December 30, 2006
I'm very angry with David G. Hartwell.
Hartwell, for those who don't know his name, is a very distinguished editor of science fiction, with a long list of anthologies and scholarly essays to his credit, not to mention fabulous taste in clothes. He's also an editor for Tor Books, where he appears to…
December 30, 2006
I actually read this months ago, but I'm only just getting around to booklogging it. Which is a problem, because I no longer remember it all that clearly...
Elizabeth Bear's previous books were a trilogy of competent neo-Heinlein adventure stories, so it's perfectly logical that her next book,…
December 29, 2006
Speaking of James Nicoll and space news, he also notes the launch of the COROT satellite, which is designed to look for extrasolar planets. The detection limit for COROT is supposed to be something like twice the mass of the Earth, so there's some reasonable expectation that it should shed light on…
December 29, 2006
James Nicoll, one of my go-to sources for odd information about space related issues, is attempting to determine whether it's true that space enthusiasm is for older people. Unsurprisingly, given who he is and what he writes about, his comments have turned up lots of examples of people born after…
December 29, 2006
Not long ago, I booklogged Odyssey, the latest of Jack McDevitt's Archeologists in Spaaaace books. When I picked that up, I also grabbed a paperback copy of Seeker, the latest in his other series of novels, these ones about, well, antiquities dealers in spaaaace. I don't believe I've booklogged the…
December 29, 2006
Yesterday's Inside Higher Ed had a story about the latest group to report on science education. Like any good blue-ribbon commission, they have changes to suggest:
The panel's members seemed agreed on several major goals. One is to align all components of education in science technology,…
December 29, 2006
A few weeks ago, the Modern Language Association released a report calling for changes in the tenure process for language and literature faculty. The report was a stirring call to action, and the members of the MLA quickly sprang into action, doing what faculty do best: arguing about stuff.
[A]…
December 28, 2006
Word and Excel are both part of the Office "suite" of programs. Like all Windows programs, they open in windows with a big red "X" button in the upper right-hand corner, and a smaller grey "x" below that. In either program, if you click the small grey "x" button, it closes just the file that you're…
December 28, 2006
It's that time of year, when people who write about music attempt to sum the year up in list form. And who am I to buck that trend?
The advent of iTunes makes it much easier than it used to be for me to compile a "best of 2006" list, as it keeps records of when I added various songs to the…
December 28, 2006
The Times today has a good article on Bob Knight and his place in coaching history:
In coaching circles, Knight's legacy appears to be intact.
His former players make up a who's who list in coaching, including Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, Iowa's Steve Alford and the Knicks' Isiah Thomas. Even longtime…
December 28, 2006
Having spent a couple of posts on the infamous Duke lacrosse case back in the early part of the year, I should make a note of the fact that the case against the lacrosse players has pretty much disintegrated. There's a piece in Inside Higher Ed today giving an overview of the situation, albeit with…
December 27, 2006
While I was out of town for the holidays, Bora announced that he's putting together an anthology of high-quality science blogging to go with the Science Blogging Conference that's happening in January. He's looking for something like fifty posts to be compiled and published using Lulu.
He's…
December 27, 2006
I've been kind of bad about responding to the "Ask a ScienceBlogger" questions lately, but they've had a lot of stuff up there that I just don't have a response for. The most recent question is something I probably ought to post about, though:
What's a time in your career when you were criticized…
December 27, 2006
I've been thinking about doing some best-of-the-year posts this week, and trying to come up with a reasonable list of best books. Frank Portman's piss-take on Catcher in the Rye, the much-praised-by-Bookslut King Dork is one of the books that might well figure in a "best books of 206" post, which…
December 27, 2006
We're back in town, and I'll schedule some science stuff for later today, but first I want to take a moment to note the passing of the hardest working man in show business. Much as we'd like to see him shake the cape off and run back to the mike one more time, James Brown is dead.
It's difficult…
December 25, 2006
I can't really come up with any scientific significance for this one, but it amuses Kate to no end to have an elephant angel on the tree. And why not? It's supposed to be a season of miracles, and what could be more miraculous than an elephant with butterfly wings shooting stars out of its trunk?…
December 22, 2006
We're off to do our annual holiday trek all over New England. We will have sporadic Internet access, but don't expect any blogging before next Wednesday. Not that anybody's going to be reading blogs over the weekend, anyway...
If you'd like some seasonal music, below the fold is a list of the 21…
December 22, 2006
The problem with the holiday season is that it just flies by so fast-- it seems like you've barely finished clearing away the Thanksgiving dishes, and then you find that you've already missed Mellowmas.
Haven't heard of that one? Well, it's a new holiday invented by jefitoblog and Jason Hare,…
December 22, 2006
Scott Aaronson is offering his services to the highest bidder in the String Wars. His prices may be a little steep-- a well organized review article will set you back $2 million, though a sloppy and poorly sourced one is probably cheaper-- but really, isn't it worth it to have the second funniest…
December 21, 2006
The big NBA story of the week is, of course, the brawl that broke out between the Knicks and Nuggets a week ago, and the big suspensions that followed. In particular, Denver star (and former Syracuse player) Carmelo Anthony was suspended for fifteen games for slugging the goon from the Knicks whose…
December 21, 2006
One of the fun things about following science news through the Eurekalert press release aggregator is that work done by big collaborations tends to show up multiple times, in slightly different forms. Take, for example, the gamma-ray-burst results being released in Nature this week, which show up…
December 21, 2006
Charlie Stross is one of the current Hot Authors in SF, but he's been pretty uneven for me. I liked Iron Sunrise quite a bit, but thought the highly-regarded Accelerando was actually pretty bad, and I didn't care much for The Hidden Family, the second volume in the Amber-with-Usenet-economics…
December 20, 2006
Slate's Explainer presents a list of questions that were submitted but not answered. They propose to answer one of these, chosen on the basis of a reader vote. (Details at the bottom of the article.)
Some of my favorites:
Lasers are now powerful and small (at least I think they are), so why don't…
December 20, 2006
A couple of the women behind Inkycircus have decided to launch a new online science magazine, called Inkling. As they put it, their mission is:
[to] cover the science that pervades our life, makes us laugh, and helps us choose our breakfast foods.
If you like the stuff you see in Seed, you'll find…
December 20, 2006
There's a news squib from the Institutes of Physics this morning touting new results on a theory of modified gravity that the authors say can explain the structure of the universe without needing to invoke dark matter. This is a significant problem in cosmology, as the article explains:
[O]ur…
December 19, 2006
A few weeks back, I was talking to my parents on the phone, and my mother asked "What do you want for Christmas?"
"Tenure," I said. Because, well, that's what's been on my mind.
This is going to be the Best Christmas Ever...
December 19, 2006
Via Doug Natelson, a very nice paper from the arxiv on Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiments with atoms. The Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment (that's two guys, one with a double unhyphenated last name) is a classic experiment from the field of quantum optics, which can be interpreted as showing the…
December 19, 2006
That's Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald, authors of the Mageworlds series of space opera novels, and a host of other books-- they're shorted on their first names, because I don't really want to test the character limit for titles in Movable Type.
Land of Mist and Snow has been in progress for…
December 19, 2006
Over at Inside Higher Ed, Edward Palm gets all Swiftian:
The Department of Defense finds itself desperately short of troops with which to sustain what promises to be a long and increasingly unpopular, inconclusive war in Iraq. The Department of Education finds itself suddenly alarmed by the…
December 18, 2006
We recently acquired some lab space that was previously occupied by a biologist, and will be offering part of it to whoever we hire for our job opening. The space will probably need some extensive remodeling, both because it hasn't been touched in years, but also because it was set up for biology…
