December 3, 2007
An off-line question from someone at Seed:
Fundamentally, what is the difference between chemistry and physics?
There are a bunch of different ways to try to explain the dividing lines between disciplines. My take on this particular question is that there's a whole hierarchy of (sub)fields, based…
December 3, 2007
A handful of sports items of interest to me:
1) My Giants defied expectations, and pulled out a 21-16 win over the Bears on two late touchdown drives, after sucking for most of the game. Well, OK, the defense was good throughout, though they were aided by the Bears not having a quarterback better…
December 2, 2007
Hamlet - The Text Adventure
"It's so unfair! You're in trouble again, just because you called your uncle - or rather, your new stepfather, Claudius - a usurping git."
(tags: games internet literature silly)
YouTube - The Killers - Don't Shoot Me Santa
Silly spoof Christmas song video, featuring…
December 2, 2007
Important Notice: I am not interested in what Cory Doctorow has termed "helpiness" (in analogy with Stephen Colbert's "truthiness") namely comments that have the general syntactical form of useful advice, without the content of useful advice. I don't want to hear about how I really should've bought…
December 2, 2007
I don't really want to turn this blog completely over to bitching about the poor representation of science in "Year's Best" lists of books, but it's that time of year when every media outlet puts out their lists of favorite books, so it's hard not to talk about it. Today's list is from the…
December 1, 2007
Amazon.com: Uranium Ore: Electronics
"When mixed with Tuscan whole milk I gained the power to control deceased woodland creatures. I am now in the process of raising an army of undead wombats to overthrow the government from deep within my volcanic lair. "
(tags: silly internet)
FilmChat:…
December 1, 2007
Another Jonah Goldberg moment-- can anybody recommend a reasonably neutral discussion of Bohm's non-local hidden variable version of quantum theory? A little Googling turns up this encyclopedia article and a tutorial dialogue on the arxiv, but I'd like to see a fairly complete treatment of it that…
December 1, 2007
"Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake! Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake!"
"Stop that! What in hell are you barking at?" I look out the window. "It's a squirrel. Why are you barking like that at a single squirrel on the tree outside?"
"It's an evil squirrel! A threat to the home!"
"No, it's not. It's little and furry and…
November 30, 2007
The Washington Monthly
"It turns out that the only thing these GOP voters hated more than helping the poor was being told that it's wrong to torture people." Whee!
(tags: politics US)
The Wetzel plan - NCAA Football - Yahoo! Sports
This is far too sensible to ever happen.
(tags: football sports…
November 30, 2007
Via Kate, a story from a legal blog about a decisions in the case of a messy professor:
"Clean your room or get out!" Words from a frustrated parent to a messy teenager? Not quite. The mess-maker in this case was a chemistry professor at the University of Texas, who ignored repeated warnings to…
November 30, 2007
This could easily be a Links Dump item, but it's so good that it deserves more prominent placement. Inside Higher Ed has a spoof Editor's Note from an imaginary US News & World Report ranking of churches:
In thanking those who took the time to write, I would remind all in the community of…
November 30, 2007
One of the strangest things about reading a lot of blogs is the way it's broadened my view of the world. Which is "more or less at random."
I don't follow a lot of mainstream news sources any more, because they mostly just piss me off, so I end up getting most of my news from an assortment of blogs…
November 29, 2007
Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Spray-Painting Pynchon
"The quality of them is not the greatest. This is obviously not a professional tagger," he said. "English majors and graffiti artists generally don't seem to be the same demographic."
(tags: silly…
November 29, 2007
The first half of Maryland's 69-61 win over Illinois was as ugly a half of basketball as you'd ever want to see. It actually resembled our lunchtime pick-up games in some ways-- lots of really clever passes being throw to guys who weren't ready, weren't able to catch the ball, or just weren't on…
November 29, 2007
In comments to my earlier cranky post about the New York Times, Carl Zimmer pointed out that they hadn't released their "Ten Best Books" list, so there was still an outside chance of a science book turning up. They posted the list today, and there's nothing on it that wasn't also on the Notable…
November 28, 2007
Lucas: More evidence of the talent gap between the Big Ten and ACC
"Instead of the annual bloodletting, otherwise known as the Big Ten/ACC Challenge, maybe a Big Ten/MEAC Challenge would help bolster the ego"
(tags: basketball)
Spoof London Underground Announcements - Emma Clarke Voiceover and…
November 28, 2007
Today's lesson:
Lead bricks are really heavy.
That is all. Carry on.
(I had a student working on a project involving radiation over the summer, in a shared lab space. A colleague needs to use the space next term, so I was moving the summer project stuff across the hall to a more permanent home. I…
November 28, 2007
You may have thought you saw some other posts here earlier in the day. You didn't. Pay no attention to the vanishing posts about things I wasn't supposed to post about.
This means, though, that I don't have any content on the blog, other than a cranky note about an idiot radio host, so, ummmm....…
November 28, 2007
I generally listen to ESPN radio in my office in the morning, because I like the Mike & Mike show. Unfortunately, they're followed by Colin Cowherd, who is a world-class pinhead.
He's currently holding forth on the death of Sean Taylor, with his basic position being that Taylor had it coming…
November 28, 2007
Over at Unqualified Offerings, "Thoreau" offers some musings about peer review. I saw this and said, "Aha! The perfect chance to dust off an old post, and free up some time..." Sadly, I already recycled the post in question, so I feel obliged to be less lazy and contribute some new content.
I…
November 27, 2007
John Cusack | The A.V. Club
"You try to make it as good as you can, but with an action movie or whatever it is, you're doing it so you can get leverage to go do Grace Is Gone or whatever these other ones are. So there's a ceiling on how good you can make something."
(tags: movies culture)…
November 27, 2007
Over at Backreaction, Bee has a long and thoughtful post (they don't do any other kind) about the interaction between science and the popular imagination. She says a lot of interesting things, but I think she comes to the wrong conclusion at the end, when she writes:
However, despite this general…
November 27, 2007
Scott Eric Kaufman draws my attention to the fact that the New York Times has posted its Notable Books for 2007 list. The list is divided into "Fiction & Poetry" and "Non-Fiction," and Scott correctly notes that the "Fiction & Poetry" books all have terrible blurbs, but I'd like to point…
November 26, 2007
Alliance Announces 2nd Annual High School Essay Contest | Alliance For Science
Write about evolution, win money (if you're a high school student, anyway).
(tags: science education biology politics)
Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Benefits for Pets, Not…
November 26, 2007
I distinctly recall reading a quote from somebody talking about the debates between Bohr and Einstein, in which Einstein invented ingenious thought experiments to measure two non-commuting observables (position and momentum, or energy and time) and Bohr poked holes in them. The comment was…
November 26, 2007
The infamous Davies op-ed has been collected together with some responses at edge.org, and one of the responses is by Sean Carroll, who reproduces his response at Cosmic Variance. Sean's a smart guy, and I basically agree with his argument, but I'm a contrary sort, and want to nitpick one thing…
November 26, 2007
I said I wasn't going to write anything about the Paul Davies thing, but it's been the hot topic for the last day or two, and I've found myself reading a bunch of the responses in blogdom. I basically agree with most of what various science bloggers have said, but being a contrary sort, I can't…
November 25, 2007
outside the (toy) box » Little Man. Watching My Son's Socialization. or "Gender - it's wicked constructed"
Gender socialization through toys.
(tags: gender society toys)
Giro.org » The Big Scary Idea
A modest proposal for bringing the SF magazines into the Century of the Fruitbat
(tags: books…
November 25, 2007
... or, Emmy's Best Thanksgiving Ever!
We did the traditional turkey-and-trimmings dinner Saturday with both sets of parents. Again, we brined the turkey overnight, following the Good Eats recipe, and other than a small glitch with the thermometer placement, everything went very well. The turkey…
November 25, 2007
There are two things creating some buzz at the moment on ScienceBlogs that I don't intend to write about because I've already commented on them. They're oddly similar, too, though they're being approached in different ways.
One is this op-ed by Paul Davies, which is basically a shorter and more…
