drorzel | September 26, 2010I'm way, way behind the discussion of this week's story, but having read it, I thought I'd post a couple of comments. This will be short, because there isn't a lot to say.
This is a sort of alternate Christianity story, a story in which Jesus gave in to the temptations offered by the devil in the desert (the relevant passages from the Gospel of Luke, in three languages), and threw himself off the Temple to be caught by angels. Once the angels had appeared, he went the secular power route, and in the story an aging Balthasar, one of the magi who visited Jesus in the manger, makes a second…
drorzel | September 23, 2010SteelyKid has been expanding her repertoire of songs lately-- it now includes "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and "The Alphabet Song" along with "Ring Around the Rosey," "The Wheels on the Bus" and "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes"-- so for this week's picture, she decided to get in touch with her inner Bono:
Irish shirt, check; big sunglasses, check; open mouth, check. Get a world leader or two in the picture, and nobody would be able to tell the difference.
drorzel | September 23, 2010One of the things I've been stressed about lately is next week, when I'm making a trip to the South, specifically Georgia and Alabama. As I mentioned here earlier, the original inspiration was a get-together with friends from college for the Florida-Alabama football game next Saturday, but it seems a shame to go all that way and not do something book-related, so I have arranged to give four talks in two days. Two of these are research colloquia, but the other two are public lectures that might be of interest to readers of this blog or How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
First, on Wednesday,…
drorzel | September 23, 2010
Learning the Rules « Easily Distracted
"Today, for a zillion complicated reasons, many of them having nothing to do with the academy itself, the discrete knowledge that constitutes meaningful cultural capital within various professional and social worlds is much more fragmented, as are those worlds themselves. [...]Sometimes you'll get this in college, sometimes you'll get it from friends, and sometimes you won't get it until later.
This is fine: I am not one of those pining for the ability to compress the culture back into a tightly canonical straitjacket. What I wonder about is whether…
drorzel | September 22, 2010
Class « The Reality-Based Community
"Real class is what the economic aristocracy of our country has almost entirely lost. The American rich are wallowing in a moral slough, grasping for more and more money they have no clue what to do with, and venting their frustration that climbing over each other to new heights of wretched excess brings no satisfaction by lashing out at every social institution, and at a government whose largesse is never enough for them. Andrew Carnegie may have had his miners shot at Homestead, but he came to regret it and he also said it was sinful to die rich. He…
drorzel | September 21, 2010Got a big box in the mail today, which included author copies of two Asian editions: the Japanese edition, which I had seen before, and this:
That is, obviously, the Chinese edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I say "obviously" mostly because I know that edition was about ready to roll out-- I can't say anything about the actual characters on the cover, other than that they don't include any katakana, and thus it's not the Japanese edition, and they're not hangul characters, meaning it's not the Korean edition. Other than that, I got nothing.
If you can read Chinese, and provide a…
drorzel | September 21, 2010On my walk with Emmy this morning, I noticed that a house a couple streets over has just gone on the market, and they had one of those "Please take one" boxes on the yard sign, with a bunch of one-page fliers about the house. Even though we have no intention of moving any time soon (and, in fact, are planning to have the basement redone), I took one because, well, I want to know what our neighbors' houses are like, and what they're selling for.
Which brings us to the silly poll topic:
The fraction of real-estate fliers picked up by people who live in the neighborhood and just want to know…
drorzel | September 20, 2010
6 Famous Unsolved Mysteries (That Have Totally Been Solved) | Cracked.com
"One of our favorite pastimes here at Cracked is sucking the mystery out of life like the cream out of a Twinkie, leaving only the bland, dry sponge cake of reality behind. To that end, we've decided to list the often mundane solutions to some of the world's most enduring mysteries, and once again, you're welcome."
(tags: science history internet lists cracked culture)
slacktivist: Jackie at the crossroads
""But this girl I work with told me about it," Jackie says. "She read it in a magazine. And she said her cousin…
drorzel | September 18, 2010Hannu Ranjaniemi's The Quantrum Thief has generated a lot of buzz, but doesn't seem to be available on this side of the Atlantic (not without exorbitant shipping charges, anyway). As a result, I haven't read anything of his, so I was happy to see "Elegy for a Young Elk on the Short Story Club list.
This is a story in the trendy posthuman post-apocalypse genre. The main character, Kosonen, is a former poet living a rustic existence on an Earth largely devoid of humans after some sort of past catastrophe that has left most animals sentient (his best friend is a talking bear, and he has to…
drorzel | September 18, 2010
Rally to Restore Sanity
"We're looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn't be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it's appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler. Or Charlie Chaplin in certain roles.
Are you one of those people? Excellent. Then we'd like you to join us in Washington, DC on October 30 -- a date of no significance whatsoever -- at the Daily Show's "Rally to Restore Sanity." Ours is a rally for the…
drorzel | September 17, 2010
http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/debut-author-lessons-10-things-about-signing-books/
Good, solid advice on signing books, some of which I've stumbled on myself, others I wish I'd known a year ago.
(tags: books publishing blogs)
Interference | Flickr - Photo Sharing!
An awesome picture of water wave interference involving a waterlogged bee.
(tags: pictures physics science waves water)
drorzel | September 16, 2010For this week's Toddler Blogging, a shot of Family Reading Time:
SteelyKid looks very serious, because she's going about the important job of locating Goldbug in Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. Grandma and Grandpa still have the copy of this that I loved when I was little, and introduced SteelyKid to it. If you're not familiar with it, it contains lots of very busy road scenes, with lots of different types of vehicles, and each drawing includes a little gold bug somewhere-- driving a bulldozer, riding in a car, hiding in a teacup. SteelyKid has really taken to the "Where…
drorzel | September 16, 2010In a place I can't link to, I encountered the somewhat boggling statement that "Nature leans more in the direction of Popular Science than Critically Peer Reviewed [Journal]." Thus, a quick poll:
Nature is:online surveys
Context is for the weak.
drorzel | September 16, 2010
What higher education costs § Unqualified Offerings
"There's a lot of talk going around about the cost of higher education. Let's look at some numbers in the state university system here, which focuses on undergraduate education."
(tags: academia education economics blogs unqualified-offerings)
Do Scientists Have a Special Responsibility to Engage in Political Advocacy? | Age of Engagement | Big Think
"I do not really believe that scientific credibility is as fragile as other people seem to believe. Scientists can be terrible people and still do good science, or they can be wonderful…
drorzel | September 15, 2010So, I'm looking at the couple-dozen tabs I have open in Chrome for stuff that I think would be worth blogging about, and the slides for this afternoon's lecture that need revising, and the student poster that needs to be completed before tomorrow, and the committee stuff that I ought to be doing, and the laundry that needs dealing with, and it occurs to me that there's one thing I haven't had time for, which is the book I'm writing.
Thus, effective immediately, I'm putting social media on quasi-hiatus. There may still be some links dump posts here, as I will occasionally be reading stuff…
drorzel | September 15, 2010
Lunch at McDonald's - The Amateur Gourmet
"I won't be the first food writer to note that McDonald's makes terrific fries. I've read interviews with chefs who try to emulate that crispy exterior and moist interior, that perfectly pleasing balance of salty, savory and sweet. These fries are prevalent around the world for a reason: food scientists engineered the formula and the formula works. There's no real arguing with that.
It's how you feel afterwards that's the problem."
(tags: food review blogs culture)
Meet the New Wired Science All-Star Bloggers | Wired Science | Wired.com
"At Wired…
drorzel | September 14, 2010Not long ago, a new preprint on the fine structure constant got a bunch of press, nicely summed up by the Knight Science Journalism Tracker last week. I meant to say something about this last week, but what with it being the first week of classes and all, I didn't find the time.
I still think it's worth writing about, though, so after a reproduction of the key figure, we'll have the usual Q&A-format explanation of why I don't quite trust this result:
So what's this all about? The preprint in question is the latest in a series of attempts to measure possible changes in the fine structure…
drorzel | September 14, 2010While waiting for SteelyKid to stop bouncing off the walls long enough to be put to bed last night, I watched a bit of the Jets losing to the Ravens on Monday Night Football. I saw most of the first half, and the end of the fourth quarter, and I noticed the announcers talking a lot about two things:
Rex Ryan's Jets blitzing all the time, especially on third-and-long, and
The Ravens converting an incredible number of third downs (11 of 19), especially long third downs
It was actually kind of amazing to me that none of them thought to connect the two. Because here's what I saw: the Jets…
drorzel | September 14, 2010Via Tom, the folks pushing for a Stephen Colbert rally on the Mall in DC (because if a clown like Glen Beck can do it, why not an actual comedian?) have found a uniquely useful way to try to boost their signal: encouraging charitable donations:
See, anyone can join a reddit or Facebook group or sign a petition. It takes, like, one minute and doesn't demonstrate much effort. So the rally movement has been looking for ways to show that they're serious, that they're willing to lift a finger to make this happen. And an idea has just been hatched: pony up some cash to one of Stephen's favorite…
drorzel | September 14, 2010
Geocentrism: Was Galileo Wrong? : Starts With A Bang
No. An exhaustive explanation of how we know the Earth goes around the Sun.
(tags: science astronomy physics planets blogs starts-with-bang stupid education)
Testing, the Chinese Way - NYTimes.com
"Professor Cizek, who started his career as a second-grade teacher, said the prevailing philosophy of offering young children unconditional praise and support was probably not the best prescription for successful education. "What's best for kids is frequent testing, where even if they do badly, they can get help and improve and have the…