My favorite new comedy

Better Off Ted – Enough daddy issues for an episode of Lost:
[Via CliqueClack TV]

Better Off Ted is really growing on me. I enjoyed it when it first aired, but I wasn’t super impressed with it. The more of it I watch, though, and the more I find myself laughing. I’m not sure if it’s me or the show, but I feel like it’s found its stride and is genuinely clever and funny. It was unique from day one, and continues to be.

This week was no different, after all is there any other word that you can use to describe a show that features the shaving of office furniture? It is definitely unique.

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This show is so sardonically twisted. As someone who worked in a research and development lab, there are so many little things that just make me laugh. All the characters are off in very delightful ways. It is like ‘I know someone like that!’

Where Big Bang Theory shows us geeks at home, Better Off Ted shows us what happens when they enter the business world. Everyone in the show is socially inept, but in very different ways. The lab guys are two geeks in white coat. Ted is just a geek with a business suit. Linda, the sole person in development, apparently, is a geek with breasts. Veronica is a geek with a big office.

None are really anyone you might want to have over but all are very funny. This week we got to see the problems they al have with authority/daddy issues. Just amazing. And it is all done with a seriousness and a lack of self awareness that only the Office has ever been able to maintain.

Plus, I watch to see the internal Veridian Dynamics spots in every show. They almost always have something cutting to say. Such as the time Obama wanted to telecast a press conference during BOT’s time slot:

These little ads are so good, they look like normal TV ads but they are wickedly satirical. Here are a few more:

Food, Yum

Life. Better

Technorati Tags: General

Eclipse and relativity

Gravity and light:
[Via Cosmic Variance]

A few hours ago the longest total solar eclipse of the Century swept across Asia. And a few days ago Evalyn Gates provided a wonderful guest post on gravitational lensing. This seems like an opportune time to note that gravitational lensing and total solar eclipses are inextricably linked.

One of the most interesting predictions of Einstein’s new theory of relativity was that gravity would cause light to bend. Imagine you are looking at a distant source of light, for example a star, or a faraway galaxy, or a quasar at the edge of the Universe. And let’s assume that, along the line-of-sight to the distant source there’s a massive object, for example the Sun, or a black hole, or a galaxy, or a cluster of galaxies. The gravity from the massive object will “pull” on the photons as they pass, shifting their paths, and thereby affecting the image that we see in our telescopes. In the simple case of a distant point source of light (e.g., a far away star), and a compact spherically symmetric lens (e.g., a black hole), the bending angle is given by

In this equation M is the mass of the lens, r is the minimum distance between the (unperturbed) line-of-sight to the source and the lens, G is the gravitational constant, and c is the speed of light. This was a crucial prediction of Einstein’s new theory, and one way to test it was to see if the stars on the sky “jump” as the Sun (which is quite massive, and traverses the sky quite briskly) comes nearby on the sky.

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This is a very nice explanation, not only of the importance of eclipses for 20th Century science, but also it provides a nice view of EInstein’s impact. Plus it has an equation that I have not seen since college. It was my inability to really ‘get’ relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. that proved to me that biology was the place for me.

Luckily for me, you do not need to work with quantum mechanics to have a nice carer in biotechnology.

I did always love the irony that eclipses, which had been a source of superstitious behavior for centuries, were used to prove the most non-intuitive theories ever created. Einstein’s work put the final nail in Newtonian mechanics but replaced it with something that, to me, seemed to have as many odd, unusual ramifications, with apparent non-rational conclusions, as any bit of fabulous magic.

Technorati Tags: Science