May 13, 2008
Kate and I have been discussing possible names for FutureBaby when he or she ceases to be a baby in potentia and becomes an ActualBaby. We've also talked a bit about the issue of FutureBaby's Internet identification-- specifically, whether I should refer to him or her by name in the eventual blog…
May 12, 2008
Confessions of a Community College Dean: False Economies
"[S]elf-defeating efforts at cost control" See also "deferred maintenance."
(tags: academia economics stupid politics)
Maths plus 'geeky' images equals deterred students
This week, in the Journal of Unsurprising Results.
(tags: math…
May 12, 2008
The Corporate Masters are holding a workspace photo contest:
Now hard at work on the next issue, Seed editors want to see the typical or not-so-typical places where you do science. For the chance to get your scientific work space featured in Seed, please send a photo of it to art@seedmediagroup.com…
May 12, 2008
Charles Kuffner reports on an "Innocence Summit" in Texas last week, and points to two more reports from Grits for Breakfast that provide more colorful detail. The news story already says most of what needs saying, though:
AUSTIN -- Nine wrongfully convicted men who spent a collective 148 years in…
May 12, 2008
Matt Nisbet points to a new Pew Survey about global warming showing very little change in public opinion on the subject in recent years. It seems that An Inconvenient Truth didn't really cause a radical change in public opinion, after all.
(Of course, it does appear to have brought climate change…
May 12, 2008
There's been a lot said and written about Cyclone Nargis recently, and reading the coverage by Chris Mooney and others makes me feel a little like a Bad Person for not saying anything myself. But, really, what is there to say? It's a gigantic disaster, and the deplorable political situation in that…
May 11, 2008
The Neon Season: Theatre Tag
Hilarious tales of disasters on stage.
(tags: theater silly society culture)
Making Light: A new holiday, rarely celebrated
"Happy Voice of Command Day, in honor of all of those people in our lives who were irrefutably right."
(tags: culture society religion silly…
May 11, 2008
Kate and I made a run to Babies "R" Us today, and looked at a bunch more baby stuff. We got a little punchy after a while, so it was perhaps not surprising that I was tremendously amused by the idea of Penguin Bowling.
On further reflection, though, it's really only natural. After all, the toy is…
May 11, 2008
Jacques Distler asks the question that every blog-reader has asked at some point:
Did all of this exist before the Web? Or have people just gotten a whole lot weirder in the past 15 years?
(I'm not even going to attempt to describe what triggered the question...)
I tend to think that the weirdness…
May 10, 2008
Solve Puzzles for Science | Fold It!
Protein Folding: The Game! It has to be better than listening to seminar talks about it...
(tags: chemistry games science computing internet news)
May 10, 2008
Via Swans On Tea, I see that Comedy Central has put up the video of George Johnson's appearance on the Colbert Report. Or, I should say, they claim to have put it up-- their video player didn't work worth a damn on my computer.
I saw this on the day-late rerun, and it was hilarious. Not because…
May 10, 2008
There's been a lot of talk about REM's decision to finally sound like a rock band again for their new album, Accelerate. I rather like the first single, "Supernatural Superserious," which sounds like the REM I remember, rather than some bloodless adult contemporary act.
So I bought the album, and…
May 9, 2008
slacktivist: L.B.: Speakerphone
"If you're a book editor, you should own a copy of Left Behind to take along to your annual performance reviews. Just open to a random page, have your boss read it, and then remind them that this is why you're worth every penny and then some."
(tags: books writing…
May 9, 2008
Timothy Burke has some interesting thoughts about the College of the Atlantic, which represents a real effort to build interdisciplinarity on an institutional level. "Interdisciplinary" is the buzzword of the moment in large swathes of academia, and the College of the Atlantic, which doesn't have…
May 9, 2008
There's a news piece in Physics World this week titled "Atom laser makes its first measurement" and you might think this would be right up my alley. Mostly, though, it serves to remind me that the term "atom laser" has always kind of pissed me off.
This is somewhat ironic, as it's a beautiful piece…
May 9, 2008
You have no idea how hard it is to be the Queen of Niskayuna. Between the talking about Relativity, and the people working on the house, and the nice weather, and the squirrels, and the cleaning service coming by, and the inferior dogs in the neighborhood, well, she's just wiped out:
She was too…
May 8, 2008
Solar System Visualizer
Look at those planets and moons go!
(tags: astronomy planets science computing internet gadgets)
Polar vortex replicated in a bucket - physicsworld.com
"The centre of the vortex is usually circular, but occasionally it assumes a triangular or even a square shape. Now…
May 8, 2008
I've been grading lab reports in two different classes, and I've been struck once again by the way that students attach mystical properties to anything with a digital readout. The uncertainty used in calculations is invariably put down as half of whatever the least significant digit displayed was,…
May 8, 2008
The video that accompanies this PopSci.com article is pretty impressive. A bunch of college kids show off their ability to hit trick shots with ping-pong balls, bouncing them off walls, doors, floors, moving skateboards, people, and items of furniture and into beer cups. As the PopSci piece notes,…
May 8, 2008
In honor of the Japanese crow story in today's Links Dump, here's a filler post with a picture of a Japanese crow:
May 7, 2008
Japan Fights Crowds of Crows - New York Times
"This is the Crow Patrol of utility company Kyushu Electric Power, on the hunt for crows whose nests on electric poles have caused a string of blackouts in [Kagoshima] on Japan's southern island of Kyushu."
(tags: Japan animals travel)
Breaking…
May 7, 2008
As seen in a recent links dump, gg at Skulls in the Stars posted a fun challenge for science bloggers:
My "challenge", for those sciencebloggers who choose to accept it, is this: read and research an old, classic scientific paper and write a blog post about it. I recommend choosing something pre-…
May 7, 2008
Writing in Scientific American, Mark Alpert argues that we need more novels about science:
A good work of fiction can convey the smells of a laboratory, the colors of a dissected heart, the anxieties of a chemist and the joys of an astronomer--all the illuminating particulars that you won't find in…
May 7, 2008
For all the ranting people do about the evils of PowerPoint, it seems to me that people are missing the one bit of technology that is most responsible for incomprehensible presentations in science: the laser pointer.
Having watched a bunch of student talks last week, I was reminded once again of…
May 6, 2008
Swans on Tea » Doomed to Fail
"A thought experiment that finds a contradiction has only shown that the transforms have not been properly applied -- the author has made a math error, or made a bad assumption"
(tags: physics relativity science education)
Dark Matter Searches at Colliders - part…
May 6, 2008
Speaking of YA literature (as I was, briefly, in the previous post), I would be remiss if I didn't note that Cory Doctorow has put up a Little Brother section on his web site, promoting his new book. As with all of his books, it's available for free download, so if you'd like to read it but don't…
May 6, 2008
A few days back, John Scalzi posted a piece celebrating YA books and authors, which included some reading recommendations. In the comments, a few people said that as childless adults they were reluctant to go into the YA section of the store, lest people think they were creeps looking for kids to…
May 6, 2008
The latest book by Iain M. Banks proudly proclaims itself to be a Culture novel-- part of a loosely connected series of novels and stories about humans living in a vast and utopian galactic civilization-- which makes its opening in a castles-and-kings milieu somewhat surprising. Well, all right,…
May 5, 2008
Closure in an Ethics Case :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, and Views and Jobs
Common sense prevails, for once
(tags: academia ethics stupid)
Ohmigosh fonts
A big step up from Comic Sans
(tags: comics computing silly language)
Jacks of Science â Using Adobe Photoshop…
May 5, 2008
The sports talk shows today were all abuzz with chatter about the death of second-place finisher Eight Belles at the Kentucky Derby, with no end of hand-wringing and moralizing about the nature of horse racing. I have to admit, I find the whole thing a little puzzling.
I'm not puzzled that people…
