March 22, 2007
This is actually Klosterman's first book, but the fourth one that I've read. As previously noted, I'm dangerously fond of his writing, so when I saw copies of a new printing of Fargo Rock City on a display in Borders, well, I had to pick it up.
To be perfectly honest, though, I was slightly…
March 22, 2007
Via Rachel Manija Brown, a Wikipedia page on misheard lyrics in Japan:
From Sean Paul's "Fire Links Intro":
Mayday! [...] Sean Paul! This one is hot!
ç®çã! [...] ã·ã£ã³ãã¼! ãªã³ã¹ã¯ç¡ãã!
Me itai! [...] Shanpū! Rinsu wa nai sa!
My eyes hurt! [...] Shampoo! There is no hair conditioner!
Global pop…
March 22, 2007
The term is over, and I've handed in my grades, about which the less said the better. Which means a minor vacation of sorts, as I clean up a last few things before making a push to get some research lab stuff done during our paltry one-week spring break next week, before the start of the next term'…
March 21, 2007
There was an interesting collision of articles about college admissions in my RSS feeds the other day. Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily had a post about a proposal to make college admissions random. The idea is that we could reduce stress on students and parents by having colleges identify those…
March 21, 2007
In addition to watching and reading about college basketball, I play a fair amount of pick-up basketball these days-- I try to play three days a week at lunchtime, and most weeks I manage two. Often, the noon hoops game is the highlight of the day, and I suspect I don't want to think too deeply…
March 21, 2007
Some guys on a mailing list that I'm on were talking about a game they were playing during breaks in the NCAA tournamnent last weekend, trying to come up with appropriate alternate mascots for colleges and universities. The idea is to pick mascot names that fit with the school name to make an…
March 21, 2007
Obviously, it depends on the type of philosopher:
Empiricist: We can't know how to change a lightbulb, but we can make lists of how big it is, the wattage, the thickness of the glass, the composition of the filiment...
Skeptic: We can't know if we're changing the lightbulb. We can't know if…
March 21, 2007
The latest news in the private space flight game is, well, let's call it mixed:
The second test flight of the privately-built Falcon 1 rocket failed to reach its intended orbit late Tuesday, nearly one year to the day of the booster's ill-fated spaceflight debut.
The two-stage Falcon 1 rocket shot…
March 20, 2007
One of the top players in college basketball this year was Texas freshman Kevin Durant, whose team lost over the weekend. Durant is 6'10", and averaged something like 30 points a game from January on, so the automatic assumption is that he's going to enter the NBA draft, where he would be one of…
March 20, 2007
Over at Backreaction, Sabine has posted a lengthy essay on the problems of treating scientific research in economic terms:
I vividly recall the first thing my supervisor told me when I was an undergrad: "You have to learn how to sell yourself." Since then I have repeatedly been given well meant…
March 20, 2007
There have been a few good posts recently on topics that I've discussed here a fair bit. I don't really have anything new to say on either topic, though, nor do I have the energy to repeat myself, so I'll just post the links:
- Gordon Watts on the collapse of corporate research labs, based on this…
March 20, 2007
In a weekend wrap-up post, Dave makes a passing reference to one of the more uncomfortable aspects of basketball:
Early in the day, I happened upon an NIT game on TV, where Mississippi State was playing someone. While I was watching, I saw a quick, aggressive Bulldog guard drive through the defense…
March 20, 2007
... is astronomy, as the New York Times notes in explaining the equinox:
Archaeological evidence abounds that astronomy is among the oldest of professions, and that people attended with particular zeal to the equinoxes and the solstices. The Great Sphinx of Egypt, for example, built some 4,500…
March 19, 2007
Well, ok, he hasn't posted anything yet, but Michael Bérubé will be joining Crooked Timber. This is good news indeed for the academic blogging community. I didn't read his blog as regularly as it deserved the first time around, but he was one of the sharper writers out there, and it's good to see…
March 19, 2007
You may notice that there are some new ads on the site. They're short videos done by DuPont, with an excessively perky anchor talking about science topics and the wonders of chemistry, and that sort of thing.
We were promised that the ads would not auto-play or break people's browsers, and as far…
March 19, 2007
I'm giving an exam this morning, and I needed to get to work early to make copies, so I didn't have time for lengthy, insightful blogging. So here's a dorky poll.
This one needs a little background. A post-doc in my old group at NIST used to say that he always wished he had a prehensile tail,…
March 19, 2007
The first weekend of the NCAA tournament wound down pretty much the way it started. There were a few good games, but almost all the higher seeds won. Only one of the top eight seeds failed to advance, and that was Wisconsin, who have looked shaky since the loss of Brian Butch. Purdue gave Florida a…
March 19, 2007
Over at Kurt's Krap, there's extensive discussion of the relative merits of Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth as the front man for Van Halen. You can also find them discussing a bunch of other songs, but the Hagar/Roth question is the important one.
By a weird coincidence, I read Chuck Klosterman's…
March 18, 2007
There's been a copy of Snake Agent at the local Borders for a while now, but it kept narrowly losing out to other books. On a recent shopping trip, though, I was buying enough stuff that throwing another trade paperback on the pile was just a small perturbation, so I picked up a copy.
The set-up…
March 18, 2007
I'm always sort of fascinated by articles in which people talk about why they believe what they do, particularly in a religious context. I basically never find them persuasive (my own inclinations are Apathetic Agnostic-- I don't care if there's a God or not), but when they're done well, they're…
March 18, 2007
Back at Boskone, I went to a panel consisting of a number of revieweres recommending books that we might not have heard of. Toward the end, one of the panelists rattled off a list of authors writing urban fantasy (what he described as "Laurel Hamilton without all the porn"), and Rob Thurman was on…
March 18, 2007
Saturday finally saw some good action in the NCAA tournamnet. Three of the eight games went to overtime, and four of the remaining five were decided by seven points or less. VCU and Xavier came up short against Pitt and Ohio State, but made fantastic runs to get the games into OT, and #6 seed…
March 17, 2007
I saw very little basketball on the second day of the tournament, because I had a meeting at 1:00 that ran until almost 3:00. I watched a bit of the second set of games between that and going to a faculty-student St. Patrick's Day event at 4:30, and then dozed off during the games after dinner.
Not…
March 17, 2007
A few days back, commenter igor eduardo kupfer compiled the log5 predictions for the first round, and tried to come up with a test of their validity. We didn't agree on anything, but for the sake of intellectual honesty, here's a breakdown of how those predictions fared, binned in 10% groups (so 0.…
March 17, 2007
Via Inside Higher Ed, a story about a unique attempt to address student problems at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai:
One of India's top engineering schools has restricted Internet access in its hostels, saying addiction to surfing, gaming and blogging was affecting students'…
March 16, 2007
Muiscal intro, fancy CGI effects
Anchor 1 (voiceover): The Showdown begins! Four regions, eight games each, sixty-four top science concepts in a fight to the finish.
Anchor 2: In today's Orbit region action, two titans of Newtonian physics collide-- will Universal Gravitation maintain its orbit, or…
March 16, 2007
The Dean Dad posts lots of very interesting things that I end up not having time to link to-- you should be reading his blog every day, if you're interested in how academia operates. This one is too good to not link, though-- a discussion of Boards of Trustees and how they operate. I particualrly…
March 16, 2007
The first day turned out to be a little disappointing, from a fan's perspective. There were only two upsets by seed, and one of those was an 8-9 game. Other than that, the higher seed won all the games, and most of them weren't all that close.
CBS demonstrated a real gift for switching to a close…
March 15, 2007
Maryland held off a tough Davidson team to win, 82-70, in a game that I saw basically none of. By the time the BC-Texas Tech game wound down to its uninteresting conclusion, Maryland had built up a fairly secure lead, and there were only a couple of minutes of garbage time left. I gather that…
March 15, 2007
While I am taking the day off to watch basketball all afternoon, I will not be live-blogging the first round, the way I have the last couple of years. I realize this is a huge disappointment to about two people out there, but since typing on the laptop got me crippling muscle spasms in my neck and…
