Galileo's Pendulum

A ghostly nebula (from Astronomy Picture of the Day). I also see an octopus in this nebula, but I may just be kraken up.

Activities for the day include taking my cat Pascal to the vet (he’s feeling better than yesterday, but I’m being cautious) and writing a version of “Brass in Pocket” for job-seekers. (“I’m gonna make you see/No other candidate, no one like me/I’m special (special!)….”)

• xkcd has a great take on homeopathy. Make sure you read the mouseover text.
• A webinar from Marie-Claire Shanahan talks about how best to bring and keep students in science and engineering who don’t fit the “white male” demographic.
• Emily Willingham takes women’s and parenting magazines to task for having no substantive science content. Since mothers are often the first source of educational information for young children and also the largest consumers of such literature, why aren’t there more science and technology features in these magazines? I can think of a half-dozen writers right off the top of my head who would rock that gig. Editors, the ball is in your court.
• The Parkes Observatory (in Australia) is 50 years old. It’s a rare telescope that stars in a movie, but Parkes is one. Beyond Hollywood and the Apollo mission, the 64-meter Parkes radio telescope is a major astronomical instrument, helping map the spiral structure of the Milky Way and leading the way in pulsar observations.

(For those whose Irony Detectors^TM are on the lowest setting, I am not proposing replacing Halloween with Scienceween, in the style of Jesusween.)