Blogging about some blogs

Some classics out there today:

Matt writes about clouds and the "chemtrail" conspiracy theories. Worth visiting just to see the photo of a fighter just about at Mach 1. BTW, Matt is correct about the second photo. It is from Castle Bravo, the largest yield device (at 15 megatons) ever tested by the US.

Amusing, but he needs to get more up to date. Check out this about sighting Michael Jackson's ghost in a CNN clip shown on Larry King.

Thanks to a commenter on FSP's blog about hating the iPhone for that last one. That was also where I found a link to another great article:

Is Google Making Us Stupid from the July issue of The Atlantic. Read it, and see if you start skimming before you get to the paragraph where the author quotes a blogger about the number of paragraphs he can read before he starts skimming.

For the record, I didn't start skimming until I read that prompt, but my attention span for scientific articles was never so great that I didn't usually follow the Feynman approach of reading the introduction and then jumping to the conclusion to see if they got the right answer. Unless it really mattered, and then it took days or a week to read the paper closely.

On that subject, Chad has a great "research blogging" article about entanglement and a hysterical article about a really bad press release title related to string "theory". I suspect that "possible relevance of mathematical tools developed for string theory to an entirely different problem" would not have gotten quite as much attention.

Also, some really good comics in the last few days. PhD comics on whether your research project is impossible (following up on a series about a student being sent on a wild goose chase) and xkcd on the 2038 bug in Unix (when the time counter runs out of seconds in 32 bits).

PS -
Like his fellow former sportscaster, Sarah Palin, Keith Olberman doesn't seem to know much science. Tonight on "worst persons" he said something implying that you use carbon dating to determine the age of uranium. Not even close. I wonder how many people noticed ...