December 18, 2006
The latest step in John "BaconCat" Scalzi's project of world domination (or, at least, domination of the SF corner of the literary world), The Android's Dream is set in an entirely different world than his Old Man's War and sequels. It's still very much a Scalzi book, though, insofar as the third…
December 18, 2006
Bill Hooker is a regular advocate of "open science," and is currently supporting a new subversive proposal: to make all raw data freely available on some sort of Creative Commons type license.
It sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea on the face of it, but I have to say, I'm a little dubious…
December 18, 2006
I don't usually read blog carnivals much, and it's probably a good thing. Scott's cryptic version of the History Carnival led me to spend a really ridiculous amount of time reading blog posts about cavalry tactics in the English Civil War (that's the first of several). And, really, I have no need…
December 17, 2006
What with Time naming everybody the "Person of the Year," Emmy is angling to snag Top Dog honors by uploading video of herself shredding a chew toy to YouTube:
It's hard to blog when you don't have opposable thumbs.
December 17, 2006
A couple of quick updates on things posted earlier this week:
1) A New York Times story on the Stardust findings.
2) A somewhat better press release on the single top quark production experiment (from the Fermilab press office, rather than the press office of one of the member institutions.
December 16, 2006
Along with tacky an inescapable Christmas music, December brings lists, as every publication that deals with music at all puts out their own compilation of songs or albums of the year. The definitive Uncertain Principles Songs of 2006 list will be coming up, but if you're just dying to see ordered…
December 16, 2006
Colleges and universities working on a semester calaendar are just finishing up classes now, which means that most academics (unlike those of us in Trimester Land, who have been out of session for a few weeks) are currently buried in grading. This leads to some fun blog posts:
Grading as a text…
December 16, 2006
The forthcoming issue of Seed will include a big spread on ScienceBlogs, and the online version is already up. They got pictures of all the bloggers (with stand-ins for the pseudonymous), and turned a caricature artist loose on us, leading to the motley mob scene at the top of that page.
The…
December 15, 2006
We might as well close out the week on a high note, so here's tonight's ornament. Actually, there are two of them:
Obviously, this is another reference to astronomy-- it's little guys looking through telescopes, after all. The larger of the two is even gazing upon a glassy celestial sphere,…
December 15, 2006
So, what are the results of the Christmas Tunes Experiment? I've had a playlist of the songs on the Jefitoblog Holidy Mix Tape (plus a few other things) locked into the iTunes Party Shuffle while I work on the computer at home. At work, I stuck with the usual four-and-five-star playlist in the lab…
December 15, 2006
One of the requirements of the Nobel Prize is that the laureates give a public lecture at some point, and as a result, there is generally a seminar scheduled a little bit before the actual prize ceremony, at which the laureats give lectures about the work for which they're being honored. These…
December 15, 2006
A flurry of press releases hit EurekAlert yesterday (one, two, three), indicating the release of a bunch of data from NASA's Stardust mission. This is the probe that was sent out to fly through the tail of a comet, and catch tiny dust particles in an aerogel matrix, and return them to Earth for…
December 14, 2006
Tonight's Science on the Tree ornament is a little more obscure:
Given the conical sort of shape, I suspect it's meant to be a Christmas tree, but it's abstract enough that it could really be some sort of Calabi-Yau thingy, so we'll let this stand as a symbol for string theory and other abstract…
December 14, 2006
We've been having intermittent DSL problems here at Chateau Steelypips, which has led to much cursing of Verizon. The fact that their tech support department screwed up the first two service appointments, and repeatedly dropped calls after half an hour spent navigating their miserable phone tree…
December 14, 2006
Here's the latest of the intermittent updates (I actually skipped one, but I'll come back to it on a slow day one of these days) from my friend Paul, who's working as a journalist in Baghdad (and, thankfully, just about done with his tour there). This is one of the most opinionated of the…
December 14, 2006
The physics story of the moment is probably the detection of single top quarks at Fermilab. Top quarks, like most other exotic particles, are usually produced in particle-antiparticle pairs, with some fraction of the kinetic energy of two colliding particles being converted into the mass of the…
December 14, 2006
The Times had an article the other day about the warped economics of higher education:
So early in 2000 the board [of Trustees of Ursinus College] voted to raise tuition and fees 17.6 percent, to $23,460 (and to include a laptop for every incoming student to help soften the blow). Then it waited to…
December 13, 2006
A long day today, so we'll go with an obvious one:
Obviously, this stands in for biology. This brightly colored ceramic fish evolved over millions of years, descended from a long line of increasingly more evolved ceramic fish. Or, possibly, it was bought at an aquarium somewhere. I don't remember…
December 13, 2006
The Democrats have decided to punt on the budget, which the outgoing Republican Congress left unfinished in a childish fit of pique. Instead of completing the usual budget process, the incoming Congress plans to pass a "continuing resolution," to fund 2007 operations of Federal agencies at the same…
December 13, 2006
Here's the day's final repost of an old blog post about space policy. This is yet another post from 2004, with the usual caveats about linkrot and dated numbers and the like.
This one is more or less a direct response to comments made in response to the previous post attempting to argue that using…
December 13, 2006
Yet another in today's series of reposts of articles about space policy. This is another old blog post from 2004, back when the Moon-and-Mars plan was first announced. As with the previous posts, any numbers or links in the post may be badly out of date, and there are some good comments at the…
December 13, 2006
This is the second in a series of old posts about space exploration in general, and the Bush Moon-and-Mars plan specifically. This is a repost of an old blog post from 2004, so any numbers or links in the post may be out of date. There were also a few comments to the original article, that you may…
December 13, 2006
As threatened in passing yesterday, I dug up some old posts on space policy, and will re-post them here. This first one dates from January of 2004, around the time that Bush first floated the idea of the new Moon-and-Mars plan that's re-shaping NASA.
The original post has a ton of links in it, and…
December 13, 2006
There's a very nice article in the new Physics World in praise of James Clerk Maxwell of "Maxwell's Equations." Incredibly, Maxwell is probably somewhat underappreciated, what with wrapping up all of classical electromagnetism in one neat and Lorentz-invariant package, making pioneering…
December 13, 2006
If you can, consider throwing it to help with the maintenance of Mixed States and the other science-themed feed aggregators at Something Similar. Mixed States is back after a long absence (long enough that I had stopped checking), and it's reminded me what an excellent resource this is.
The…
December 12, 2006
That damn airplane-on-a-treadmill problem has come up again, thanks to the New York Times, aided and abetted by Boing Boing. For some reason, this problem inevitably produces very heated responses, such as this one. It doesn't help that the problem is frequently mis-stated to explicitly have the…
December 12, 2006
Here's the second of a series of holiday photo-blog posts showing some of the ornaments we have, and providing explanations for how they're really all about the science. It starts to get a little harder here:
"Dude," you say, "that's a teapot. What does that have to do with science?"…
December 12, 2006
It's job-hunting season in academia, so we're not the only ones sifting through huge piles of applications looking for the One True Job Candidate. Clifford Johnson has his own pile of mail, and some suggestions for how to fix the process:
Of the order of a decade ago I suggested (to nobody in…
December 12, 2006
A few weeks ago, Ethan Zuckerman got wistful about collaboration:
Dave Winer's got a poignant thought over at Scripting News today: "Where is the Bronx Science for adults?" He explains that, as a kid, the best thing about attending the famous high school "was being in daily contact with really…
December 12, 2006
Surprising approximately no-one outside the medical profession, Eurekalert today features a press release about a paper showing that doctors on long shifts make more mistakes:
The study, published in PLoS Medicine, which was led by Charles Czeisler and Laura Barger from Brigham and Women's Hospital…
