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Professor Demoted For Video Game Designer

Say it ain’t so Hasbro, say it aint so. From an NPR story on a makeover of the game “Clue”:

The characters have changed, too. Miss Scarlet has a first name: Cassandra. Colonel Mustard left the military; he’s a former football star. Victor Plum, formerly the professor who was always known as the smartest man in the room, became recast as a self-made video game designer — a dot-com billionaire.

Take that you stuffy academic professors, with your padded elbows and your pipes and your uncombed Einstein hair: you’re no longer the smartest person in the room (unless you’ve made a video game, that is.) But I still think you were the murder, in the spa, with the baseball bat.

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Watching BioBarCamp From Afar

Over at Science in the open, the the ScienceOpener (Cameron Neylon) is attending BioBarCamp. Now, IANAB (that stands for “I am not a stamp collector” 🙂 ) but there are a ton of cool talks at BioBarCamp: many on open science / social media / science 2.0 etc (for which biologists are kicking everyone’s rear at.) Here is the schedule on google docs. Because I’m supposed to be working on a talk for an upcoming review, I need something to listen to and watch out of the corner of my eye, as I work on the review. And ScienceOpener provides: A lifefeed of the event.
Which is cool, because now I can hear awesome interesting ideas, while trying to work on my presentation (with less awesome ideas, BTW.) And I even get to see familiar faces (well…familiar people lounging while listening):
How cool is that. Science, it is a changing, my little pea sized mind thinks 🙂

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Got Auditory Synesthesia? Test Yourself!

A very cool discovery out of Caltech: auditory synesthesia. Synesthesia, you probably know, is an effect wherein the stimulation of one sense causes automatic sensations in another sense. For example, grapheme-color synesthesia is where numbers or letters appear to those observing to be shaded or tinged with different colors. Now two researchers at Caltech, Melissa Saenz (Who I know! I know someone who discovered something really cool!) and Christof Koch, have identified a new form of synesthesia, auditory synesthesia. To describe it, it’s funner to read what Dr. Saenz has to say about how it was discovered.
Continue reading “Got Auditory Synesthesia? Test Yourself!”

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EEQ / UAL / SMC

Physics and Physicists points to an article: “The Einstein formula: E_0=mc^2 ‘Isn’t the Lord laughing?'” by L.B. Okun on confusion about Einstein’s famous mass and energy formula.

Abstract:The article traces the way Einstein formulated the relation between energy and mass in his work from 1905 to 1955. Einstein emphasized quite often that the mass $m$ of a body is equivalent to its rest energy $E_0$. At the same time he frequently resorted to the less clear-cut statement of equivalence of energy and mass. As a result, Einstein’s formula $E_0=mc^2$ still remains much less known than its popular form, $E=mc^2$, in which $E$ is the total energy equal to the sum of the rest energy and the kinetic energy of a freely moving body. One of the consequences of this is the widespread fallacy that the mass of a body increases when its velocity increases and even that this is an experimental fact. As wrote the playwright A N Ostrovsky “Something must exist for people, something so austere, so lofty, so sacrosanct that it would make profaning it unthinkable.”

Reminds me of a (apocryphal?) story my Physics 1 TA told me. He described how a friend of his, who was rather geekly looking, you known glasses with tape holding them together stuff, was walking down the street one day when a group of local yokels drove by. The group, spotting the weak geek sought immediately went into yokel mocking mode and so shouted at him “Hey geek! E equals MC squared!” The geek thought for a few seconds and yelled back “Only in the rest frame!”