March 7, 2007
Dave and Jim Munger are doing their annual male-bonding fest this weekend:
Over the course of the next four days, Jim and I are going to watch, and review, every Rocky and Rambo movie.
[...]Here's our tentative viewing schedule:
Today: Rocky I and II
Tomorrow: Rocky III
Friday: Rocky IV and V…
March 7, 2007
I forgot to post this earlier, but there are a few posts out there about the second day of the APS March Meeting:
Cocktail Party Physics has interesting comments on a bunch of biophysics.
Doug Natelson gets roped into chairing a session, and talks about some STM talks.
Matt Leifer talks about…
March 7, 2007
Here's the scenario: You are the sole executive authority of Hypothetical College, which has a faculty of three. It's performance evaluation time, and you have $1,500 in bonus money to distribute, in increments of $500 (that is, you can award $0, $500, $1,000, or $1,500 to each faculty member, but…
March 7, 2007
On Monday, I lectured about the strong nuclear force. It's called that because it's, well, a force, that acts within the nucleus of the atom, and is, um, strong.
On Wednesday, I'm lecturing about quarks, which are called that because, um, well, because Murray Gell-Mann is a pretentious git, and…
March 7, 2007
Inside Higher Ed has an op-ed piece up urging faculty to abandon textbooks:
Here's a statement with which everyone can agree: College instructors cannot assume that students come to their classes in possession of basic knowledge. Now here's one sure to generate some controversy: In many cases…
March 7, 2007
Three more automatic bids last night, earning three teams their coveted one-paragraph summary on Uncertain Principles:
Wright State: The shocker so far (for small values of "shocker"), the unranked Raiders beat #19 Butler to win the Horizon League title and a trip to the NCAA's. Though Butler is…
March 6, 2007
Over at the Freakonomics blog, Steven Levitt takes up the question of tenure in academia. As you might expect, it's bad from an economic perspective, and ought to be eliminated:
If there was ever a time when it made sense for economics professors to be given tenure, that time has surely passed. The…
March 6, 2007
Arcane Gazebo provides a picture of a giant blue bear, a few notes on talks about quantum computing, and thoughts on the Kook Session.(*)
Cocktail Party Physics offers thoughts on Irish giants and large-scale pattern formation in geological systems.
Physics World offers three posts: on carbon-…
March 6, 2007
Physics World has a story today about a new addition to the now-you-see-it, now-you-don't maybe-it's-a-Higgs-boson signals seen at Fermilab. (See here and here for a flavor of the earlier discussions). This one is a beyond-the-Standard-Model particle that would require a supersymmetric theory to…
March 6, 2007
Four more automatic bids to the NCAA's were won over the last couple of days:
Creighton: The Blue Jays almost don't deserve to be thought of as a "little guy" any more, given that this is their seventh win in the last nine years. They did, however, have to beat a ranked Southern Illinois team to…
March 6, 2007
Kate bought this a while back, and I picked it up a little bit before Boskone, because I wanted to read at least a little of it before the Mike Ford retrospective panel. I was a little disappointed that the panel didn't mention this or his other lesser-known works, but, hey, it got me to read the…
March 5, 2007
James Nicoll is soliciting recommendations for a series of novels about the planets of the Solar System. His first pass:
Mercury:
Venus:
Earth: Imperial Earth, Arthur C. Clarke
Mars:
Jupiter: Jupiter Fred and Carol Pohl (ed)
Saturn:
Uranus:
Neptune: Triton, Samuel R. Delany
As you can see, there…
March 5, 2007
It's been a while since I did a "Basic Concepts" post. They tend to take a good bit of effort, and things have been hectic enough at work that I haven't had the energy. To make up for the blizzard of basketball-related stuff over the last week (with more to come), here's a look at the concept of…
March 5, 2007
The ACC Season came to a bloody and unpleasant end last night, with Duke's Gerald Henderson busting UNC's Tyler Hansbrough open with an elbow to the face in the final seconds of a Carolina victory. Henderson was ejected from the game, and will reportedly be suspended for Duke's first-round ACC…
March 5, 2007
The March Meeting of the American Physical Society is happening this week. This is one of two large multi-divisional meetings the APS has each year (the other is in April), and it's billed as the largest physics meeting of the year.
I've only gone to a March Meeting once and that was the year it…
March 4, 2007
I don't usually do "memes," but the "weird things" one (via Janet) seems entertaining. So here are some weird things about me:
1) I carry on complicated conversations with the dog, translating her bits into English in a high-pictched voice. I started doing this to amuse/ annoy Kate, but now I do it…
March 4, 2007
It's officially March, which means my basketball obsession kicks into high gear. As if you hadn't noticed from the last week or so of posts...
Anyway, it's clear from the lack of comments that my basketball obsession is not that widely shared, so here are some links to amuse the rest of you while…
March 4, 2007
It's that time of year, when "mid-major" and small conferences have their basketball tournaments, with the winners earning one shot at sports-geek immortality with a chance to score an upset in the first round of the NCAA's. Four teams earned automatic bids yesterday, and they deserve a post of…
March 4, 2007
It was a regular hoopsapalooza yesterday in Chateau Steelypips, with Syracuse playing Villanova at 2:00, and Maryland playing NC State at 3:30, both games on tv. And, of course, there were a host of other games on, including UCLA getting waxed at Washington, THE Ohio State University narrowly…
March 3, 2007
I'm not quite sure why it's behind the paywall, but the New York Times today features a column by William Rhoden marking the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the three-point shot to college basketball. It's not anything terribly ground-breaking-- complaints from the usual suspects, like…
March 3, 2007
1) Take a 20 oz Poland Spring bottle, or other lightweight plastic container with a screw-on lid.
2) Using a pocket knife, cut a small (~2 mm diameter) hole in the lid.
3) Put ~5 oz of liquid nitrogen in the bottom of the bottle.
4) Screw on the cap.
5) Shake vigorously once, then quickly place the…
March 2, 2007
Inside Higher Ed's regular "Quick Takes" feature is chock full of weirdness today.
From the "I Thought Mormons Were Nice" file:
The Utah Legislature has passed legislation allowing students at public colleges and universities to request that they share rooms only with students who don’t carry…
March 2, 2007
As I've noted many times, I grew up out in the sticks, in a small town which nonetheless has a Wikipedia page. I should note, though, that I am not hick enough to have been the ScienceBlogger to discover this article about cutting-edge physics research:
Margo Lillie, a doctor of zoology at the…
March 2, 2007
Philosophia Naturalis #7 is all about the tabloid physics.
March 2, 2007
Over at metadatta, Sujit has video of Jim Carrey and Conan O'Brien talking about experimental physics.
(There are a bunch of more serious things that I really ought to be posting-- I owe Dave an answer to his questions about X-Ray lasers, for example-- but there's an ice storm, I have a class to…
March 1, 2007
Dr. Lonnie Thompson of THE Ohio State University spoke at Union Wednesday night as part of the Environmental Studies Seminar Series on Abrupt Climate Change. Dr Thompson is an eminent climate scientist, and has spent thirty-ish years doing research on glaciers around the world, and what I learned…
March 1, 2007
This is probably too arcane to be an official Dorky Poll, but I thought of it yesterday, and sort of like the idea. In pop-culture circles, it's very common to find people making list of "Desert Island Books" or CD's or DVD's, or whatever. The idea being to list those pop culture items that are of…
March 1, 2007
You can't buy a car these days without a rear window defroster-- the little built-in electric heaters that melt ice and frost off the rear window. You push a button on the dashboard, and the ice just melts away, no scraping required.
Why is it, then, that to clear the windshield, you have to rely…
March 1, 2007
One-sentence review of this game: I don't think I've ever seen so many two-foot shots missed in a Division I game.
Maryland played Duke last night in the overhyped confines of Cameron Indoor Stadium, and for the way Dick Vitale talked about it, you would've thought that they were playing for first…
February 28, 2007
Back when I first mentioned the idea, people were kind of down on the idea of SciRate.com, Dave Bacon's project to make a collaborative filter for the arxiv.org prerprint server. Not one to be easily discouraged, Dave has continued to work on it, and it now features papers from all the different…
