G-Man Case File: TSA Fail

I was bypassing screening (again on official FBI business) with my .40 caliber semi-automatic pistol, and a TSA officer noticed the clip of my pocket knife. "You can't bring a knife on board," he said. I looked at him incredulously and asked, "The semi-automatic pistol is okay, but you don't trust me with a knife?" His response was equal parts predictable and frightening, "But knives are not allowed on the planes.

Twitter's URL lengthener really ticks me off

It's incredibly annoying to craft an informative tweet, packing all the info I can into it down to the last character while still linking to a citation using a j.mp (bitly) shortened URL, only to have Twitter fail to post it because Twitter's *lengthened* URL makes the message too many characters.

Does defining yourself as an "artist" as opposed to "photographer" give you special privilege?

“There’s nearly always a suggestion in these discussions that if you don’t back the artist (as opposed to the photographer) you’re trampling on their freedom of expression. In these situations (not all of which went to court) — Jeff Koons and Andrea Blanch, Richard Prince and the original photographers of the Marlboro Men campaign, Warhol and Frank Powolny (who took the Marilyn Monroe photograph), and now Fairey and Garcia — there’s an implication that defining yourself as an “artist” as opposed to a “photographer” makes you more important and gives you special privilege. It also implies that a straightforward photograph is of lesser significance or value than a painting or conceptual work of art. I object.”

Seven equations that rule your world - New Scientist

Without equations, most of our technology would never have been invented. Of course, important inventions such as fire and the wheel came about without any mathematical knowledge. Yet without equations we would be stuck in a medieval world.

Equations reach far beyond technology too. Without them, we would have no understanding of the physics that governs the tides, waves breaking on the beach, the ever-changing weather, the movements of the planets, the nuclear furnaces of the stars, the spirals of galaxies - the vastness of the universe and our place within it.

There are thousands of important equations. The seven I focus on here - the wave equation, Maxwell's four equations, the Fourier transform and Schrödinger's equation - illustrate how empirical observations have led to equations that we use both in science and in everyday life.