In a move sure to threaten my relationship with my girlfriend, I am going out to the U.S. Grand Prix after all. This will be the first time I've attended consecutive F1 races, and if my experience in Monza is any indication the weekend will be incredible. Now, if Sandi will only talk to me again....

Updates this weekend will be correspondingly sparse, and my write-up of the Nürburgring will also be delayed until next weekend.

Although there hasn't been a trial of any sort, it appears that solid-state physics prodigy Jan Hendrik Schon is indeed guilty of fraud in many of the dozens of papers he has produced since 1998. It's a sad day for physics, and hopefully it will lead to an overhaul of the peer review process which today resembles something of a rubber stamp for papers published by leaders in their respective fields.

This stuff takes me back to junior high school. Somehow I think that Faisal and I will be present at the concert. Arrests are sure to follow.

By way of Faisal's site I found a story intriguing to all armchair physicists: Earth's magnetic field apparently can boost gravity which may account for the relatively large variation between past measurements of Newton's gravitational constant. This may also account for the fact that the most distant space probes we've launched (e.g. Pioneer 10) have traveled farther away than they should have. Fascinating. <raises eyebrow>