September 29, 2008
In the comments to last week's science majors follow-up post, commenter Jim G calls me out:
OK, I agree with that 100%, and I'm sure everyone who reads this post has observed the phenomena you mention dozens of times or more. But I wonder whether you have a proposal, or if you're just pointing out…
September 29, 2008
October is almost upon us, which means that the winners of the 2008 Nobel Prizes will be announced soon. Very soon-- the first announcement (for Medicine) is next Monday. The most important announcement-- the Nobel in Physics-- is next Tuesday, October 7.
This is a good excuse for a contest, so:…
September 29, 2008
Congratulations to SpaceX for successfully launching a payload into orbit after three failed attempts:
The two-stage Falcon 1 rocket built by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) lifted off at about 7:15 p.m. EDT (2315 GMT) from the U.S. Army's Ronald Reagan Ballistic Defense Test Site on the…
September 28, 2008
Cocktail Party Physics: prime time science
Why you should stop worrying and learn to love science-themed tv shows.
(tags: television science culture society)
blarg? » I'm Sorry, Are You From The Past?
Standards-compliant Web design, Microsoft style.
(tags: computing internet stupid)
September 28, 2008
I'm currently reading David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Brief History of ∞, because his recent death made me want to read some of his stuff, and I haven't read this (which turns up on best-science-books lists) before, so it seemed like a good way to go. Reading Wallace does tend to…
September 28, 2008
There's an interesting exchange over at the Reality-Based Community around the topic of "earmarks" for science, like the grizzly bear DNA study McCain keeps mocking. Michael O'Hare argues that science should not be funded by earmarks:
Almost any piece of scientific research, especially in biology,…
September 28, 2008
SteelyKid has a new friend, courtesy of my sister:
It's a shlumpy google-eyed dragon, stuffed with pure awesome. I'm dubbing this guy "Wellington," for family-historical reasons. A side shot (with extra bonus baby in the mirror) is below the fold:
In case I didn't mention it before, he's awesome…
September 27, 2008
Editors for Obama : Editors for Obama
Change in which we can believe.
(tags: language education silly internet)
September 27, 2008
Here's an update to the SteelyKid feeding pattern, with almost twice as much data as the previous graph:
Still no solid pattern to the feedings, time-wise, but there has been some change, in that the individual feedings have gotten more distinct. They tend to be longer, and the intervals between…
September 27, 2008
As I said last night, I wound up watching all of the presidential debate. I turned it on expecting to get disgusted and flip away in half an hour or so, but it was remarkably better than the last two elections' worth of debates. Almost as if both participants were qualified to be President.
I'm not…
September 26, 2008
Primer: TV Detectives | The A.V. Club
"A brief history of--and notable highlights from--television's long-term love affair with procedurals, mystery stories, and the colorful characters who figure out whodunit."
(tags: television review culture avclub)
September 26, 2008
God help me, I watched all of the debate tonight. I'm not sure why, but I did, and I'll say something about it in an overall sense tomorrow. It occurs to me, though, that one moment after the debate sums up everything that has gone wrong with this country over the last N years.
I watched on PBS, so…
September 26, 2008
October is almost upon us, which means that we've been subjected to a bunch of long segments on Mike & Mike about baseball. These serve to remind me just how little use I have for baseball, and baseball statistics.
I've long thought that baseball fans are stat-obsessed dorks, but my opinion…
September 26, 2008
At the time of this writing, it's still not clear whether the scheduled presidential debate will take place this evening. If you'd like to be prepared, just in case, here are a couple of links that might help you get through it:
FreePress.net is offering a "Rate the Debates" service, where you can…
September 25, 2008
Good Math, Bad Math : How Mortgages Turned into a Trillion Dollar Disaster
"The question is, if mortgages are at the root of the current economic disaster, how can it possibly result in close to a trillion dollars worth of losses?"
(tags: US politics humanities math diversity stupid)
Easily…
September 25, 2008
At my 15th class reunion this past June, I agreed to become the class secretary for the next few years, writing up little news updates for the Cult of the Purple Cow Quarterly, so my classmates can read about the achievements of their fellows. In that spirit, I feel I should note an accolade that…
September 25, 2008
In email this morning from the American Physical Society, a call for a financial bailout:
Congress has not passed any FY 2009 appropriations bills and is now
finalizing a Continuing Resolution (CR) that will keep the government
operating when the new fiscal year begins on October 1, 2008. The…
September 25, 2008
Behold, the incredible expanding baby:
The "Smart Cookie" onesie she's wearing was also featured in the Week 4 picture, and now, it basically doesn't fit her any more (it's not fully buttoned under the blanket). We've already had to retire a couple of boxes of little-baby clothes, and she never…
September 24, 2008
Dynamics of Cats : how to buy a house
A first-order approximation.
(tags: economics society US politics)
Good Math, Bad Math : Bad Probability and Economic Disaster; or How Ignoring Bayes Theorem Caused the Mess
"One of the big questions that comes up again and again is: how did they get away…
September 24, 2008
The dog marches up to my computer as I'm checking my morning email. "What the heck is the deal with relativity?!?"
"Well, good morning to you, too. How are you this fine morning?"
"I'm fine, but I'm confused about relativity." Sarcasm is totally lost on her.
"What are you confused about?"
"Well,…
September 24, 2008
So, the LHC has been shut down until next year, after a major helium leak in on section. This means it will be March or April of next year before collisions in the ATLAS detector create dragons that will eat us all.
Now you know why I didn't make a big deal of the "start-up" a couple of weeks ago…
September 23, 2008
Playing the odds at the LHC: the luminosity frontier « Shores of the Dirac Sea
"The chances (odds) of one proton hitting another in such tight conditions... are almost as bad as having to win a lottery three times in a row."
(tags: physics particles science blogs education math)
The Best of…
September 23, 2008
Derek Lowe has posted an article about X-ray lasers in chemistry, which amused me because of the following bit:
Enter the femtosecond X-ray laser. A laser will put out the cleanest X-ray beam that anyone's ever seen, a completely coherent one at an exact (and short) wavelength which should give…
September 23, 2008
One full day of the Science in the 21st Century meeting wound up being devoted to what might be characterized as defining what we mean by Science. This started off with a talk by Harry Collins (microblogging, video), a sociologist of science who has done a great deal of work on the nature of…
September 23, 2008
Two new articles appeared yesterday on the topic of science blogging and academic science:
GrrlScientist posted the text of an article she wrote titled "Science Blogs Can Advance the Academic Process".
ScienceBloggers Shelley Batts, Nick Anthis, and Tara Smith have a new article in PLoS Biology,…
September 22, 2008
Submission Form
"Use this form to nominate a blog post for The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2008. "
(tags: science blogs books)
BuyMyShitPile.com: Hey Washington, can you buy my bad investments too?
"Use the form below to submit bad assets you'd like the government to take…
September 22, 2008
Baby push-ups!
She can't maintain it for all that long, but SteelyKid can manage to push herself up and take a look around, when placed on her stomach. This is definite progress from a week or so ago.
September 22, 2008
I meant to follow up on some of the comments to my post calling for more science majors last week, but we had some Issues Thursday night, and I didn't get to it on Friday. There were a number of people making negative comments about things that weren't quite what I was saying, though, and I do…
September 22, 2008
Your must-read academic link of the week is today's Inside Higher Ed article by Gary Lewandoski, with the provocative title: Stop Trying to Get Tenure and Start Trying to Enjoy Yourself. His thesis is pretty much clear from the title:
When I started my own tenure-track position I had the same…
September 21, 2008
Making kinematics graphs in Excel | Dot Physics
Important tips on making a graph with Excel.
(tags: physics education computing blogs science)
Robert Hughes on Damien Hirst's upcoming Sotheby's auction | Art and design | The Guardian
"Where you see Hirsts you will also see Jeff Koons's balloons…
