Ah, the busy life of a modern homeowner: making phone calls, dealing with the mail, and doing some washing up: Meanwhile, outside the house, Emmy ponders whether it would be worth the effort to huff and puff, or if trying to blow the house down would just get her scolded. This isn't the greatest Appa-for-scale picture, but as a special bonus, below the fold we have a different reference measure: From this, we can do a little image analysis, and say that SteelyKid is now 0.60 Mommys in height. And still growing rapidly. The change in post title reflects the other big change around Chateau…

Back in the uncomfortable questions post, crowther asks: This is an excellent blog, but the volume of posts leaves me with a mixture of envy and annoyance (to be unnecessarily honest, perhaps). How in the world do you find the time to do so much blogging and reading of others' blogs? Aren't you supposed to be insanely busy trying to get tenure, changing diapers, guiding excitable but naive undergrads in research projects, etc.? Do you have time management secrets based on how time can be warped in some weird quantum way whose theoretical basis is traceable back to Einstein? Well, one or two…

What, If Anything, Is Big Bird? | The Loom | Discover Magazine Determining the species and ancestry of every kid's favorite giant flightless crane. (tags: kid-stuff television silly biology video talks) Reflections on American Academy's Report: Do Scientists Understand the Public? : Framing Science Detailed comments on the inexplicably controversial Mooney article, from everybody's second-favorite science communications blogger. (tags: science politics communication blogs social-science) The Last Airbender :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews ""The Last Airbender" is an agonizing experience in…

The kerfuffle of the moment in the science blogosphere once again relates to Chris Mooney, who is pretty much a kerfuffle looking for a place to happen at this point. This time around it centers around a Washington Post op-ed that is basically the executive summary of a American Academy of Arts and Sciences paper that is itself the executive summary version of a series of four workshops on science and the public. You can get a reasonable sense of the kerfuffle from the links in Chris's responses to the responses. I'm currently making one of my intermittent attempts to be a better person--…

I have now finished all of the short fiction on this year's Hugo Award ballot (links to most nominees are available here), and I have to say, the pickings here are pretty slim. The stories that aren't forgettable or preachy are deeply unpleasant, leaving me wanting to put a lot of stuff below "No Award." And there's one story that makes me want to bleach my frontal cortex. More detailed comments, category-by-category, below the fold: Best Novella “Act One”, Nancy Kress (Asimov’s 3/09) The God Engines, John Scalzi (Subterranean) “Palimpsest”, Charles Stross (Wireless; Ace, Orbit) Shambling…

The Kagan Hearings: Elena Kagan does her best John Roberts impression. (1) - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine "Yet the ghost of [Thurgood] Marshall himself comes in for tremendous abuse today at the hands of Republican members of the committee. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., starts the ball rolling by accusing Kagan of having clerked for "a well-known liberal activist judge." John Kyl, R-Ariz., tears into Kagan for respecting Marshall's emphasis on protecting the underdog and says she "enthusiastically embraces" Marshall's philosophy by labeling it a "thing of glory." Not to be outdone, John…

I gave a short introduction to how to give a presentation today to the students who will be presenting their research in our twice-weekly Summer Student Seminar Series. This included examples of a data slide that is bad in the ways that students' first attempts at data slides tend to be bad, and the same graph re-done in a more appropriate manner. As long as I'm doing format conversions of this anyway, I figure it might be amusing to post them here. So, here's the bad graph, with the bullet points highlighting the mistakes: And here's the good version: (The seminar series features three…

The dogphysics karma joke is pretty much dead, as countries with current or future editions of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog have gone a dismal 1-3-0 in the first round of elimination play. I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did, honestly. The big story of the World Cup at the moment is the immense suckitude of the refereeing, which currently accounts for at least four screwed up goals (two not allowed for the US, one for England, and an improperly allowed goal for Argentina). It's gotten to the point where FIFA is being dragged toward the Century of the Fruitbat, and might start…

A couple of significant news items from the world of particle physics: There was a conference on neutrino physics recently, and the big news from there is that two experiments measure something funny with neutrino oscillations, namely that the oscillations seem to proceed at different rates for neutrinos and antineutrinos. This is a really surprising sort of asymmetry, and would be awfully hard to explain. These are, however, preliminary results that are being released now because there was a conference on neutrino physics, not because the people doing the experiments have rock-solid proof…

slacktivist: Rendering unto Krugman "But knowing their hypocrisy, he said unto them, "Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a dime and let me see it." And they brought one. Then he said to them, "Whose head is this -- FDR's or Herbert Hoover's?" They answered, "Roosevelt's." And he said unto them, "Right. So shut up. Have you morons already forgotten the 20th Century? When the choice is between imitating what worked and what really, really didn't work, why are you pretending it's terribly complicated?" And after that, no one dared to ask him any question." (tags: economics politics…

Last week, Dmitry Budker's group at Berkeley published a paper in Physical Review Letters (also free on the arxiv) with the somewhat drab title "Spectroscopic Test of Bose-Einsten Statistics for Photons." Honestly, I probably wouldn't've noticed it, even though this is the sort of precision AMO test of physics that I love, had it not been for the awesome press release Berkeley put together, and this image in particular (grabbed with its caption): This is a nifty paper, and deserves a little explanation in Q&A format: Is this another New Scientist style "Einstein was wrong" paper? No. If…

There is a proposal for a Physics Q&A site along the lines of Stack Overflow for computer stuff. Like many such projects, this largely conflates "physics" and "theoretical particle physics," so I'm not sure how much of a contribution I can really make. I've got plenty of theorist readers, though, so if this seems like the sort of thing you would like to have exist, click the link above.

Josh Rosenau makes an excellent and important point regarding prayer meetings and the Gulf oil spill: that the point is not so much that God will stop the oil gushing into the Gulf, but that religious groups are a key community organization point for getting people together to work on the problem. He puts this into a larger context toward the end of the post, saying things I've said myself numerous times: Most people attend church for a lot of reasons, and many of those reasons are self-reinforcing. Someone who goes to church with no particular views on theism (pro, con, or agnostic) could…

Power and making § Unqualified Offerings "A colleague was complaining yesterday about the way that some faculty are treated better than others. Not so much in my department as in certain other departments. Some people, for a variety of reasons, probably do get a better deal (even if not to the extent that he thinks). I won't go into the reasons why, mostly because I think the politics is complicated enough that I can't venture a theory with any great confidence. (My colleague would beg to differ, but I think he's only seeing one dimension of a complicated problem.) However, I said to…

... because SteelyKid is a baby on the move, and she moves fast: SteelyKid spent a long weekend with Kate's mom, and we went down there yesterday to pick her up. This picture, snapped during a playground visit this morning, gives you some idea of her energy level. Accordingly, Kate and I are both exhausted. Which means no deep thoughts for you on the blog, but at least you got a cute baby picture out of the deal.

The last two days of group play were kind of disappointing, with two games (Brazil-Portugal and Spain-Chile) barely being contested in the second half, as the teams involved were sure to advance, and just sort of kicked the ball around idly in the middle of the field until the clock ran out. In a just universe, the teams involved would be punished with embarrassing losses in the first eleimination game; as they play each other, that's not going to happen. Note that seven of the final sixteen teams are countries where How to Teach Physics to Your Dog has sold. Of countries who have purchased…

A couple of related items from the uncomfortable questions comments. First, from Elizabeth: What's your favorite homemade supper? What is your favorite thing to cook? then a bit later from CCPhysicist: What is the WORST thing that Kate ever cooked? What was your own worst cooking disaster? This is a tough question, because I like to cook, and I like pretty much everything I cook. I don't get to do much complicated cooking these days, though, because with SteelyKid running around, it's a little risky to do much beyond "grill meat, heat vegetables, serve." My favorite thing to cook is…

Testing the Best-Yet Theory of Nature « Berkeley Lab News Center ""[I]t should be remembered that the Standard Model is not a final theory of all phenomena, and is therefore inherently incomplete," says Dmitry Budker, a staff scientist in the Nuclear Science Division of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley. Budker has long been interested in testing widely accepted underpinnings of physical theory to their limits. In the June 25 issue of Physical Review Letters, he and his colleagues…

Inside Higher Ed has a news squib about gender disparities in academic science, which points to a Nature story about a survey on job satisfaction (bad IHE, giving a false impression on the story!). The gender portion of the story is limited to a short section at the end of the article, and one graph: The larger story is actually pretty positive, but I fear that as IHE did, too much attention will be focused on this one graph (which, by the way, is surprisingly badly done). There's a fairly narrow point about the presentation of this that I think is worth making (even though it will likely be…

A second uncomfortable question from tbell: boxers, briefs, or other? That's an interesting question. Not many people would think to ask about a comparison between professional fighting and the products of the legal profession. Boxing, while no longer the cultural force that it once was, does occasionally provide for some compelling watching. Boxers themselves tend to be a little cartoonish, a combination of being hit in the head repeatedly and the sport's need for endless hype. Legal writing, on the other hand, tends to be rather dry and repetitive. The main points in a legal brief are laid…