A few great links

1. John Lennon's Imagine (short video, via Selva).

2. Neil deGrasse Tyson's kinship with the cosmos (short video on Nayagam's blog).

3. Hot experiments that produce cool data (via Guru):

The popcorn study is an example. We found that people ate more popcorn when we gave them bigger buckets. I’d originally done all that in a lab. So that’s great, that’s enough to get it published. But it’s not enough to make people go “hey, that’s cool.” I found a movie theatre that would let me do it. It became expensive because we needed to buy a lot of buckets of popcorn. Once you find out it happens in real theatres, people go “cool.” You can’t publish it in great journal because you can’t get 300 covariates; we published it in slightly less prestigious journal but it had much greater impact than a little lab study would have had.

4. The curious case of Ranjit Chandra (see Seth Roberts for the gory details):

In order to try and prop up his case, Chandra published a study by someone named Amrit Jain in Nutrition Research confirming his previous results. Amrit Jain was supposedly affiliated with the Medical Clinic and Nursing Home, Jaipur, India; however, this place appears to be completely fictional. It has never been referred to anywhere except in Amrit Jain's paper. Also, Amrit Jain's mailing address is not in India, but a Canadian post office box. When investigators attempted to contact Jain, they were unable to get a reply or even confirm his existence or credentials.