April 23, 2009
Michael Bay And Shia LeBeouf Spitball Transformers 2 Ideas | Film | A.V. Club
"Michael Bay: Okay, so boom goes the sphinx. Boom goes the pyramid. Boom! Boom! Boom! Go the HondaCivicstrons we positioned all around the entrance to the tomb. And then, whhhhhhhhiiiiiiirrrrr, click, clack, crunch,…
April 23, 2009
A little while ago, I was pointed to Jim Munger's blog, which is full of ranting about various topics. Not quite to the standards of alt.peeves, back in the day, but some of it is entertaining.
It also includes several mentions of his band, Better Than Abstinence. There seemed to be something wrong…
April 23, 2009
I'm speaking, of course, about this past weekend's Bloggingheads conversation between Jennifer Ouellette and Diandra Leslie-Pelecky. They both blog at Cocktail Party Physics, and Diandra has written The Physics of NASCAR.
It's a good Bloggingheads, covering a wide range of topics related to…
April 22, 2009
Particulate pollution cuts carbon dioxide, model shows - physicsworld.com
"Falling levels of aerosol pollution could make it much harder to curb the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. That is the conclusion of climate researchers in the UK and Switzerland, who have found that pollution in the…
April 22, 2009
The official release date for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is December 22nd, exactly eight months from today. It's probably a little too early to go into countdown mode, but I thought I would mention a couple of recent developments with the book.
First, the book itself continues its steady…
April 22, 2009
No, I'm not talking about students bribing faculty for good grades, but the reverse: faculty bribing students to attend events outside of class. For example, I offered the students in my class five bonus points on tomorrow's mid-term exam if they attended last night's Alan Lightman lecture. I'm…
April 22, 2009
We had a talk last night by Alan Lightman of MIT, a theoretical physicist and novelist, best known as the author of Einstein's Dreams. He spoke for about an hour about his own background, and the similarities and differences between the worlds of science and the arts.
One of the differences he…
April 21, 2009
Pop Quiz - Advanced Placement - Education Life - Interactive Quiz - A.P. Economics - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com
I got 14/18, which isn't all that bad if you consider that I never took economics at any level.
(tags: economics business quiz)
Think Progress » TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress To…
April 21, 2009
I tagged Geoffrey Pullum's rant against The Elements of Style for del.icio.us a few days back, because it struck me as interesting, but I didn't have time to say more. In the subsequent days, I've seen a bunch of "Preach it, Brother Pullum!" responses, most recently from revere. I've also received…
April 21, 2009
The book-in-production will be released eight months from tomorrow, which means that I'm thinking of ways to promote it on-line. One obvious possibility would be some sort of YouTube video type thing, showing a conversation with the dog about physics. This runs into problems, though, given that the…
April 20, 2009
The Washington Monthly
"[S]trange to say, in 2007 the median family income in New York City was $52,871. Maybe New York takes in floods of new residents every year, and so many of them die of starvation that the median income is actually below the level needed to survive. Maybe over half of the…
April 20, 2009
A couple of physics stories in the last few days have caught my attention for reasons that can be lumped together under the Vizzini Effect-- that is, they say things that involve unconventional uses of common words. Take, for example, the Physics World story Physicists distinguish between the…
April 19, 2009
Amazon.com: From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time: Sean Carroll: Books
Sure, it looks like a really good book about physics. But where's the talking dog?
(tags: science physics books)
Built on Facts : Testing 123
"In the physical sciences and physics especially,…
April 19, 2009
The dog comes into the office looking disgusted. "Well, you've really done it now, dude."
"What? What did I do?"
"You had to go and put a bird feeder in the front window, didn't you?"
"What about it?" We put a thistle-seed feeder in front of the bay window in the living room, and I added a small…
April 18, 2009
Star Formation: The Game | DISCOVER Magazine
Play the Hand of God and place supernovae to produce star-forming regions in a cloud of gas. My best score is just over 2000.
(tags: science astronomy games internet)
Questions for Steven Chu - The Science Guy - The Green Issue - Interview - NYTimes.…
April 18, 2009
SteelyKid is fascinated by the John Archibald Wheeler tribute issue of Physics Today:
"I find his popular writings much more digestible than the Big Book of Gravity," she says. "Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler is much too big to put in my mouth."
April 17, 2009
slacktivist: T.F.: By the rivers of Babylon
"That's a change from the view of apocalyptic types from older times. They used to fear people like Napoleon -- those who sought to conquer the world through force, riding forth on literal, flesh-and-blood white horses, intent on empire. But to…
April 17, 2009
North Of The Border Case File #135: Canadian Bacon  | DVD | A.V. Club
"Just as Ned Flanders likes Woody Allen movies except for âthat nervous fella thatâs always in them,â I like Michael Moore movies and kind of hate Michael Moore himself. "
(tags: culture movies review avclub world)
Solar…
April 17, 2009
Via the arxiv Blog, a review article has been posted by the Haensch group with the title"Testing the Stability of the Fine Structure Constant in the Laboratory." The fine structure constant, usually referred to by the symbol α is a ratio of fundamental constants-- the electron charge squared divded…
April 16, 2009
SteelyKid says, "Being sick is exhausting... Zzzzzzzzzz":
She's been running a fever for the last couple of days, which happened to coincide with the closing of the JCC day care center for Passover. This has wreaked a certain amount of havoc on plans for the adults in the house, but it could've…
April 16, 2009
Bristol Palin and two kinds of virginity | TPMCafe
"Prior to the Palin blow-up, the evangelical wing and the traditional upper crust WASP wing of the party had a pretty basic agreement about the value of pure white virgin daughters. Having a few of these hanging around on podiums made politicians…
April 16, 2009
The other day, I wanted to hear the seasonally-appropriate Hold Steady song "How a Resurrection Really Feels" ("She crashed into the Easter Mass, with her hair done up in broken glass, She was limping left on broken heels and she said 'Father, can I tell your congregation how a resurrection really…
April 16, 2009
Physics World has a nice news article about a new experimental development in quantum computing, based on a forthcoming paper from the Wineland group at NIST in Boulder. I'd write this up for ResearchBlogging, but it's still just on the arxiv, and I don't think they've started accepting arxiv…
April 15, 2009
A recurring problem in academic science is trying to correctly identify a single author. For example, I was reviewing a grant that made reference to a group, but not a specific paper, and needed to sift through a few pages of search results in order to determine which of the people with that…
April 15, 2009
EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect
"If you indeed instituted the calls to flatten out the federal tax distribution, the influence of state and local taxes would leave you with an incredibly regressive tax structure, not a slightly less progressive tax structure. Which is something to keep…
April 14, 2009
Over at Faraday's Cage, Cherish has had a Huck Finn moment with regard to paper writing style:
I know that I'm not supposed to use the first person plural when writing papers. Frankly Scarlet, I don't give a damn. I am going to say, "we did this" and "we did that".
This made me blink a little,…
April 14, 2009
Over the weekend on FriendFeed, Paul Buchheit posed an interesting question:
Assume that I'm going to get rid of $20,000 and my only concern is the "common good". Which of these is the best use of the money: give it to the Gates foundation, buy a hybrid car, invest it in a promising startup, invest…
April 13, 2009
EDSBS » Archive » CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS COVERS THE NATIONAL TITLE GAME
"Like the tyrant who conjured a territory whole from the aether, so have we on this field two imaginary kingdoms wrenched forth from geographic oblivion. Florida, were it not for the intervention of a few real estate…
April 13, 2009
Howard "Yaaaaah!" Dean, the former governor of Vermont, Presidential candidate, and head of the DNC, will be speaking on campus tonight. It's exceedingly unlikely that I'll ask him any questions, because I prefer to leave that to students when possible, but if anybody has any really brilliant…
April 13, 2009
I've remarked several times that I think condensed matter physics gets slighted in public discussions of the field, especially relative to its usefulness. Particle physics gets all sorts of press, but in practical terms, it is essentially useless-- whether CERN or Fermilab locate the Higgs boson or…
