Links for 2009-10-22

"By thirty-years-old, your adult will probably be able to...

Feed and maintain a house pet,
Hold down a job,
Maintain eye contact while speaking,
Refrain from discussing high school,
Cook a meal (three-course),
Make small talk,
Forgive his family,
Acknowledge other viewpoints (social),
Detect and respond to ambiguity,
Finish school"

"Brad Carroll, a professor of physics and chair of the physics department at Weber State University, created an entire course exploring the physics (he assigns a science materials alongside the plays) and philosophy in these three plays. Here's what he had to say about reading Tom Stoppard as a physicist and using his plays to teach physics to students from all disciplines."

"The bottom slide suggests that if race-blind admissions were enacted the percentage of Asian students at elite universities would jump from 24 percent to 39 percent. Note that 39 percent is similar to the current Asian populations at Caltech and Berkeley, two elite institutions with (roughly) race-blind admissions; the former due to meritocratic idealism, the latter thanks to Proposition 209."

"So the Fermi Paradox is solved: it is just anthropic selection - anyone unlucky enough to share our branch of the multiverse has been annihilated oompteen kazillion times over by our krazy experimenting with forces We Do Not Comprehend..."

"I was eager to see Parker engage in a blind tasting. Blind tastings are incredibly challenging, of course, and can humble even the most accomplished tasters. On the other hand, Parker is known to be a formidable taster, and he has made some impressive claims about his own tasting abilities. In the famous profile of Parker published in The Atlantic (that Parker displays on his web site) back in December 2000, the author wrote that Parker "stores the sensation of each [wine] into a permanent gustatory memory. When I asked him about the mechanical aspects of his work, he told me in a matter-of-fact way that he remembers every wine he has tasted over the past thirty-two years and, within a few points, every score he has given as well.""

"There is, I think, a difference obvious to everyone not hopelessly invested in alter kocher journalism, between blogs and other forms -- features, books and so on. That there are huge variations, even genres in blog writing is obvious too, but I'm not going there. Here I just want to talk about issue or subject focused blogging with pieces that mostly follow the text-and-exegesis form familiar to anyone who's listened to a sermon (however skillfully buried the text might be)."