November 10, 2008
Over at Slate, Daniel Gross has a really dumb piece on rich people voting for Obama "against their own economic interest". There are many dumb things about this article, starting with the fact that it doesn't even attempt to answer the question in its title, but the main thing that's dumb is the…
November 10, 2008
SteelyKid has recently begun to figure out her hands. As I noted last week, within the last couple of weeks, she's started to be able to reliably grab things near her. Just within the last few days, she's discovered that she has two hands, and they can interact with each other:
She's started…
November 10, 2008
The announcement of Cosmic Variance's sell-out has prompted some people to link to Nicholas Carr's lament for days gone by:
Blogging seems to have entered its midlife crisis, with much existential gnashing-of-teeth about the state and fate of a literary form that once seemed new and fresh and now…
November 9, 2008
Warnock's Dilemma - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"[T]he problem of interpreting a lack of response to a posting on a mailing list, Usenet newsgroup, or Web forum. It occurs because a lack of response does not necessarily imply that no one is interested in the topic, and could have any one of…
November 8, 2008
Highlights: Newsweek's Special Election Project | Newsweek Politics: Campaign 2008 | Newsweek.com
I'm about the one millionth person to recommend this, but their series of articles about the election really is excellent.
(tags: news politics US society history journalism)
The New Adventures of…
November 8, 2008
SteelyKid was a little bit fussy yesterday, and would only be quiet when carried in the "airplane" position. There are a limited number of ways to pass the time when doing this, so I had the tv on, and while channel-surfing past MSNBC, caught something saying that Obama would be giving his first…
November 7, 2008
Study finds many motorists don't see need to heed speed limits
A result that will surprise approximately nobody with a driver's license.
(tags: social-science news law silly)
Better Late Than Never?: Titanic | The A.V. Club
"If only every woman in the world was periodically forced to choose…
November 7, 2008
If, like me, you have long thought that the world needs more thrillers based on quantum physics, the students and post-docs of the Ultrafast Group at Oxford have got a short film for you: The DiVincenzo Code, in six parts on YouTube.
It doesn't make any less sense than a Dan Brown novel, and the…
November 7, 2008
In a comment on a post from last week, Neil B. Asks a good question about my snarky response to the "make-your-own-universe" kit:
[Y]ou never explained why this "universe creator" could be considered based on a misapprehension. Considering the way multi-worlds QM theory is usually presented, IIUC;…
November 7, 2008
Looking over my scheduled posts for today, I see that there isn't anything stridently political. Not wanting to shock the systems of readers still coming down off the election, let me add my voice to the chorus of ScienceBloggers expressing concern over the idea of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of…
November 7, 2008
Former NBA player Manute Bol spoke on campus last night. Bol, who was born in southern Sudan, is currently working with a group called Sudan Sunrise to promote peace and reconciliation efforts in that country, and specifically to build a school in his home village.
Bol spoke for an hour or so about…
November 7, 2008
It's SteelyKid's three-month birthday! One quarter of a year, already. To celebrate, she shows off her developmental progress:
Within the last week or so, she's finally grasped the idea that the larger world consists of objects that she can interact with. Just this week, she's begun to reliably…
November 6, 2008
Kevin Drum - Mother Jones Blog: Raw Data
"Which groups did Obama do especially well with? That is, which groups did he swing by margins substantially more than 9 points?"
(tags: us politics math statistics social-science society)
Easily Distracted » Blog Archive » Appalachia and Other…
November 6, 2008
For lucky Week 13, SteelyKid models an outfit from the Belichick Collection:
Asked about the picture afterwards, she said "It is what it is. Right now, we're focused on next week. We just take it one game at a time."
Well, ok, she's not that advanced. She does, however, know what to do with a…
November 6, 2008
On the way in to work this morning, I was switching through stations on the radio, and heard a bit of "Only" by Nine Inch Nails ("Only" on last.fm) followed by "Hitchin' a Ride" by Vanity Fare ("Hitchin' a Ride" on last.fm). I was struck by the unsettling realization that the chorus of "Only" would…
November 6, 2008
Getting back to science, at least for the moment, I was puzzled by a press release from RPI, with the eye-catching headline Solar power game-changer: 'Near perfect' absorption of sunlight, from all angles. The article describes work published in Optics Letters (that I haven't been able to put my…
November 6, 2008
I've seen several people linking to Andrew Gelman's analysis of voting in the election, which is generally good and interesting. I would like to quibble about one thing he says, though. After noting that young voters overwhelmingly went for Obama, he says:
But there was no massive turnout among…
November 5, 2008
stevenberlinjohnson.com: The System Worked
"We hear so often that the American political system is broken, but I think the last two years suggest that our national politics are healthier than we have been led to believe."
(tags: politics us society culture blogs)
Easily Distracted » Blog…
November 5, 2008
Slate (who, by the way, drive me up the freaking wall with their habit of giving each story about six different headlines, depending on where the link is) has hit the ground running with a panel of distinguished right-wing types discussing what the Republicans should do now. Jim Manzi gets the ball…
November 5, 2008
As I said in an earlier post, the only election-night coverage I watched was the Comedy Central special and Obama's speech on C-SPAN. This morning, though, I flipped back and forth between MSNBC and CNN while feeding and walking the floor with SteelyKid (when she's fussy, she won't tolerate me…
November 5, 2008
Some commentary on the night just past. This will be somewhat scattered, as I stayed up until 1 to hear Obama and read the celebratory postings at my favorite left-leaning blogs:
-- As much as I believed what folks like Nate Silver were saying, I was still afraid that it would somehow all go wrong…
November 5, 2008
Heart-warming morning thought: SteelyKid is going to grow up in a world where "Can a black man be elected President?" will be considered a stupid question.
That's worth a smile:
Hell, that's worth some dancing in the streets:
In a heavy drizzle shortly after midnight, several thousand people…
November 4, 2008
The Supreme Court's 100 percent dirt-free exploration of potty words. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine
"Perhaps it's true that the Supreme Court can take away our F-bomb. But they cannot touch our dirty, dirty minds."
(tags: US politics language law society culture)
Watching the election…
November 4, 2008
It seems like everybody with a blog has put up a live-blogging/ open comment thread about the election. I can't really type fast enough to compete in this sort of thing, and anyway, it seems cruel to leave foreigners and apolitical types out of the fun.
So, for the benefit of those who can't vote…
November 4, 2008
There aren't any results yet. Turn off the computer.
Go vote. Already voted? Watch some silly videos. Eat a sandwich. Do some freakin' thing. Just stop reloading FiveThirtyEight and Talking Points Memo, already.
Your incessant reloading is slowing my reloads, dammit.
November 4, 2008
As you know, even if you're not Bob, I promised to "dance like a monkey" if my DonorsChoose challenge passed $6,000 in donations, which it did. Thus, I am obliged to dance like a monkey.
You might think this would be a simple matter of capering about in a loose-limbed, vaguely simian manner, but it…
November 3, 2008
Fafblog! the whole world's only source for Fafblog.
""All we really need is some kind of simple technological solution," says Giblets, "like a garbage-powered weather machine or a synthetic source of God.""
(tags: fafblog science environment silly blogs)
McCain Refusing To Tell Voters What's In…
November 3, 2008
Kevin Drum is amused by a historical comparison:
THEN AND NOW....In 2004, everyone complained that John Kerry was an old-media plodder who didn't react quickly enough to conservative attacks. What a dunce! In 2008, everyone is praising Barack Obama for keeping his composure and not letting…
November 3, 2008
Continuing the series of descriptions of candidate technologies for making a quantum computer (previous entries covered optical lattices and ion traps), we come to one that's a little controversial. It's the only remaining candidate I can describe off the top of my head without doing some more…
November 3, 2008
Is it just me, or is this New York Times article on undecided voters just a more genteel version of this Daily Show segment on undecided voters?
(Personally, all the people in the Times sound like they want to vote for McCain, but know there's no good reason to do so. They'll talk themselves into…
