January 15, 2008
Steroid scandals in sports, most particularly baseball, have been dominating sports media for a couple of years now. I thought that there really wasn't anything I could possibly care less about, but the New York Times proved me wrong with an article on steroid use among hip-hop artists.
Actually,…
January 14, 2008
Overheard in New York | The United Nations, Encapsulated
"They have been underestimating my power for quite some time now."
(tags: silly blogs)
SFFWorld 2007 Best Reads Review (Part 1)
A discussion of the best in fantasy last year.
(tags: books literature SF review)
SFFWorld Best Reads 2007 (…
January 14, 2008
Steinn offers an excellent suggestion, after noticing that CNN is soliciting debate questions from random people on the Internet:
Keith over at NASAwatch suggested his reader swamp it with NASA policy questions to try to get one into the actual debate. Scienceblog readers could do the same - send…
January 14, 2008
Yo, E! (Do you mind if I call you E?)
I'd like to draw your attention to an item on your web page: NY Giants 21, Dallas Cowboys 17. Yeah, shocking as it may seem, the Giants won that game. Go figure. Hey, it surprised me, and I'm a Giants fan!
Still, in light of that item, doesn't it seem odd that…
January 14, 2008
I've seen a lot of people linking to this exhaustive recounting of Chris Matthews's unhealthy fixation on Hillary Clinton, which leads off with a great quote from this firedoglake post:
I do not care which person is your candidate. I don't care what you think of Hillary Clinton as a potential…
January 14, 2008
Well, OK, not really. You can, however, hear what I sound like by listening to a couple of official Tor podcasts made from the panel I did at Worldcon with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Adam Rakunas, Paul Cornell and Yoshio Kobayashi.
The panel was back in September, but I haven't seen the files on Tor's…
January 13, 2008
Just Science 2008 » Just Science 2008
People blogging about nothing but science, Feb. 4-8.
(tags: blogs science)
Fantasy and Science Fiction: Fiction
A Nebula-nominated story, available online. Yet another thing I'll read in my copious free time.
(tags: space stories books)
Prisoner's…
January 13, 2008
The New York Giants, who played all their starters in a "meaningless" game against the Patriots in the final week of the season are now 2-0 in the playoffs.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Indianapolis Colts, and Dallas Cowboys, who played their starters only sparingly at the end of the regular season to…
January 13, 2008
I'm sitting on the couch, watching tv, when the dog comes in. "Hey, dude, what ever happened with that book, anyway?"
"What book?" I ask, distractedly.
"The one about me. What other book would I be asking about?"
"Oh, yeah. I sent the first draft off to my editor and a bunch of other people, and I'…
January 13, 2008
So, how much does it suck to be David Garrard? He was 22-for-33 for 278 yards, with two touchdowns and only one interception, an excellent performance by any normal standard, but he was the second-best quarterback in the game. Tom Brady was 26-for-28, 262 yards, three TD's, no interceptions. And…
January 12, 2008
Copernicus' Secret - Jack Repcheck - Book Review - New York Times
Copernicus, you dog!
(tags: history science astronomy books review)
Libraries Digging Deep for Geothermal Savings - New York Times
They're doing this for the high school near our house.
(tags: environment energy science gadgets…
January 12, 2008
Looking at the traffic stats for the week, we see the following pageview totals:
The Funding Issue: 688
Unions and Sour Grapes: 777
Teacher Compensation: 946
Sheep!: 1,261
So, to recap:
Ranty blogging about serious issues of science funding and public outreach = Nobody cares.
Ranty blogging…
January 12, 2008
Taking my time to copy a meme from Dave, here's the list of cities where I spent at least one night in 2007:
Niskayuna, NY (duh)
Whitney Point, NY
Tewksbury, MA
Mineola, NY
Boston, MA
New York, NY
Holland, MI
San Rafael, CA
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Cruz Bay, St. John, USVI
Kyoto, Japan
Yokohama,…
January 11, 2008
YouTube - Svezia, Inferno E Paradiso (1968)
The origin of everybody's favorite Muppet earworm, via the AV Club.
(tags: music video youtube silly movies television)
YouTube - Muppets - Mahna Mahna
The Muppet version. You can thank me later.
(tags: music silly television youtube)
Jobs, News and…
January 11, 2008
It's been a while since I did one of these (see "How to Tell a True Lab Story" for an explanation), but yesterday's laser tech story reminded me of one.
The lab next to mine in grad school also used an argon ion laser to pump another laser, but they were much more cramped for table space than we…
January 11, 2008
An example of what academics do to blow off steam:
This is a detail of a long whiteboard hanging in the basement hallway near my research lab. Sometime this fall, a colleague divided part of the board into a grid, and wrote "Sheep drawing contest! Rules: Draw a sheep" at the top. Students and…
January 11, 2008
From Inside Higher Ed:
Data drawn from the National Collegiate Athletic Association's annual survey of graduation rates, analyzed by Inside Higher Ed, show that scholarship athletes make up at least 20 percent of the full-time black male undergraduates at 96 of the nearly 330 colleges that play…
January 10, 2008
Why don't we drop medical waste and nuclear waste into active volcanoes? - By Daniel Engber - Slate Magazine
The Question of the Year. I was rooting for "Is it possible I have the softest cat in the world?"
(tags: environment science silly)
Hubble finds double Einstein ring
Three galaxies, all…
January 10, 2008
Kate and I got our Hugo nomination ballots in the mail yesterday (as members of the 2007 Worldcon, we get the right to nominate works for the 2008 Hugo Awards). The nomination deadline isn't until March 1st, but this still seems like a good time to ask:
What should I be nominating for the 2008 Hugo…
January 10, 2008
As I mentioned a few days ago, a colleague asked me if I'd be interested in doing a guest lecture for a class on science fiction. She suggested that a good way to go might be to pick one story to have the class read, and talk about that.
Kicking ideas around with Kate, I latched onto the Ted Chiang…
January 10, 2008
Back when I was a grad student at NIST, we had a large frame argon ion laser that put out 10-15 watts of green light that we then used to pump a Ti:Sapph laser to produce the infrared light we used for laser cooling. This particular type of laser had a small design flaw-- the energy needed for…
January 9, 2008
Lounge of the Lab Lemming: Geophysicists moderate neutrons
Estimating conference attendance by the attenuation of the cosmogenic neutron flux due to people on the exhibit floor.
(tags: physics silly science)
A Natural Scientist: Before You Sign Up For Indentured Servitude
The three most…
January 9, 2008
The first half of NOVA's Absolute Zero program aired last night, and I was able to watch the whole thing. Well, more or less-- it was a long day, so I was drifting off a little bit about fifteen minutes in, and didn't get all of the Michael Faraday story, but a phone call woke me up, and I watched…
January 9, 2008
I occasionally joke that some of the articles passing through my EurekAlert feed ought to be published in the Journal of "Well, Duh!", but I think this one takes the cake: Teens find the benefits of not having sex decline with age:
The study, reported in the January 2008 issue of the "American…
January 9, 2008
Gordon Watts is mad as hell about funding cuts, and blaming petty partisan politics:
As far as I can tell, here is what happened:
Congress just about finishes the omnibus spending bill. [Snark: exactly how late was this!?]
At the last minute Bush says he will veto it unless it comes at his number…
January 9, 2008
Via a back channel, the Gardner Project of EniTech Research. They have an argon laser, so you know it's science!
(This is way too slick to be the work of real crazy people, and, of course, there's this ad... This is almost certainly either performance art or viral marketing for an upcoming tv show…
January 8, 2008
PHD Comics: Research Diagram/Research Reality
No schematic survives its first encounter with the apparatus.
(tags: silly comics science experiment)
Teens find the benefits of not having sex decline with age
"The greatest change in attitudes was among teens who became sexually experienced during…
January 8, 2008
Having made a snide comment or two about engineers earlier, I feel like I should relate a positive experience today:
Over the Christmas break, there was a power outage in my lab. Not an accidental outage, but a planned outage that nobody told me about-- a contractor cut the breakers in order to do…
January 8, 2008
In my email this morning, I have a note from everybody's favorite online retailer, informing me that:
We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by Christopher Moore have also purchased Esther's Revenge at Susa: From Sennacherib to Ahasuerus by Stephanie Dalley.
OK, fine, they…
January 8, 2008
One final note on the teachers-unions argument: The comments to the original post on the low regard for teachers relative to lawyers immediately jumped on the union thing. Commenter Doug Hering provided what's probably the best statement of the causal link:
I do agree that teachers must be treated…
