January 25, 2007
Inside Higher Ed reports today on a new study of junior faculty job satisfaction showing that faculty satisfaction doesn't correlate with institutional prestige:
The collaborative, known as COACHE, last year released aggregate findings from its survey of thousands of faculty members at dozens of…
January 25, 2007
I picked this out of the to-be-read pile because it's specifically name-checked in the "SF and the History of Science" panel description on my Boskone schedule. I figure it's pretty likely to get brought up, and since we had a copy lying around, I might as well actually read it so as to be able to…
January 24, 2007
Some news for those interested in open-source publishing and "Open Science": Dave Bacon is announcing the debut of scirate.com, a sort of social-networking site for physics preprints:
The idea came from the observation that while the arxiv is a amazing tool, one of the problems was that the volume…
January 24, 2007
We've been running a search to fill a tenure-track faculty position for next year, and I've spent more time than I care to recall reading folders and interviewing candidates. Now that the process is nearing completion, I'd like to do a quick post offering advice for those thinking about applying…
January 24, 2007
An article came through my RSS feeds yesterday that looked for all the world like the New York Times was copying our Basic Concepts idea. Labelled as "Basics," it promised to provide a general discussion of the concept of time. "You bastards!" I thought.
The actual article by Natalie Angier isn't…
January 23, 2007
Earlier today, I posted two "Dorky Poll" entries, one asking for people to nominate their favorite science textbook in comments, the other asking for their least favorite science textbook. As of 7:15, a bit less than nine hours after the posts went live, the comment totals are:
Dorky Poll: Least…
January 23, 2007
It's going to be a very busy day, in ways that will keep me away from the Internet for most of the day, so you'll need to entertain yourselves. Here's a question for the science-minded:
What's your least favorite science textbook of all time?
It could be a book that you loathed when you were a…
January 23, 2007
It's going to be a very busy day, in ways that will keep me away from the Internet for most of the day, so you'll need to entertain yourselves. Here's a question for the science-minded:
What's your favorite science textbook of all time?
It could be your favorite book from when you were a student,…
January 23, 2007
Inside Higher Ed has a report on a new frontier in administrative idiocy:
After passing a new online test on ethics required of all state employees, [a] tenured professor in the English department at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale received a notice from his university ethics officer…
January 22, 2007
A little while ago, John Lynch asked what really draws readers to ScienceBlogs, and listed his top twenty posts. In a similar vein, here are the top twelve Uncertain Principles posts of the past year, ranked by number of pageviews:
SAT Challenge: Bloggers Dumber Than High-School Kids
Local Realism…
January 22, 2007
In the initial "Basic Concepts" post, I discussed the concept of Force in physics. This time out, I'll be talking about fields, which is a much dicier proposition. Not only are fields considerably more abstract than forces, but I've never lectured on fields in general (specific instances of fields…
January 22, 2007
The last booklog post was about an author who made a name writing urban fantasy, who is trying to write in a different subgenre, so it seems somewhat appropriate to have this post be about an urban fantasy by an author who made a name writing something else. OK, Charlie Huston might object to…
January 22, 2007
Scott Aaronson lists his favorite foods, and says that he expects to weigh 3000 pounds by the time he gets tenure.
Jenn Fallis explains his mistake: he's a theorist. Experimental physics can provide a built-in exercise problem as you haul bits of apparatus from one place to another. Theory's…
January 21, 2007
Via Neil Gaiman, I learn that:
John Crowley (author of Little, Big)has a LiveJournal...
... where he's collecting suggestions for reference works for people seeking to invent interesting fantasy worlds...
...and he's come up with a great class exercise/ party game for the results:
Can't do it for…
January 21, 2007
The discussion of Charles Murray continues in comments to my earlier post, and some interesting things have been said there. Also, some fairly loathesome things-- you take the bad with the good.
For those who can't get enough Murray-bashing, let me also point to a few other people:
Dave's…
January 21, 2007
Jim Butcher's last few Dresden Files books (coming soon to a tv series near you...) have included little afterwords in which he tells the story of how he started reading SF, and urges readers to check out his new epic fantasy series (the "Codex Alera"). He explains that he's always wanted to write…
January 20, 2007
I'm going to be on a few program items at Boskone again this year. The highly preliminary schedule I received a couple of days ago includes a Saturday afternoon talk on "Spooky Action at a Distance," which will be a sort of popular-audience explanation of the EPR Paradox and Bell's Theorem. "Weird…
January 19, 2007
My Giants are done for the year, but Kate's Patriots are still in it, so there will be football-watching this weekend (well, actually, I'll be playing in an intramural basketball game for a good chunk of the Pats game, but Kate will be watching). In honor of the Pats, then, here's a video for Kate…
January 19, 2007
Charles "The Bell Curve" Murray is back with a three-part essay series on edcuation, published in The Wall Street Journal:
Part I: The world is full of stupid people.
Part II: Too many stupid people go to college.
Part III: We should spend more money on the tiny fraction of people who are smart…
January 19, 2007
As I said previously, I get a lot of emails from people looking to promote their sites, and I do try to look at most of them. Yesterday's batch included ePrep, a site offering college preparation advice, and while I can't speak for the quality of their services, they get a link for pointing me to…
January 18, 2007
A couple of bloggers have issued a challenge: a week of blogging about Just Science. I like RPM's description better than what's on the official site:
It boils down to this:
One week of science blogging and only science blogging.
At least one post a day of pure science content.
No blogging about…
January 18, 2007
I'm giving an exam this morning, and there's yet another job talk at lunch, followed by an afternoon of trying to finish all the stuff that's been pushed aside by candidate talks and interviews, so I'm a little too busy for detailed blogging. Sounds like time for a couple of audience participation…
January 18, 2007
Well, ok, it doesn't generally suck, but it's absolutely horrible at ripping CD's. I haven't done much of this lately, but in doing some other stuff, I recently discovered that I never ripped the Death cab for Cutie album Transatlanticism into my collection. So I popped it into the CD drive, and…
January 17, 2007
I spent the better part of an hour putting nail polish on mirror mounts yesterday.
No, this isn't a tragic misinterpretation of my students' advice to "wear more pink." It's because the optical table looks like this:
All those black things are mirror mounts like the one in the top picture,…
January 17, 2007
A couple of quick stories off Physics Web:
First, they have a short article about a record-breaking cat state. This is a state in which a group of researchers have maneged to "entangle" six photons so that they are either all polarized vertically, or all polarized horizontally. This breaks the…
January 17, 2007
I'm running about a day behind on my Inside Higher Ed commentary because the ongoing search has made this a Week From Hell, but there was an interesting news item yesterday about an economic study suggesting that health care subsidies would improve education more than tuition credits:
The study's…
January 17, 2007
Scott Aaronson talks sense about religion, in response to an emailer who stopped reading his quantum computing lectures because he made references to "God":
What I'm trying to say, Bill, is this: you can go ahead and indulge yourself. If some of the most brilliant unbelievers in history -- Einstein…
January 16, 2007
Over at Good Math, Bad Math, Mark offers two entries for the Basic Concepts series:
Mean, Median, and Mode
Normal Distributions
Between those two, he tells you almost everything you need to know to lie with statistics. Or how to spot when somebody else is trying to lie to you with statistics,…
January 16, 2007
This is the first post I'm doing for the "Basic Concepts" series. When I asked for suggestions, I got a good long list of stuff, and it's hard to know quite where to start. I'm going to start with "Force," because physics as we know it more or less started with Isaac Newton, and Newton is best…
January 16, 2007
Via a mailing list, I got sent this link to a really mind-boggling Microsoft marketing video from the 80's. It really defies description, but the original poster made a good attempt:
Microsoft sent this tape to retailers to explain the benefits of Windows 386. Boring until the 7 minute mark when…
