Can't get enough of that wonderful physics

This afternoon I have been spending time scanning some of the posts on cosmicvariance.com - and as such have been sidetracked by the attached comments and links to other blogs/websites (this interconnectivity thing can lead you off in some interesting tangents e.g. Naked Under My Lab Coat - well with a blog title like that I'm going to have a look aren't I). This (cosmicvariance that is) is a joint blog between 5 (astro)physicists and I've mentioned it before. It is also linked from my sidebar, although after reading several posts I've decided that the name of my link, currently "Physicists who blog about actual physics! And other stuff" is fairly wide of the mark, and should actually be "Physicists who blog about stuff, oh and some physics". The majority of it is talking about, unsurprisingly at the moment, the World Cup, along with other random topics that you or I might write about. Admittedly there is some physics (well actually having a second look at the blog there's a fair bit of physics, but being an astrophysicist myself I think I filter it out), even in a post about the World Cup. In another of World Cup posts Fiddling with the World Cup there was one of the most vitriolic anti-American rants, via the medium of footballing analogies, I've heard in a while by a guy called Alfredo Louro saying things like:

"Americans don’t know how to improvise. This is why their armies, the most technologically sophisticated armies in the entire Local Group, are helpless against some barefoot guerrillas. If Americans stopped thinking about how to change the rules of football, and actually tried to understand the game, they might actually begin to understand guerrilla warfare, and save their lives."

If you read his whole comment I think most people would agree that he was being a tad harsh (especially on the post's author Sean) - unless, say, his father was killed by an American misinterpreting the back pass rule (not quite sure how that could happen, but I'm just saying).

Comets

This morning I learnt from Prof. David Hughes that the more we learn about comets the less we actually know! He was in Glasgow giving a seminar to the astronomy group and very interesting it was to - he's a very good public speaker, so if you get the chance go to one of his talks. He did also show us some nice pictures of comets, although I didn't spot any alien spacecraft hiding behind any of them.