August 2, 2009
It's critically important to be on your guard when exploring our living room at the moment. The wily SteelyKid can strike without warning:
Of course, not all of her attacks are quite so violent:
Awwwwwww.....
August 1, 2009
These aren't really SteelyKid's first steps, just the first ones I got on video:
She routinely goes farther than that, more confidently than that, but the big lunge at the end is awfully cute. It's hard to get her really good walks on video, because she always seems to be on the verge of disaster,…
August 1, 2009
CHART ATTACK!: 8/1/92 | Popdose
"I just read the following in their Wikipedia entry: "In 2009, Boyz II Men announced plans for a new cover album, that covers 'artists I don't think people would expect us to cover!' according to Shawn Stockman." Can Popdose get in on this? Can we make a list of…
July 31, 2009
I should queue up some more PNAS posts, but I think I'm going to save a bunch of them for when we're at Worldcon. And I do have more serious science-related stuff that I've marked to talk about, but it's Friday, and everybody could use a break. So here's a silly pop-music thing instead.
As with…
July 31, 2009
Yesterday's historical physics poll was about precision measurements. Who were those people, and why are they worth knowing about?
As usual, we'll do these in reverse order of popularity...
First up is Ole Rømer, a Danish astronomer who is no stranger to this blog, having been profiled as part of…
July 31, 2009
I had a bit of a discussion via Twitter with Eric Weinstein yesterday, starting with his statement:
Ed Witten has no Nobel Prize. Now tell me again how this era's physics just feels different because we are too close to it.
Basically, he appears to feel that Witten is sufficiently smart that he…
July 31, 2009
Guided By Voices | Music | A.V. Club
"Dozens of people can say they were members of indie-rock institution Guided By Voices during its 21-year run, but the Dayton, Ohio-based band was chiefly a creative outlet for a music-obsessed former schoolteacher named Robert Pollard. And Pollard was very…
July 30, 2009
It's really getting difficult to get good Baby Blogging pictures, now that SteelyKid is mobile. We've had to resort to trying to sneak Appa into the background when she pauses to regroup by chewing on an outgrown outfit:
That's not the best Appa-for-scale picture, I know, but it's tough. This one…
July 30, 2009
Keeping up the string of poll questions about less-well-known physicists (started here), here's a list of physicists who are known for having made very precise measurements of physical quanitites. Which of them is the best?
Which of these physicists who made precision measurements is the best?(…
July 30, 2009
Yesterday, I posted a silly poll about optical physicists. Who are those people, and why should you care about them?
In inverse order of popularity:
Bringing up the rear in this race is John William Strutt, who, even more than Lord Kelvin in the thermodynamics poll, is hurt by the fact that people…
July 30, 2009
There's another paper about the Fermi Paradox highlighted on the arXiv blog today. This one describes extensive numerical simulations which purport to show that no more than 1,000 spacefaring civilizations can be exploring the galaxy with non-replicating slower-than-light robotic probes.
Of course…
July 30, 2009
The missing research program for space colonization -- KarlSchroeder.com
"No amount of data about how the human body reacts to zero-G is going to answer the important question, which is: how does the human body react to extended periods under fractional gravity--like the moon's 1/6 G or Mars's .…
July 29, 2009
The semi-nonymous Phillip H. at DC Dispatches liked the idea behind the Project for Non-Academic Science, but he didn't want to reveal his secret identity. So he wrote up and posted his own interview:
1) What is your non-academic job?
I'm the National Program Coordinator for Protected Species at my…
July 29, 2009
In the same basic vein as yesterday's post about thermodynamics, the following poll contains a list of physicists who are not household names, but who made significant contributions to the science of optics. Which of them is the best?
Which of these physicists from the field of optics was the best…
July 29, 2009
The Corporate Masters have launched a "featured blogger" program, asking individual ScienceBloggers to comment on news articles from the main site, and publishing the responses with the magazine piece. I just did one on new quantum experiments, which was posted today.
The news article is…
July 29, 2009
So, yesterday featured a silly poll about underappreciated old-timey physicists. Who are these people, and why should you know about them?
Taking them in reverse order of the voting:
Rudolf Clausius is the originator of the infamous Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of any…
July 29, 2009
(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too…
July 29, 2009
The Republic of T. » Sotomayor & The Vulcan Standard, Pt. 2
"It hit me like a slap in the face. It sounded familiar, but different. To me, this fictional family was white. But in the time and place they occupied on the page they weren't "white enough."
"Oh my God!" I exclaimed. My husband,…
July 28, 2009
While I'm stealing post ideas from Twitter, here's another poll question, thanks to Eric Weinstein, who wrote earlier:
And @CameronNeylon, when you write "Good science means not having an (emotional) allegiance to any theory surely?" I must strongly disagree.
This position results from the luxury…
July 28, 2009
The question of who is the greatest physicist of the physicists who are household names-- Newton, Einstein, Maxwell, etc.-- has been debated thousands of times, and will undoubtedly be debated thousands of times in the future. What isn't as often discussed is the ranking of physicists who aren't in…
July 28, 2009
(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too…
July 28, 2009
There's an interesting report at Inside Higher Ed today on a study of religiosity and college. Some of the results will probably come as a surprise to many people around ScienceBlogs:
# The odds of going to college increase for high school students who attend religious services more frequently or…
July 28, 2009
kate_nepveu: Worldcon: online jerkitude
"I'm trying to come up with a list of bedrock principles that apply across all online contexts, and I keep getting bogged down in my lawyer tendencies. So what would you say are the fundamental, applies-anywhere minimum requirements of human decency when it…
July 27, 2009
The Project for Non-Academic Science posts have been very well received, and I continue to get a steady trickle of new volunteers. I'm going to slow the rate of posting these a little bit, as the recent posting rate has been a little ridiculous, but I'll keep posting them as long as people keep…
July 27, 2009
(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too…
July 27, 2009
(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too…
July 27, 2009
Timothy Burke notes a controversy about an NEH program that some philosophers feel tramples their discipline. In talking about a hypothetical program that would do the same for his field of history, Burke suggests something that caught my eye:
f the NEH set up a course development grant called "…
July 27, 2009
KR Blog » The Wilderness of Memory
"[Chabon asks] a valid question, but I can't escape the feeling that it reflects a particularly American idealization of childhood. Growing up slowly is a privilege of wealth, and few children throughout human history have enjoyed a childhood without the…
July 26, 2009
The del.icio.us automatic blog posting that usually produces the daily links dump posts here has been broken during the recent ScienceBlogs upgrade. The links dump posts from last Thursday on didn't happen, but we've kludged up a way to get that material back. These are the links that should've…
July 26, 2009
The del.icio.us automatic blog posting that usually produces the daily links dump posts here has been broken during the recent ScienceBlogs upgrade. The links dump posts from last Thursday on didn't happen, but we've kludged up a way to get that material back. These are the links that should've…
