Or so they say. Slashdotted or fooled? You never know.

The Wolfram Blog, Hybrid Logos and a Fortunate Mistake:

The idea struck me as I was toweling off after a swim: what would happen if I crossed the Mercedes-Benz and Grignani logos from my February 2009 blog post, Exploring Logo Designs with Mathematica? Hybrid vigor is a well-known phenomenon responsible for increased yields in corn, and metaphorically, for the economic and cultural flourishing of civilizations that engage in foreign trade. Would the progeny of Benz and Grignani show similar effects?

A ray of light from the world of high-level programming, shining into the joyless den of C programming that I spent most of this week wallowing in.

Why Austria’s Jörg Haider Was Assassinated, via fefe. Also inside: The secret link of Josef Fritzl to the Olof Palme assassination. This is… erm… interesting.

Update: A bit closer to home, Ex-FPÖler Klement vermutet Mossad-Attentat auf Haider, original blog post (a bit strange, the text seems to indicate that there should be links where none can be found).

Update^2: Of course. Why does text that should have links not have them? Because it was c&p’ed by a nitwit – from here. Which kinda makes the derStandard article pointless, but I’ve stopped expecting serious journalism from them a couple of years ago.

Jon Katz:

I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs.

Well, anecdotally, things seem slightly up from the time when this was written, especially if you’re in the right subfield. Then again, maybe the physics job market will be flooded by physicsts-turned-quants-turned-physicists-again for the next couple of years…

Update: I should mention, of course, that that subfield is NOT high-energy theory, but I guess we all knew that.

Update 2: Peter Woit:

As a very, very rough guess, my impression is that in recent years maybe half of the new Ph.D.s in theory get postdocs, and of these, maybe 1/5 end up in a permanent academic job where they can do research. So, if you’re a new theory Ph.D., one chance in ten…

I finished my first CERN post marvelling at the openness of CERN’s network to the Internet. I though I’d add a few things that I found fun and that are accessible without any kind of authentication.

• First off, the web page you’re usually presented with when going to cern.ch is CERN’s public web page, which is a nice bit of fluff, but not overly useful. There’s a link labeled “CERN users”, which takes you to the page you get when going to cern.ch from within CERN. This is much more informative, including an overview of what’s happening at CERN – seminars, conferences, other announcements.
• The summer student lectures have video and slides online, which is quite nice. For physicists, I recommend Antonio Pich’s Standard Model lecture, especially for its hilarious slides. There’s also an introduction to particle physics for non-physicists and a couple of lectures about CERN’s computing projects.
• Indico is CERN’s conference management system, which has a nice calendar with mouseover popups where you can get at the slides and minutes of the thousands of meetings and conferences that go on.
• Want to see what’s going on in CMS? There’s a page of web cams watching different parts of the detector complex, from the experimental cavern to the parking lot.
• For the more technically minded, here‘s a view of the status monitors for CERN’s accelerator complex. If you’d like to make sense of the blinkenlights, this page and the linked FAQ are pretty useful. More operational fun: Since CERN’s accelerator complex is rather old, parts of the status information are still transmitted via CCTV channels and, of all things, teletext – the CERN teletext server is a gateway for those of use using more modern receiver equipment.

I’m still amazed that all this stuff is public. Yes, the actual discussions surrounding new discoveries will be a lot more secretive, but I still like the idea that hundreds of millions of people can watch the SPS go through various stages of a power failure for their Sunday afternoon entertainment…

Update: Oh, the LHC vistar is a lot more interesting this weekend, as you can watch the progress of the second injection test.

19:00 Alternate injections into sector 78 and sector 23 which is pretty blooming amazing.

:)

Update^2: Due to the CERN reorg, most of the links to the accelerator stuff above are broken. Here is the new Vistar page.

Another take on my perennial favourite social convention, the dress code: Signalling (on Cosmic Variance).

This instance of the pro-dress-code argument is so lame I can hardly be bothered to discuss it (“Everyone should dress so that they wouldn’t embarrass my mother”), but I welcome people making good fun out of it. So, like I already said back in the day, dressing up is about signalling status – but why do we have to drag aesthetics into this? Can’t we simply wear t-shirts that show our current bank balance, grade average, or pictures of our model-grade SOs? Why the silken suicide utility? I might add that signalling status is actually counterproductive in academia, since discussions are not supposed to be guided by “the guy with the necktie said it, so it must be true”-type decisions. In the long run, I hope that the belief in suit == authority will fade away, helped along by the tireless work of Chinese tailors flooding the market with cheap high quality evening dress. Still, I’m not holding my breath (nor am I as religious about the “don’t dress to impress” rule in real life, being the unprincipled cynic that I am).

This is what we have the Internets for:

Scylla: I waterboard!
So much talk of waterboarding, so much controversy. But what is it really? How bad? I wanted to write the definitive thread on waterboarding, settle the issue. Torture, or not?

To determine the answer, I knew I had to try it. I looked at my two small children. Surely, in the interests of science?…..

(via Brad DeLong)

Interesting:

The dangers of living in a zero-sum world economy
By Martin Wolf

We live in a positive-sum world economy and have done so for about two centuries. This, I believe, is why democracy has become a political norm, empires have largely vanished, legal slavery and serfdom have disappeared and measures of well-being have risen almost everywhere. What then do I mean by a positive-sum economy? It is one in which everybody can become better off. It is one in which real incomes per head are able to rise indefinitely.

The (filtered, and thus really good) comments have all kinds of views on the issue, from outright doomsayers to optimists who don’t see the current situation as all that different from past environmental crises. Personally, the idea scares me because it sounds plausible. Of course, there are plenty of open questions. I’d like to have a model that gives democracy as the optimal form of organization in the alleged positive-sum world and a different result in a negative sum world, for starters. Then, I’m not convinced that an energy shortage is actually enough to push our current equilibrium into a zero/negative-sum state. I wish I was an economics grad student with time to waste.

A while back, I heard about Hulu, which looked like a kind of commercial content YouTube, offering lots of TV content in a hassle-free way via a flash-based player. I signed up for the private beta, and got my access code yesterday. Once registered, I spent ten minutes trying to find a single video that didn’t lead to the “Unfortunately, this video is not currently accessible in your country or region.” Doesn’t look like the future of television to me, then. Cue repetitive rant: I WANT to pay for content. I don’t want to pay for content that’s overly restricted, months behind release and unusable.

Deutsche Grammophon have a newly opened web shop that I like a lot. It serves good, clean 320kbps MP3s, they have a re-download service, and their catalogue is full of amazing music. Downsides? Well, the pricing is a bit steeper than what I’m used to from eMusic or iTunes, but that is at least in part due to the added value of performance by top league artists. Their web site could also use some improvement, but it’s not utterly unusable.

Now, I hope I can subdue my Christmas spirit long enough to refrain from shelling out another 21.99 for a disc of Bach cantatas…