October 14, 2008
Via Physics and Physicists, a breathtaking blog at the Washington Post proudly proclaiming the author's ignorance of algebra:
I am told that algebra is everywhere - it's in my iPod, beneath the spreadsheet that calculates my car payments, in every corner of my building. This idea freaks me out…
October 14, 2008
Going into last night's game, my New York Football Giants were 4-0, leading the NFL in a whole bunch of statistical categories. SteelyKid watched at least part of every one of those games with me.
Last night, just before kick-off, Kate took SteelyKid upstairs for a late-evening feeding. After…
October 13, 2008
Q and A - What Happened to the Golf Ball the Astronaut Hit on the Moon? - Question - NYTimes.com
"Alan Shepard actually hit two balls on the Apollo 14 mission of 1971, and they are still on the Moon, he said in a 1991 interview on the Academy of Achievement Web site for students."
(tags: space…
October 13, 2008
I've had miserable problems with hives over the past few years. I'm not sure what it is that I'm allergic to, but I take a distressing number of pills in an attempt to control the itching.
The past few days, I've been coming down with a cold-- sinuses full of gunk, a bit of a sore throat, etc. You…
October 13, 2008
Throughout the unfolding financial meltdown, I keep finding myself thinking that there might be one small, positive effect to come out of this: namely, a much-needed dose of realism and humility for market advocates. Because, really, after reading this Steven Teles post:
All through the financial…
October 13, 2008
The 2008 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Honor of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to Paul Krugman.
Usually it's the Peace prize that's awarded on the basis of what will make right-wingers' heads explode in the US. They went for a Scandawegian for that one, though, so the economics…
October 12, 2008
Swans on Tea » Grad School Camp
It's crazy, but it just might work.
(tags: academia silly education blogs)
The Reality-Based Community: Palin at the Flyers: What the @#$%& Were They Thinking?
Alternate title: "We Booed Santa Claus, and Governor, You're No Santa Claus."
(tags: US politics…
October 12, 2008
Why I love New England:
That's the maple tree on the line between our house and the neighbors'. It's always one of the first trees to turn, and it's always spectacular when it does.
It's particularly striking when Emmy and I set off for our morning walk and the back yard is still in shadow, but…
October 12, 2008
Some time back, I saw Brother Guy Consolmagno talk at Boskone, and said "You know, I should invite him to campus." For those who don't recognize the name, he's an SF fan and an astronomer (well, planetary scientist) who also happens to be a Jesuit brother. He works at the Vatican Observatory, where…
October 12, 2008
As you have no doubt noticed, the annual DonorsChoose fundraiser is under way, raising money to help school teachers and children. You can < ahref="http://www.donorschoose.org/donors/viewChallenge.html?id=19006">donate directly through my challenge, but you can also help them out by voting…
October 11, 2008
nanoscale views: What's interesting about condensed matter physics
"It's amazing how many complicated phenomena result from just simple quantum mechanics + large numbers of particles, especially when interactions between the particles become important. "
(tags: physics science materials blogs)…
October 11, 2008
When people attending a meeting-- particularly a meeting that starts at 8am on a Saturday-- elect to drink tea rather than coffee, they do so because they do not want coffee. For this reason, it is imperative that you not select the urns at random from a large pile of them, but rather use urns for…
October 10, 2008
slacktivist: They need help
"The reason I've been writing about/obsessing over things like the P&G rumor or the usefulness of Snopes is that I'm trying to figure out how to liberate the captives of unreality. "
(tags: politics psychology US society culture education)
Images of the 2008 TC3…
October 10, 2008
Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton has a post titled "College as magic garden: Why Pamela Dean's Tam Lin is a book you'll either love or hate". Tam Lin, for those who don't know it, is a version of the old ballad set at a liberal arts college in the upper Midwest (I believe it's based on Carleton, but I'm…
October 10, 2008
It's been a frustrating and annoying week here at Chateau Steelypips, so I was probably in the perfect mood for Mike Hoye's subway busker story:
After a relatively crappy day, I got off the subway, and there's a couple of buskers playing a fiddle and a banjo at the station. And they're really going…
October 10, 2008
I went to an evening talk last night by Brother Guy Consolmagno (about which more later, maybe), and one of my colleagues said "Hey, congratulations on your blog appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education." Being quick on my feet, I said "Hunh?"
So, of course, I checked it out when I got home.…
October 10, 2008
The 2008 Nobel Peace Prize goes to Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, "for his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts."
Fortunately for uneducated boors like me, they provide a press release listing some of those efforts:
Throughout…
October 9, 2008
slacktivist: False Witnesses 2
"Far more interesting than those greedy sleazeballs, though, are the members of the much larger group of gossips who enthusiastically spread [rumors about Satanism at Proctor and Gamble]. This larger group has no financial interest at stake, so what's in it for them…
October 9, 2008
In the spirit of the previous post, I thought I would provide a short list of the reasons why I am happy to be a physicist in the area of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) Physics. Like nearly anyone who hung on long enough to get a Ph.D. in some field, I think the area I work in is the coolest…
October 9, 2008
If you go by physics-related stories in the mass media, you'd probably get the impression that about 90% of physicists work at the Large Hadron Collider or some other big accelerator lab. The other 10% would be dominated by people working on foundational questions in quantum mechanics-- Bell tests…
October 9, 2008
SteelyKid had her two-month check-up in Monday (her two-month birthday was Tuesday), and checking in with the medical profession means we've got the opportunity for some baby science. And it's not science without graphs:
That's SteelyKid's weight as a function of time. Like most babies, she…
October 9, 2008
The 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."
I'll be honest, I've got nothing on this one. Anyone who knows anything about his work,…
October 8, 2008
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2008 - Speed Read
A two-minute explanation of this year's prize.
(tags: physics particles Nobel news science theory)
The Collapse of Peer Review « The Scholarly Kitchen
"Is peer review in decline? Glenn Ellison, an economist at MIT, is beginning to question the…
October 8, 2008
A Colbert Report re-run about the financial crisis has just ended, so I turn the tv off, grab my jacket and the leash, and head out for a walk with the dog. She's oddly pensive as we head up the street. After a little while, she stops and asks, "What was that all about?"
"All what?"
"All that '…
October 8, 2008
As the DonorsChoose fundraiser rolls along, I'm making an effort to highlight a few worthwhile proposals from my challenge entry, in case the lack of specificity is keeping people from donating. This time out, that's the "Sizzling Science" proposal, from Broward County, FL. This description echoes…
October 8, 2008
The 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded for the discovery of green fluorescent protein. It's split equally among three scientists, Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien (and just out of curiousity, how do they choose the order in which they list those names?).
The citation…
October 7, 2008
The full story of Earth-impacting asteroid 2008 TC3 - The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary Society
"All in all, I think the episode of 2008 TC3 has proven that the world's astronomical community, at least, is prepared to respond when an object on a collision course is detected. Within just…
October 7, 2008
I got some interesting comments on last week's post about the science blogging bubble, and there were two in particular I wanted to highlight. Bee wrote (among other things):
But what I think are further obstacle to blogging is the inappropriateness of the medium to science. E.g. blogs put by…
October 7, 2008
Paul Ginsparg, the founder of the arxiv preprint server for physics, has a very nice article at Physics World reminiscing about the rise of the Internet, particularly in physics. This also serves as a nice counterpoint to his talk at the Science21 conference (video, microblogging), which included a…
October 7, 2008
The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been announced. Half will go to Yoichiro Nambu "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics," with the other half split between Makoto Kobayahi and Toshihide Maskawa, "for the discovery of the origin of the broken…
