I missed last week's installment of Short Story Club while traveling, but want to get caught up again with this week's story, "Miguel and the Viatura." I'm not sure this will be posted in time to get into the discussion post, but we'll see. The title character, Miguel, lives in a future city that is not clearly identified, but based on the names is presumably in Brazil. The story opens as he is trailing behind his brother Joaõ on the way to see his father. His father, it turns out, has quite literally sold himself, allowing his body to be filled with magic nanotechnology, and inhabited by…

This is a couple weeks old, but I only just got around to uploading it. It should give you some idea of what it's like reading books with SteelyKid, though: That's Kate and SteelyKid going through some of Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. SteelyKid is big into pointing things out in the art of whatever book we happen to be reading. This has a slight tendency to undermine the effectiveness of Goodnight Moon as a bedtime ritual, as there's a lot of "Mouse right there!" and "Cow jumping over moon!", but it's really, really cute, so I roll with it.

Via Sheril, Science Friday on NPR needs money: We at SciFri are facing severe financial difficulties, i.e. raising money. NSF [National Science Foundation] has turned us down for continuing funding, saying they love what we do, we are sorely needed, but it's not their job to fund us. At the same time, NPR has said the same thing, telling us that if we want to stay on the air, etc, we now have to raise all our own money. Despite what listeners may think, NPR only gives us about 10 percent of our funding. Emmy's suggested solution was "They should have me on to talk about physics. And bunnies…

Goodnight to Goodnight Moon? « Easily Distracted "When experts in education, childhood, psychology, economics, what have you, venture forth into the public sphere to say that our schools are failing to do something utterly essential, or that tomorrow's children must absolutely have some skill that they do not have now, or that oh my GOD SWEDEN and CHINA and ARGENTINA all have started teaching children how to program in Java while they are still in the WOMB, you know what that's the equivalent of? It's like going up to someone who is starting to develop a dissassociative identity disorder…

With Halloween coming up, some scary stuff seems appropriate: Boo! (The explanation of where this comes from.)

On the way to get SteelyKid from day care last night, I flipped on ESPN radio in the vain hope of getting a baseball score, but wound up listening to former Mets manager and freelance jackass Bobby Valentine talking about how difficult batting is, which included the statement: And the whole thing is over in a mega-second! A mega-second, of course, is 1,000,000 seconds, or a bit less than twelve days. That's awfully long for an at-bat in baseball, though it might not be unreasonable for cricket. Subsequent comments made clear that Valentine was trying for "millisecond," though it remains…

A Nobel prize for levitating a frog - The Dayside "Unlike the graphene discovery, frog levitation hasn't begotten a vast worldwide research effort whose fruits include thousands of research papers and scores of patents. Nevertheless, as Novoselov recounted in an interview with ScienceWatch, the two projects have something in common: 'The style of Geim's lab (which I'm keeping and supporting up to now) is that we devote ten percent of our time to so-called "Friday evening" experiments. I just do all kinds of crazy things that probably won't pan out at all, but if they do, it would be really…

SteelyKid has a new friend, who she shows off in this week's Toddler Blogging: She's a huge fan of Goldbug in Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, so when we found out that there's a plush Goldbug toy available on the Internet, it was a real no-brainer. She recognized it immediately, despite Goldbug-the-toy being approximately 100 times Goldbug-the-character. Unrelated disgustingly cute toddler babble story: Today was the first break we've had in a week of dreary rain, so we celebrated by stopping by the playground after day care. For a little while there was a really bright…

I'm shamelessly stealing this question from James Nicoll, who asked it about science fiction. The question is a play on the famous comment that only of order a thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground record, but every one of them went on to start a band. So, the question is, who is the Velvet Underground of science? That is, who is the best example of somebody whose work was only read by a tiny number of people, but ended up being incredibly influential on those people and subsequent generations? The physics example that comes to mind immediately is Sadi Carnot. Carnot wrote a…

Between travel and general work craziness, I completely forgot to note that the UK version of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog has gone on sale: The title for this edition is How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, and the vanity search keeps turning up mentions to it in the Guardian Bookshop, so I guess they like their dog physics with extra quantum in Britain. Anyway, if you've been waiting and wondering when there would be a version with fewer idiomatic Americanisms, it's here, and available from the usual sources. This brings the in-print edition tally to five, that I know of: the…

Career Advice: Rules for Science Job Talks - Inside Higher Ed "4. Give a strong, conceptually oriented introduction. Be as brief as possible while still making all of your points. Be sharp at the beginning. Remember the 20 Minute Rule: You should show a data slide no more than 20 minutes into your talk (or your audience has the right to get up and walk out!)." (tags: science biology academia presentations inside-higher-ed jobs) AIP Journals - 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics Everything you might want to read about this year's Nobel Prize in Physics, and then some. For free from AIP. (tags:…

Via Steve Hsu, a GNXP post about the benefits of elite college educations, based largely on a graph of income vs. US News ranking. While the post text shows some of the dangers of taking social-science data too literally (the points on the graph in question are clearly binned, so I would not attribute too high a degree of reality to a statement like "The marginal benefit of getting into the next highest ranked school is actually higher the higher the rank of your current school. In other words, Yale grads should really really want to go to Harvard"), the apparent effect is pretty significant…

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2010 goes to Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki for giving people a reason to care about palladium. OK, it might not be the only reason-- I'm not actually sure what palladium is used for other than organic synthesis and cold fusion-- but it's the context in which I'm most likely to hear the element mentioned. I don't pay that much attention to the Chemistry prize, so my reaction to this was mild surprise that it hadn't already won. Palladium catalyzed reactions turn up often enough when people are talking about making organic molecules for some…

Trains on the moon: John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless / Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts "At the heart of John M. Ford's Growing Up Weightless (1993) is a train trip by a group of teenaged roleplayers across the far side of the moon. It's also the story of how thirteen year old Matt Ronay discovers what growing up means, and how his father Albin writes a symphony about water on the moon. It's set four generations after Luna became independent--and that's Lunna, not Loonam, and absolutely never call it "the Moon," as if it were something Earth owned. This is a…

The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Geim and Novoselov for their work on graphene, a material consisting of one-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms in a hexagonal array. This is one of those prizes that was basically inevitable, as graphene is one of the hot materials of the last couple of years. Hardly a week goes by without a couple of press releases touting some amazing new potential application. Joerg Heber has a nice explanation of the basics of graphene, including some cautionary notes about overhype. From an experimentalist's perspective, the really cool thing about this prize is…

YouTube - John Orzel - Treading Water My uncle's tv ad for his NY State Senate campaign. (tags: politics video television new-york youtube) Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money - Politics - GOOD In other news, the Sun rose in the east today. (tags: class-war politics statistics society culture education math us blogs)

A quick check-in from Tuscaloosa, where we're getting ready to head out for the football tailgating. While I've got a minute, though, here are the slides from my public lecture, via SlideShare: What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics View more presentations from Chad Orzel. These are probably less comprehensible that some of my other talks, as I deliberately avoided putting much text on the slides, which I think works better for this kind of presentation. The down side, of course, is that it's not as obvious what some of the slides mean, if you don't know the intended flow of the…

There's been a lot written in the last day or so about this Pew Foundation Survey on who knows what about religion. Like most such surveys these days, they have a really easy online quiz version that you can take and marvel that anybody missed any of these questions. My first thought was to just tag some of the better reactions for the Links Dump, and leave it at that. The auto-posting feature has been broken for some time, though, and my Internet access will be spotty for the next several days, so it's easier to do a quickie post pointing out the more worthwhile posts on the subject that…

I am in Alabama at the moment, the temporary owner of a ginormous Ford SUV and a hotel room that even I think is a little more air-conditioned than strictly necessary. Which means that it's time for the How to Teach Physics to Your Dog mini-tour of the Southland. On Wednesday, I'll be driving to and speaking at Berry College at 8pm, then on Thursday, I'll be driving across Alabama to speak at the University thereof at 7:30. If you're within striking distance of either of those places, come on by and see the talk-- I've got an all-new public lecture for this trip, and I promise it will be…

It's that time of year again-- the Swedes will be handing out money to famous scientists, with the announcements of who's getting what starting one week from today. Thus, the traditional Uncertain Principles Nobel Prize Picking Contest: Leave a comment on this post predicting the winner(s) of one of this year's Nobel Prizes. Anyone who correctly picks both the field and the laureate will win a guest-post spot on this blog. The usual terms and conditions apply. If you don't have anything you'd like to guest-post about, you can exchange your guest post for a signed copy of How to Teach Physics…