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Alumni Magazines in Economic Bad Times

As an alumnus of the California Institute of Technology (thats “Caltech” not “CalTech” peoples!) and a member of the Caltech alumni association, I get a quarterly copy of Engineering and Science (E&S). In this month’s issue there is a letter from the editor concerning the future of the print version of Engineering and Science. It seems that, like much print media today, this esteemed publication’s print edition may go the way of the dodo.
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Strip Malicious Mischief

Ah, the games people play:

A 23-year-old Tacoma man and an 18-year-old Lakewood woman are suspected of throwing rocks from a railroad trestle onto at least 14 vehicles traveling southbound on Interstate 5 early Monday.
…
Investigators told KOMO-TV that the couple was playing a stripping game that involved each of them shedding a layer of clothing for every headlight they managed to break.

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Fudzilla Plays Telephone and Loses

Here is an article at physorg.com about a result in quantum computing (see here for my own article on this result.) And here is an article on the website fudzilla describing this physorg result. How in the world do you get from the physorg article to fudzillas: “Top boffins who have been looking under the bonnet of Quantum computers are starting to think that they may not be the future of computing”?
Is the internet version of the game telephone more or less noisy than the spoken game?

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Lies Your Physics Teacher Told You?

He of uncertain principles asks Which do you prefer: transverse waves, or longitudinal waves? The fact builder chimes in with a clarification of a common misconception.
Myself, certainly I’m going to go for transverse waves. Not only are all the cool waves transverse (well sort of), electromagnetic waves, gravitational waves, stadium waves, etc, but you can’t surf on a longitudinal wave.
And of course, how cool are gravitational waves? So cool they produce this mesmerizing action on a ring of particles:
Interestingly while light is often used as the quintessential example of transverse waves, (the example being give is usually that of plane waves of light) if you talk about light beams with finite diameter, longitudinal modes appear. (For example, see here) But I don’t fault my physics teachers for not teaching me this: learning physics is really just a series of less lying anyway isn’t it?

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Best Bacon Desert?

Jorge sends me a link to The Best (Bacon) Dessert Ever?: a bacon-topped blue cheese panna cotta. Uh oh, Mrs. Pontiff has competition! Luckily this creation is just down the hill from our home at the Palace Kitchen, so we’ll be able to compare and really find out if it is the best bacon desert ever.