Breakfast Beach

Milk Meets Coffee

For the coffee lovers out there. Here are more photos. 

Physics Rap

The story behind the rap.

Scientists Close to Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak

Times Online: INVISIBILITY devices, long the realm of science fiction and fantasy, have moved closer after scientists engineered a material that can bend visible light around objects.

The breakthrough could lead to systems for rendering anything from people to large objects, such as tanks and ships, invisible to the eye – although this is still years off.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, whose work is funded by the American military, have engineered materials that can control light’s direction of travel. The world’s two leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, are expected to report the results this week.

Cool Campaign Art

Since Barack Obama inspires coolness, artists are coming out with posters, stickers and buttons, street murals and other artistic works to support Obama.

Nature Break

Scribd: The Coolest New Thing

This site is awesome. If you have documents to publish or want to cite a document or embed it in your blog, Scribd lets you do it easily. 

For example, if I want to embed Barack Obama’s Blueprint for Change in this blog, I just copy the code. You can publish photos, resumes, books, articles. 

Obama’s Blueprint For Change – Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Obama’s Blueprint For Change

The Lowdown on Oil

Here’s why we’ll never see low gas prices again. But hopefully, we’ll see more hybrids and plugins and bikes and windmills. 

WaPo: Earlier oil shocks have had obvious causes. In October 1973, OPEC raised prices and declared an oil embargo against the United States and other countries that had supported Israel in its war earlier that month against its Arab neighbors. The embargo ended in March 1974, but pricing power had shifted from the oil companies to the producing countries. In 1979, prices soared again after the Iranian Revolution curtailed output and consumers and oil companies went on a spree of panic buying.

Now, however, there is no one culprit and no single international crisis to blame. Instead, world demand has been increasing faster than supply, steadily squeezing oil markets.

This in turn has signaled to investors that prices are inevitably heading higher. Financial players, such as Wall Street banks and hedge funds, have bet just that, investing tens of billions of dollars in oil futures. Critics on Capitol Hill and elsewhere say this speculation has turbo-charged the market, helping lift prices even more.

The tightening of the oil market reflects decisions made a decade ago, when conditions looked radically different. Regular unleaded gas was less than a dollar a gallon. Oil was little more than $10 a barrel. And the Economist magazine, predicting prices could soon be half that, ran a cover story with the headline: “Drowning in Oil.”

Those low prices sent the wrong signals to consumers and oil companies alike.

Demand for oil jumped as U.S. sales of gas-guzzling cars soared and China’s breakneck economic expansion picked up pace.

Daniel Yergin, a historian of the oil business and head of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, said that over the five years from 1998 to 2002, world oil demand grew 1.1 percent annually, raising daily consumption by 4.2 million barrels. But in the following five years from 2003 to 2007, world oil demand grew 2.1 percent annually, boosting consumption by about 8.2 million barrels per day. 

Inspirational Randy Pausch Dies

The Last Lecture. Aspire to your childhood dreams and if you don’t achieve them, you’ll still get a lot out of trying. 

Obama Shoots Hoops in Kuwait

He sinks his first shot and the soldiers are showing Obama some love, indeed.