links for 2009-03-25

All 13 episodes of Carl Sagan's landmark series. Because if you're going to watch video on your work computer, it might as well be something good.

"Itâs an interestingly odd book, hilariously funny, very clever and not much like anything else. Heaven and Hell are trying to bring about Armageddon. Their agents on Earth, an angel called Aziraphale (who runs a second-hand bookshop) and a demon called Crowley (who drives a 1926 Bentley) who have had an Arrangement for quite a few centuries now by which they work together, realise that they quite like Earth and donât want it to be destroyed. And this is the theme of the whole book, that it is humanity who are the best and the worst, Heaven and Hell donât stack up."

The IRS thinks of everything.

"Yesterday Sven Heinemeyer kindly provided me with an updated version of a plot which best describes the experimental constraints on the Higgs boson mass, coming from electroweak observables measured at LEP and SLD, and from the most recent measurements of W boson and top quark masses. [...]
The graph is a quite busy one, but I will try below to explain everything one bit at a time, hoping I keep things simple enough that a non-physicist can understand it."

"Suppose you put take two identical cans of soda out of the fridge and place them on the floor in the middle of a room. One can you leave alone and one can you cover with a wool blanket. After an hour, you come back and check on the two cans of soda. Which will be warmer?"

"Selective colleges did not mean for this to happen; rather, they are victims of their own success, along with the emergence of a truly national higher education market and the rise of a rankings-driven consumer culture. But, there is no going back now, so colleges should embrace the unavoidable randomness and go from a lottery-like system to a true lottery. "

"One of my favorite anecdotes was one [Shirley Jackson] told to illustrate why it's important not to be too easily offended. Sometimes what seems like overt racism/sexism is simply poor social skills or awkward phrasing (we all suffer sometimes from foot-in-mouth syndrome). Case in point: she applied for a summer job at MIT in a physics lab as an undergraduate. She didn't have any specific lab experience, but the professor asked, "Well, can you cook?" When she said yes, he told her she was hired. Jackson, confused, replied, "To do what?" It was not, as it happens, to whip up some tasty grits for his breakfast each morning; rather, the professor assumed that if she could cook, she had the practical skills necessary to learn her way easily around the lab."