A couple gems MoCo Loco has posted in the past month or so:

For the jedi in all of us, mathmos has an “airswitch” lamp with a rheostat one adjusts by moving one’s hand up or down over the light.

Also, thought Jeff in particular woud dig this watch from &design. It just oozes eight bit sex.

I don’t have a lot of commentary (never thought you’d hear me say that, eh?) to accompany this, though it would be great to discuss.

1. NYT: “Einstein Has Left the Building”
2. Slashdot discussion of same
3. Edward Witten, “Einstein’s successor” (maybe?), on Wikipedia… ooh, he worked on Morse Theory! I’ve done some of that!
4. A simple explanation of M-Theory on everything2 (better than Wikipedia’s)
5. The big kahuna explanation of M-theory on Wikpedia

A lot of the comments on slashdot are pretty bunk; I guess that shouldn’t really be a surprise to me. There are a lot of researchers and researchers-to-be bitching about how hard it is to be Einstein and making lame excuses that don’t hold up to scrutiny. One of the best points, simply that new science is driven by new data, which is awfully hard to get to in physics these days, is made by a non-scientist.

Though it’s not quite so relevant to this topic, I was recently reading “You and Your Research” by Richard Hamming, in which he discusses Great Research and slams the Institute for Advanced Study; you might also find it interesting.