June 6, 2009
SteelyKid attempts to show off her street cred:
Of course, her attempt at looking tough is kind of undermined by the Princess Tutu type duck on her hoodie...
That's ok, though, because it's all fun:
Getting pictures taken for the blog is funny...
June 5, 2009
Diary of a Trade Book (Newton and the Counterfeiter) 7.1: Rewards and Bribes « The Inverse Square Blog
"[W]hen sheer love of words and sentences and ideas canât carry you through, what can you fall back on?
Bribery."
(tags: writing books levenson)
Matthew Yglesias » Book Launch 2.0
As someone…
June 5, 2009
This may be too late in the day to generate much action, but I thought of it just a little while ago. Two questions:
1) If you were writing a letter of recommendation for a student, would you refer to them as "Firstname" or "Mr./Ms. Lastname"?
2) Does your answer depend on the level of the student…
June 5, 2009
Physics World posted a somewhat puzzling story a few days back, headlined Ultra cold atoms help share quantum information:
Scientists in the US have demonstrated a novel "light-switch" in an optical fibre that could become a new tool in the communications industry. The device created by Michal…
June 5, 2009
Physics World reports on the awarding of a major French prize in science:
A physicist has been awarded France's top science prize for his work on atomic physics and quantum optics. Serge Haroche -- one of the founding fathers of cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) -- was presented with this year's…
June 4, 2009
Swans on Tea » Going UP (Very Precisely)
"Ignoring that weâre working in English units, which scientists donât really do very much, the big thing that pops out to the budding, fully-bloomed, or dying scientist is the misuse of significant digits. Do we really believe the estimate of the houseâs…
June 4, 2009
My mom was in Saratoga Springs for a meeting, and stopped by tonight to make a guest appearance in this week's Baby Blogging. Here, SteelyKid shows off how she can haul herself into a standing position on the big tub of outgrown baby clothes sitting in the living room:
"How do we know she did that…
June 4, 2009
Tom Levenson has another excellent piece in his series on the writing of his forthcoming book on Newton, this one on hitting a wall:
The one bit of history specific to the Newton and the Counterfeiter project came when I hit a wall. I had written about a quarter of the manuscript by the autumn of…
June 4, 2009
When this first came out, I didn't pick it up, despite a glowing recommendation from Jennifer Ouellette, because NASCAR is one of the few things on ESPN that interests me less than baseball. I didn't really think I'd be interested in reading a whole book on the subject.
I saw Jennifer and Diandra…
June 3, 2009
kitchen table math, the sequel: alternate universe
"While visiting schools in a variety of districts, I began to notice something that puzzled me. Some of these schools, particularly those with large numbers of poor and minority children, are working against daunting â some would say unreasonable…
June 3, 2009
For reasons that don't really matter, I learned yesterday that there is a marathon in Antarctica:
On December 12th, 2009, the fifth Antarctic Ice Marathon will take place at 80 Degrees South, just a few hundred miles from the South Pole at the foot of the Ellsworth Mountains. This race presents a…
June 2, 2009
slacktivist: Killing in the name of
"In 1973, most evangelicals regarded opposition to abortion as a Catholic Thing -- and therefore vaguely suspect, as though it might lead to praying to Mary or something. But throughout the 1970s and into the '80s, that changed. The person most responsible for…
June 2, 2009
I'm in a line of work where I have to listen to a lot of graduation speeches-- at least one per year. Yesterday, though, I got a phone call asking me to give one at my old high school's graduation in three and a half weeks.
This is kind of a weird situation, because while it has been 20 years since…
June 2, 2009
I'm eligible to vote for the Hugos this year, as a paid-up member of Anticipation. As such, I got the free packet of nominated works that they put together for the voters, and have started working my way through the short fiction (I've read all the novel nominees that I'm going to). Whether you're…
June 1, 2009
Silence Is The Enemy | The Intersection | Discover Magazine
Today begins a very important initiative called Silence Is The Enemy to help a generation of young women half a world away.Why? Because they are our sisters and childrenâthe victims of sexual abuse who donât have the means to ask for…
June 1, 2009
Two noteworthy things in the meta-blog category:
1) The 3 Quarks Daily science blogging prize nominations are up, and it's a great list of sciencey bloggy goodness. If you're looking for a way to procrastinate, you could kill several days reading all 171 entries.
Once you're done reading them, go…
June 1, 2009
Before there was such a thing as Uncertain Principles, let alone Thursday Baby Blogging, there was this:
Still the best call I ever made, seven years on.
June 1, 2009
Today is the first day of the last week of class, hallelujah. Unfortunately, it's also the first class on rotational motion and angular momentum. This is unfortunate because it's the hardest material in the course-- angular momentum doesn't behave in as intuitive a manner as linear momentum, and…
May 31, 2009
The Boston Terrier Break Dance | The Intersection | Discover Magazine
A photo essay.
(tags: dog animals silly pictures)
Vagabond Scholar: Anti-Terrorist Fantasy Dream Team on the Case
""I believe a fictional threat is best met with decisive fictional force," explained President Obama. "Jack…
May 30, 2009
Off the Kuff: Saturday video break: Literally!
"Mullet with headlights?"
(tags: music silly video youtube nostalgia)
Career Advice: Preparing for the Non-Academic Interview - Inside Higher Ed
"People assume the only reason to earn a Ph.D. is to become a professor to the exclusion of all other…
May 30, 2009
I don't intend to turn this entirely over to Video Baby Blogging, but SteelyKid has been adding new tricks at an amazing rate, and I have the camera... Here, she showcases her newfound mobility, and her inherited taste in entertainment:
The odd one-leg-under crawling style seems to be a local…
May 29, 2009
Could an iphone tell if your parachute didn't open with its accelerometer? | Dot Physics
"The first and simplest answer would be ânoâ."
(tags: physics education science technology gadgets dot-physics blogs)
Robert J. Lang Origami
Awesome origami art, and science as well.
(tags: art math science…
May 29, 2009
SteelyKid's day care is closed today for a Jewish holiday, so she's spending the day at home with her grandmother. It was a real struggle to get my mother to come up for the day...
Something I'm sure is on the agenda is playing with her shape sorter box, which she was good enough to demonstrate on…
May 29, 2009
Why do we have two meter sticks taped together back to back?
What is the dark stain obscuring the markings between 30 and 70 cm on half of the meter sticks?
Where the hell are all the stopwatches?
Why are the demo magnets sticky?
Why do we still have six meters worth of a rusting, broken torsional…
May 28, 2009
The Washington Monthly
"This is one of the things I love most about blogs: Barack Obama nominates Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court; I, a non-lawyer, wonder what her record is like, and find the summaries in newspapers much too shallow and focussed on the politics of her appointment rather…
May 28, 2009
This week, a special Literary Edition:
Those are the first pass typeset proofs for the book, which just arrived in the mail today. Aren't they adorable?
Oh, okay, fine. You're just here for the conventional cute baby pictures:
SteelyKid's rapidly expanding bag of tricks now includes standing up.…
May 28, 2009
We're having some technical difficulties on the ScienceBlogs back end, so this may be futile, but I've got a 9am lab class, so here's a Dorky Poll in hopes that the comments will work well enough to be entertaining. Today's lab is the "ballistic pendulum," in which students use conservation of…
May 28, 2009
I already mentioned this in a Links Dump, but there's enough buzz that it's probably worth a full post: the people at Three Quarks Daily have decided to offer prizes for blog writing:
Starting next month, the prizes will be awarded every year on the two solstices and the two equinoxes. So, we will…
May 27, 2009
Race and the Full Court Press at Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture
A good piece on the creepy racial subtext of that Malcolm Gladwell article. (I can stop posting about that any time I want to. Really.)
(tags: race culture sports basketball society)
Confessions of a…
May 27, 2009
A thousand curses on Kevin Drum for making me read some idiocy from the National Review's attempts to find things wrong with Sonia Sotomayor:
Deferring to people's own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the…
