September 18, 2006
As of this morning, the Blogger SAT Challenge has been looked at by 177 people. The number of completed essays is considerably smaller-- Dave estimates somewhere around 40-- and so far, everyone I've heard from has said that it was a lot harder than they thought it would be.
Even Kate thought it…
September 18, 2006
I root for the Giants, and Kate roots for the Patriots, and at times in the last few years, it's seemed like they had a zero-sum relationship. When the Giants win, the Pats lose, and when the Pats are playing well, the Giants look awful.
Yesterday wasn't zero-sum, but the games were practically…
September 17, 2006
So, the good news is, Gregg Easterbrook is writing about football for ESPN again. His "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" columns are some of the most entertaining football writing around. Here's hoping he can make it through the whole season without saying something stupid to get himself fired.
The bad…
September 17, 2006
Does including his middle name make USC quarterback John David Booty sound more or less like a porn star?
(Yesterday was the inauguration for our new college president, so it was a long day, and I'm a little punchy watching SportsCenter...)
September 16, 2006
Scott Westerfeld's new YA novel The Last Days is a sequel to his earlier Peeps, so technically, it's a book about teenage vampires. Only really it's a book about a bunch of misfit kids forming a band and trying to make it big. While the Vampire Apocalypse happens around them.
In Peeps, we learn of…
September 16, 2006
The booklog post on Scott Westerfeld's The Last Days got to be long enough that I wanted to split it just to keep it from eating the front page. Which would sort of preclude using the extended entry field for spoiler protetction, so here's the stuff with the spoilers. Don't read the rest of this…
September 16, 2006
Travis Hime listens to Justin Timberlake so you don't have to.
September 15, 2006
Via a mailing list, Peugeot offers a parallel-parking simulator. So, if you're a person who thinks that Grand Theft Auto doesn't contain enough three-point turns, there's a Flash game just for you...
September 15, 2006
It's raining, nobody's petting her, nobody's dropping any food, nobody's taping bacon to slow-moving domestic animals:
Some days it's hard to be the Queen of Niskayuna.
September 15, 2006
As discussed last week, the comments about the perfect-scoring SAT essays published in the New York Times made me wonder whether bloggers could do any better. On the plus side, bloggers write all the time, of their own free will. On the minus side, they don't have to work under test conditions,…
September 15, 2006
The New York Times has a story about yet another weird extrasolar planet, this one a gigantic fluffy ball of gas bigger than Jupiter, but less dense than water:
While gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are made primarily of hydrogen and helium, they also possess rocky cores and crushing pressures…
September 14, 2006
The truly remarkable thing about the BaconCat incident is not that John Scalzi taped bacon to his cat (as you can tell from his wife's reaction), or that he got a bazillion hits from Fark for it (which is what the Internet is for, after all), or that he made a motivational poster about it (because…
September 14, 2006
It's been a while since I did one of these, so here's a new Dorky Poll for readers to vote on: What's your favorite of the fundamental forces of nature?
As always, vote by leaving a comment. The winning force will be entitled to display a small graphic proclaiming it the choice of ScienceBlogs…
September 14, 2006
The current crop of String Theory Backlash books has a lot of people wondering about what will replace string theory as the top fad in theoretical physics. Other people (well, ok, me) are worried about a more important question: What will replace string theory as the most over-hyped area in…
September 14, 2006
Despite turning in early last night, I'm sleep-deprived and I have an early morning lab, so here are some random songs from iTunes to hold you until I feel more like blogging. Ten tracks from the four-and-five-star playlist, with bonus commentary on a few:
"Little Razorblade," The Pink Spiders. A…
September 14, 2006
Over at Science and Reason, Charles Daney has launched a new blog carnival, focussing on physical science and technology issues. I rarely remember to participate in these things-- the deadlines just go whooshing by, like deadlines do-- but the general concept is pretty popular, and we need more…
September 13, 2006
Next year's World Science Fiction Convention is being held in Yokohama, Japan, the first time a Worldcon has ever been held in Japan. With this year's Worldcon out of the way, we're starting to see some discussion of who's going, and whether various US-based fans will make the trip or not.
If I…
September 13, 2006
Timothy Burke is thinking up new classes all the time, which is probably the bane of any academic. It's probably more common in the humanities, where the curricula are more mutable, but even us science types usually have a couple of ideas that would make for a good course if only we didn't have to…
September 13, 2006
Janet thinks she's scoring nerd points by posting a picture of her nerdy watch, but I can match her timepiece:
OK, there's nothing particularly nerdy about the watch itself-- the nerd part is the band, which in this case, is held together with a cable tie. The little loops that are supposed to…
September 13, 2006
Dylan Stiles is blogging from the American Chemical Society meeting, as only he can. He's got three daily summary posts up (one, two, three), with more presumably on the way for however long the meeting lasts.
Personally, I can't make heads or tails of the scientific content, so I can't tell you…
September 12, 2006
The two most talked-about books in physics this year are probably a pair of anti-sting-theory books, Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics, and Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong, which shares a name with Jacques Distler's favorite weblog. I got review copies of both, but Not Even Wrong arrived first (…
September 12, 2006
When Redskins running back and noted NFL whack job Clinton Portis got injured in a preseason game, he generated a lot of buzz with a press-conference rant about how stupid it is to make players go through pre-season games at all. The sports punditocracy kept the topic alive for pretty much the…
September 12, 2006
I thought about posting something in advance of my annual moment of bloggy silence, to let people know what's up, as my traffic has increased by about an order of magnitude since the last time I did this. As the post is equal parts gesture of respect and protest against the use of the anniversary…
September 10, 2006
The NFL season starts in earnest today, and it's about damn time. Granted, the early afternoon offerings on our local cable system-- Jets/Titans and Eagles/Texans-- probably don't really qualify as "football," and the late afternoon Cowboys/Jaguars game is interesting only insofar as either Terrell…
September 9, 2006
The first weekend of the Fall term is always a strange time. Classes are back in session, so I'm in Teaching Mode, but there really isn't that much to do, because I haven't collected any work requiring grading yet. I always feel like the last weekend before classes ought to be some grand last…
September 8, 2006
Some time back, I asked people to pimp me new tunes, and got a wealth of recommendations. I put in a big iTunes order not long after, and now I've had a chance to listen to most of those tracks, so I thought I should post a follow-up summary of what I bought and what I think of it (below the fold…
September 8, 2006
One of the things that ends up bothering me about the discussion of how to get more women in science is that it tends to focus on the college and professional elvel. Everybody seems to have an anecdote about a creepy physics professor, or an unpleasant graduate student, or a sexist post-doc.
This…
September 8, 2006
Last weekend, when talking about the new SAT, I attributed the low quality of the essays reproduced in the New York Times to the fact that this is a test with vague questions and a short time limit. Dave Munger was a little skeptical in comments, and I remarked that:
Somebody ought to get a bunch…
September 8, 2006
One of the perks of this corporate blogging gig is that it's put me on the radar of book publishers, who have started sending me free stuff. We like free stuff, here at Chateau Steelypips, and we like books, so that's a Good Thing.
It's becoming almost too much of a Good Thing, though-- In the past…
