Links for 2010-08-06

This is a classic problem. You are in a car heading straight towards a wall. Should you try to stop or should you try to turn to avoid the wall? Bonus question: what if the wall is not really wide so you don't have to turn 90 degrees?

"In the 1960s, Stax Records blazed the trail for sweaty, funky Southern soul, pioneering an earthy sound that was rougher and more immediate than the glossy productions of Phil Spector or Motown. Founded by brother and sister Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, whose last names combined to give the label its name, Stax--and Volt, its subsidiary imprint--both produced voluminous, sprawling outputs, and once you get past the major players, you're likely to confront a sea of unfamiliar names. Soul aficionados prize Stax's raw, potent sound, but guessing where to start is like trying to eat barbecue without getting your hands dirty."

"I couldn't help but raise a smile while skimming through the arXiv preprint server when I found a paper by researchers in Japan who have studied the effect of growing a new type of superconductor in "hot commercial alcohol drinks" such as red and white wine, beer, Japanese sake, whisky and shochu.

By heating powders of iron, tellurium and tellurium sulfide together at 600 °C they produced samples of FeTe0.8S0.2. But instead of performing experiments on these samples, they decided to put them into 20 ml glass bottles containing different alcoholic beverages.

They found that when they put the sample in an ethanol-water mixture, only around 10% of the material was superconducting below 6 K. But when it was dunked into whisky, sake or wine the superconducting fraction of the sample jumped."

"This Fall, with just a few weeks to go before the start of classes, we're seeing a weird bifurcation. Applications for enrollment, and applications for financial aid, are both up significantly even when compared to last year. But students who have actually registered are significantly down. Put differently, the number of students who started trying to attend and then vanished is dramatically higher than it has been in past years.

The folks in Admissions have done follow-up calls to the folks who've applied and taken their placement tests but not registered, to see what happened. I was hoping to hear that the most common reason was something like "you were my safety school, but my first choice school came through with a great offer." Instead, the most common answer was "my unemployment ran out.""

"Arriving at the end of the '80s, the deliciously nasty black comedy Heathers works as a critique of Hughes' brand of high-school movie: It inflates these same stereotypes until they explode. The caste system present in all of these films, with popular kids at the top and nerds on the bottom, here becomes an endless, ruthless, Darwinian struggle that not even murder after murder after murder can resolve. And the types aren't just present, they're interchangeable: The ruling clique are all pretty girls named Heather, and the jocks skulk around in varsity jackets, calling people fags. Heathers also has real characters, who rebel in a dark way against the status quo, but it's smart about recognizing the clichés of high-school movies and satirizing them to the hilt, all while tapping into the genuine frustration of students who are pressured to conform at all costs."