Anyone watching this evening’s episode of Comedy Central’s new Lewis Black vehicle, The Root of All Evil (10:30, 9:30 Central), might just see some familiar scientists and/or bloggers. Maybe.

Elsewhere, stars of the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory (about which more anon) seem to have been reading up on their Spacetime and Geometry.

No appreciable bump in my Amazon ranking, though.

Rediscovering this ancient Sesame Street skit has been my one source of joy while I slog through the writing of an immense, tedious, but necessary data paper.

Sorry for the meager posting of late. I’m in one of those phases with papers that are justthatclose to being done, and have to concentrate on pushing them out the door. So blogging might be light for a while.

By way of light diversion, here’s the LA Times’ take on grading recent Nobel Laureates on their fashion savvy (hat tip to Jennifer). The first thing to note is that physicists come out looking good, although one suspects that the grading was done on a curve. Here is Peter Gruenberg, of Giant Magnetoresistance fame.

On the Hit/Miss scale, the Times bestows a “Hit” on Gruenberg’s ensemble. “Here’s a guy who knows cool,” they say. Who am I to argue with the mainstream media?

But it’s not only the physicists who seem to get the benefit of the doubt. Here’s Literature laureate Doris Lessing, just after the Prize was announced.

This one is also graded a “Hit.” Admittedly, I wouldn’t want to be graded on my fashion choices as I was being surprised by photographers upon returning home from a trip to the grocery store. But still, rhapsodizing about the “curving highlight of red scarf” seems a bit much.

In other cases, the Times is unduly harsh. Here is Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

I’m sorry, but that is one stylin’ bureaucrat. Yet the Times gives him a “Miss,” complaining that the blue of his tie blends into the blue of his shirt. Like I said, graded on a curve, and not the same curve for everyone.

And then we have Medicine laureate Mario Capecchi.

Again, the Times comes down hard, especially on the hat. Obviously they’ve spent too much time at Oscar parties and not enough at convocation ceremonies. The guy’s receiving an honorary degree in medical biotechnologies from the University of Bologna. This is the one yearly chance for your typical academic to go whole hog for the pomp and circumstance. Good for him.

I would like to embed a video!

No particular reason, really.

Celebrated economist, James Bates Clark Medal winner, and Freakonomics author Steven Levitt is having a good time, and doing pretty darn well, at the World Series of Poker. (Via Marginal Revolution; here’s Levitt’s own blog.) I am willing to go on record as predicting that he will not do as well as physicist Michael Binger did last year.

I’ve been reading a bit about game theory and the mathematics of poker, and have lots of great theories, including an elaborate analogy between poker and quantum mechanics. Here is one theory: physicists (and I imagine economists, too) will end up being much better poker players than mathematicians. The reasoning is that No Limit Hold’em is an incredibly complex system; not only can we not derive a dominant strategy in closed form, we can’t even prove any very useful theorems about realistic games. So game theorists and mathematicians study simplified systems about which they can actually prove theorems. They can do pretty well in figuring out strategies at a showdown (just two players), but early in the hand at a full table there’s almost nothing they can say. It becomes a question of which approximations to make and which models to choose for your opponents. That’s much more the purview of physicists and economists, who are forced to get their hands dirty in the real world. (A corollary: phenomenologists and astrophysicists will be better poker players than string theorists.)

Why am I not at the WSOP myself? Good question. I’m totally going next year.

I know everyone is eagerly awaiting the cinematic event of the summer: Ocean’s Thirteen, third in a series of the lighthearted adventures of a gang of elegant rogues who like to pull off elaborate capers centered on lavish casino heists. Admittedly, the Eurocentric Ocean’s Twelve was a somewhat rambling letdown, but the latest installment promises a return to Vegas and hopefully also to form.

Seeing buzz about the new movie reminded me of a review I read of Ocean’s Twelve. To paraphrase, it expressed the sentiment “This isn’t by any means a very good film, but man, these people sure know how to wear clothes.” This summer’s installment adds Ellen Barkin and Al Pacino to the cast, so the knowledge of clothes-wearing should only be enhanced. (Also Noureen DeWulf, although I’m not familiar with her work.)

So my question is, what does it mean to “know how to wear clothes”? We might at first guess that it refers to the ability of a person to choose clothes that are right for their style, their body type, and the occasion. But in a major motion picture, one presumes that there are professionals whose job it is to do the clothes-choosing, so (respecting the reviewer enough to imagine that they meant exactly what they said) that can’t be it. It could also mean “is wearing nice clothes” or simply “is pretty hot,” but neither of those talents would accurately be characterized as knowing how to wear clothes.

So is there a specific kind of knowledge that refers to the ability to wear clothes? Is it not just a matter of picking out a good outfit, but a particular method of wearing them, adapting one’s demeanor and bearing to the clothes one wears? Or are we just faced with a sloppy deployment of language in an attempt to convey “Boy, that George Clooney would look yummy in a burlap kilt” in an imaginative way? Help me out here, people.

(p.s. Apparently we don’t have a “fashion” category on this blog. Yet.)

March Madness is winding down and today is the start of the Men’s Final Four games, while the Women’s Final Four have just been determined. This year, science has also participated in March Madness, complete with brackets of its own (via Science Blogs):

(A full screen image is available here.)

Note that science is still on the sweet sixteen stage and has yet to determine the final four. Sometimes the progress of science marches more slowly than we would like. It’s probably a funding issue.

The four regions being represented are physics, scientific methods, biology, and chemistry. Not that I’m biased or anything, but may particles win!

From Angela Gunn comes news of Flatland: the Movie. And also, unconnectedly, Flatland: the Film. So, two different animated versions of Edwin A. Abbott’s classic “Romance of Many Dimensions” available for your DVD player. The Movie has the bonus that Martin Sheen is voicing the protagonist, but the Film has the advantage that it’s already available.

Of course, as Angela points out, you could just read the original. It’s a favorite among physicists, especially those who work on extra dimensions. What they never seem to remember is how the book ends — protagonist A. Square, who has claimed to have proof that extra dimensions exist, is imprisoned for life on charges of heresy. Hmmm.

Apparently New Zealanders are more naturally curious about things than Americans are — they also noticed the puzzling absence of God in The Queen on airline flights, and actually started asking around about it. (Thanks to Richard Easther for pointing this out.) And they found an answer!

The story is that the version that was shown on Air New Zealand, and presumably also on United, was actually meant for Middle Eastern airlines. Flight Productions, the company that distributed the bowlderized version, suggested that some airline had requested that “God” be bleeped out. This raises another question, of course: why? There isn’t any traditional prescription against saying “God” that anyone could think of.

Hassan Hosseini, an Iranian community spokesman in Auckland, said he could not see why it would have been a problem with Muslims, as Allah was God.

“We believe in God, we would not be offended. We use the word God.”

And then, of course, if you’re going to start bleeping out words, there are better choices.

The Anglican Dean of Auckland, Richard Randerson, said he had seen The Queen at the cinema and could not recall much use of the word God.

“There were plenty of other words. I think the Queen said ‘bugger’ when her four-wheel-drive vehicle got stuck in a Highland creek.”

This would be the appropriate thread in which to debate whether the Queen was referring to the commonplace, literal, interventionist “bugger,” or whether she had in mind a more sophisticated, ineffable notion of “bugger.”

Update: There’s now an alternative explanation (thanks to several people for pointing it out). CNN claims it’s just an overzealous editor. One way or another, it’s not standard operating procedure, apparently.

A couple of days ago, flying from Washington to LA, I was happy to discover that the in-flight entertainment was actually a decent movie: The Queen, featuring a fantastic performance by Helen Mirren. (Not that Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights, which I managed to see on more than one flight in December, wasn’t a piece of cinematic magic in its own right.)

At one point in the film there was a strange moment of silence, as if the soundtrack had momentarily cut out. Airplane movie technology being what it is, this hardly registered as unusual. But then it happened again, and later on it happened yet again — and every time, when one of the characters was clearly about to say a particular word. The word was “God.”

So, like, anyone know what’s going on here? This is clearly an intentional feature of the “edited for content” version of the film that was being shown by United. I checked with others (same airline, different flights) who confirmed the phenomenon — the word “God” has been censored out of United Airlines’s version of The Queen. As far as I could tell, the word wasn’t being used in any especially problematic context, whatever that might be — basically it was people saying “God only knows” or “for God’s sake” or something equally mild. Someone apparently thought that somebody should be shielded from hearing the word “God,” but I honestly don’t know if it was for fear of having the Lord’s name taken in vain, or dislike for heavy-handed religiosity. Neither one of which would have fit the circumstances at all. (Could Richard Dawkins be succeeding in his nefarious campaign to criminalize all forms of religious speech?)

According to the World Airline Entertainment Association, the edited-for-airlines versions of films are provided by the film distributors themselves. But I couldn’t find anything from Miramax, who distribute The Queen, about this particular phenomenon. I simply refuse to believe that someone is going around deleting the word “God” from movies, for whatever reason, without stirring up enormous resistance (or at least argument) from someone else, for whatever other reason.

Worst of all, the Internets are failing me. I’ve googled around, searching for any chitchat about film distributors expurgating the word “God” from airline movies, only to come up short. Can I really be the only one to have noticed this? I feel lost without the internet to guide me.