February 24, 2009
the results from yesterday's poll on reporting exam scores were pretty strongly divided. 47% favored giving histograms, or some very detailed breakdown, while 33% were in favor of statistical measures only (mean, standard deviation, extrema, that sort of thing). 19% were in favor of giving no…
February 24, 2009
Tallying up the results of yesterday's poll about formula sheets (as of 8:00 Tuesday morning, 39 total comments), people were overwhelmingly in favor of formula sheets. 72% of respondents reported being allowed to use formula sheets as students, and 69% were in favor of allowing formula sheets as…
February 23, 2009
editors / 23 / 02 / 2009 / Views / Home - Inside Higher Ed
Inside Higher Ed has done a comprehensive redesign of the site, including a bunch of new features. The best online academic journal just got better.
(tags: academia computing internet)
The Reality-Based Community: Annals of sexist…
February 23, 2009
Inspired by Leigh Butler at tor.com, I've been re-reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. This happened to coincide with my recent vicious cold, which is good, because they're great sickbed reading.
Most of my re-reading has been done on my Palm, which miraculously came loaded with electronic…
February 23, 2009
No, this isn't a mistake-- I'm doing two quasi-polls on academic issues today, because I care what you think...
I'm handing back last Thursday's exams today. The scores on the test were about what I expect, given the material. As I'm looking at the scores, trying to assess the class as a whole, I'm…
February 23, 2009
In the basement, across the hall from my lab, there are three plastic-covered collages made up of formula sheets from long-ago exams. One of my colleagues let the students in a Physics for Pre-Meds class write whatever they wanted on one sheet of paper to bring into the final, and made art from the…
February 22, 2009
What will be your Edward Gorey death? - Quiz | Get More Quizzes at Quizilla
"We are all going to die. Why not die in an Edwary Gorey way. Find out how which Gashlycrumb Tinies child you will die like."
(tags: silly literature books internet)
Cocktail Party Physics: when satellites collide, it's…
February 22, 2009
Holding TUH not very neatly done up in pink butcher's paper, whcih was all he could find in a last-minute search before leaving to catch his train for London, Mr Earbrass arrives at the offices of his publishers to deliver it. The stairs look oddly menacing, as though he might break a leg on one of…
February 22, 2009
This week's Science Saturday on bloggingheads.tv features Carl Zimmer and Phil "Bad Astronomy" Plait:
It's a wide-ranging conversation, covering topics in astronomy, why people believe crazy things, how the Internet can help, and the death of newspapers and their eventual replacement by blogs.…
February 21, 2009
Cocktail Party Physics: science, politics, and getting it wrong
"One surefire way to panic the heck out of people is to mention nuclear bombs and radical Islam in the same sentence. I dunno about you, but I kinda had a mini-freakout when I read about the amount of enriched uranium the United…
February 21, 2009
Maryland 88, North Carolina 85 (WARNING: Auto-playing video):
Greivis Vasquez did something no Maryland player had done since 1987, and the Terrapins pulled off an upset that was almost as remarkable.
Vasquez had a career-high 35 points and 11 rebounds and 10 assists -- Maryland's first triple-…
February 21, 2009
We are now one week out from the deadline for Hugo Nominations. I'm eligible to nominate this year, and while a couple of past requests for recommendations have failed to generate anything, I thought I'd throw up a preliminary look at my ballot in hopes of bringing in a few recommendations:
Best…
February 20, 2009
mmcirvin: Some children's music
"We listen to a LOT of children's music these days. Maybe a little too much sometimes. On the other hand, we're fortunate to live in an age of relatively listenable children's music with some adult appeal. Here's some stuff Jorie's been hearing lately:"
(tags:…
February 20, 2009
Over at Making Light, Jim Macdonald has a response to the anti-vaccination movement, taking his cue from the Navy:
There's a manual that every Navy gunnery officer is required to read or re-read every year: OP 1014; Ordnance Safety Precautions: Their Origin and Necessity. It's a collection of…
February 20, 2009
I left off last time with a brief introduction to uncertainty, followed by two classes worth of background, both mathematical and Mathematica.
Class 15 picked up the physics again, starting with an explanation of the connection between the Fourier theorem and uncertainty, namely that any attempt…
February 19, 2009
Abstruse Goose » How Stuff Works
"Science killed my unicorns."
(tags: science comics silly abstruse-goose)
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Hugo Nominations
Including a few links to recommended-reading lists.
(tags: movies SF literature books hugos)
Physics and Physicists…
February 19, 2009
For this week's Baby Blogging, SteelyKid couldn't decide whether to show off her ability to grab Appa or her ability to touch her toes, so she tried to do both at once:
The color scheme of this outfit is undoubtedly going to lead to some irritating interactions with people in malls ("Why is her…
February 19, 2009
A few days ago, Bee put up a post titled Do We Need Science Journalists?, linking back to Bora's enormous manifesto from the first bit of the Horgan-Johnson bloggingheads kerfuffle. My first reaction was "Oh, God, not again..." but her post did make me think of one thing, which is illustrated by…
February 18, 2009
slacktivist: Why I'm peeved
"House-of-cards fundamentalism allows for no distinctions between babies and bathwater, between the central tenets of the faith and the adiaphora and error. So once one part of this belief system begins to collapse -- as it inevitably will since young-earth creationism…
February 18, 2009
I've already mentioned two of the program items I was on at Boskone (global warming and quantum physics for dogs). I should at least comment on the other two, "Physics: What We Don't Understand" and "Is Science Addicted to Randomness?" They both featured me and Geoff Landis, but other than that…
February 17, 2009
US LHC Blog » Higgs Hunting News
"Depending on what the mass of the Higgs boson is, it will decay into other particles that are easier or harder for an experiment to detect. So for example if the mass turns out to be about 170 GeV, the Tevatron experiments say their chances are almost 100…
February 17, 2009
My cold from last week has shifted into a bit of bronchitis (and here I thought my virus-fighting strategy of staying up really late drinking beer would clear everything up), so I'm kind of groggy and lethargic. And I have book edits to work on, which precludes taking a long time to write blog…
February 17, 2009
I no longer remember the context, but the Gravity Probe B experiment came up in discussion around the department last week, and nobody could really remember what the status of it was. It came up again during the "Physics: What We Don't Understand" panel Saturday morning, where Geoff Landis was able…
February 16, 2009
immlass: You have no privacy. Get over it.
"Facebook may be sleazy and selling more of your information than you like to advertisers, but the idea it wants to steal your IP and do something with it seems vanishingly unlikely. I suspect the change in TOS has something to do with protecting their…
February 16, 2009
On Saturday at Boskone, I gave a talk on the Many-Worlds Interpretation of QM. This was held up a bit by waiting for the projector to arrive (I was busy enough with other stuff that I didn't notice that I hadn't received confirmation of my request for a projector until late Thursday night, so this…
February 16, 2009
Sunday morning at Boskone, I moderated a panel on "Global Warming: Facts and Myths, (and all that jazz)", featuring James Morrow, Mark Olson, and Vince Docherty. As noted previously, I was a little worried that this would turn out to be absolutely awful in one of a couple of obvious ways, but it…
February 13, 2009
Notes on sociopathy
"Sometimes, a day of interacting with the rest of the human race on the roads and streets leaves you convinced that the world would be a much nicer place if most newborn humans were tossed in a burlap sack with some stones and then deposited in the nearest pond.
But hereâs…
February 13, 2009
I've been a Grumpy Blogger this week, what with one thing and another (some of my general malaise has finally resolved into a cold, which I suspect explains a lot). I'm headed to Boskone for the weekend, though, so let's end the week on a positive note. I'm declaring this a Happy News Open Thread:…
February 12, 2009
It's Darwin's 200th birthday today, and SteelyKid is wearing her ladybug outfit to celebrate:
If you can't make it out, the outfit is pink, and covered with little pink and orange ladybugs. The feet are larger ladybugs, complete with antennae.
Why is this an appropriate Dawrin's Birthday outfit,…
February 12, 2009
Different Cliffs, Different Bottoms, Different Parachutes « Easily Distracted
"If one of the goals of stimulus is to get American consumers shopping again, then I think itâs going to take some substantial changes to the entire retail landscape for that to be more than a momentary upward blip in…
