A Capella Science: Higgs Boson

Not entirely sure who the singer is but this video is really amazing! Hat-tip to Chris Lintott for the link.

Tuesday Observations

1. Why are the Lorentz Center advertising for Viktor & Rolf? Are they sponsoring this workshop? That would be awesome. But unlikely.

2. There is no need for high-heeled clogs. Ever. If you are in any doubt as to how hideous these things are, watch the fashion show here (although having lighting rigs mounted on their shoulders can’t have helped with the models’ comfort).

A pretty picture of me

Ha! No, I’m not giving you an actual pretty picture of me – I may have a blog but I’m not that much of a narcissist. Two of my favourite online toys right now are Wordle and social bookmarking site Delicious, which I started using a couple of months ago as a way of keeping track of links and bookmarks. So far it works well for me and it integrates nicely with other applications I use, like Twitter and FriendFeed. I created a Wordle of my Delicious tags and despite having only used the site for a short while, the tags sum my science-related interests up pretty well (and it looks so attractive!).  Click to see a bigger version.

Now apparently I just need to settle on how I want to spell “visualis/zation”!

Blogging research

ResearchBlogging.orgYou may have noticed the appearance of this little icon on my blog in recent weeks. I though I’d write a quick post to explain! Last month I found out about, and signed up with, ResearchBlogging.org. ResearchBlogging is a site that aggregates blog posts on academic research. When I want to write about a paper, I can use the site to generate a citation in html format that I can include in my post. ResearchBlogging then picks up these citations in blogs that are registered to the service, and collates them according to subject. Once a week or so, editors pick highlights from different subject categorie and publish them on the site’s own news blog.

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Le Grand Jacques

The Guardian today has a nice article about a new Jacques Brel album recently released with the Belgian legend’s earlier songs from the 1950s – aptly named Jacques Brel in the 50s: The Birth of a Genius. The article has some great quotes from other musical legends like David Bowie about Brel.

Brel is one of my favourite musicians – one of many that I will sadly never get to see. But I never get tired of his music, and here is one of my favourites, Amsterdam. And did I mention he’s from Belgium?

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