Professor Stephen Hawking is the closest I will ever get to (future) Nobel blood. Of course, my link is an illusion, tofu was being naughty that day. I envy you guys.

That was Subramanyan Chandrasekhar. Very pleasant to talk to.

I didn't talk to him but I once received personal email from Brian Josephson.

As I have done a lot of volunteer work for UNICEF I consider myself to have won 1/200,000th of the 1965 Nobel Peace Prize.

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Now while I might be amused by Cthulhians, I don't necessarily distrust them to carry out the functions of government. -- JayUtah

What's it like being a skeptic in the Middle East? Check out my blog.

I've met five additional Nobel winners (two before winning, three after). An advantage of working with atomic clocks and in the laser cooling/trapping field - four of the prizes since 1989 have tied in, somehow, so we attend the same conferences.

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"I have a cunning plan that cannot fail."
S. Baldrick

It's not science, but it is a Nobel Prize. So, the final award of 2005 was the Literature Prize awarded this year to the playwrite Harold Pinter. The award citation read "Harold Pinter, who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms" Well. it certainly sounds prettier than the citations for the physics and chemistry prizes.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

It is a rare thing when the winner of the Literature Prize is someone I've heard of, and sadly this year is no exception. Anyone care to comment on Mr. Pinter's works?

(side note: looking back at previous winners, the 1953 Literature prize went to Sir Winston Chruchill. That struck me as kind of odd, perhaps he won for his speeches?)

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Now while I might be amused by Cthulhians, I don't necessarily distrust them to carry out the functions of government. -- JayUtah

What's it like being a skeptic in the Middle East? Check out my blog.

His memoirs, in fact.

And no, I've never read Pinter, but I have heard of it.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I was thinking the very opposite. Usually I've never heard of them, but Harold Pinter is an exception.

He certainly deserves it. He's just about the only current playwright I'd regard as a writer of great literature.

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- Learn a lot teaching others.

Chemistry Nobel Laureate Smalley Dies
Nobel laureate Richard Smalley, a Rice University professor who helped discover buckyballs, the soccer ball-shaped form of carbon, and championed the field of nanotechnology, has died at the age of 62.