May 14, 2008
Category: Art
I feel a little bad about posting a long ranty thing about stupid and annoying art at the Met, because every time I go there, I find something new and really impressive. For example, the renovations underway in the museum forced me to cut through the European Decorative Arts section, where I never go, because who wants to look at a bunch of over-decorated bedrooms? But in passing through there, I stumbled across a couple of Italian rooms that were really cool-- this trompe l'oeil studio, and a neighboring reconstructed chapel with strange Escher-like geometric figures done in wood inlay on some of the wall panels. It was amazing, and I had never run across it before, despite being to the Met several times.
They also had one good and two outstanding special exhibitions going on. The merely good one was a group of painted Korean screens showing books and knick-nacks, with some good explanations of the symbolism of the objects pictured, and the history of the fad for such screens.
The first of the outstanding exhibits was a collection of Chinese paintings with detailed explanations. This was a terrifically well-done exhibition (and the thing I was looking for when I wandered into the Korean screens), because it's usually not clear quite why some paintings are considered masterpieces, especially when they're from foreign cultures. This exhibit set out to explain why, and did a fine job of it.
Read on »
Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:57 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia • Art • Pop Culture
Having done a whirlwind and somewhat disappointing swing through the Museum of Natural History, I strolled across Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to get me some culture. I guessed correctly that it was less likely to be choked with middle-school kids, and I never fail to find something interesting to look at.
Of course, art being art, I always find some crap, too, so let's get that out of the way first. Also, it's easier to blog snidely about art I didn't care for than to explain the wonders of the stuff I did like.
We'll start off easy, though, with the Gustave Courbet exhibit now showing. I feel a little bad about throwing this in here, because the paintings on display were mostly unobjectionable, and the Portrait of the Artist as a Deranged Johnny Depp is quite striking.
The problem was with the history.
Read on »
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:51 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia • Education • Personal • Science
Some colleagues organized a bus trip to New York yesterday, which I went on, on the grounds that a) it was cheap, and b) in a few months, we won't be doing much traveling at all for a while. This required me to get up at an ungodly hour to catch the bus on campus, and the trip itself reminded me of why I don't take public transit, but on the whole, it was a good day. And, of course, blog fodder.
The purpose of the trip was to take students from the intro Astronomy classes to the American Museum of Natural History to see the planetarium show (cue Fountains of Wayne). As this show takes less than an hour, we were free for the rest of the day to wander around The City.
I did a very quick swing through the AMNH, because it was Take Your Shrieking Middle-Schooler to the Museum Day, or some such-- there were probably thirty school buses in or near the museum, and vast packs of third-graders wandering around with name tags stapled to their shirts. There were lots of museum volunteers set up with tables of demonstrations, and the whole program seemed to be very well organized, but it was a littel, um, shrill for somebody who got up at 5am.
I did want to take in the highlights, though, because I have fond memories of the AMNH from when I was a little kid.
Read on »
Posted by Chad Orzel at 7:54 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Links Dump
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"Some connections are obvious: libertarianism and MWI are both are grand philosophical theories that start from premises that almost all educated people accept (quantum mechanics in the one case, Econ 101 in the other), and claim to reach conclusions that
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"So if many worlders are the libertarians of interpretations of quantum theory, what political parties do the other interpretations of quantum theory fall under?"
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A lengthy but probably not exhaustive guide to Mars adventure stories.
Posted by Chad Orzel at 5:37 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 13, 2008
Category: FutureBaby!
Kate and I have been discussing possible names for FutureBaby when he or she ceases to be a baby in potentia and becomes an ActualBaby. We've also talked a bit about the issue of FutureBaby's Internet identification-- specifically, whether I should refer to him or her by name in the eventual blog posts (and oh, yes, there will be blog posts...), or adopt some sort of pseudonym to preserve a tiny bit of privacy in this Google age.
At the moment, we're leaning toward adopting a pseudonym for blog-reference purposes. Which raises the important question that I will throw open to you, oh wise and worldly readers:
How should I refer to FutureBaby on the blog in future years?
It's a tough question...
Read on »
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:52 AM • 51 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Links Dump
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"[S]elf-defeating efforts at cost control" See also "deferred maintenance."
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This week, in the Journal of Unsurprising Results.
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"This phenomenon will allow researchers to achieve various quantum effects in graphene for fundamental research and for technological applications,"
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"[W]hen our own Matthew Bolin suggested that one of our first lists should be a rundown of our favorite age-inappropriate rock songs, the suggestions came fast and furious. "
Posted by Chad Orzel at 5:40 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 12, 2008
Category: Blogs
The Corporate Masters are holding a workspace photo contest:
Now hard at work on the next issue, Seed editors want to see the typical or not-so-typical places where you do science. For the chance to get your scientific work space featured in Seed, please send a photo of it to art@seedmediagroup.com by Tuesday, May 13th at 5:00pm EST. Please write "Where I Do Science Photo Submission" in the subject line, and send as high a resolution image as you can. In the body of the email, please include: your name; what kind of science you do; and the location of the photo.
My office is moderately impressive for its clutter, but not terribly photogenic-- for one thing, it's impossible to get far enough away from the desk to get the whole thing in frame. If you have a workspace that will photograph well, though, snap a picture and send it in.
Posted by Chad Orzel at 8:14 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics
Charles Kuffner reports on an "Innocence Summit" in Texas last week, and points to two more reports from Grits for Breakfast that provide more colorful detail. The news story already says most of what needs saying, though:
AUSTIN -- Nine wrongfully convicted men who spent a collective 148 years in Texas prisons met with a select group of prosecutors, judges and police chiefs in the Senate chamber Thursday to urge the state to establish a commission to investigate claims of innocence.
"I'm crying out for mercy today for someone who may still be in prison," said James Curtis Giles, who served 10 years in prison for rape before DNA testing proved him innocent.
[...]DNA testing in recent years has cleared 33 men of charges related to rape, kidnapping and murder.
It's conceivable that, given a perfect and infallible court system, there might be an interesting discussion to be had about the ethics of capital punishment. With the court system we have, particularly in the state that is most gleeful about executing people, it's just not a conversation worth having.
The second Grits for Breakfast post also adds some really good material, which I'll quote below the fold in case you have some good reason for not going over there:
Read on »
Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:12 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Environment
Matt Nisbet points to a new Pew Survey about global warming showing very little change in public opinion on the subject in recent years. It seems that An Inconvenient Truth didn't really cause a radical change in public opinion, after all.
(Of course, it does appear to have brought climate change to the attention of media elites, which is probably more important than general public opinion, in the end...)
The really interesting thing about this, as usual, is a tidbit near the end of the summary (and shown in the graphic Matt posted:
Among Republicans, similar percentages of college graduates and those with less education say there is solid evidence of global warming (46% and 51%, respectively). Yet for Republicans, unlike Democrats, higher education is associated with greater skepticism that human activity is causing global warming. Only 19% of Republican college graduates say that there is solid evidence that the earth is warming and it is caused by human activity, while 31% of Republicans with less education say the same.
So, while going to college increases Democrats' belief that humans are responsible for global warming (from 52% to 75%) , it decreases Republicans' belief that humans are responsible for global warming.
I can imagine two possible explanations for this:
Read on »
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:54 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: News
There's been a lot said and written about Cyclone Nargis recently, and reading the coverage by Chris Mooney and others makes me feel a little like a Bad Person for not saying anything myself. But, really, what is there to say? It's a gigantic disaster, and the deplorable political situation in that part of the world isn't helping anything.
In an effort to do something halfway constructive, I'll pass along a link from my email, to Mercy Corps's Myanmar Cyclone page. They're one of the organizations that I sent money to after last summer's atheist charity search, and from all reports are an organization with an excellent track record.
If, like me, you can't think of anything useful to say about the tragedy, you might think about sending them a few bucks.
Posted by Chad Orzel at 7:40 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Links Dump
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Hilarious tales of disasters on stage.
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"Happy Voice of Command Day, in honor of all of those people in our lives who were irrefutably right."
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"What economics has done is to take the models of the supply and demand of consumer goods and apply them to the supply and demand of labor. This, I believe, is fundamentally wrong-headed. "
Posted by Chad Orzel at 5:40 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 11, 2008
Category: FutureBaby! • Physics
Kate and I made a run to Babies "R" Us today, and looked at a bunch more baby stuff. We got a little punchy after a while, so it was perhaps not surprising that I was tremendously amused by the idea of Penguin Bowling.
On further reflection, though, it's really only natural. After all, the toy is really nothing more than a child's introduction to the study of physics. It's really an educational tool that captures the very essence of physics: we learn about the world we live in by throwing things at other things, and seeing what happens when they collide. Sometimes we throw photons at atoms, or protons at anti-protons, and sometimes we throw rattly plush bowling balls at crinkly stuffed penguins (or farm animals or fuzzy monsters).
Whatever the target, and whatever the projectile, it's all good physics.
Posted by Chad Orzel at 3:53 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Blogs
Jacques Distler asks the question that every blog-reader has asked at some point:
Did all of this exist before the Web? Or have people just gotten a whole lot weirder in the past 15 years?
(I'm not even going to attempt to describe what triggered the question...)
I tend to think that the weirdness was always there, and the Internet has just made it easier for the weird people to find each other. You can find antecedents of the social Internet in things like mimeographed fanzines and nineteenth-century magazine letter columns, so I suspect that for any modern weirdness, there are probably analogous bizarrities in some pre-Internet forum or another. A bit of Googling will probably turn up some lovingly maintained page on exotic mail-order kink in 1795, or some such-- whatever weird stuff went on in the past, somebody probably knows all about it, and is dying to share that knowledge with the world.
The Internet has just enabled this stuff to get around faster. But bizarre behavior is just an emergent property of large groups of humans given the ability to communicate over long distances.
Posted by Chad Orzel at 8:25 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 10, 2008
Category: Science • Science Books • Television
Via Swans On Tea, I see that Comedy Central has put up the video of George Johnson's appearance on the Colbert Report. Or, I should say, they claim to have put it up-- their video player didn't work worth a damn on my computer.
I saw this on the day-late rerun, and it was hilarious. Not because Johnson is at all witty or amusing-- he's not. But toward the end it turns into an xkcd comic, and achieves a sort of accidental brilliance.
Check it out, if you can get it to play.
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:22 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Music
There's been a lot of talk about REM's decision to finally sound like a rock band again for their new album, Accelerate. I rather like the first single, "Supernatural Superserious," which sounds like the REM I remember, rather than some bloodless adult contemporary act.
So I bought the album, and it's been of shuffle play with a bunch of other stuff for a few weeks now. And you know what? The rest of it is pretty tedious. It is a departure from their recent stuff in that it's at least loud and tedious, rather than adult-contemporary tedious, but I'm not liking it all that much.
I just wanted to throw that out there. Feel free to suggest other recent releases which are less likely to be disappointing.
Posted by Chad Orzel at 8:08 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
