August 4, 2008
Last weekend's post, The Innumeracy of Intellectuals, has been lightly edited and re-printed at Inside Higher Ed, where it should be read by a larger audience of humanities types. They allow comments, so it will be interesting to see what gets said about it there.
I may have some additional…
August 4, 2008
Last week, I was asked my expectations about the LHC, and offered my half-assed guess. If you prefer your speculation from people with relevant knowledge of the subject, Sean Carroll weighs in with his oddly-precise guesses.
On a related, less theoretical note, Tomasso Dorigo posted a summary of…
August 4, 2008
As you may or may not have seen from the banner ads on the site (depending on whether you read via RSS or not), ScienceBlogs is running a Reader Survey at the moment. Here's your chance to tell the Corporate Masters that they really need to sign up some more physics blogs.
Or, you know, whatever…
August 3, 2008
Bad news from the worthwhile sections of this morning's New York Times: another SpaceX rocket blew up.
A privately funded rocket was lost on its way to space Saturday night, bringing a third failure in a row to an Internet multimillionaire's effort to create a market for low-cost space-delivery.…
August 3, 2008
Every week, the New York Times Magazine features some sort of profile article about a person or group of people who are supposed to represent some sort of trend. Every week, the people they choose to write up come off as vaguely horrible, usually in some sort of entitled-suburbanite fashion.
I'm…
August 2, 2008
Museum Review - At the Insectarium, Getting Down With All That Skitters, Buzzes or Crawls - Review - NYTimes.com
"In the new $25 million Audubon Insectarium, which opened here in June, you can watch Formosan termites eat through a wooden skyline of New Orleans..., stick your head into a…
August 2, 2008
I subscribe to a bunch of EurekAlert RSS feeds, including the "Education" feed, which could often be re-named "The Journal of Unsurprising Results." Take, for example, today's ground-breaking study, Male college students more likely than less-educated peers to commit property crimes, which comes…
August 2, 2008
Around 20% of women who go into labor do so after eating Chinese food.
Another 17% or so go into labor after eating Indian food.
True facts.
(No baby yet. We were amusing ourselves yesterday talking about urban legends on how to induce labor, and these occurred to me this morning as possible…
August 1, 2008
Temporally Controlled Modulation of Antihydrogen Production and the Temperature Scaling of Antiproton-Positron Recombination
"Our observations have established a pulsed source of atomic antimatter, with a rise time of about 1 s, and a pulse length ranging from 3 to 100 s. "
(tags: physics science…
August 1, 2008
The second complete draft was sent off to my editor yesterday, and after a little bit of excitement regarding files that wouldn't open, it was successfully delivered. There were only minor changes since the last update, mostly having to do with the figures and section headers and so on.
I'll put…
August 1, 2008
You know, my opinion of "No Child Left Behind" style attempts to measure "failing" schools is as low as anybody's, but even I think this new Ohio State study sounds ridiculous:
Up to three-quarters of U.S. schools deemed failing based on achievement test scores would receive passing grades if…
August 1, 2008
The Borg assimilates another quality blogger: Built On Facts is joining ScienceBlogs. If you haven't been reading Matt's blog, it's one of the best basic physics blogs around, with math and everything.
It'll be good to have another non-philatelic scientist around. Update your blogrolls accordingly.
August 1, 2008
Well, OK, that's a stretch, but there is water, according to the latest Phoenix results:
"We've now finally touched it and tasted it," William V. Boynton, a professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona and the lead scientist for the instrument that detected the water…
July 31, 2008
UKTV: About UKTV: The world's ten oldest jokes
"Modern puns, Essex girl jokes and toilet humour can all be traced back to the very earliest jokes identified in this research."
(tags: silly history)
TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect
"[D]id any other random black people who like Barack Obama…
July 31, 2008
The other day, the Dean Dad remarked on one of the quirks of academic technology:
Last week I saw another iteration of something I still don't really understand. People who are perfectly civil in person are often capable of firing off incredibly nasty and hateful emails. Sometimes they'll do that…
July 31, 2008
"The Internet is silly!"
I turn around from the computer. "Yes it is," I say to the dog, "But what, specifically, makes you say that?"
"All these posts about physics theories. Comparing them to women and men and stupid wizards, and relationships. It's silly."
"Yes, well, it does seem to be the…
July 30, 2008
Cassini instrument confirms liquid surface lake on Titan
'"We can see there's a shelf, a beach, that is being exposed as the lake evaporates," Brown said.'
(tags: astronomy science planets news space)
Prelude to the Higgs: A work for 2 bosons in the key of Z
"The properties of the ZZ diboson…
July 30, 2008
Over at Backreaction, Bee has a nice post about uncertainty, in the technical sense, not the quantum sense. The context is news stories about science, which typically do a terrible job of handling the uncertainties and caveats that are an essential part of science.
Properly dealing with uncertainty…
July 30, 2008
A colleague emailed me yesterday with the following question:
As I have mentioned the other day, [Prof. Firstname Lastname] of Comp. Sci. is putting together an exciting course "Can Computers Think?" (Intro to Comp. Sci.), and she hopes to use Sci Fi short stories (and movies, and TV series) to…
July 29, 2008
The Nature of Glass Remains Anything but Clear - NYTimes.com
"David A. Weitz, a physics professor at Harvard, joked, "There are more theories of the glass transition than there are theorists who propose them.""
(tags: physics materials science)
Medium Large
It's back! Maybe the best Web comic…
July 29, 2008
Currently in heavy rotation at Chateau Steelypips (links to last.fm):
"Do the Panic" by Phantom Planet. I'm a sucker for the "Ba ba ba" chorus...
"Sequestered in Memphis" by the Hold Steady. "We went to some place where she cat-sits." I had to Google that.
"Glad It's Over" by Wilco. "I hate you…
July 29, 2008
In the Reader Request Thread, Ian asks:
I'd like to hear what you think we'll learn (if anything!) when the LHC comes online next month.
Well, that sort of depends on the time scale. I'm not a big accelerator guy, but my sense from reading the blogs of people who are is that we're not likely to…
July 29, 2008
I tagged this for del.icio.us, but on reflection, it deserves better than to be buried in a links dump. It's so rare that the New York Times notices physics that doesn't cost billions of dollars, that Kenneth Chang's article on glass deserves its own post.
Peter G. Wolynes, a professor of chemistry…
July 29, 2008
Because I am a Bad Person who thinks and types relatively slowly, I have been lax about following up to the many excellent posts that have been written in response to this weekend's two cultures posts. Let me attempt to address that in a small way by linking a whole bunch of them now:
My rant was…
July 28, 2008
The Font Sizes of the Planets | Orbiting Frog
The Solar System as a Wordle. You can get it on a T-shirt, too.
(tags: astronomy planets science silly)
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Thoughts on Service
"[T]he path of least resistance is lip service to service, with a tacit…
July 28, 2008
In the Reader Request thread, Mary Kay writes:
I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on becoming a father. Both before and after the actual event.
I mentioned this to Kate, and she asked whether I thought there was a difference between "fatherhood" and "parenthood." I'm not that attuned to…
July 28, 2008
Last week's Reader Request Thread produced a bunch of good suggestions, some of which I'll be responding to this week as I put the last touches on the book draft and send it off. We'll start with a good physics question from Moshe:
So, what do you think about graphene? the next big thing, or just…
July 28, 2008
The New York Times front page yesterday sported an article with the oh-so-hip headline "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?." This turned out to be impressively stupid even by the standards of articles with clumsy slang in the headlines:
Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate…
July 27, 2008
A question raised in comments to yesterday's rant about humanities types looking down on people who don't know the basics of their fields, while casually dismissing math and science:
[I]t occurs to me that it would be useful if someone could determine, honestly, whether the humanities professors…
July 27, 2008
Richard Reeves is probably best known for writing biographies of American Presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan), so it's a little strange to see him turn his hand to scientific biography. This is part of Norton's "Great Discoveries" series (which inexplicably lacks a web page-- get with the 21st…
