May 28, 2007
It's Memorial Day in the US, which is the official public tribute to the dead of our various wars. This is marked with parades, and ceremonies at cemetaries in towns all across the country.
When I was a kid, we always went to the parade in town, which went from the center of town out to the main…
May 27, 2007
Saturday, I went for a good long bike ride before it got hot, making it all the way to the end of the Erie Canal portion of the bike path. There's a "detour" that takes you to further path via some dirt roads, but I opted instead for the quiet stretch of path along the canal, that dead-ends at some…
May 26, 2007
I'm not particularly pining for WisCon, but for those who are, let me throw out a movie topic for discussion:
Three Strikes and You're Out: Why Do Third Movies Suck So Much?
It's a well-known phenomenon in genre film: in a series of movies, the third movie is almost always where the series goes off…
May 26, 2007
There's a popular science fiction convention going on this weekend in Madiscon, WI. Of course, not everyone can make it to these things, so some people in LiveJournal Land have put together BitterCon, and online event for those unable to attend WisCon.
Kate's jumped right in, providing space for a…
May 25, 2007
One of the many after-hours events contributing to my exhaustion this week was the annual Sigma Xi award and initiation banquet, at which some fifty students were recognized for their undergraduate research accomplishments.
The banquet also featured a very nice presentation on visualizing a four-…
May 25, 2007
Courtesy of EurekAlert:
physicists Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer from Vanderbilt University predict that trillions of years into the future, the information that currently allows us to understand how the universe expands will have disappeared over the…
May 25, 2007
Philosophia Naturalis #10 is now up, providing all sorts of physics-bloggy goodness. I particualrly liked mollishka's explanation of the Lyman-alpha forest and Scott Aaronson's math-free explanation of Shor's factoring algorithm is a classic, but there's lots of good stuff there.
May 25, 2007
Something old, something new, on the topic near and dear to every academic.
The old is a post by Doug Natelson from a couple of weeks ago, giving advice on how to get tenure, as a response to the recent flurry of tenure discussions on science blogs.
The new is an article by Lesboprof at Inside…
May 25, 2007
Via John Lynch, Fark brings us LOLPresidents:
There's some good stuff, along with the usual rubbish. I also liked this motivational poster:
I'm easily amused, and it's been a really long week.
May 24, 2007
The Female Science Professor has a nice post about high and low tech data acquisition:
An MS student has repeatedly questioned why he/she has to use a low-tech method to acquire, somewhat tediously, some data that could be acquired more rapidly with a higher-tech method. I say 'more rapidly'…
May 24, 2007
A discussion in the back-channel forums reminded me about all the many things I've learned how to do badly in the course of my scientific training. My junior high shop teacher probably sprained something laughing the first time he heard that I was doing machine shop work as part of a research…
May 24, 2007
Somewhere between yesterday's posts about uselesss junk and useful antiques, there's this. The picture to the right is a tragedy in progress, though is might not look that way: It's an FTIR spectrometer left behind by the previous occupant of my lab.
It's a top-of-the-line instrument, a Bomem DA-8…
May 23, 2007
As sort of a counterpoint to the previous entry, here's a more positive poll question:
What's the most useful antiquated tool you keep around?
That is, what dusty old relic do you keep around because there's no modern alternative that works as well for what it does?
In one of the pictures in the…
May 23, 2007
Welcome to the laboratory graveyard:
This picture shows the back room in one of the labs, and most of the gear in it is broken or useless. There's a computer that's so old it has a 5 1/4" floppy drive, the skeleton of a vacuum evaporator, a crappy student STM system, and an electrometer that's so…
May 23, 2007
Matthew Yglesias has a couple of posts on opposition to the US News college rankings, the first noting the phenomenon, and the second pointing to Kevin Carey's work on better ranking methods. The problem with this is, I think he sort of misses the point of the objections.
Matt writes:
All that said…
May 22, 2007
Every day, a handful of physics news items pass through my RSS feeds, and every few days, one of them looks interesting enough that I check the little box to keep it unread, so I can comment on it later (I don't blog from work if I can avoid it). Of course, most of the time, I don't get around to…
May 22, 2007
I'm taking the unusual step of tarting up a booklog entry with a cover image, just for the "Advance Reading Copy-- Not For Sale" box on the cover. A few weeks back, when Kate and I were in New York, we dropped by the Tor offices to meet Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and I was admiring the…
May 21, 2007
One of these days, this will be the universe where steak falls on the floor.
May 21, 2007
So, back in November, I bought a new car, which came with a six-month free trial of Sirius Satellite Radio. That's about to run out, and while it does have its good points, I'm not really interested in paying money to listen to the radio.
What I would prefer is to be able to play my iPod in the car…
May 21, 2007
So, over the course of Saturday and Sunday, I watched the first eight episodes of Season Five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, through a combination of general boredom and wanting to give the show a fair shot. So, does this mean I'm now hooked?
Well, when Kate got home, I was just starting episode 12…
May 21, 2007
Top choices from the recent acquisitions playlist:
"Sly," Cat Empire. I bought this because of the 75 or Less review, which asks the important questions: When did G Love become the bandleader for the Blues Brothers? And when did they add reggae and Latin influences? And why are my feet doing this…
May 20, 2007
Saturday was a miserable cold and rainy day, and today wasn't a whole lot better. I took advantage of a brief spot of sun in the afternoon to get a short ride in, but it was awfully windy with dark clouds on the horizon, so I just rode around on local streets, so as not to end up five miles from…
May 20, 2007
For the last several years, Schenectady has been trying to get a movie theater in the downtown area, as part of an ongoing urban renewal project. This week, it finally opened, and one of the first movies on the bill is Hot Fuzz, from the people who did Shaun of the Dead, which I wanted to see…
May 19, 2007
Eductaion reform is a contentious topic, and everybody has their own ideas about the best ways to improve the teaching of basic skills. Some people favor a "whole language" approach, others think we should go back to teaching phonics and memorizing grammar rules. I've heard people speak of "…
May 19, 2007
Jennifer Ouellette is coming to campus this week to give a talk about her book The Physics of the Buffyverse. Having never been a Buffy fan, and not seen more than snippets of a few episodes here and there, I figured I should at least watch a few representative episodes before the talk, just to…
May 18, 2007
I'm mired in lab grading at the moment, which is sufficiently irritating that I usually have to decamp to someplace with no Internet access, or else I spend the day blogrolling instead. Or, really, just hitting "Refresh" over and over on Bloglines, hoping that somebody in my RSS subscriptions has…
May 18, 2007
Closely related to the idea of order-of-magnitude estimates is the idea of Fermi Questions, a type of problem that demonstrates the power of estimation techniques. The idea is that you can come up with a reasonable guess at an answer for a difficult question by using some really basic reasoning,…
May 18, 2007
Dave at the World's Fair is asking ScienceBloggers to show off their coffee mugs. I don't usually have a camera at work, but my signature mug was bought via the Internet, so I snagged the image from the CafePress Store.
It's a "Still Not King" mug, a reference to the famous Very Secret Diary of…
May 17, 2007
Via Steinn, the Smithsonian's Astronomy Abstract Service has an index entry for some book called De revolutionibus orbium coelestium by some Polish guy. They've got a scanned electronic version available for free, but the stupid thing is in Latin, and who speaks that these days?
Also, it's only got…
May 17, 2007
Ages and ages ago, Jennifer Ouellette commented on the start of the Basic Concepts series with a list of topics she'd like to see done. One of these was "Size and Scaling:"
First, let's tackle the jargon problem: Just what the heck is an order of magnitude? I use the phrase all the time now, after…
