April 12, 2011
Making Light: *Spoilers* Sucker Punch *Spoilers*
"Imagine The Matrix as written by M. Night Shyamalan, casting no one you've ever heard of, and shot as soft-core porn. That's Sucker Punch."
(tags: movies culture review blogs making-light)
WTF: Journal publishes ESP B-u-n-k |
"The article ends,…
April 11, 2011
Cocktail Party Physics: so you want to be a science consultant
Step Zero: Live in Los Angeles.
(tags: science education outreach media television movies blogs cocktail-party books communication)
April 10, 2011
Once upon a time, there was a beautiful young girl from a family of modest means, who received a spiffy new jacket as a gift. It was bright red, and had a big warm hood that she could pull up over her head when she didn't feel like combing her hair. She was so pleased with this jacket that she wore…
April 10, 2011
"Tie this to your lanyard, Billy Collins"
"My brother Aryaman (the talented one) writes: "A colleague of mine who is interested in pursuing science education after her PhD was directed to a collection of (I think apocryphal) answers to science questions from 5th and 6th graders in Japan. I…
April 9, 2011
Over in LiveJournal land, nwhyte just finished reading all the Hugo-winning novels, and provides a list of them with links to reviews or at least short comments. He also gives a summary list of his take on the best and worst books of the lot.
The obvious thing to do with such a list, particularly…
April 9, 2011
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Remedial Levels
"[T]he CCRC found that the single strongest predictor of student success that's actually under the college's control -- so I'm ignoring gender and income of student, since we take all comers -- is length of sequence. The shorter the…
April 8, 2011
It's college admissions season, which means a steady influx of high-school seniors thinking about coming here next year, making campus visits. Most of these students sit in on at least one class, to get an idea of what it's like. Which occasionally leads to odd things, but nothing stranger than…
April 8, 2011
How Much is a Dragon Worth? - Michael Noer - Backslash - Forbes
"To silence the skepticism and to give fans of the list some idea of just how deep the rabbit hole goes, I've decided to flash a little bit of imaginary ankle and walk through a typical Fictional 15 investigation, in this case of…
April 7, 2011
A shot from this morning, before SteelyKid had gotten dressed:
Why is she balanced precariously on the arm of that chair, you ask? So she could do this, of course:
This was the exciting game of the morning: climbing up on the arm of the recliner, then doing a dramatic drop back to the seat. Over…
April 7, 2011
A few weeks ago, I gave a talk based on How to Teach Physics to Your Dog for the University of Toledo's Saturday Morning Science program. At that time, their local PBS affiliate recorded the talk, for use on their very nice streaming video site, Knowledgestream.org. My talk is now up, and the…
April 7, 2011
Revenue Streams 2010 « Whatever
"In my continuing quest to demystify things related to the business of writing, at least inasmuch as they relate to me, today I am going to talk revenue streams. As many of you know, I am a huge proponent of writers having multiple revenue streams, so that when…
April 6, 2011
I'm deep in editing mode at the moment, and faintly depressed at the number of words I have managed to remove by changes like turning "was [verb]ing " to "[verb]ed." It's a tedious and labor-intensive process that is weirdly exhausting-- all I'm doing is sitting in a cafe somewhere reading text…
April 6, 2011
The Blog : How to Get Your Book Published in 6 (Painful) Steps : Sam Harris
"The process of getting a nonfiction book published by a mainstream publisher--as distinct from an academic press, or a smaller, independent publisher--is quite straightforward. This is not to say that most people…
April 5, 2011
Surviving the World - Lesson 921 - Offense
I'm offended.
(tags: comics surviving-world pictures culture silly)
The birth of electromagnetism (1820) | Skulls in the Stars
"It is oddly fitting that the birth of electromagnetism, and an entirely new direction in physics, started with the tiniest…
April 4, 2011
This past weekend, I ended up hearing sports-radio pinheads holding forth proudly about their ignorance of college basketball. The justification for this is that "the regular season doesn't matter," since the NCAA tournament is single-elimination, and lesser-known teams keep ending up making big…
April 3, 2011
Jonah Lehrer on Problems With SATs, GREs, the NFL Combine and Other Performance Tests | Head Case - WSJ.com
"We live in a society obsessed with maximum performance. Think of exams like the SAT and the GRE. Though these tests take only a few hours, they're supposed to give schools and companies a…
April 2, 2011
Thursday's post about the troubles of biomedical scientists drew a response from Mad Mike saying that, no, biomedical science Ph.D.'s really don't have any career options outside of academia, and pointing to Jessica Palmer's post on the same subject for corroboration. Jessica writes:
This is…
April 1, 2011
I've got draft versions of all the chapters of the book-in-progress now, which is great. Of course, when you add up all the words in those chapters, it comes to 92,000, when the contract calls for 70,000. Which means I've entered the part of the writing process where progress is measured not by how…
April 1, 2011
Another day, another snowfall. Sigh. Thus, a poll:
Snow on April 1 is:online survey
Snow, even in springtime, is depressingly, boringly, classical, so you may choose one and only one option, not a quantum superposition of multiple answers.
April 1, 2011
How to Get Tenure at Almost Every Other Research University | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
A useful counterpoint to Sean's post about tenure at top-tier research universities.
(tags: academia jobs blogs science physics cosmic-variance)
A Lament for Diana Wynne Jones « Bookselling with…
March 31, 2011
SteelyKid has extremely fine hair that doesn't grow very quickly. While this leads many people to mistake her for a boy (that, and the fact that a lot of her play clothes are from the boys' section at Target, because lots of girl-toddler outfits are ridiculously impractical), it does lend itself to…
March 31, 2011
Via Mad Mike, a discussion of why it sucks to be a biomedical scientist:
87% of my blog-related e-mail is from unhappy, bitter, troubled, distraught biomed grad students, postdocs, technicians, and early-career faculty. Others write to me with problems, but these tend to be of the "I'm frustrated…
March 31, 2011
COLUMN -- American workers got what they deserved - Holland, MI - The Holland Sentinel
"So you're an American employee. Maybe you make car parts. Maybe you're an engineer or designer. Maybe you're an accountant, store clerk or tradesman. Whatever you do, you're probably stupid or lazy. Yes, I…
March 30, 2011
I got my student comments from last term's intro mechanics course yesterday, which is always a stressful moment. As tends to happen, they were all over the map, with some students really liking me and others absolutely hating me.
It struck me while I was reading through the written comments that…
March 30, 2011
No Cox please, we're British... « In the Dark
"The problem with Wonders of the Universe is betrayed by its title. The word "wonders" suggests that the Universe is wonder-ful, or even, in a word which has cropped up in the series a few times, "awesome". No authentic British person would ever use…
March 29, 2011
Nascence at Tobias Buckell Online
"New York Times Bestseller Tobias S. Buckell has published 45 short stories in various magazines and anthologies. But in the process of learning how to sell those 45, he wrote over 100 short stories that failed in a variety of ways while learning the craft.
In…
March 28, 2011
Crankitude: A Quick Glossary. In the Pipeline:
"I get probably more than my share of come-ons for various wonder-healing potions. For some reason, people see that I talk about drug discovery and think that I'm sure to be interested in homeopathic wonder water, magnetic healotronic belt buckles,…
March 27, 2011
Occasional commenter Evan Murphy emailed to bring my attention to Siege Toys, a new venture that aims to make desktop snap-together wooden trebuchets. Why? Because medieval siege warfare engines are awesome.
They're looking for funding via Kickstarter, so if you've ever wanted your very own…
March 27, 2011
I'm old enough to remember when the three-point shot was a new addition to college basketball, and it was not without controversy. It's been part of the game for better than twenty years now, and you'll still hear people talking about how it's revolutionized the game, generally in a positive way.…
March 26, 2011
little chief honeybee.: Life's Too Short for the Wrong Job
One of the cleverest ad campaigns ever.
(tags: advertising world pictures culture blogs)
