Happy Birthday, Lori! And Happy Anniversary, Plei & Mr. Plei!

Flying Virgin anytime soon? Apple and Dell laptops will have to have the batteries removed to come on board: [link]

Here is a question I have related to the coup in Thailand: How could a military coup fail, in the short term? Can't the guys with the guns and the tanks basically just run over the politicians and bureaucrats? (or local equivalent)

Well, if the coup is, you know, three tanks and ten guys, not the entire military force, the loyalists could step in and neutralize the threat.

Oh yeah. I figured the people heading the military would be leading the coup, and the soldiers etc. would follow, but yeah, I guess it wouldn't have to be. Even if the Army tried to take the Capitol, the Marines could put up a good fight.

Arrrrgghh. Good thing I'm here on Talk Like a Pirate Day.

I haven't much to say about the possible coup in Thailand, except that it must be hella scary when you're far away from home, even if it's one corporal on a bike with a flare gun.

Also, I enjoyed Studio 60 enough to watch it again, but it didn't blow me away. Then again, I was never a WW fan anyway. I'm much more excited about Tyra and her fivehead birthing the CW tomorrow night.

Oh, also, I have one of those Dell laptops with the potentially exploding batteries. The college is supposed to be replacing them, but nothing yet. I enjoy using the battery just to see what will happen . . . sort of like a technologically advanced game of Russian Roulette.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LORI!

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY P & P!

What I find interesting in the Thai coup is everyone going "We love the king! Yay, king!" Which has to be gratifying, if you're the king.

What I find interesting in the Thai coup is everyone going "We love the king! Yay, king!" Which has to be gratifying, if you're the king.

It's good to be the king.

While we don't have a built-in pirate mode here at Cocktail Party Physics, you can translate this, and any other blog post, into Pirate Speak from here. The day's festivities got us to thinking about what it would take to institute an annual Talk Like a Physicist Day. I think we need one. C'mon, let's pillage the concept and make it our own. How cool would it be to have physics-mania sweep the nation, with everyone going crazy for scientific gear, competing for the wildest demos, and vying over who can best mimic that inimitable Physicist-Speak? Here's a few rudimentary, off-the-cuff pointers for daring neophytes willing to take the plunge.

1. Never say anything in clear, direct English if you can obfuscate it with technical jargon. (This also works beautifully in literary criticism; just check out the writings of Jacques Lacan.) For instance, if someone asks you how, exactly, radio signals are encoded, toss off this jaunty phrase: "Oh, you just modulate the amplitude of the sine wave!" All the scientists out there understand this immediately, but trust me, to the average American, the sentence conveys no actual meaning, even though they listen to their radios every day.

2. Use terms like "orders of magnitude" to describe significant differences of scale.

3. A particularly challenging task is not "difficult"; rather, the problems to be overcome are "nontrivial," probably because of large (and therefore difficult to predict/calculate) "perturbations."

4. It's not that the course of true love never runs smooth; it is filled with turbulence and bifurcations.

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