Unqualified Offerings

Looking Sideways at Your World Since October 2001

Archive for September 30th, 2008

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

Physics you can use!

By Thoreau
Physicists study whether or not dice tossing is really random.  However, they neglected to include “Did the luckless ranger touch them before tossing?” as one of the variables in the simulation.  There’s a guy in my D&D group who will confirm that this is the most crucial variable of all.

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

The Atheist Bugaboo, Redux

By Mona
Casual prejudice and even contempt for atheists has long been an affront to me. And I’m especially disappointed to find it among some progressives, as I just wrote about at AoTP.

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

And some botany students seem to know an awful lot about hydroponics….

By Thoreau
Over at Scienceblogs, they’re discussing the case of a chemistry grad student who turned out to be REALLY good at organic synthesis.
To me, the real issue here is not drugs and background checks.  The last thing I want to do is tell a person with a criminal conviction that he cannot go to school [...]

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

Behind the Music

Doesn’t "Little Jackie Paper" sound like a mafia nickname?

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

My Bonnie Lass, She Walketh Like a Doe, and Soundeth Like a Crow

Julian has an acute and entertaining take on the "Free Sarah Palin" boomlet:
Sure, we can look back and find instances where she’s handled herself more competently, but her gaffes have not been, as some of her apologists seem to want to imply, a matter of getting flustered by her failure to recall the name of [...]

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

So that’s how Valinor was hidden from mariners!

By Thoreau
Waves are waves, whether they are waves of water, waves of light, waves of electrons, waves of sound, or waves of whatever else.  For the last few years there has been a lot of work on using exotic new materials to bend light around an object and make an invisibility cloak.  The concept has [...]

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

Descended from monkeys Tuesday

By Thoreau
New research shows that Neanderthals ate a lot of seafood.  So much for the theory that Omega-3 fatty acids will keep you from going extinct.
No word on whether they got drunk while hanging out at the beach.