May 15, 2012
Tell me a story. Tell me the story about the three hippopotamuses.
Ummm... OK.
Once upon a time, there were three hipopotamuses. And they lived in Africa, in a river.
Right, it was a great big long river, that had so much salt in it that they could float!
Well, salt does help things float, but…
May 14, 2012
Surviving the World - Lesson 1395 - Arguing
And, once again, the internet has been explained in under 20 words.
If Publishing Is Dead, What Happens to Non-Fiction? « Maureen Ogle
Consider: I started working on the meat book in early 2007. I finished it in early 2012. You do the math. I spent…
May 11, 2012
As mentioned previously, the crack technical team at ScienceBlogs HQ is working on shifting us from our creaky Movable Type system to a shiny new WordPress system. Part of that process involves moving all the old posts over, which has been done... sort of. At present, any post since April 18 has…
May 11, 2012
Next Time, Fail Better - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Humanities students should be more like computer-science students. I decided that as I sat in on a colleague's computer-science course during the beginning of this, my last, semester in the classroom. I am moving into…
May 10, 2012
There's been a bunch of discussion recently about philosophy of science and whether it adds anything to science. Most of this was prompted by Lawrence Krauss's decision to become the Nth case study for "Why authors should never respond directly to bad reviews," with some snide comments in an…
May 10, 2012
A rare interview with former no. 1 overall pick Greg Oden about his injury-plagued career - Grantland
He was just ... Greg. For instance, as we were finishing our meal, three separate groups of fans approached him and asked for autographs and pictures. Like always, he granted their requests with…
May 9, 2012
One final thought on the Big Science/ Space Chronicles stuff from last week. One of the things I found really frustrating about the book, and the whole argument that we ought to be sinking lots of money into manned space missions is that the terms of the argument are so nebulous. This is most…
May 9, 2012
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Adjuncts on Food Stamps
The general idea isn't new, of course, but the numbers are. The story notes a threefold increase just from 2007 to 2010 in the number of people affected. I have to admit that my first response was "there but for the grace of God."…
May 8, 2012
I go back and forth about the whole question of scientific accuracy in tv shows and movies. On the one hand, I think that complaining "Explosions don't make noise in space!" is one of the worst forms of humorless dorkitude, and I'm generally happy to let bad science slide by in the service of an…
May 8, 2012
Continuing the blog recap series, we come to the "split year" of 2005-2006. The blog was initially launched in late June, so that's when I'm starting the years for purposes of these recaps, but ScienceBlogs launched in January 2006, so this year was half Steelypips and half ScienceBlogs. This post…
May 8, 2012
A Visual Approach to Simplifying Radicals (A Get Out of Jail Free Card) | Reflections in the Why
Consider a square with an area of 24. The side has length â24. This square can be divided into 4 smaller squares, each with an area of 6. The sides of these smaller squares have length â6. Two of these…
May 7, 2012
Some time back, I reviewed a cool book about Fermi problems by Aaron Santos, then a post-doc at Michigan. In the interim, he's taken a faculty job at Oberlin, written a second book on sports-related Fermi problems, and started a blog, none of which I had noticed until he emailed me. Shame on me.…
May 7, 2012
Since I've gotten a bunch of questions via email and Twitter, this probably deserves its own post: Yes, I'm aware that the ScienceBlogs front page and the Last 24 Hours and ScienceBlogs Select RSS feeds have gone dead.
Here's the story: The crack technical team and ScienceBlogs Headquarters is…
May 7, 2012
Confrontation with my grand dad-The difficult task of proving the earth is round! « lazychemist
To have grown up with an idea that earth is not flat, it never occurred to me that I will ever need to prove that to anyone, at least not to someone in my own family. But given that my grand dad (a…
May 4, 2012
Enough slagging of beloved popularizers-- how about some hard-core physics. The second of three extremely cool papers published last week is this Nature Physics paper from the Zeilinger group in Vienna, producers of many awesome papers about quantum mechanics. Ordinarily, this would be a hard paper…
May 4, 2012
Amazon.com: The Best Science Writing Online 2012 (9780374533342): Jennifer Ouellette, Bora Zivkovic: Books
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way we think about science-- from…
May 3, 2012
I was tremendously disappointed and frustrated by this book.
This is largely my own fault, because I went into it expecting it to be something it's not. Had I read the description more carefully, I might not have had such a strong negative reaction (which was exacerbated by some outside stress when…
May 3, 2012
A few more links that have turned up of people talking about either How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog:
Andrew Johnston has a review of the UK edition, praising it because "it's bang up to date, and goes beyond the basic quantum concepts into more complex…
May 3, 2012
Is Cosmology in Shambles? « Galileo's Pendulum
I'll fill in more about each of these studies shortly, but note in both cases, the authors make very strong statements about the very existence of dark matter, including the quotations that begin this post. In fact, the National Geographic coverage…
May 2, 2012
I've gotten really bad about posting pictures of the kids, but we got the official school picture proofs today, featuring a smiling SteelyKid and an insouciant Pip:
Both pictures pretty accurately reflect them at this stage, which is kind of nice. SteelyKid's kind of camera-averse at the moment,…
May 2, 2012
A week or so ago, lots of people were linking to this New York Review of Books article by Steven Weinberg on "The Crisis of Big Science," looking back over the last few decades of, well, big science. It's somewhat dejected survey of whopping huge experiments, and the increasing difficulty of…
May 2, 2012
I've been busily working on something new, but I'm beginning to think I've been letting the perfect be the enemy of the good-enough-for-this-stage, so I'm setting it aside for a bit, and trying to get caught up with some of the huge number of things that have been slipping. Which includes getting…
May 2, 2012
Self-enhancement and imposter syndrome: neither is good for your teaching | Science Edventures
McCrickerd points out it is only through dissatisfaction that we change our behavior. An instructor with an overly-enhanced self sees no reason to change when something bad happens in class. "Not my…
May 1, 2012
Delayed again by the need to do actual, you know, work, here's a look back at the third year of this blog's existence. You can also read posts covering year one and year two.
2004-2005 was the last complete year before the move to ScienceBlogs in January of 2006, after which the making of these…
May 1, 2012
McSweeney's Internet Tendency: The Only Thing That Can Stop This Asteroid is Your Liberal Arts Degree.
Don't think I don't have my misgivings about sending some hotshot Asian Studies minor into space for the first time. This is NASA, not Grinnell. I don't have the time or patience for your…
April 30, 2012
I'm about a week late talking about this, but I've mostly resigned myself to not doing really topical blogging these days. Anyway, there was a lot of excitement last week over the announcement that an all-star team of nerd billionaires is planning to do commercial asteroid mining. (The post title…
April 30, 2012
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Class Dismissed
In my darker moments, I sometimes wonder if the root of the problem with public higher education in America is that it was designed to create and support a massive middle class. And we've tacitly decided as a society that a massive middle…
April 29, 2012
SteelyKid: Daddy, would you like to go to visit Jake and the Never Land Pirates?
Me:: In principle, sure. But it's a cartoon. We can't go there, it's not a real place.
SteelyKid: Yes it is. Never Land is real, we can go there.
Me: Well, look, if you find some pixies dust that we can use to make us…
April 28, 2012
Learning about science education from the experts: Kids « Boundary Vision
By far the best panel on science education I've seen recently was given by a few of the most important people in the field: kids.
April 27, 2012
This is apparently my day to be annoyed at the reporting of pieces about gender differences in STEM, because a bunch of people are linking to this PBS NewsHour article about women in engineering, which is linked to an interview with Maria Klawe of Harvey Mudd College, who I ran across a few weeks…
