February 21, 2007
John Scalzi is being railroaded into heading a new movement in SF: The New Comprehensible. He disdains manifestoes ("people who issue literary manifestos should be thrown into jet engines"), but does offer a set of precepts for people seeking to write in the New Comprehensible:
1. Think of an…
February 21, 2007
I picked up a copy of the re-issue of The Armageddon Rag in the dealer's room at Boskone, mostly because Emmet O'Brien raves about it. This is, of course, a little dicey, because Emmet's a weird guy sometimes, but the premise looked fairly interesting.
The book follows washed-up author Sander Blair…
February 21, 2007
The AIP's Physics News Update this week highlights a paper on the laser cooling and trapping of radium by a group at Argonne National Laboratory. This is a new record for the heaviest atom ever cooled and trapped.
It's not quite as cool as the previous record, which involved the trapping of…
February 20, 2007
As Kate and I are planning to attend the Worldcon this year, we're eligible to nominate for the Hugo Awards, which are sort of SF's version of the Oscars, or maybe the Golden Globes (the Nebula Awards being the other). This is only the third time I've had this opportunity, and it's always kind of…
February 20, 2007
The post title is taken from the announcement for today's colloquium talk. The abstract:
Quantum gravity is the theory which is thought to underlie quantum theory and general relativity. I will introduce the subject, emphasizing recent results which suggest that spatial geometry is discrete. Such…
February 20, 2007
Kate and I spent the weekend in Boston for the science fiction convention Boskone, which we've been going to every year for the past several years. I'm not going to do a detailed recap of everything that was said on every panel that I went to, mostly because I don't keep notes. Also, that would…
February 20, 2007
The first panel I was on was travel advice for the Japanese Worldcon:
Visiting Japan,
If we attend the Worldcon in Yokohama this August, what knowledge should we bring along? What ten phrases are essential? What societal differences should we be prepared to accommodate? What are Japanese SF fans…
February 20, 2007
This one came across the RSS feeds last week, when I was getting ready to leave town and didn't have time to post, but I really can't let this slide by without comment. The EurekAlert headling really says it all: Sleep disturbances affect classroom performance:
As a night of bad sleep can have an…
February 19, 2007
In my campus mailbox this morning:
Dear Chad:
I am pleased to report that on Februrary 10, 2007 the Board of Trustees approved our recommendation that you be tenured effective September 1, 2007 at the rank of Associate Professor.
Woo-hoo!
It took about half a second to decide to sign the copy…
February 19, 2007
We're back from Boskone, which included lots of fun stuff, and not enough sleep. I also cleverly forgot to bring my lecture notes home from work, which means I need to go in early to figure out what the hell I'm talking about in class today, so there's not much time for blogging at the moment.
I…
February 18, 2007
You may think it's the year of the pig, but know this:
Every year is the Year of the Dog.
February 17, 2007
Over in LiveJournal land, Kate has an open letter to Daniel Keys Moran:
As someone who very nearly cries at the idea of a completed Trent novel languishing on your hard drive, may I introduce you to Lulu or Cafe Press? Both will print books from uploaded files, as they are ordered, for the price of…
February 16, 2007
Because I said so.
February 16, 2007
Why not leave a question in the comments?
February 16, 2007
Inside Higher Ed has a story today about a former Middlebury College president who is launching a non-profit organization to advocate a serious discussion about drinking age laws in the US. As he notes, real data on the topic are a little hard to come by:
What was striking about the research,…
February 16, 2007
I am totally mystified by the vagaries of the publishing industry. Karl Schroeder's latest novel, Sun of Suns apparently came out back in October, but I can't recall ever seeing a copy in a bookstore. I think I would remember it, because he's on my "buy immediately" list after Permanence and Lady…
February 16, 2007
There's a press release on EurekAlert about new measurements limiting the change in the fine structure constant from the Time and Frequency division of NIST in Boulder:
Some astronomical and geological studies suggest there might have been very small changes in the values of fundamental constants…
February 15, 2007
In general, EuerkAlert has been a useful source for drawing my attention to interesting things that I might not otherwise notice. Every now and then, though, there are press releases that just make me faintly embarrassed for everyone involved.
Such as yesterday's announcement from LSU:
Subhash Kak…
February 15, 2007
I'm giving an exam at 9:00 this morning-- neither snow, nor more snow, nor blowing snow, nor single-digit temperatures shall stay the progress of shaping young minds. Anyway, to keep things lively while I'm proctoring the test, here's a poll question inspired by the exam:
What's your favorite…
February 15, 2007
I read Guy Gavriel Kay's newest book, Ysabel a while ago, but I've been dithering about what to say in the booklog entry. I've been dithering long enough, in fact, that Kate beat me to it, so now I have to post something.
Kay is best known for a set of very loosely connected pseudo-historical…
February 15, 2007
One of those only-on-the-Internet, adventrues-in-D-list-celebrity videos: A YouTube clip of a hair metal cover band joined onstage by one of the teachers from "Saved by the Bell" and Dallas Cowboys snap-dropper Tony Romo, singing "Somewhere in the Night" by Journey. Romo really gets into it, and…
February 15, 2007
As usual, Scott Aaronson says it better than I did:
[M]ost of the commentary strikes me as missing a key point: that to give a degree to a bozo like this, provided he indeed did the work, can only reflect credit on the scientific enterprise. Will Ross now hit the creationist lecture circuit,…
February 14, 2007
Before we get to the dog pictures, I want to give a quick shout-out to the Comment of the Month here, which is Josh's bunny made of cheese. That's great.
Anyway, we went outside with the camera for a little while this afternoon, to get the table picture posted earlier. This was an adventure for Her…
February 14, 2007
Somebody at work had printed out a table of MCAT scores by major, compiled by the AIP. I couldn't find it on the web, but I found the original source, and made my own version of the relevant bit. This shows the average numerical scores on the three sections of the MCAT test for students majoring in…
February 14, 2007
This is our cast aluminum patio table, which always looks really cool when snow piles up on the lattice-work pattern of the top. Click the image above for a slightly larger picture.
We've gotten more than a foot of very powdery snow thus far, and it's still coming down hard. I taught my class,…
February 14, 2007
A couple of years ago, we undertook a grand revision of our General Education curriculum, the set of core liberal arts courses that all students are required to take in order to graduate. The old system was very specific, requiring a large-ish number of courses in very specific areas, and was…
February 14, 2007
Over at metadatta, Sujit is doing spectroscopy experiments with interferometers, and has posted a very nice introduction to the technique. Basically, if you have a light source emitting two different wavelengths that are very close together, you can determine the wavelength difference by shinging…
February 14, 2007
Over at Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee celebrates everybody's favorite annoying holiday with a look at two scholars of sex: the late Gershon Legman who coined "Make love, not war" back in 1963; and Blaise Cronin, who currently studies the more respectable sort of pornography at Indiana. Personally…
February 13, 2007
A couple of times a year, our department secretary will organize potluck luncheons, and badger the faculty into cooking things and bringing them in for a big gathering in the conference room. We invite all the students, and everybody eats way too much, talks too much, and generally has a good time…
February 13, 2007
PhysicsWeb has a
story about a new theory of axions that claims to resolve some discrepancies between past experiments. Two previous experiments looking for axions-- hypothetical weakly interacting particles that might be an explanation for dark matter-- have found conflicting results: the CAST…
