Here are some dribs and drabs, connected tenuously with a shared theme of physics. Sort of. I mean, everything’s linked by physics, right? Or science? Do I mean science? (update: I am on day 10 of feeling like crippity crap; please forgive the fog)

Extry Extry! NASA’s Cassini-Huygens probe sends back spacey blips, bloops, buzzes and squeals from Saturn that sound eerily like theremins and synthesizers in an otherworldly orchestra.

From the SF Chronicle (which I read online every day, yes I do), I dig Mark Morford’s essay on wonder (and lack thereof) of technology, Talkin’ to the Steering Wheel: When everyday tech is nearly identical to magic, why don’t our little bodies explode? A snip:

So then. The steering wheel rang. The Kings fell silent. The iPod waited calmly. I pressed the answer button and heard a long-distance voice say, “Hello,” and suddenly the world collapsed and time and space and distance lost almost all meaning as roughly 500 different technological marvels fell into place in the span of roughly 1.2 seconds. … There were no wires. There were no horses with saddlebags full of scrawled letters. There was no carrier pigeon or transcontinental transport ship or weary royal messenger exhausted from the three-week trudge through the desert. There was only this irrefutable sense of effortless, everyday magic.

NASA, by the way, informs me that the universe is made of 75% dark energy, 21% dark matter, and 4% normal matter. So glad that is finally cleared up.

I’ve mentioned the Awesome! blog before, full of mentions of excellent things to buy and written by a really sassy and amusing army of shopping fools. Witness this astronomic sorbet review.

MMmmm, planets.

I’ve been wracking my brain to come up with things that are better than Ciao Bella’s Blood Orange Sorbet. So far I’ve got ninety billion dollars, immortality and power over the universe.Of course, if I had ninety billion dollars, I would buy up the entire supply of Blood Orange Sorbet, and if I was immortal I would eat it all day and all night and never worry of dying from morbid sorbet obesity, and if I had power over the universe both these options would be true. PLUS, I would turn all the planets into balls of sorbet, then eat those too.

Now that’s a great life!

Now here’s a random email sent out by a physics grad student. I find it funny, most will not:

Does anyone have an extra 60 or 100 L dewar of liquid helium?

Here’s another snippet, this time from a chemical engineering faculty member, from his class notes:

Don’t worry, it’s just regular multivariate calculus.

I love this sentence and its friendly, soothing tone, and use it quite often (esp. to said faculty’s face). Most science and math types do not find it funny at all — I’ve tested it out. In fact, in San Francisco, a stranger overheard me relate the origin of the phrase and actually came up to me to say “I’m an engineer, and that isn’t funny.”

I would like to point out here I am just as smart as any scientist, just differently-abled, as it were.

Photo: science museum, by dkwonsh. Thanks for letting me use it!

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