June 12, 2006
Miscellaneous thoughts prompted by yesterday's Commencement:
- Like most of the graduations I've been to, Union's academic procession is led by a pipe and drum band. Why is that? What is it about academia and bagpipes?
- Also like most of the graduatiions I've been to, Union's graduation is held…
June 12, 2006
Between graduation yesterday and a trip to Williamstown Saturday (to see the Clark brothers exhibit, which was very cool), I didn't actually get to watch much soccer over the weekend. I caught most of the second half of the ancestral homeland's humiliating loss to Ecuador, and most of England's one…
June 11, 2006
Today was Commencement at Union, and a cold and miserable morning for it. Normally, the faculty are grateful for our spots on the Library collonnade, where we're out of the sun, and able to enjoy a slight breeze, but today, it was about twenty degrees colder than normal, and the breeze was more of…
June 10, 2006
By the numbers:
Exams graded: 16
Mean exam grade: 64%
Mean final grade for Physics 121: B-
Papers assigned: 17
Papers received and graded: 16
Mean final grade for Physics 311: B+
Students receiving grades of Incomplete: 1
Large bottles of Scottish ale drunk while watching "Dr. Who": 1
And another…
June 10, 2006
Large meteorite hits northern Norway:
A large meteorite struck in northern Norway this week, landing with an impact an astronomer compared to the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima.
The meteorite appeared as a ball of fire just after 2 a.m. Wednesday, visible across several hundred miles in the sunlit…
June 9, 2006
A big event took place at noon Eastern time today. That's right, the soccer World Cup has started, and as I type this, Germany leads Costa Rica 2-1.
Oh, yeah, and because the science nerds need something to do while the sports fans are all obsessing over soccer, the new, improved ScienceBlogs front…
June 9, 2006
It's been a while since I did a True Lab Story, and it seems like an appropriate sort of topic for a rainy Friday when I have grades to finish. I'm running out of really good personal anecdotes, but there are still a few left before I have to move entirely to hearsay. And who knows, maybe I'll…
June 9, 2006
Kate mentioned this story to me yesterday, and today, it's made the New York Times:
Fed up with the inability of two lawyers to agree on a trivial issue in an insurance lawsuit, a federal judge in Florida this week ordered them to "convene at a neutral site" and "engage in one (1) game of 'rock,…
June 9, 2006
It's very, very hard to be the Queen of Niskayuna:
June 8, 2006
Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll (SF reviewer and walking True Lab Story) is discussing the best novels of the 1990's. He doesn't have the "SF" in there, but it's sort of implicit, because that's what James does.
Keeping up the literary/ pop culture bent of the last couple of weeks (there'll…
June 8, 2006
Because it's not science without graphs:
(Click for larger image.)
Basically the same deal as the last time I posted one of these. It pretty much breaks into three parts: 1) The initial "eat less and exercise" weight-loss plan, with a linear slope through January and February, 2) The "heartburn…
June 8, 2006
Look-- miniature dinosaurs! OK, fine, they're not that small:
These "dwarf" dinosaurs were slightly longer and heavier than a car, Sander said. "They stopped growing when they reached 6 metres [20 feet] in length and a ton in body mass," he estimated. Their brachiosaur cousins, by contrast, were up…
June 7, 2006
My Quantum Optics class this term is a junior/ senior level elective, one of a set of four or five such classes that we rotate through, offering one or two a year. We require physics majors to take one of these classes in order to graduate, and encourage grad-school-bound students to take as many…
June 7, 2006
Over at Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse recommends mystery writers, and touches on something that's always puzzled me about the genre:
Like Symons [Robert Barnard] has largely eschewed the detective series, which is probably has kept his profile lower than it could have been, but there is one…
June 7, 2006
A little while back, Eugene Wallingford wrote about the dumbing-down of cookbooks as a metaphor for computer science education. As we get a fair number of student in introductory calculus-based physics who can barely take a derivative of a polynomial, I have some sympathy with what he describes.…
June 7, 2006
Over at Gene Expression, Razib responds to my brain drain comments in a way that provokes some twinges of Liberal Guilt:
Second, Chad like many others points to the issue of foreign scientists allowing us (Americans) to be complacent about nourishing home grown talent. I don't totally dismiss this…
June 6, 2006
Another week, another "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question. This week, the topic is the putative "brain drain" caused by recent US policies:
Do you think there is a brain drain going on (i.e. foreign scientists not coming to work and study in the U.S. like they used to, because of new immigration rules…
June 6, 2006
I've been watching Netflix DVD's of the late, lamented Homicide: Life of the Street lately, and a little while back, I went through the DVED's of the first season of The Wire, which shares some of the same creative team. In particular, both series were based in part on work by David Simon, whose…
June 6, 2006
I'm sort of on a roll of unpleasantly political posts lately, which I try to avoid. I can't really not link Scalzi on the framing of gay marriage, though:
There's a manifest difference in a debate which has as its founding proposition that same-sex marriage is a theoretical construct in the US --…
June 5, 2006
Kate's come up with a semi-ambitious plan for the summer: She's going to re-read The Lord of the Rings (for the first time since the movies came out), and post chapter-by-chapter thoughts on her LiveJournal. At the moment, she's only gotten through the introductory material and one critical essay,…
June 5, 2006
Via bookslut, an interview at AlterNet with Tamara Draut, author of Strapped, a book about how hard young people have it today. The basic thesis of the book and the interview is that twenty- and thirty-somethings these days are in a uniquely bad position, because of the rising cost of college and…
June 5, 2006
Locus is the semi-official magazine of SF-- its reviews are quoted almost as prominently as those of better-known mass media outlets in cover blurbs and the like-- but it remains a small operation, a "semi-prozine" in Hugo ballot terms. That means most issues aren't edited quite as carefully as…
June 4, 2006
Despite generating a surprising number of comments with last week's burning question (thanks to Kate for the suggestion), we didn't actually go see X-Men III until yesterday afternoon. Short verdict: Not quite as bad as I was led to believe.
The longer version is either on Kate's LiveJournal, or…
June 4, 2006
As you know, Bob, the Hugo Awards are one of the top literary honors in the field of science fiction and fantasy. They're voted on by the attendees of each year's Woldcon, held in August or September, and include awards for Best Novel, Novella, Novelette, and Short Story. I posted about the Best…
June 3, 2006
PZ notes and article about a controversial physics demonstration:
Every year, physics teacher David Lapp brings his Korean War era M-1 carbine to school, fires a shot into a block of wood and instructs his students to calculate the velocity of the bullet.
It is a popular experiment at Mill Valley'…
June 2, 2006
Having been depressing and/or political for the last few posts, I feel like I ought to do something to lighten the mood. So here are some pop songs (extended beyond the canonical ten because it's the last day of classes. Woo-hoo!):
"The Devil Went Down to Georgia"Charlie Danliels Band
"Since You're…
June 2, 2006
Scalzi has the proper response to the Bush Administration's latest insult to the collective intelligence.
New York has no national monuments or icons, according to the Department of Homeland Security form obtained by ABC News. That was a key factor used to determine that New York City should have…
June 2, 2006
Matt Welch has a nice post-mortem for the 2001 blogging boom, in which he recalls the days when the whole post-September-11th-attacks thing seemed like it would really shake up American politics, and that weblogs were at the forefront of a grand realignment. That failed pretty spectacularly, didn't…
June 2, 2006
The post title pretty much says it. Raymond Davis Jr., who shared the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work on detecting neutrinos, died Wednesday. The Times obituatary showed up in my RSS feeds today.
Davis got his dynamite money for the neutrino detection experiment that he ran for years in the…
June 1, 2006
A List of Things Thrown Five Mintues Ago is live-blogging the National Spelling Bee.
The Internet is large, and contains multitudes.
(Via a comment at Making Light.)
