@girls Don’t Let A Man Interrupt Your Education

Ways I Am Like the Standard Model

Clearly flawed, but with no obvious path to improvement

Can go from a top to a bottom under the right circumstances

I too have a problem with hierarchy

Influenced by Richard Feynman

Too weird to be widely understood

If you froze my body and shattered it down the middle that would arguably be symmetry breaking

Lots of self-coupling

Many of my interactions are weak

Incompatible with gravity (I fell out of bed the other day)

Will break down under extreme conditions

All of my friends describe me as a gauge quantum field theory containing the internal symmetries of the unitary product group SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1)

A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer were in a hotel for a convention.

Then, in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, a fire breaks out in the engineer’s wastebasket. The engineer rushes over to the bathroom, empties out the ice bucket, fills it with water and pours it into the trash can, dousing the fire. Satisfied that the problem was solved, the engineer goes back to sleep.

Shortly thereafter, a fire broke out in the physicist’s wastebasket. The physicist rushes to the bathroom, whips out his calculator, frantically does a few computations, pulls out a cup, fills it to a precisely measured level, and rushes back to the wastebasket, pouring the water onto the fire. As the last drop hits the flame, the fire goes out. Satisfied that the problem was solved, the physicist goes back to sleep.

Finally, a fire breaks out in the mathematician’s room. The mathematician rushes to the bathroom, sees the ice bucket, sees a cup, sees the water faucet. Satisfied that the problem could be solved, he goes back to sleep.

(◡‿◡✿)

There is no such thing as veganism as there are always going to be microscopic animals on everything you eat.

Fabiola Gianotti

Particle physicist Fabiola Gianotti was born on October 29, 1960 in Rome, Italy. In 2014, it was announced that she will become CERN’s next Director-General beginning in 2016. As head of Atlas, one of CERN’s principle detector projects that discovered the Higgs-Boson particle, she oversaw a team of 3,000 scientists. She also serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the UN Secretary General.

Happy birthday, Fabiola Gianotti!

photo: fabiola gianotti/origin symposium, claudia marcelloni

photo license

Still image from Mexican science fiction-noir film La Pantera Negra.

NIH to retire all research chimpanzees

Two years after retiring most of its research chimpanzees, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is ceasing its chimp programme altogether, Nature has learned.

In a 16 November e-mail to the agency’s administrators, NIH director Francis Collins announced that the 50 NIH-owned animals that remain available for research will be sent to sanctuaries. The agency will also develop a plan for phasing out NIH support for the remaining chimps that are supported by, but not owned by, the NIH.

“I think this is the natural next step of what has been a very thoughtful five-year process of trying to come to terms with the benefits and risks of trying to perform research with these very special animals,” Collins said in an interview with Nature. “We reached a point where in that five years the need for research has essentially shrunk to zero. “

The US National Institutes of Health once maintained a colony of roughly 350 research chimpanzees. Cyril Ruoso/Minden Pictures/Getty

Epimetheus Above the Rings of Saturn

via reddit

We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world.

Haruki Murakami, in an interview with the Paris Review (via bookishmadness)

my writing style could best be described as “probably more commas than is entirely necessary”