I was a little late to the SMBC party but have been a fan for several years now. I laugh a lot of Zach’s comics because they are funny. Zach is funny. Sometimes he does that funny plus another level though that is just great. I really liked this one…
Or not. But we are either sure or almost sure depending on your standard of certainty that the Higgs Boson has been detected by CERN and therefore that we have evidence of the Higgs field, the theory that explains mass as a result of elements interaction with the Higgs field. PhD Comics has this very cool video explaining not only Higgs but several aspects of the standard model: [vimeo 41038445 w=500 h=656] The Higgs Boson Explained from PHD Comics on Vimeo.
I just finished Kim Stanley Robinson‘s 2132 so space and Mars is already on my mind. Robinson is probably best known for his Blue/Green/Red Mars trilogy. All of those books touch on terraforming Mars, the concept that we might alter the atmosphere — the entire planetary system — of Mars such that ultimately it could be inhabitable by humans. Here’s a video on the idea from Michio Kaku, a Professor of Theoretical Physics at CUNY and Science-Person-On-TeeVee: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrvhOepio4Q&w=560&h=315] But today, we haven’t even sent a human to Mars. Still in my lifetime the most exciting part of the space program has …
Pop Culture Rewind: writing about pop culture years after it was current. So I watch the movie Contact the other night. First off, I read the novel by Carl Sagan almost 10 years ago. I have fond, but mixed memories of that book that watching the film actually clarified (although I am not really sure how closely the film follows the book – obviously the film condensed the book’s plot considerably). The book’s strength is Carl Sagan’s account of how a “first contact” with an alien civilization might occur. Not what the aliens would be like or what they would say to …
by 