Academics for Mere Politicians | Wired Science | Wired.com "It's not personal, and it's not business This is a big one (that is why I put it first). A university isn't a business in the normal sense. Oh sure, they bring in money and they spend money. From the outside, it is easy to mistake it for a business but it isn't. But don't universities produce students? Well, the outcome is to have students, but that is not really the purpose. What nonsense do I speak? Let me just say what a university should be. It should be a community of learners. That is it. All this grades and graduation stuff…

SteelyKid is off spending a weekend at Grandma and Grandpa's, so this week's picture was actually taken early Wednesday morning: The early hour accounts for both the pacifier (she wasn't willing to give it up yet) and the frizzy hair (bed-head toddler!). I'm pretty sure she hasn't grown measurably since yesterday, though. This photo is in honor of SteelyKid's sporting activities, as part of the SoccerTots program. Several weeks ago, before the time change, I was lamenting the fact that cold weather and early sunsets were going to make it harder to tire SteelyKid out by letting her run around…

How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, the UK edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog continues to sell very well. The vanity search today led me to this, screen captured from the Guardian newspaper in the UK, which sells our book in its online bookshop: Woo! Take that, biology! Yeah, yeah, I should be so lucky as to squeak onto the list in 150 years. Still, it's kind of a hoot to see that list.

Over at Backreaction, Bee runs through the pros and cons of different presentation methods for academic talks. As she quite correctly notes, both PowerPoint presentations and chalk talks have strengths and weaknesses. You can give a good talk with either, and a bad talk with either. This does suggest a topic for a reader poll, though, namely, if you have to sit through a bad presentation, which sort of bad presentation would you prefer: What sort of bad presentation would you rather sit through:survey software Please note that "I'd tune it out and watch good presentations on the TED website…

SteelyKid is off spending the weekend with her grandparents, so Kate and I went out to a nice restaurant last night (we love SteelyKid dearly, but miss eating in restaurants without a kids menu). I was kicking myself for forgetting to set the DVR to record a basketball game, though. Not the Duke or Kentucky games on ESPN, but the much more Mid-Majority friendly BYU-Vermont game up the road, on the local cable system. Why? Because the game was being played in Glens Falls as a tribute to Jimmer Fredette, BYU's star point guard, and a local legend. Fredette started to get national attention…

YouTube - Inception in Real-Time All four levels of the dream caper synched up in one video clip. (tags: movies video youtube culture) Making omelettes inside of eggshells - Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories Weirdly fascinating food geek blogging. "Weirdly," because I don't like eggs at all, and yet I read this whole article about ridiculous ways of cooking them. (tags: food blogs technology science silly) Balancing the Budget, One NSF Grant at a Time - The Quantum Pontiff "But clearly this is barking up the wrong tree! The NSF budget is only $7 billion-ish (and there is no WAY that this…

The great British physicist Ernest Rutherford once said "In science, there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting." This is kind of the ultimate example of the arrogance of physicists, given a lovely ironic twist by the fact that when Rutherford won a Nobel Prize, it was in Chemistry. (He won for discovering that radioactive decays lead to transmutation of elements, causing one contemporary to quip that the most remarkable transmutation ever was Rutherford's change from a physicist to a chemist for the Nobel.) Of course, there's a little truth to the statement-- not the part about…

Locus Online: Locus Magazine Digital Editions "Starting January 2011, we will be launching our first digital editions of Locus magazine. Subscriptions will be available in, at minimum, PDF format, and we hope to have e-pub and Kindle versions also. We plan to primarily distribute from our own website, though we will be looking into other distribution options as well. Many of our readers have requested digital editions, and we are excited to be able to offer this alternative." (tags: sf books magazines internet publishing) Dropping the turkey to cook it - another method | Wired Science |…

Today is the official release date for the paperback edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, so I wanted to write up something cool about quantum physics to mark the occasion. I looked around the house for inspiration, and most of what we have lying around the house is SteelyKid's toys. Thus, I will now explain the physics of quantum teleportation using SteelyKid's toys: "Wait, wait, wait... You're not seriously planning to explain something quantum without me, are you?" "I could hardly expect to get away with that, could I. No, I'm happy to have your contributions-- the book is about…

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Research Design in a Recession "My college is planning a major student survey for the Spring. We're drawing up questions that we think could help shape budget priorities over the next few years, assuming there's actually enough money to have some level of discretion. (That's far from certain.) We've got several of the usual questions: have they seen their academic advisor, how often do they use the library, etc. I suggested one asking whether they have internet access at home, so we could get a sense of the degree to which more open computer labs…

I'm going to be at a media training session for most of the day. I had hoped to have a long and silly post about physics to schedule today, but, well, that didn't happen. So here's a silly poll to pass the time. The name of element number 13, chemical symbol Al, is pronounced with how many syllables?survey software We normally deal in macroscopic quantities of this one, so quantum superpositions of answers are right out.

Surviving the World - Lesson 821 - Santa Claus Many Worlds, many presents. (tags: comics surviving-world physics silly quantum science) On jargon, and why it matters in science writing | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine "The bottom line is that you educate people by explaining complex ideas in a simple way, not by explaining simple ideas in a complex way (or, for that matter, elucidating elementary conceptions in an abstruse fashion). It comes down to thinking about your audience, rather than about yourself." (tags: science writing blogs language biology education…

YouTube - MST3K - Patrick Swayze Christmas A carol to move the hardest of hearts... (tags: silly music movies television youtube video) Not Even Not Even Wrong - Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design : Built on Facts "Isaac Newton, when he wasn't revolutionizing mathematics and almost single-handedly inventing physics as a systematic discipline, wrote some really ridiculous stuff. Alchemy, occult esoterica, you name it. In his defense, it was the 1600s. He didn't have a whole lot of prior scientific understanding to help him sort the wheat from the chaff. Until he reached the age at which…

It feels a little weird not to be doing a Short Story Club entry, so here's a different sort of pop culture item: Over at EphBlog, my classmate Derek Catsam has decided to break up the carnival of reactionary politics by commenting on great albums, jumping off from Spin's Top 125 of the Last 25 Years. Which is always a fun game, so let's roll with that. 25 years goes back to 1985, which is right around the time I started buying albums, so this covers most of my pop music lifetime. Which is convenient, because pretty much anything I can remember buying new is eligible... In making their list,…

The 12 Days of Christmas | The Language of Bad Physics "On the fifth day of Christmas, My PI gave to me: Five Ci-ta-tions... 4 revisions, 3 rejected drafts, 2 data sets, And a pile of papers to read." (tags: academia education silly music blogs kavassalis) A is for Ackbar | brandonpeat.com "When my wife Emma and I found out we were pregnant with our first child, Tycho, we began thinking of fun ways to decorate a baby boy's room. Since we live in an apartment and aren't allowed to paint the walls, that meant posters or prints of some kind. And, being artists, we naturally wanted to create…

Lance Mannion has a good post on the fake outrage of the moment in sports, where Derek Anderson, the terrible quarterback of the godawful Arizona Cardinals, was caught on camera maybe laughing with one of his receivers during their drubbing by the not at all good San francisco 49ers. When questioned about it at a press conference afterwards, Anderson blew his stack at a reporter, then stormed out of the room. The whole thing is pretty farcical. As Mannion notes: Listen. Soldiers under fire laugh. Sailors going down with the ship laugh. Pilots watching engines fail laugh. Firefighters,…

Cocktail Party Physics: books, books, books galore! "A couple of weeks ago, an editor asked me to name my favorite science book from 2010 for a year-end round-up her magazine was putting together. My incredulous response: "You mean you want me to pick just one?" Because let's face it, 2010 has been a banner year for popular science books. [...] The steady stream of science books hasn't stopped, either, so I thought I'd highlight just a few of the new offerings (mostly math and physics related) that came out this fall -- just in case you're looking for the perfect gift for the science…

SteelyKid decided she needed to put on her Christmas outfit earlier tonight, and her day care class at the Jewish Community Center has begun celebrating Chanukah, so it seemed like a good night for a festive holiday Toddler Blogging picture, with some bonus Feats of Strength: Look! SteelyKid can lift a sky-bison all by herself! A second photo, with a slightly clearer view of her Christmas outfit: Joking aside, happy holidays to everybody who's celebrating some sort of holiday at this time of year. And, you know, the rest of you just have a nice day.

In reading a bunch about relativity and related subjects as research for the book-in-progress, I have run across a usage question that seems like a good basis for a poll. So: The "Classical" in "Classical Physics" means:online survey Please note that none of these options include quantum mechanics, so you are restricted to only one answer, not a superposition of multiple answers at the same time.

The poor coverage of science in the media is an evergreen topic in blogdom, to the point where I've mostly stopped clicking on links to those sorts of pieces. This ScienceProgress post about newsroom culture bugged me, though, and it took me a while to figure out the problem. The author worked as a reporter in North Carolina over the summer, covering science topics, and writes about his dissatisfaction with the journalistic template: I had one editor who required that I give him my story pitches using six words or fewer. But the message wasn't even simply to shorten; it was to make it punchy…