March 24, 2009
Ten photons per hour « A Quantum Diaries Survivor
"The small speck of light shown in the upper left of the picture above, labeled as MGC 10-17-5, is actually a faint galaxy in the field of view of NGC3690. It has a visual magnitude of +15.7: this is a measure of its integrated luminosity as seen…
March 23, 2009
Chris and Sheril announced today that The Intersection has gone over to the Dark Side moved to Discover's growing collection of high-quality science blogs. They're now available at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection.
This is not entirely unexpected, but I wish them well in their spiffy…
March 23, 2009
I handed in my final grades for the term this morning, and am now on "Spring Break" which is the misleading term for the week of frantic preparation for next term's classes that our schedule allows. Here's a poll question for you, though:
We operate on ten-week "trimesters." How late into the ten-…
March 22, 2009
My computer is starting to run slow in that way that indicates that either Microsoft has released an important update, or it's just been on too long without a reboot. Either way, I need to clear some browser tabs before restarting, and there are a bunch of articles that I thought were too…
March 22, 2009
The Mid-Majority: Respect, Resilience, Joy and Despair Â
"This must be a lot of fun for you, this March Madness. It must be pleasant to rally behind something until you have no use for it anymore, to adopt and dispose the efforts of a team, to judge its efforts without any real consequence. But…
March 21, 2009
The good news is, I'm solidly ahead of Barack Obama in my NCAA pool. The bad news is, the success rate of my serious picks is distressingly close to that of the Physics Grad Programs backet...
Various and sundry thoughts on the first two days of NCAA tournament action:
-- Not that many big upsets,…
March 21, 2009
weir3 / Instant Mentor / Advice / Home - Inside Higher Ed
"Unless youâre a botanist or geologist thereâs no pedagogical reason to teach outside. The first gorgeous day of spring semester will bring a clamor to meet underneath the spreading maple students spy from the window. Donât do it! That…
March 20, 2009
I carry some of my gear to and from the lunchtime basketball game in a red and white canvas-and-mesh bag. The zipper doesn't work, and hasn't for years, and the logo on the side is almost worn off, but if you look closely, you can still make out the New York State Public High School Athletic…
March 20, 2009
The nominees for this year's Hugo Awards were announced last night. The most important category is, as always, Best Novel:
Anathem by Neal Stephenson (Morrow; Atlantic UK)
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen; HarperVoyager UK…
March 20, 2009
slacktivist: The Immortals
"I'm something of an expert on the demographic implications of the baby boom. I've developed this expertise from copy editing hundreds, probably thousands, of articles* on the effect of the baby boomers' impending retirement on Social Security. Based on what I've…
March 19, 2009
While the DVR piles up enough basketball to allow me to fast-forward through CBS's nine-minute commercial breaks, here's this week's Baby Blogging picture:
SteelyKid has been in an amazingly good mood this evening, and here you see her obligingly stretching out to her full length so you can see…
March 19, 2009
The final exam for my modern physics class is this morning, which means I'll have a bunch of time to kill while I proctor the test. This will likely involve a lot of brainless time-wasting, but I need to be on hand both as a formal guard against cheating, but more importantly to answer questions…
March 19, 2009
I'm giving an exam this morning, then taking the afternoon off for my annual hoops overdose, so there won't be much physics commentary here for the next few days. If you want hot physics news, though, there are a bunch of bloggers at the March Meeting, providing summaries on the Internet:
Doug…
March 19, 2009
Mike Dunford has a post up titled You Almost Have to Feel Sorry for Jim Tedisco, about the special election that's being held to fill Kirsten Gillibrand's House seat. The title alone is enough to tell you that Mike doesn't live in this area any more. Nobody who has to listen to the multi-media…
March 19, 2009
Idle Question of the Day
"Exactly what bad consequences would follow if laws were passed by the relevant countries rendering credit default swap contracts void henceforth? (That is, canceling all the outstanding wagers because the bookies went bust.) "
(tags: blogs politics economics social-…
March 18, 2009
Over at the New York Times' Freakonomics blog, Justin Wolfers gets into the March Madness spirit by reporting on a study of basketball games that yields the counter-intuitive result that being slightly behind at halftime makes a team more likely to win. It comes complete with a spiffy graph:…
March 18, 2009
I needed to generate an electronic recommendation letter for a former student yesterday, and printing the letter on paper and scanning the paper copy seemed a little too... 1998 to be worth doing. As a result, I spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling around with Microsoft Word to come up with…
March 18, 2009
Yesterday's bad graphic post spurred me to finally get around to doing the "Why Does Excel Suck So Much?" post I've been meaning to do for a while. I gripe about Excel a lot, as we're more or less forced to use it for data analysis in the intro labs (students who have taken the intro engineering…
March 18, 2009
In an effort to wrest something positive from the smoking ruins of the fannish precincts of LiveJournal, a number of people (Kate included) have put together a community to raise money to provide financial assistance to fans of color who want to attend Wiscon or some other convention. They're…
March 18, 2009
bs / 17 / 03 / 2009 / News / Home - Inside Higher Ed
"[A] panel at the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication considered the question of âEmpty Rhetoric and Academic Bullshit: Strategies for Compositionâs Self-Representation in National Arenas.â In the…
March 17, 2009
Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau offers a provocative comment on class and higher education:
Today (OK, yesterday, but I didn't really sleep on the plane, so it's still yesterday, or tomorrow is also today, or something) a friend offered (without necessarily endorsing) the theory that one…
March 17, 2009
I was busy with other stuff when this hit the blogs, but I did want to at least comment in passing on Fermilab's announcement that it still hasn't found the Higgs Boson. Detailed commentary is available from Tommaso Dorigo and John Conway.
If you're not a physicist, or even just not a particle…
March 17, 2009
Nobody is ever going to mistake me for Edward Tufte, but whenever I run across a chart like this one:
(from Matt Yglesias, who got it from Justin Fox where it was merely one of many equally horrible plots), I find myself distracted from the actual point of the graph by the awfulness of the…
March 17, 2009
The Mid-Majority: The Court and the Conference Room Â
"Back when I was in college, there wasn't a day I loved more than Selection Sunday. I would sit in front of the television as the details were leaked out, tried to keep up by scratching excited team acronyms and codes on my blank bracket. I…
March 16, 2009
The NCAA men's basketball tournament bracket was announced yesterday, which has kicked off the usual round of people "predicting" the outcomes based on totally silly criteria like the Academic Progress Rate of the schools in question.
This is, of course, completely frivolous. What you really need…
March 16, 2009
Scientific American has an article by David Albert and Rivka Galchen with the New Scientist-ish headline Was Einstein Wrong?: A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity and the sub-head "Entanglement, like many quantum effects, violates some of our deepest intuitions about the world. It may also…
March 16, 2009
The Dean Dad takes a question from a reader on a topic of perpetual interest:
How do other teachers remember their students' names? I confess, I am AWFUL with names. My wife and I have gone to the same small church for 20 years and I still go blank on names of people we've been friends with for…
March 16, 2009
EurekAlert offered a press release from the American Physical Society over the weekend that may indicate that someone in the press office has won a round of drinks:
The American Physical Society (APS) is elated that the Senate has approved the FYO9 Omnibus Bill, which will allow scientists to…
March 16, 2009
Book Vs. Film: Watchmen | Books | A.V. Club
Moore and Gibbons vs. Zach Snyder
(tags: comics movies literature books avclub)
First Lensman (1950), by E.E. âDocâ Smith | Books | A.V. Club
"First Lensman combined a lot of elements that, over the course of reading classic science fiction, have come…
March 15, 2009
I've lost a lot of sleep this weekend staying up late to watch Syracuse games, so I'm only getting to some of the Friday articles in my RSS feeds now. I don't want to let this utterly worthless column by William Rhoden of the New York Times pass without comment though. It's ostensibly about the…
