Cool science stuff

CalTech is a great place.
Obviously, they're all great, but CalTech is kind of under the radar for some reason, probably the relatively small size.

They rank 19th on one accounting of Nobel prizes:
List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

It's just very interesting to see somebody go through this kind of "college recruiting" process, as opposed to the farce of most athletic recruiting.

If StarBro keeps his grades up at 4.3 plus and smokes the SAT like he has the ACTs, his pick will probably come down to the place which offers him the best package of grants/ scholies.

StarSis says he could probably get full rides from half NCAA D1 right now: in a lot of the really advanced academic majors, "lesser schools" will hand out full rides to get academic superstars on campus and boost the overall prestige of the department (and university).

 

Some state universities will give full-ride scholarships based on SAT scores alone.

 

In a related note, my boys are only three months old but I've already begin telling them that if they do not get full academic scholarship offers to Berkeley and/or Stanford they will be nothing but disappointments to me.

 

Be sure and back that up with the Board of Education.

 

Let them know if they go to CalTech, they might be able to hang out with Leonard and Penny's daughters.

 

I'd be ecstatic if they went to CalTech, but I'm pushing Berkeley and Stanford because they have a broader palette of majors.

Unfair expectations and emotional distance - these are the key elements to being a good father.

 

Check out this NASA animation of a flight over Ceres - large asteroid between Mars and Jupiter. Animation comes from images of the orbiting satellite there.

http://news.google.com/news/url?sr=1&ct2=us%2F7_0_s_3_1_a&sa=t&usg=AFQjCNE02YvkplUNVLICziDSRjh5rmU-ZA&cid=52779039250248&url=https%3A%2F%2Fearthsky.org%2Fspace%2Ftake-a-colorful-flight-over-dwarf-planet-ceres&ei=HV6vVoWmHdLL3gH05YKoBw&rt=HOMEPAGE&vm=STANDARD&bvm=section&did=1656481739459093583&sid=en_us-snc&ssid=snc&st=1&at=dt0

 

UPDATE: We'll know Thursday if this discovery is for real or we've all been strung along.

Einstein's most incredible prediction may be proven right on February 11 — or a wild rumor debunked

 

Rumors no longer -- LIGO announces gravitational waves have in fact been detected.

In Historic First, Einstein's Gravitational Waves Detected Directly

So Einstein is right again. Suck it, haters!

 

I don't care how smart he was. You ever wonder if he ever got a blowjob?

 

So it seems there is a possible explanation for the supposedly impossible EmDrive that doesn't blow conservation of momentum out of the water -- quantized momentum. If it turns out inertia is caused by something called Unruh radiation (the radiation, BTW, was another prediction of Einstein's general relativity), then the pressure caused by that radiation could be the cause of the thrust.

Next Big Future: Emdrive may be explained by quantized momentum, New Emdrive experiments are showing thrust replication and superconducting Cannae drive demo set for May 2016

The Curious Link Between the Fly-By Anomaly and the “Impossible” EmDrive Thruster

According to the stories, six independent experiments have found the EmDrive does indeed produce thrust. Another experiment is scheduled in May.

If there really is science behind this, it could be a pretty big deal.