Kaye Effect video

I hope all the physics geeks out there have seen this video of a stable Kaye effect. It's absolutely fascinating!

Save the chocolate!

I just saw this on the Ph.D. comic blog:
Hershey and some other chocolate manufacturers are trying to get the FDA to change their rules so that they can use vegetable oil instead of cacao butter or milk fats and still call it chocolate! This is terrible!!! They already have an FDA approved name for things like that they are called Made with Chocolate or Chocolatey or Chocolate Flavored. There's a reason those things aren't just called chocolate...

Anyway, there's a group that's organizing protests to the FDA called Don't Mess With Our Chocolate.

The Boston Marathon

I work in Hopkinton (the start of the marathon) and plan to walk over to the starting line on Monday. The field contains a number of great runners, but the most exciting part may well be the weather. Granted, I'd still watch the race anyway :), but this has the potential to make it much more exciting.

A new graduate...

I can post again! I wasn't able to for a little while so this is a bit old but...
Mike Slakenerny has graduated!!
So as I told our graduate students, even in a fictional comic everyone gets out of grad school eventually; see there's hope! ;) It will be interesting to see where he goes from here...

Open thread

So it seems that the new blogger sucks. I'm trying a test right now to reinvite a few people in the hopes that that's all it will take to restore access. If the test goes well, I'll dig through my e-mail for everyone's addresses. If your e-mail has changed since you last contacted me, drop me a message. I'm reachable at my standard username at my alum account.

In the meantime, post discussion topics as comments.

Missing Mac Options :(

Does anyone here have a mac? My hard drive failed, and after reinstalling (on a new hard drive), the "Options..." button on the Airport sheet in the Network prefpane in system preferences doesn't work anymore. It says it can't create a window because it's not a modal session. I've tried everything I can think of except reinstalling the OS (because that seems to be overkill for such a small thing). It's not that I don't know how to change the plist manually. It's just that's it's particularly galling to have such a problem with a mac; I mean, it's not like it's a windows machine. I searched online and was able to find seven (7) other people who had posted about the same problem on the apple site. It even has a radar bug number...and has for several years! It's annoying because it's probably the sort of thing that would be really easy to fix if only you could figure out what the problem was. Any ideas?