I notice you’re still working with polymers.

Still? What else would I be working with?

Ah, what else indeed? Let me put it another way…

(Dialogue between Scotty and Dr. Nichols in Star Trek IV)

Those guys had way to much time and resources at hand… watch the Simpsons intro amazingly reenacted in the real world (at Google Video).

Blydepoort Dam, photographed from the Three Rondavels view point, Blyde River Canyon, South Africa, 28. September 2004.

Father: “…great view…”

Son: “Dad, what is a ‘view’?”

Father: “What you see here is called a view.”

[Actually, the above quote was spoken at the view point at The Pinnacle, which is quite a few miles further south at the Blyde River Canyon than the spot where the picture was taken. But unfortunately, I didn’t take a decent picture there. Sorry for the inaccuracy.]

The availability of a paper is inversely proportional to its importance for your research.

Speaking of the English language:
Monty Python once wrote a good piece about the most versatile word in the English language. There’s a (probably well known) flash animation in the web out there (for example at the site fun.drno.de, to which’s copy the former link refers) that features this. Very entertaining and grammatically instructive at the same time!

(Warning: As it is the so called f-word which is considered the most versatile word in the English language, obviously the reader will find a good deal of possibly offensive language in aforementioned flash animation.)

Until today it would never have occurred to me that to disappear is an ambitransitive verb. It can not only be used in an intransitive sense (the magician disappeared) but also in a transitive sense (the magician disappeared the elephant). If you – like me – can’t at first read believe that using to disappear transitively is correct: Let Merriam-Webster tell you about it.

(Depending on what’s your business,) quite often you want to calculate a photon’s energy E (in electron volt, eV) from it’s wavelength λ (in nm) or vice versa. If you throw all together (charge of electron, speed of light, Planck’s constant, decades) you just get

1240 = E [eV]*λ[nm]

I’m sure everyone to whom this might be helpful has memorized this shortcut already. I’m just writing it down here so that I won’t forget the 1240 myself anymore. 1240, 1240, 1240….

I found this great piece in a comment in Scott Adam’s Dilbert Blog

What came first? The chicken or the egg? Answer: The EGG! Because you must first define specifically what a chicken is. Then follow it’s family tree backwards, say to a bird that could fly gracefully. At some exact point, a bird in the ancestry will fail your definition of a chicken. It’s offspring is a chicken and came from an egg not laid (by exact definition) from a chicken. That’s evolution.

It was written down there by “cman_yall”, and unfortunately I couldn’t trace the origin of this quote any further, so his source description has to do: “Quote from some guy… requoted by BBC maybe…”

Following a discussion with Frank about copyrights I decided to protect the recent post “Die Perfekte Messung” with a password, and every now and then might do so for other posts to come. You can email me and if you ask nicely, I’ll reply with the password. :-)
You’ll find my contact information on the “About Me“-page.

Thanks to Sebastian‘s brilliant idea there’s a new t-shirt available at the Holistic Illusion shirt shop: I just pretend to listen.

Go ahead, buy the shirt, and let people know…