Saturday, January 05, 2013

Breaking News

I know that I'm everyone's source for late-breaking physics-news, and so I've rushed to the terminal (neh, laptop) to update you all.

Everyone's favorite Star Trek-related author and physicist Lawrence Krauss is talking about The Higgs Boson Hangover. It's pretty mild compared to what Peter Woit might say, but then again this is in Slate and probably reaches a wider audience. The older I get, the more I realize that I continually overestimate the understanding of science and how it proceeds by the general public. And so it's good to publicize that scientists tend to want to be surprised instead of proven right.

Doug is discussing some fraud in the biomedical community about which I was completely unaware. This is, of course, part-in-parcel of how science corrects itself. Teaching the scientific method in school is all well-and-good, but I think it would behoove us to teach how science-the-enterprise corrects for the faults of those who practice it.

Slashdot today mentions a Forbes article about how I've got such a low-stress job. The link isn't working for me and so I've not read it, but apparently there's a big stink about it, and Slashdot has a number of links to some arguments against.

Finally, unrelated to physics, I wanted to link to a couple pieces by, and with, the person who turned-in Bradley Manning for allegedly leaking all those documents to Wikileaks: a very difficult piece by Adrian Lamo and a chat with him and someone else. Whatever one thinks of Manning's actions, the torture he's been put-through is awful and inexcusable.