June 27, 2007
Not long before the Matthew Nisbet post about uncharitable atheists crossed my RSS feeds, I had marked a Fred Clark post about mission trips that has some really good thoughts about the mechanics of charity:
But the point of these mission trips is not only to get [a rural school in Haiti] built.…
June 27, 2007
Over at Framing Science, Matthew Nisbet notes a survey about poverty which finds, among other things, that atheists are less likely to take part in anti-poverty efforts. There are a number of good reasons to be skeptical of this survey, which I'll mention at the end of this post, but Nisbet seems…
June 27, 2007
It's been ages since I posted a True Lab Story, mostly because I've been too busy to do anything really dumb. I had a good day for True Lab Stories yesterday, though, so here's a tale of something idiotic I did, or, rather, had my students do.
I have a student working on a project to put anti-…
June 27, 2007
The final step in the tenure process here is the Very Nice Letter. I'm not sure that it's an official step, as opposed to an established tradition, but whichever it actually is, at the end of the process, a candidate who passes the tenure review gets a letter from the faculty committee that handles…
June 26, 2007
Inside Higher Ed today offers an opinion piece about "assessment" which is the current buzzword in academia. It correctly identifies a split in academic attitudes toward internal ("for us"-- assessment of classes and programs within the academy) and external assessments ("for them"-- assessments to…
June 26, 2007
Two news releases came across my EurekAlert feeds containing findings that I'm shocked-- shocked!-- to learn about. The first delivers the startling news that "A high percentage of young males appear willing to purchase alcohol for underage youth." They conducted a "shoulder tapping" study, in…
June 26, 2007
This is the last of the short fiction categories. You can read my comments on the Best Novella and Best Short Story nominees in the archives. This means the only fiction nominees I have left to read are Blindsight and Glasshouse.
The nominees in the Best Novelette category (the full text of all the…
June 26, 2007
Ethan Zuckerman has an interesting addition to the discussion of class and networking, offering a description of a talk by danah boyd (whose name I have been capitalizing, which apparently isn't right) about the history and usage of MySpace and Facebook. What's particularly striking is the opening…
June 26, 2007
Yesterday's Danah Boyd article has produced a lot of responses around the Internet, with plenty of blogger types turning out to be social butterflies with accounts on both Facebook and MySpace. So much for social science, I guess.
There was an interesting collision of articles in my RSS feed this…
June 25, 2007
There's a lot of buzz in physics blogdom about the Strings 07 meeting, which starts today in Spain. They currently have a list of speakers, and promise slides and video to come.
Also, there's a new paper by Edward Witten on the arxiv, cue sound of heavenly choirs:
We consider the problem of…
June 25, 2007
I mostly read science-oriented blogs these days, where I get to hear again and again about how awful the treatment of academic scientists is, and how physics departments are horrible Kafkaesque operations dedicated to crushing the souls of postdocs and junior faculty. Which makes the train wreck…
June 25, 2007
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has suffered some setbacks in recent months, but they aren't letting that hold them back:
CERN has announced that the Large Hadron Collider will switch on in May 2008, with collisions at full energy starting in summer 2008.
"We'll be starting up for physics in May…
June 25, 2007
Via Bora, a very interesting essay by Danah Boyd about class divisions in social networking sites:
Over the last six months, i've noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking…
June 25, 2007
Scott Eric Kaufman must have a dissertation deadline coming up, because his procrastination is getting intense. He's just set up a text adventure game on his blog:
You are standing near the Moral High Ground. To your South are Theists (or Theorists). To your North are Atheists (or Anti-Theorists…
June 24, 2007
The other book that I've torn through really quickly this week is the sequel to Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell. The first third of the sequel, Ragamuffin is freely available on the web page for the book, for those who are interested. I tend to find sample chapters frustrating, though, so I didn't…
June 24, 2007
There are lots of other books in the booklog queue, but this one is due back at the library today, so it gets bumped to the front of the list. Of course, it doesn't hurt that it's probably the most widely discussed of the books waiting to be logged...
In case you've been hiding out in a cave that…
June 23, 2007
Via a colleague:
(Original here.)
I enjoy the really obscure ones...
June 22, 2007
The great media relations debate is starting to wind down, but there's still a bit of life in it. In particular, I want to comment on something that Bora said, that was amplified on by Melinda Barton. Here's Bora's comment:
Everyone is afraid to use the F word, but the underlying tension is, at its…
June 22, 2007
The other day, while we were walking from my office back to the lab, one of my students asked me a question that's perfect for a Dorky Poll:
What's the coolest single word you've encountered in physics?
His vote was for "antineutrino," but I've got to go with "counterintuitive," as in "Stimulated…
June 22, 2007
Here's my achievement for the week:
OK, that may not seem like much, but this is what it looked like before I started:
OK, that's not really my only accomplishment for the week-- I have three students for the first half of the summer (two of them for the whole summer), and all three got off to…
June 22, 2007
Via Jennifer Ouellette, I find that there's a site where you can get a movie-style rating for your blog. And the answer is:
by Mingle2
Well, fuck.
June 21, 2007
President Bush vetoed a bill that would have allowed more funding for stem cell research, saying that it would force taxpayers to support the destruction of life:
"Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical," Mr. Bush said in a brief ceremony in the East Room of the…
June 21, 2007
That's shocking mostly in a Claude-Rains-in-Casablanca sort of sense ("I am shocked--shocked!"), but there are a couple of stories in Inside Higher Ed this morning presenting new findings that seem like they ought to be really obvious.
The first is a new study of the University of California system…
June 21, 2007
I've never really understood the distinction between "Novellas" and "Novelettes"-- I know it's a length thing, but I don't have a good feel for where the dividing line is, and I can never remember which is longer. And, as far as I can tell, the only place this ever comes up is in SF awards.
Anyway…
June 21, 2007
The mysterious saga of "supersolid" helium continues this week. If you recall, there were some new results a little while back showing that the effect depends on disorder in the samples, followed by neutron scattering studies that didn't show the expected distribution of states in the sample. These…
June 20, 2007
The video link I posted earlier appears to require some plug-in to play, which is a pain in the ass. I'm going to try posting it via YouTube, then, and see if that's better behaved.
June 20, 2007
Tara's post about science journalism has sparked a lively discussion, with John Wilkins, Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer joining Jennifer Ouellette in defending science journalists. Interestingly, this all sprang up yesterday, on a day when I wound up appearing on tv.
Yesterday morning, while I was…
June 20, 2007
Today's Inside Higher Ed has a story about growing resistance to the US News rankings:
In the wake of meetings this week of the Annapolis Group -- an organization of liberal arts colleges -- critics of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings are expecting a significant increase in the…
June 19, 2007
My friend Paul, the Official Middle East Correspondant of Uncertain Principles, has been doing another rotation in Baghdad, and has sent an update on the "surge." This latest dispatch describes some... reliability issues with the Iraqui police forces who are supposed to be stepping up to provide…
June 19, 2007
One of my colleagues raves about David Lindley's Where Does the Weirdness Go? as a basic introduction to odd quantum effects, but somehow, I've never managed to get around to reading any of his books until now. I recently had a need to know a bit more about the historical development of quantum…
