Well-known jeweler Tiffany&Co. has introduced a new website and iPhone(R) App for people who fall in love and simply must see other stories about people in love.    How well known is Tiffany's?    There's the rather famous "Breakfast at Tiffany's",  from a novella by Truman Capote that was made into a Blake Edwards film starring Audrey Hepburn, but they likely aren't showing it in the store today because Mickey Rooney's buck-toothed Mr. Yunioshi comes across as racist to a modern crowd.

Dear BBC,

Before publishing an article like this...



...would you take a step back and think, "Is this really what my facts are telling me?" Because, if they don't, consider your position as a self-styled centre for top quality journalism, and don't publish misleading, irresponsible things like this.

And please, don't adopt the Daily mail tactic of putting a caveat halfway down the page. Or in this case, literally in the second paragraph,

Summer conferences are just around the corner, and the LHC experiments are putting together O(1 fb) samples as we speak (in another post I will report on the progress of data collection at CMS, which has already collected over 650 inverse picobarns of useful data). It seems that this is a good time to make the point of where we stand with Higgs boson searches.

I am speaking, of course, of the Standard Model (C) Higgs boson, the only one which exists (maybe). Fancier concoctions, predicting five, eleven, or exp(pi) new scalars will be reviewed another day when I am under drugs.

\begin(short introduction)

'Project Calliope' will have a nearly circular polar low-earth orbit... but what does that actually mean?  Here's a brief mini course in orbital mechanics.

Any orbit requires 6 elements to specify the position and motion fully.  Since we live in 3-D space, it's equivalent to 3 spatial dimensions and 3 velocities.  You could use (x,y,z) for the position and (vx,vy,vz) for the velocities.  You could use spherical coordinates, or Euler angles.  All of those give you, at any instant, the full position and motion in 3D of the satellite at a specific instance in time.

In 1956, science-fiction author Philip K. Dick wrote a short story for Fantastic Universe called "Minority Report", about a futuristic world where precognitive mutants can predict crimes before they can happen.    The ethical concerns about encroachment of big government and the possibility of a police state are obvious in a time of the USSR and increasing government regulation in the period - how can you be guilty of a crime you did not yet commit?   The argument was also whether free will existed.  Tom Cruise starred in a movie based on the story in 2002.

I suppose the recent Egypt-centric focus on food consumption had to end eventually.  The 'food pyramid' you have seen for decades, craftily negotiated by food lobbyists, is being replaced by...a pie.   First Lady Michelle Obama is on a war against obesity and she will fight over food. Pres. Obama warned us, "You do not want to be between Michelle and a tamale" and the new dietary guideline shape is the latest weapon.

Firstly, I guess an apology is in order. Its been a hell of a long time since number 4 went out; I got rather caught up with other things and this series then languished on my list of half-written articles. So, apologies for that!

But before we get cracking with the final 3, I thought I'd pick up on an episode of fakery that just wasn't. This is the tale of Archaeopteryx, who has weathered the storm and has retained its place as perhaps the greatest example of a transitional fossil that we have.

Most of us seek out like-minded individuals who will reinforce our worldview. As I remind my students, we hold no beliefs we think are incorrect. After all, if we thought we were wrong, we wouldn't believe it. There's a reason that it can be hard for us to agree to disagree or live and let live, too. If I am certain I am right, and you disagree with me, then you must be wrong. 

The fact that I am swamped by the too many activities I am involved in these days can be gauged by things like the following: I get to know about important new physics results coming from an experiment I am part of by... private communications from amateurs! Knowledgeable and informed ones, of course -but that's not the point.