July 18, 2006
This week has been dubbed "International Blog Against Racism Week" by some folks over on LiveJournal, with the goal being to have lots of people, well, blog about issues related to race. It's not likely to save the world, but it's a noble enough cause, and deserves a mention. There's some good…
July 17, 2006
This past weekend, Union played host to the New York State Association for College Admissions Counseling's Camp College program. This is a three-day summer program where students from disadvantaged backgrounds (the vast majority of this year's students were from New York City, with a handful of…
July 17, 2006
It's not as sexy as Strings 2006, but it's easier to understand what the talks are about: Nathan Lundblad is blogging from the International Conference on Atomic Physics in Innsbruck, Austria (the bastard). Posts so far:
First day introduction.
First day talk recaps.
(The latter includes the…
July 17, 2006
As you know, Bob, clumsy exposition, particularly in the form of lengthy "infodump" sequences in which large quantities of information are blasted toward the reader in the manner of a shotgun or a firehose, is often held to be one of the hallmarks (or, perhaps, banes) of the SF genre (where "SF"…
July 17, 2006
We get the Sunday New York Times delivered, because there's something infinitely more civilized about reading an actual paper than sitting at the computer browsing news stories on the Web. The message isn't any different, but the medium makes a difference. Also, I'm more likely to stop to read a…
July 16, 2006
In the lecture hall yesterday, from left to right: A dewar of liquid nitrogen, a tube of racquetballs, a squeaky dog toy, a handful of yellow balloons, a vase of flowers, an inflated red balloon, an insulated glove, and a 4-liter jug of liquid nitrogen.
The dewars, the vase, the glove, and the dog…
July 16, 2006
Slow blogging this weekend, as yesterday was taken up with activities that will be blogged about later. Today promises to be a sticky and unpleasant day outside, so I'll probably end up doing a lot of blogging in my nice, comfortable, air-conditioned home office. Of course, there's not much point…
July 14, 2006
My plan was to spend yesterday and this morning doing deep and substantive blogging while sidelined by a medical test. That sort of fell through, which means I get to spend an extra day in the lab, but also means you get lazy blogging. And what could be lazier than the classic "Random Tracks from…
July 14, 2006
I was scheduled for a deeply unpleasant medical test yesterday, which I thought was going to leave me lots of time for blogging. yesterday afternoon and this morning. The preliminary test turned out to be so unpleasant (if anybody ever offers to stick a tube through your nose into your stomach,…
July 14, 2006
There's been some behind-the-scenes tweaking of the ScienceBlogs framework, which has caused some problems with commenting on other blogs (along with some other embarassing glitches, involving posts being blocked by spam filters, and fun stuff like that). I haven't heard any complaints here, but it…
July 13, 2006
The Dean Dad, spinning off an article in the Chronicle, has some interesting thoughts on the economic benefits of colleges and universities:
Apropos of my minor obsession with the economic conditions in Northern Town, the Chronicle of Higher Ed has a story noting that the University of Rochester is…
July 13, 2006
Over at Backreaction, Bee has posted a fairly readable introduction to extra dimensions, including a sort of taxonomy of different models. If you're interested in that sort of thing, take a look.
It almost makes up for the dreadful visual pun from a little while back.
(There's other good stuff…
July 12, 2006
There are two main reasons why I don't write a great deal about politics here. The first, and most important, is that I tend not to like the way that I end up sounding when I go off on political topics. The second, only slightly less important, is that I rarely feel like I have anything worthwhile…
July 12, 2006
Over at Inside Higher Ed, there's an article by Laurence Musgrove on whether student writing has really gotten worse in recent years. He suggests a good mechanism for how faculty might be fooled into thinking so:
[...] I think the main difference between students then and now exists mostly in our…
July 12, 2006
Via Dave Sez, a Sports Illustrated columnist says that Zidane's head-butt was understandable because of all the flopping other players do:
So Zidane slammed a guy. He lost it. Writers all over the world are competing with themselves to heap scorn on France's greatest player. You know something? I…
July 12, 2006
An off-hand comment in my RHIC post has provided a lot more traffic and entertainment than I would've thought possible, and has also accidentally re-confirmed what we used to call "Furr's Law" back in my Usenet days-- namely, that the fastest way to get information on the Internet is to say…
July 11, 2006
Among other things, pointing me to silly bits of pop-culture ephemera that I haven't noticed before. Such as, for example, The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny:
this is the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny
good guys, bad guys, and explosions as far as the eye can see
and only one will…
July 11, 2006
Having spent the weekend at Readercon, I feel like I should talk about it a little. For those who have never been to a SF convention, it's not all people dressing up like space aliens and fairy princesses-- in fact, the cons Kate and I go to tend not to have all that much of the dress-up thing…
July 11, 2006
Having spent the weekend at Readercon, I feel like I should talk about it a little. For those who have never been to a SF convention, it's not all people dressing up like space aliens and fairy princesses-- in fact, the cons Kate and I go to tend not to have all that much of the dress-up thing…
July 11, 2006
This month's Physics Today has an article by Murray Peshkin on "Addressing the Public About Science and Religion", that is both a nice change of pace (as physicists don't do much of that sort of thing), and a reminder of why a lot of physicists don't do that sort of thing. It's not that he says…
July 10, 2006
Rob Knop offers a nice discussion of the speed of light, in response to last night's question. This post is not about that, though you should go read it.
This post is about my odd reaction to Rob's title: "'Speed of Light' : a bad name for a great fundamental constant?" The notion of a "great…
July 10, 2006
Via See You at Enceladus, a Canadian team has succeeded in making a flapping-wing airplane:
Yesterday Dr. James DeLaurier, an aeronautical engineer and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace Studies, fulfilled a lifelong dream, seeing his manned mechanical…
July 10, 2006
I didn't get to see either of the weekend's games, other than about five minutes at the start of the second half of the championship, so I have very little to say. I haven't even seen highlights, as I had to spend the morning at the hospital for an intensely boring test, and they didn't have…
July 9, 2006
I was away at Readercon this weekend, which meant a fair amount of hanging out in a hotel bar socializing with writer types. One of whom was working on a novel that will have some hard-science elements to it, and had been looking for a physicist to ask questions of. Having just sat down, and being…
July 7, 2006
This week, Seed asks:
On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to?
Answer behind the cut:
Dammit, Jim, I'm a physicist, not a developmental biologist. I didn't have any particular expectation of how…
July 7, 2006
I had errands to run this morning before work, which meant that I didn't have time to queue up the usual handful of blog posts to appear during the day. I don't want to have the site go dark, though, so I'll throw up a post or two on my lunch hour, to note some physics stuff that's kind of cool.
I'…
July 6, 2006
The last couple of days at work have been Shop Days, with a fair bit of time spent in the department's machine shop making holes in a metal box. This would, I'm sure, be the occasion of much hilarity among my old junior high shop teachers, as my ineptitude in both metal and wood shop was pretty…
July 6, 2006
p>Gordon Watts has some thoughts on a subject near to my heart: the ways we drive students out of physics.
For the past 6 years I've taught various versions of the introductory physics survey course. It covers 100's years of physics in one year. We rarely spend more than a lecture on a single…
July 6, 2006
My Corporate Masters have finally posted the piece that ran in the most recent print edition of the magazine, in which prominent physicists comment on the LHC. They've got predictions and explanations of why the LHC is interesting from an impressive array of people.
Most of the answers are pretty…
July 5, 2006
As you've no doubt seen elsewhere on ScienceBlogs, Nature posted a little story about popular science blogs that included a list of said blogs, including a link to yours truly (tied with Deltoid for 11th in their list by Technorati rank order.
My ranking has actually climbed slightly since then (#…
