Links for 2010-10-19

One of the staples of 80's teen movies was the moment when the screwup hero realized that he had imbibed (or allowed others to imbibe at a forbidden party) much of what was in the parents' liquor cabinet -- these houses always had well-stocked liquor cabinets -- and didn't want to get caught. Invariably, he'd add water to the various bottles to make the cabinet look, at first glance, undisturbed. Tossing bottles would have given the game away.

SUNY Albany is tossing bottles, and catching holy hell for it. Apparently, it's suspending admission to programs in French, Italian, Russian, and classics. Stanley Fish has opined that this marks the official collapse of the humanities.

As regular readers know, I stand in awe of Stanley Fish's ability to maintain a prominent and successful career without ever, even by accident, getting anything right. It's an astonishing record, really. He's the David Hasselhoff of academia; nobody can really explain why he's still there, yet he's still there.

"IEEE congratulates Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, now both at the University of Manchester, who were jointly awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for "groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene."

To celebrate their brilliant achievement, IEEE Xplore will provide open access to all of their articles published in IEEE journals, conferences and AIP journals. This complimentary access will remain in effect until January 1, 2011. "

"I'll try to relate what I got out of each talk, with more words than equations and with no figures. I'll aim for a general audience level but I think I'm likely to end up at a physics undergrad or a popular-science-savvy level, as technical terms are bound to be thrown about. If there's one you don't know, feel free to ask over in the comments or take this as an opportunity to delve into Wikipedia.

I'll also provide two handy metrics to the quality of the talk, my Interest Level, defined as the amount of time before I start playing with my phone, and my Comprehension level, defined as the amount of time where I was still following the speaker."