'Tis the season
Caolionn O'Connell discusses celebrating Christmas in an interfaith relationship. Her devout mother's "disappointment quickly switched to glee when I informed her that if we were to marry, we would always be at her house for Christmas. Mom is now a BIG fan of the 'Jewish boyfriends for Catholic daughters' concept."

And, in the "How did they do that?" category, Maaike Limper reports that "the Christmas spirit had even reached the ATLAS pit as was demonstrated by a little tree dangling on top of the construction..."

Back to basics
As part of his tenure case, Peter Steinberg gives a lecture on his research for the public. Besides discussing quarks and black holes, he also puts forward "a controversial 'parallel lives' claim about me vs. [Nobel Prize-winner] Murray Gell-Mann. At least one other person in the last 13 years (when I first noticed this) has recently confirmed the slightly uncanny resemblance between the young Murray and the putatively young Steinberg, both in terms of looks and CV."

Stephon Alexander offers a lay explanation of what we know about the structure of the universe, and what questions remain to be answered. "To answer these questions we really need to understand the nature of gravity fully in terms of quantum gravity. Well this is why I'm going off to Penn State, to work with the great Abhay Ashtekar at the Center for Geometry and Quantum Gravity."