Poor Jeremy Piven. First, the Emmy-award-winning Entourage star made headlines in December after he bowed out of the Broadway run of David Mamet's Speed the Plow, less than two months after it opened to strong reviews, citing high mercury levels in his system -- ostensibly from eating too much s...

Let me once again offer a mea culpa for lack of blog activity. I can't speak for my fellow bloggers, but I have been stuck in traffic, which really cuts down on blogging time. And Jen-Luc Piquant won't let me blog and drive. I can't even Twitter and drive, since as of January 1, it is il...

I've always had a soft spot for Michael Faraday, for any number of reasons, but one of those reasons is that he was a brilliant experimentalist with world-class instincts for investigating the behavior of this strange new phenomenon, and yet he possessed only rudimentary mathematical skills -- s...

Let me borrow a riff from co-blogger Allyson: Forgive me, readers, for I have slacked (from blogging, that is). It has been 50 phone calls, 200 emails, seven meetings, four gym workouts, three dinners, two "events", one screening, and a dental appointment since my last blog post. That's the downside...

Surely by now you've heard the tragic tale of the Wal-Mart employee in Valley Stream, Long Island in New York City who was literally trampled to death by crazed shoppers who'd camped out all night for the big post-Thanksgiving Day sale. Poor Jdimytai Damour didn't stand a chance against ...

One wouldn't expect the 17th century English philosopher Francis Bacon to have much of a sweet tooth; he always struck me as a rather curmudgeonly sort, thoughts firmly fixed on Higher Matters, eschewing the paltry comforts of the flesh. But Jen-Luc Piquant suspects he might have had a secret fondne...

Fans of BloggingHeads.TV can now watch my latest diavlog with Big Daddy Chad (Orzel) of Uncertain Principles. We talked about dancing like a monkey, True Lab Stories, why choosing a small teaching college doesn't mean you're a "failure" in the Ivory Tower hierarchy, what's wrong with Neal ...

Fans of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are familiar with the fictional Infinite Improbability Drive that powers the spaceship Heart of Gold . It allows for faster-than-light travel, per Adams, and is based on one of the central peculiarities of quantum physics: the notion that a sub...

It's All Soul's Day, and Jen-Luc is proudly sporting her vampire look for the occasion, eschewing the usual Halloween festivities last night. She embraces the notion (popularized on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) that vampires and other nasty things actually take the night off on Halloween -- because the...

Jen-Luc Piquant is tres, tres fache at the moment because a group of unprincipled global warming denialists is spreading lies about our beloved American Physical Society (APS). Readers familiar with my backstory might recall that I took a job with the APS many years ago when I was struggling to make...