April 1, 2008
In which I steal post ideas from Kate: The following are two-word phrases from songs in my iTunes library that ought to be enough to identify the song in question. Leave your guesses in the comments:
Pre-Raphaelite curls
Chrome horse
Pink torpedo
Jasmine tea
Ashtray floors
Quartet practiced…
April 1, 2008
I've managed to avoid most of the recent fracas over Expelled and what Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney have said about it, mostly by unsubscribing from the RSS feeds for most of the participating blogs a few months back. Prescient of me, no?
I've kept my RSS subscription for Chris's blog, though, and…
April 1, 2008
I'm a Bad Blogger.
I got a free review copy of this book last summer, and it's taken me nine months to getting around to reviewing it. I started it as soon as I got it, but it seemd like it would be tempting fate to take it to St. John on vacation, and then I couldn't really justify lugging a…
March 31, 2008
Hackers Assault Epilepsy Patients via Computer
People suck.
(tags: internet computing medicine evil stupid)
Word Munger » One-letter google searches
The alphabet, according to Google.
(tags: internet computing silly)
The Gashlycrumb Tinies
"M is for Maud who was swept out to sea/ N is for…
March 31, 2008
My post-tenure sabbatical, alas, is officially over today, as I begin teaching the honors section of the introductory E&M class. This will keep me busy for most of the morning, which makes it the perfect opportunity for a Dorky Poll:
Electricity or magnetism?
Yes, I know they're unified, and…
March 31, 2008
The latest issue of the Cult of the Purple Cow Quarterly-- er, I mean, the Williams Alumni Review has a story about a woman I knew in college (she was a senior when I was a freshman) who has started a non-profit organization called Quest for College, working to help prepare kids for college (…
March 31, 2008
Academics of all sorts are highly protective of their scholarly territory. It's an unavoidable consequence of the process of becoming an academic-- I've often joked that getting a Ph.D. requires you to become the World's Leading Expert in something that nobody else cares about. To make it through…
March 30, 2008
Talk Like A Physicist | Talk Like A Physicist 3.14 » A water balloon not exploding in high-speed
Possibly even cooler than a water balloon exploding at high speed.
(tags: physics video youtube science)
THE FIVE WAYS OF PROVING SANTA CLAUS
After Aquinas.
(tags: silly humanities culture society…
March 30, 2008
Davidson's amazing NCAA tournament run came to an end today, as Kansas just squeaked past them, 59-57, when a shot at the buzzer went wide. The low score probably offends NBA fans, but to my mind, this game showed everything that's right about the NCAA tournament.
If you watched the game, it was…
March 30, 2008
(Now that I look at the title, that sounds like an incredibly tepid harness-team command. "On, Moderation! Forward, with prudent speed!" I could clear that up by adding "Comment" in the middle, but I kind of like the image...)
Over at Boing Boing, Teresa Nielsen Hayden has posted a long explanation…
March 30, 2008
North Carolina beat Louisville last night to reach the Final Four, in what was the first good game in a couple of days. Xavier never seriously challenged UCLA in the early game, and while it's nice to see Davidson win, there wasn't much drama in their whomping of Wisconsin on Friday.
That Times…
March 29, 2008
The 6 Cutest Animals That Can Still Destroy You | Cracked.com
Oh shit! Run!
(tags: animals biology psychology video science silly)
Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More - New York Times
Crazy people seek an injunction to keep the LHC from destroying the universe.
(tags:…
March 29, 2008
Over at Reassigned Time, "Dr. Crazy" offers a remarkably sane post on what tenure means to her:
Ultimately, this is the allure of tenure for me, and it's what I think is most positive about the way I see tenure working at my institution. This is not to say that the tenure process at some…
March 29, 2008
As noted many times, FutureBaby is due in July, which means we're at the point in the process where we need to start acquiring, or at least registering for, Stuff. Of which there is a frightening amount.
Kate's big on consumer research, so we picked up the Baby Bargains book that several people…
March 29, 2008
Over at Evolving Thoughts, John Wilkins pokes string theorists:
Ernst Rutherford, the "father" of nuclear physics, once airily declared "In science there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting". By this he meant that the theory of physics is the only significant thing in science. Such…
March 29, 2008
Anachronista: The Simpsons Bayeux Tapestry Couch Scene
It's missing the comet...
(tags: silly television video)
Good Math, Bad Math : Introduction to Linear Regression
The basics of data fitting.
(tags: science math)
Quantum Decoherence Reduction by Increasing the Thermal Bath Temperature
A…
March 28, 2008
There are fewer of them this time, so I'll keep them above the fold.
Graphene
makes for better optical displays - physicsworld.com
"According to the same group of
researchers that first fabricated the 2D sheets of carbon nearly four
years ago, graphene has the ideal optical properties to form the…
March 28, 2008
My sabbatical is coming to an end, so I've begun prepping my class for the term that starts Monday. I'm teaching the honors section of introductory E&M, and for the intro classes, I lecture off PowerPoint. We're starting an entirely new syllabus this year, and I plan to use my spiffy tablet PC…
March 28, 2008
Back in the comments of one of the "Uncomfortable Question" threads, Matthew Jarpe asked (as background research for a new novel):
If someone were to hand you the keys to your own particle accelerator and you could do any experiment you wanted, what would it be?
Well, if somebody just gave me the…
March 28, 2008
Most of my best ideas come from Kate, so I'll steal this one, too:
If you could only give me one piece of advice [regarding FutureBaby, due in July], what would it be?
If you've been itching to provide child-bearing or -rearing advice (and I know some of you have), here's your chance. Please limit…
March 28, 2008
Today's question come to us courtesy of Ivy League white-reggae band Vampire Weekend:
So, who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma, anyway? Well, John Scalzi, obviously, but the real question is: why? Why does this simple piece of punctuation engender such strong negative feelings in people who are…
March 27, 2008
You may or may not have noticed the absence of the "Links for [Date]" posts the last couple of days. There's been some sort of glitch at del.icio.us, and they didn't auto-post the way they usually do. You may or may not have missed them, but I do, so below the fold you'll find the big long list of…
March 27, 2008
The Dean Dad posted an interesting article about "national service" programs yesterday. He's against them, for class reasons:
The message that national service programs send strikes me as dangerous. The implication seems to be that rich kids can just jump right into higher ed and start moving up…
March 27, 2008
This is the second Takeshi Kovacs novel, sequel to Altered Carbon. Kovacs is a former UN Envoy, a generally amoral individual loaded up with a bunch of sophisticated mental conditioning, and sent out into the world to troubleshoot problem spots for the world government. And he's a guy who really…
March 27, 2008
David Horowitz is an idiot.
Granted, anyone with any sense has known this for a good while now, but now we can prove it with SCIENCE!!! Well, political science-- Inside Higher Ed reports on a study of student political views that finds that liberal faculty make no real difference:
One of the key…
March 27, 2008
Matthew Hughes's Majestrum is part of a linked series of novels and stories set in a distant future in which the rational rules of logic and science governing our universe are beginning to weaken and give way toa new age goverened by "sympathetic association," better known as magic. He's been…
March 26, 2008
I tried to get a copy of this at Boskone, but Larry Smith's whole stock sold out on Friday, before I hit the dealer's room at all. I'm not sure how many copies there were originally, but Melko was doing the Happy Dance at the Tor party, and deservedly so. I had to wait to get my copy until we got…
March 26, 2008
Timothy Burke has a typically excellent post about the problems with academic tenure. Not the usual "It's an abomination that prevents that Magic Power of the Market from working its wonders" complaint from outside, but problems from the academic side:
Oso Raro and Tenured Radical underline one of…
March 26, 2008
Returning to logging the books next to my computer in the order in which they were read, Matthew Jarpe's Radio Freefall was one of the few books I picked up at Boskone (I think I got Larry Smith's last copy). I read most of it during our trip to DC a little while back, and I'm only just getting…
March 26, 2008
It's been ages since I did a booklog post here. I've been reading lots of stuff, I just haven't been blogging it. I really should do something about the books in the stack by my computer, though, so I'm going to try to write a short post about each, and then shelve them before they topple over onto…
