July 2, 2009
SteelyKid's nearly over her coxsackie virus, but has just enough spots left that we can't take her to day care. Which means another day of baby wrangling, and another poll question chosen by the dog:
What is the biggest single threat to your household security?(surveys)
Emmy is convinced that we'…
July 2, 2009
There is a fairly prominent strain of SF fandom which vehemently rejects all but the most superficial forms of literary analysis. This mostly seems to be due to bad experiences with English Lit classes in high school and/or college, at least based on the long rants they used to uncork on Usenet,…
July 2, 2009
Just a reminder, if you're someone who's eligible to vote for this year's Hugo Awards, the deadline to do so is tomorrow. Of course, you probably already know that-- they sent out reminder emails last night. They want me to vote so badly, in fact, that I got four reminder emails last night, two…
July 1, 2009
Newton, P.I. | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
"Happily, Tom Levenson (of The Inverse Square, and one of our honored guest bloggers) has provided us with a fascinating peek into a telling episode in Newtonâs later life â his career as a criminal investigator. Not really âP.I.â, as Newton was…
July 1, 2009
Whoever came up with the idea of making little string bikinis in infant sizes should be beaten to death with Barbie dolls.
Seriously. The world does not need 6-9 month size versions of the useless "swimwear" that gets modeled in Sports Illustrated. We barely need the adult versions.
July 1, 2009
I no longer recall who pointed me to this current.com post titled "Scientists Make Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light "-- somebody on Facebook, I think. As it would be a pretty neat trick to make light move faster than light, I took a look. The opening is fairly standard semi-gibberish:
Scientist…
July 1, 2009
The Infinite Summer people got me to start re-reading Infinite Jest, but I'm not really going to attempt to hold to their proposed reading schedule. Not because I find it hard to find time to read, but because I have trouble putting it down to go to sleep, let alone in order to keep pace with an…
June 30, 2009
Acephalous: Infinite Summer: Morbid? Culturally Imperial? Morbidly Culturally Imperial?
"In the end, whatâs interesting about the 25-year-old Kleinâs post about the 46-year-old Foster Wallaceâs novel is the notion that someone who was 18 years old when the Clash first performed in America and…
June 30, 2009
Over at Confused on a Higher Level, Melissa has been thinking about undergraduate research:
As a member of the Physics and Astronomy Division of the Council of Undergraduate Research (CUR), over the past few months I've gotten several e-mails about the effort by CUR, the Society of Physics Students…
June 30, 2009
Firday's quick and sarcastic post came about because I thought the Dean Dad and his commenters had some interesting points in regard to high school math requirements, but we were spending the afternoon driving to Whitney Point so I could give a graduation speech. I didn't have time for a more…
June 29, 2009
Physics Buzz: A day at the International Submarine Races
"Last weekend, travelers at a rest stop in Minnesota became alarmed when a group of college kids pulled up in a U-haul truck, carefully unloaded a large, sleek object from the back, and set to work on it with power tools. About the length…
June 29, 2009
The National Science Foundation uses a computerized proposal-and-report submission system called FastLane. When I first submitted a proposal, this required three things to log in: your last name, your Social Security number, and a password of your choice.
Sometime in the last year, they stopped…
June 29, 2009
I'm not entirely sure why I keep responding to this, but Bruce Charlton left another comment about the supposed dullness of modern science that has me wondering about academic:
The key point is that a few decades ago an average scientist would start working on the problem of his choice in his mid-…
June 29, 2009
While I've seen him on tv a bunch of times (both on NOVA and on the Comedy Central fake-news shows), I have somehow managed not to read anything by Neil deGrasse Tyson before. I'm not sure how that happened. After his appearance on The Daily show last year, and especially after the Rubik's Cube…
June 28, 2009
Cocktail Party Physics: dial-a-scientist
"It all started Wednesday, when I got an email from Brandon Webb, who handles PR for the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at UT Dallas. He wanted to know if I could talk to a reporter who wanted to know whether a Styrofoam cup could break a…
June 28, 2009
One of the fun thing about being at home for a weekend is that I get to see a close-up view of the death of the American newspaper. When I was a kid, Binghamton had two daily papers, the Sun-Bulletin and the Evening Press, published in the morning and evening, respectively (bet you couldn't've…
June 27, 2009
The following is the (approximate) text of the speech I gave Friday night at the Whitney Point High School graduation. Or, at least, this is what I typed out for myself Thursday night-- what actually comes out of my mouth on Friday might be completely different. That's why they do these things live…
June 26, 2009
Hacker News | I was a theoretical physicist for 13 years, and struggled a lot with this questi...
"One unusual but very useful style was to set a goal like reading 15 papers in 3 hours. I use the term "reading" here in an unusual way. Of course, I don't mean understanding everything in the papers…
June 26, 2009
I'm headed home to give a speech at my old high school's graduation. Which is a weird feeling-- I don't feel like I'm really old or successful enough to be on the lecture circuit. Then again, it is twenty years since I graduated there myself, which means I've been out of high school longer than…
June 26, 2009
"What are you doing?"
"Hmm? Oh, I'm trying to think of a Dorky Poll question to post to the blog, because I'm going to be away from the computer for a while."
"Why are they always human polls?"
"Um, because the vast majority of my readers are human?"
Yeah, but why don't I ever get to pick poll…
June 26, 2009
The Dean Dad slaps his forehead and asks a question:
We have anecdotal evidence that suggests that students who actually take math for all four years of high school do better in math here than those who don't. We also have anecdotal evidence that bears crap in the woods. Why the hell do the high…
June 26, 2009
Chris Mooney has an explanation of the "accommodationist" position that deserves better than to be buried in a Links Dump:
I don't see a need to pry into how each individual is dealing with these complicated and personal matters of constructing a coherent worldview. Rather, from a political and…
June 25, 2009
Technology & Middle Earth : Built on Facts
"Why doesn't anyone just use a telescope or binoculars? Ok sure, it's ancient middle earth and presumably a Galileo hasn't been born yet. But I see no reason that this ought to stop them. Middle Earth is not a completely pre-technological environment…
June 25, 2009
SteelyKid is pondering a life as a costumed crime-fighter-- she's got the pseudonym for it, after all-- and here we see her trying out a catchphrase to strike fear into the hearts of naughty people:
"Spooooon!!!"
Actually, that's lifted from somebody else. Probably needs more work.
The traditional…
June 25, 2009
Just a quick reminder post to note that you can win an advance proof copy of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in one of two ways:
By captioning pictures of the dog with physics apparatus
By writing short poems about dogs and physics
Regarding the last one, I'm thinking of adding a second poetry…
June 25, 2009
Over at Skulls in the Stars, gg has a very good response to the polemic about the dullness of modern science that I talked about a few days ago. He takes issue with the claim that modern science is "dull" compared to some past Golden Age, and does a good job of it-- go read it.
I think he makes…
June 25, 2009
Consecutive entries in my RSS reader yesterday:
Salty ocean in the depths of Enceladus
Discovery could have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life
An enormous plume of water spurts in giant jets from the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus. In a report published in the…
June 25, 2009
I've been reading a bunch of posts at Infinite summer lately, where they're planning to spend the summer (re)reading David Foster Wallaces most magnum of opuses, Infinite Jest. In a development that surely nobody could see coming, I've decided to spend some of my infinite (hah) free time re-reading…
June 24, 2009
Confessions of a Community College Dean: An Unmarked Car
"[A]t work, I can wear, say, a gray suit, and be both situationally appropriate and utterly impersonal. On dress down days, the alternate uniform of tie-less Oxford and khakis (or a close variant) gets the job done. There's nothing terribly…
June 24, 2009
Via email, a news story from San Francisco with the headline "Physics discussion ends in skateboard attack":
A homeless man is on trial in San Mateo County on charges that he smacked a fellow transient in the face with a skateboard as the victim was engaged in a conversation about quantum physics,…
