Today's post in honor of the 2011 Cephalopod Awareness Days. October 11th is Myths and Legends Day.

And what better way to celebrate than with an account of the newly discovered Triassic Kraken, you know, the one who made a self-portrait with the vertebral discs of dinosaurs a couple of millions years ago?

Good news for migraine sufferers.  Your treatment may have gotten a little cheaper.  Exercise is often prescribed as a treatment for migraine, though without sufficient scientific evidence that it really works, but research from the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg shows that exercise is just as good as drugs at preventing migraines. And so are relaxation techniques.

Electrocrystallization, electric-field-induced phase transformation, predicts that under the influence of sufficiently high electric fields, liquid droplets of certain materials will undergo solidification, forming crystallites at temperature and pressure conditions that correspond to liquid droplets at field-free conditions. A study in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C says they have done it.

The researchers set out first to explore a phenomenon described by Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor in 1964 in the course of his study of the effect of lightning on raindrops, expressed as changes in the shape of liquid drops when passing through an electric field.

In Jewish and Christian tradition, Moses wrote the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Recent evidence shows that multiple writers had a hand in composing the text of the Torah and the other books of the Hebrew Bible and of the New Testament are also thought to be composites.
 

Global warming is bad but at least we have a chance to control it.  Simple life hundreds of millions of years ago had to just go with the flow so when global glaciation put a chill on things back then, the only way even simple life in the form of photosynthetic algae could have survived was in a narrow body of water with characteristics similar to today's Red Sea, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters.

The U.S. military has its own judicial system.  If you commit an infraction, you are charged under the Uniform Court of Military Justice. This keeps the military from becoming a political football. The four other professions also have their own internal monitoring system. For example, even if you do not commit a criminal act as an attorney, you can still be disbarred for conduct outside their rules.

I read with interest and some amusement (on the mouse joke) the piece written here by Sascha Vongehr. I find his arguments wrong and decided to answer him in the comments thread of his post, but my answer got a bit too long and I did not want to hijack a nice discussion that was developing there; plus I found out that what I was writing could be suitable for this blog in its own right. So below I explain what I criticize about his arguments.

Today's post in honor of the 2011 Cephalopod Awareness Days. October 10th is Squid Day.

It's the happiest day of the year here at Squid A Day! To celebrate (or perhaps it was just a coincidence) I attended Litquake's New Writers Workshop to get some tips on publishing my squid racing novel. The writers, agents, and publishers on the panels were very generous with their time and their advice; I came away with pages of useful notes.

RETRACTION: I have decided to retract three blogs (Deriving … 4/5, 5/5, 6/5+1). I was unable to figure out a reasonable statement concerning gauge symmetry. When the blogs were initially written, I focused on the field equations, mainly the Gauss-like law, and ignored the force equations entirely. Finding a solution that works with the the field and force equations were not looked for. A consistent proposal should do all three things (fields, forces, and solutions) with grace. I have concluded it is not possible to achieve these goals with the Lagrangian as written, hence the retraction.