Linkedy Links X

More Phenomenal random links to random stuff: life, the Universe and Everything

• Phenomena - new blog group under National Geographic, including some long time scibloggers: The Loom, Not Exactly Rocket Science, Laelaps and Only Human, to begin with.
• On the Usefulness of Useless Knowledge - Bee explains.
• Substantive Advice to Admissions Committees - Or, why, all things being equal, we should prefer candidates from less prestigious institutions.
  This is actually sensible - it is a "what have you done with what you were given" argument.
  But, all things are very rarely equal... and no one ever got fired for buying IBM, at least not in the last millennium.
• Was Life Inevitable? - aka "The compositional and evolutionary logic of metabolism" (pdf - open access)
• Photosynthesis, oxygen and manganese - fossil evidence for transition to modern photosynthesis
• There Is Only One Higgs - in the data, to date. Matt Strassler explains.
• Testing whether we live in a computer simulation - Martin Savage et al on conjecture anisotropy in high energy (ie small scale) interactions as signature of QCD like lattice simulations of, well, us.
  " Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation" (arXiv)
• Solar System: glass christmas ornaments.
  Not to scale.
  And bacon!!!