotic device, which allows heart surgeons to operate through only one small incision. It consists of a snakelike articulated robot that is capable of accurately sliding along a path in three dimensions described by the surgeon in real-time with a joystick. That way the robot does not risk exerting uncontrolled lateral pressure on the patient's inner organs as it moves. The two photos (credit: Amir Degani) illustrate the functioning of the CardioArm device, which really does have the creepy appearance of a snake. In the second photo you can spot the snake robot crawling right underneath the membrane tissue of a pig's heart. Absolutely amazing. This is totally the kind of thing that really gets me excited about science and technology, especially as in this case when engineers take a cue from nature to design higher-performing systems.

What are you sinking?

On the value of learning a proper English accent... or not! The only thing funnier I can think of would be a similar ad but featuring the French. Kudos to Florent for bringing this essential piece of advice to my attention.

FSM statue inaugurated

In a magnificient throwback to the 2005 erection of a Ten Commandments monument in front of a Kentucky courthouse, the Crossville, Tenn. chapter of the Church of Flying Spaghetti Monster have now inaugurated a statue of His Noodly Appendage in front of their local courthouse. In fact, they have made it into a monument to all faiths and to freedom of speech. Of course, beyond the hilarious goofiness of the whole Flying Spaghetti Monster movement lie the extremely serious issues of the separation of Church and State and, equally importantly, the separation of religion and science in general.

Coming from a Roman Catholic family and having grown up as an agnostic physicist myself, I am indeed feeling very much concerned by this question. In Europe one would hardly ever hear the suggestion that creationism, the biblical description of how God created the Universe and the Earth in seven days, should be taught in public schools. So it's always come as a shock to me, as I was living in the United States, that some states were imposing the teaching of neo-creationism, also called intelligent design, alongside evolution in biology classes.

Of course, I have nothing in general against people who do believe in the Genesis. I have always had friends of extremely diverse religious backgrounds, whether Buddhist, Christian or even Hindu, and who each have a completely different understanding of how the Universe and us inside it ever came into being and, perhaps more importantly, why. Since I've studied quantum physics, I am indeed well aware that characterizing what reality really is is a complicated question and that science does not always have all the answers yet, and perhaps never will. In fact, as U.S. president Bill Clinton once famously put it, "it all depends what the meaning of is is."

But I do find the Flying Spaghetti Monster both so hilariously funny and philosophically essential when it comes to making it clear that religion is not science and conversely science should not be confused with religious beliefs. From Darwin's first observations of evolutionary patterns within populations of Galapagos tortoises and mockingbirds, to the very contemporary experiments in genetics and all of the serious problems we are now having with TB germs that have evolved to become resistant to antibiotics, there is no doubt in my mind that much value is to be found in modern biology.

Most importantly, science does have its own clear set of rules that one must follow in order to come up with reasonably meaningful experiments and conclusions. From this point of view, intelligent design is not at all science and should not be taught either as such or even alongside Darwinian theory in biology classes. For this would be very much like imposing the teaching of, say, Karl Marx's Das Kapital at Sunday school-not very appropriate. I am all about exposing young people to a variety of points of view but at the very least it seems to me that education ought to be about teaching kids something both meaningful and consistent.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is indeed a wonderful reminder of that and an illustration of how teaching creationism in biology classes is complete nonsense: it will only sow confusion in the minds of young children who are otherwise quite capable of recognizing the value of both science AND religion to their own intellectual development. RAmen!