October 3, 2007
You may notice, a couple of posts down, a post with the title "Links for 2007-10-03," with a bunch of, well, links in it. This was auto-generated by del.icio.us, and is the main reason why I started using that service this week-- the idea is to give me a way to collect together the sort of almost-…
October 3, 2007
This is more Bora's thing than mine, but I should note that the new open access journal PMC Physics A has published their first articles as freely available PDF's. They also have a video interview with the editor up on the site.
Of course, with titles like "Dilaton and off-shell (non-critical…
October 3, 2007
School cheating scandal divides New Hampshire community - International Herald Tribune
At some point, wouldn't it actually be easier to learn stuff, rather than breaking into the school to steal the exams?
(tags: stupid education)
PhysMath Central takes off with a big bang
(tags: physics…
October 2, 2007
Speaking of cryptic particle physcis results, noted rumor-monger Tommaso Dorigo has a rather long post about the ongoing Higgs search. It basically boils down to "There are new results due to be released soon, and I'm not going to talk about them," which wouldn't seem to require 2000 words, but…
October 2, 2007
I've got a bunch of EurekAlert feeds in my RSS subscriptions, that I use to keep up with recent developments, because I need blog fodder. One of the really striking things about these is how extremely variable the quality of the releases is.
Take, for example, the release headlined New particles…
October 2, 2007
Natalie Angier has a piece in the Times this morning about the loss of a beloved pet cat:
Cleo was almost 16 years old, she'd been sick, and her death was no surprise. Still, when I returned to a home without cats, without pets of any sort, I was startled by my grief -- not so much its intensity as…
October 2, 2007
Via Inside Higher Ed, a brilliant new approach to the problem of high tuition costs, coutesy of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley (whose highly impartial Wikipedia entry is a hoot):
The runaway cost of a college education has been on the mayor's radar screen for some time. Last year, Daley suggested a…
October 1, 2007
A little while back, I asked for help identifying some anime recommended by a Japanese fan. I have subsequently found the business card on which he wrote the titles:
The first one looks like it is "Gurren-Lagann, so a shiny gold star for commenter Patrick.
the second one is a total mystery to me…
October 1, 2007
I missed the New York Times article about Rutgers professor William Dowling, who is campaiging against college sports, and has written a jeremiad on the subject and gotten it published by-- slight irony alert-- Penn State University Press.
There are a lot of things to dislike about big-time college…
October 1, 2007
As you may or may not remember from last year, a number of us at ScienceBlogs participated in a charity drive, raising $34,000 for the educational charity DonorsChoose. It's back again this year, and better than ever: we've got our own dedicated leader board, and the event this time out will be a…
September 30, 2007
"Dude, what is your deal?"
"What? I'm just taking a couple of pictures."
"A couple? You've taken, like, forty pictures of me already today. You're cramping my style. I'm trying to go for a walk, here. I've got bushes to sniff, lawns to pee on, critters to chase-- I don't have time for photography…
September 30, 2007
If you like free money, Six Apart (owners of Movable Type and LiveJournal) have an offer for you: send them an email, and they'll send you $30.
"What's the catch?" you say. Because there has to be a catch...
And, indeed, there is a catch: the $30 is in the form of a gift certificate for…
September 30, 2007
The selection of a smaller subject area for viewing, and the contrast between the dim interior and the bright exterior really enhance the aesthetic experience of the garden:
What?
That's a picture of the garden at Koto-in, a subtemple of Daitoku-ji in northwest Kyoto, cropped down a bit from the…
September 29, 2007
I haven't even had a book contract for a month, and already I'm engaging in Authorial Avoidance Behavior...
I spent a while this morning messing around with setting up a del.icio.us account. This does actually have a worthwhile goal, namely to be an improvement over my current system of keeping a…
September 29, 2007
America's Finest News Source has the last word in generic science articles:
According to the scientists, the electromagnetic science-maker will make atoms move and spin around very quickly, though spectators at the hearing said afterward they could not account for how one could get some atoms to…
September 29, 2007
From the "You Read Too Much SF" file: I was really disappointed by the press release that went with the headline:
Mysterious energy burst stuns astronomers
A headline like that really ought to involve bodies strewn about a remote observatory, and enigmatic alien forces roaming free, perhaps being…
September 28, 2007
Via a mailing list, two giraffes beating each other up:
I'm sure that an actual biologist could explain something about what this odd behavior signifies, and there's probably some fascinating biophysics in the way that they whip their necks around like that.
But, really, in the end, my main…
September 28, 2007
Physics World had a news story about developments in quantum computation, covering two new papers in Nature:
Coupling superconducting qubits via a cavity bus from the groups of Steve Girvin and Rob Schoelkopf at Yale, also described in this press release.
Coherent quantum state storage and…
September 28, 2007
The libertarian side of the blogosphere is all abuzz about "Direct Instruction" at the moment, thanks to a Marignal Revolution post by Alex Tabarrok touting the method:
Ayres argues that large experimental studies have shown that the teaching method which works best is Direct Instruction (here and…
September 27, 2007
The New York Times is commemorating the 50th anniversary of Sputnik with a huge clump of articles about, well, space. I'm a little surprised that I haven't seen more said about these-- they turned up in my RSS feeds on Tuesday, but I've been both busy and slightly ill, and haven't gotten around to…
September 27, 2007
Steven Gould's 1992 YA novel Jumper is one of my favorites in the category, a story about an abused teen who discovers that he has the ability to teleport, and how he uses that power to make a better life for himself. It's very much in the tradition of the famous Heinlein juveniles, though with…
September 27, 2007
The Silver Pavilion:
The Golden Pavilion:
Which do you like better?
I actually have much better pictures of the Golden Pavilion (which can be seen at Flickr), but this is about as good as the Silver Pavilion shots get (see this set), so to make it a fair comparison, I went with the picture above…
September 26, 2007
I had a 9pm intramural hoops game last night (the other team didn't show, so we won by forfeit, but it still pushed bedtime back a bit), and I have an 8am meeting today, not to mention the beginning of a nasty head cold that is turning my brain to cotton wool. Sounds like a good day for a shuffle-…
September 26, 2007
So, I've put myself into a position where I need to spend a substantial amount of time thinking about weird foundational issues in quantum mechanics. This has revealed to me just why it is that not that many people spend a substantial amount of time thinking about weird foundational issues in…
September 26, 2007
Physics World has a somewhat puzzling news article about the solar system:
Physicists have known for some time that the motions of Pluto and the inner planets are chaotic. This means that a small external force on a planet could, over time, cause a major change in the position of the planet within…
September 25, 2007
Sean Carroll is disappointed with academia, at least as revealed through the Chronicle of Higher Ed's article on guilty pleasures of academics:
As it turns out, compared to my colleagues I’m some sort of cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Caligula. Get a load of some of these guilty pleasures:…
September 25, 2007
It's been over a month since I last hit iTunes for new music, which is a long time for me. I'm going to be going on a mini buying spree tonight, so I have a simple question for my musically inclined readers:
What albums from the last couple of months should I be getting at iTunes?
I know there's a…
September 25, 2007
A simple question: We have the Great Buddha at Nara:
and the Great Buddha at Kamakura:
Which is better?
(Unfortunately, that's the best picture I have of the Nara Daibutsu. The camera has a million different modes, selected by a clicky wheel on the top, and the wheel kept getting spun to odd…
September 24, 2007
I was just reminded again of a mysterious thing in Yokohama, that some readers may be able to help with. One of the first nights we were in Yokohama, I went up to the bar on the 70th floor, just to see what it was like. I was neither cool enough nor rich enough to really be there, but they let me…
September 24, 2007
I had a long post about Norman Spinrad all typed up when Firefox crashed, so you'll have to wait for train-wrecky SF goodness. So here's some sports commentary to pass the time.
It was a good sports weekend in Chateau Steelypips:
1) I don't really follow college football, but I do have a certain…
