July 27, 2006
Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber is enthusiastic about something that appears to be that rarest of rarities, a new idea in the education funding debate: instead of giving the best students money to move to different schools, let schools bid for the best students.
Betts suggests this: first fund…
July 26, 2006
I drove down to NYC yesterday to have dinner with some of my ScienceBlogs colleagues, and put faces to names. Seven or eight years ago, I probably would've driven back that night, but I'm old and settled, so I shelled out for a hotel room the size of our spare bedroom (maybe 9' square), and drove…
July 26, 2006
So, here's a different sort of scenario for an audience-participation post:
Imagine that you are in a weirdly well-stocked karaoke bar, and you have to sing a song. There's no way out of it-- if you don't you'll lose your job, rabid squid will eat your family, deranged America-hating terrorists…
July 26, 2006
Greetings from Chateau Steelypips, home of the world's saddest dog:
Why is she pining away? Because I've gone down to New York for a ScienceBlogs get-together, and left her alone. ..
(Bonus pathetic picture below the fold.)
OK, she's not really pining because I'm away. Not in that picture, anyway…
July 25, 2006
Well, the extremely dorky poll on favorite fundamental constants seems to have petered out at 48 comments, two short of the threshold at which it would've become non-dorky. Still, that was a good effort.
Since that worked pretty well, here's another dorky poll question: What's your favorite…
July 25, 2006
I'm beginning to put my tenure review materials together, which means lots of angst about academia generally. Happily, there's the Internet, which can always make matters worse by providing more links:
For example, a couple of my ScienceBlogs colleagues are blogging about family issues and academic…
July 25, 2006
Via Inside Higher Ed, the National Research Council (a part of the National Academy of Sciences) has released a new report calling for a renewed federal committment to AMO science. AMO here meaning "Atomic, Molecular, and Optical," namely the sort of physics I do.
The federal government should…
July 25, 2006
The New York Times offers a review of several books on science and religion today, including a new screed by Dawkins, Daniel Dennett's book from a little while back, and several books attempting to find common ground between science and religion, by Francis Collins, Owen Gingerish, Joan Roughgarden…
July 24, 2006
Twelve of the Top 25 Most Played songs were correctly identified over the weekend. Given the obscurity of some of these, that's pretty impressive. I think there's only one that should've been obvious that didn't get guessed.
Full answers are below the fold.
(Edited to add: If you enjoy this sort of…
July 24, 2006
As promised in the previous post, some thoughts on superstition in science. This was originally posted in October 2004, and astute readers may note that my opening comments about sports went horribly awry not long after. I take this as proof of my point: talking about these things only screws them…
July 24, 2006
One of the drawbacks of having the sort of day job that I do is that it's hard to blog about interesting things in a timely manner. For example, Janet's post on improving communication between scientists and non-scientists is a week old, now. That's positively neolithic in blog terms.
It's well…
July 24, 2006
Via a comment by Anton Sherwood: Have you ever seen an episode of Star Trek with a particularly bad bit of technobabble, and said to yourself "You know, I'd be willing to fact-check their scripts for a few hundred bucks..."
Well, Dave Krieger did just that, and it wasn't all it's cracked up to be.…
July 23, 2006
Today's New York Times has an article on the loss of the middle class in major cities:
The Brookings study, which defined moderate-income families as those with incomes between 80 and 120 percent of the median for each area, found that the percentage of middle-income neighborhoods in the 100…
July 21, 2006
This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question breaks a three-week string of topics I have no real opinion on:
If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?
I have two answers to this question: the true answer, and the answer they're…
July 21, 2006
Via a mailing list, Reason magazine has an article claiming that SUV's are better for the environment than hybrid cars:
Spinella spent two years on the most comprehensive study to date - dubbed "Dust to Dust" -- collecting data on the energy necessary to plan, build, sell, drive and dispose of a…
July 21, 2006
We haven't done the guess-the-lyrics thing since I moved over to ScienceBlogs, and that seems like a good thing for a lazy Friday (I played soccer after work on Tuesday and Thursday, and basketball at lunch on Wednesday, so I'm pretty wiped. What a drag it is getting old.).
A little variant on the…
July 21, 2006
I'm pretty sure the folks at Inside Higher Ed don't know that it's International Blog Against Racism Week, but they've provided some good material all the same. Today, Alan Contreras offers some provocative thoughts on diversity in academic hiring:
Anyone interested in actual improvement of the…
July 21, 2006
So, you've finally achieved (through a combination of hard work and inheritance) a livable monthly income, and are looking for a way to cut loose and splurge a little?
Well, for just $35 million, you can both visit the Space Station and walk in space ($20 million to get there, $15 million for the…
July 20, 2006
In the previous post, I said that the fine structure constant alpha provides us with a way to measure whether the fundamental constants making it up (the electron charge, Planck's constant, and the speed of light) have changed in the last few billion years. How, exactly, does that work?
The easiest…
July 20, 2006
As noted yesterday, someone going by "who" (who may or may not be a doctor) took me to task in the comments to the dorky poll for talking about fundamental constants that have units, preferring dimensionless ratios instead:
I would be really interested to hear what your readers come up with if the…
July 20, 2006
In the wake of academic scandals involving the Auburn football program, Inside Higher Ed reports on a study looking at the majors of athletes. The results will be shocking to, well basically no-one who has ever set foot on a college campus:
While accusations of widespread abuse like that alleged at…
July 20, 2006
Kate and I both hate doing housework, so a year or so ago, we broke down and hired a cleaning service. Every other week, they send a crew in to vacuum and dust and clean the bathroom and kitchen, so we don't have to. IT's not a terribly expensive service, and we're happier as a result.
I…
July 20, 2006
Via James Nicoll, there's a new press release from the Cassini mission talking about new radar maps of a region on the surface of Titan that's been dubbed "Xanadu." The topography looks very Earth-like, with rivers and lakes and oceans of methane, providing Dr. Jonathan Lunine an opportunity to…
July 19, 2006
Scientific Curmudgeon John Horgan reads calls for more nuclear power and offers a slightly different objection to nuclear power than most people:
Five years ago, I might have considered climbing aboard this bandwagon, even though Indian Point has an imperfect safety record, but not any more. In…
July 19, 2006
I was planning to write a big, long post tying together Nathan's mention of an ICAP talk on the time-variation of fundamental constants with Rob Knop's post on same and this comment regarding the dorky poll (still time to vote!) and a conversation I had with Kate about the meaning of the fine…
July 19, 2006
I'd be remiss in my academic-blogging duties if I failed to point out this Inside Higher Ed piece on teaching core courses. Like many articles published in academic magazines, it's aimed directly at English composition, but the main points can be extended to intro classes in other disciplines. In…
July 19, 2006
Speaking of fictional science, was there a sci-fi cliche that Eureka (new show on the Sci-Fi Channel) missed last night? Shows like this really make me question whether Battlestar Galactica can be as good as people insist it is (the one episode I watched didn't sell me on it).
(I'm also kind of…
July 18, 2006
The article about physicists in movies cited previously had one other thing worth commenting on: the fictional portrayal of the practice of science:
All these films illustrate a fundamental pattern for movie science. Rarely is the central scientific concept utterly incorrect, but filmmakers are…
July 18, 2006
Benjamin Cohen at The World's Fair posts a link to an article about physicists in movies. The author provides a surprisingly detailed breakdown of what must be every character described as a physicist in the history of motion pictures. He also says really nasty things about What the Bleep Do We…
July 18, 2006
On Saturday, Kate and I went to see Johnny Depp swish his way through a second movie as Captain Jack Sparrow, with assistance from Kiera Knightly, Orlando Bloom, and a lot of other wooden props. She's posted a review with spoilers, and I'll post some spoilers below the fold, but my one-word,…
