A grey and dreary day here in Schenectady for the 216th Commencement at Union College. This is probably healthier for the graduates than the years when it's sunny and hot and people pass out in their seats, but it isn't the most pleasant send-off. Then again, my own college graduation was a grey and dismal day, and that's worked out all right. This year's class of Physics majors was small, but stellar. We only had four majors, but every one of them graduated with both departmental honors (for doing thesis research) and Latin honors ([superlative] cum laude), and those honors were well…

slacktivist: Sex & Money, part 3 "My conundrum was not unique -- not to me and not to the question of usury. The same dilemma arises whenever we treat the Bible as a rulebook. That's an approach that guarantees -- that manufactures -- conflicts between text and reason, text and experience, text and reality, text and context. And such conflicts always produce perverse choices. In my case it was the perverse choice between, on the one hand, the evident goodness of the work being done by South Shore and Grameen and a hundred real-world incarnations of the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan…

This was supposed to go up earlier, but it turns out that thinking you selected "Scheduled" in the MT back end is not, in fact, enough to schedule the post to appear. So this is showing up after games have already begun, but nothing of consequence has happened yet, so it's no biggie. Anyway, the soccer World Cup has begun, making this one of the rare summers with sporting events worth watching on television. And time for the quadrennial spectacle of Americans pretending to know/care about soccer. So, anyway, there's a big tournament going on, and it seems only fair to offer space to discuss…

I've got multiple home improvement projects that need work while SteelyKid is out of the house and the weather is reasonably nice, so no deep thoughts about science today. Instead, here's some silly pop culture: a selection of songs from my music collection starting with numbers from one to ten: "One," U2 "Two," Ryan Adams "Three Easy Pieces," Buffalo Tom "Four-eyed Girl," Rhett Miller "5 Mile (These Are the Days)," Turin Brakes "Six O'Clock News," Kathleen Edwards "Seven Nation Army," the White Stripes (I don't actually own "Eight Days a Week" by the Beatles, but it would go here) "Nine in…

Will New York Rebel Against Fracking? - Green Blog - NYTimes.com "A well blowout that shot gas and water polluted with drilling fluids as high as 75 feet into the air in Pennsylvania is a vivid reminder how a new generation of gas drilling is becoming more of a presence in the Northeast. Discussion of whether the main result will be jobs and royalty payments or environmental degradation still remains surprisingly below the radar screen in New York State, aside from the upstate communities that will probably be affected. But the issues are already a huge fact of life just across the Delaware…

Kate was away last Thursday, and just got back yesterday, so this is the first time in a week that all of us have been together. In honor of that, we'll break out the fancy camera remote technology for a group portrait (a Baby Blogging first!) Emmy snuck into the lower left corner of the frame, to express her skepticism at all this shmoopy biped stuff.

The Science Channel debuted a new show last night, Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, with the premier apparently designed by committee to piss off as many Internet types as possible. The overall theme was "Is there a creator?" and it featured physicist-turned-Anglican-priest John Polkinghorne talking about fine-tuning but no atheist rebuttal. It spent a good ten minutes on Garrett Lisi and his E8 theory, making it sound a whole lot more complete than it is. And it got this aggressively stupid review in the Times: Oh, let's face it: it was hard to concentrate on the first half of the…

One of the questions asked of Neil deGrasse Tyson at the WSF thing last week was "When did you change from a mild-mannered astrophysicist to a rock-star scientist?" (or something close to that phrasing). In his answer, he said that after his first tv interview was edited down to a three-second shot of him wiggling his hips, he made a deliberate effort to practice giving sound bites-- answering questions in 3-4 sentences with a good "hook" for the tv people to work with. I thought of this when I stumbled across the following YouTube clips, which were shot by TV Ontario when I was at the…

I'm not in the general habit of endorsing candidates for state office in districts where I don't live, but I think I can make an exception in this case: In a unanimous vote, the Broome County Democratic Committee approved of Town of Triangle Councilman John Orzel to run for the state's 52nd district, currently represented by Republican Sen. Thomas W. Libous. John Orzel is my uncle, and my 10th and 12th grade Social Studies teacher back in the day. Libous is a career politician in the most negative sense of the phrase, and was one of the Republicans who orchestrated last summer's farcical…

I'm back in Niskayuna, dealing with mountains of end-of-term paperwork. Which means you get a poll to pass the time: The best end-of-term evaluation method is:survey software This poll is brought to you by the number π, the letter q, and the two take-home exams I'm waiting for before I can finish my grading.

Sunday Function : Built on Facts "Let's say you want to prove that all the dominoes are going to fall. One way to do this would be to prove that the fall of one causes the fall of the next, and that the first domino falls. Those two statements combined prove that all the dominoes will fall. Mathematical induction works much the same way." (tags: science math blogs built-on-facts education) Audubon Magazine "Audubon has sent me to lots of wild places over the past 31 years, but I'd seen only one wolf and three cougars (a litter) until December 8, 2009. On that day, before noon in the…

Ethan Zuckerman has an excellent round-up of selection strategies for who to support in the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament. Options include strategic support, support through spite, non-FIFA support, and aesthetic considerations. A couple he left off: Flopping Artistry: To American eyes, one of the most notable features of international soccer is the way that players dive on the ground wailing at the slightest hint of contact. Inexplicable as this is, it is evidently an essential part of the sport, so why not select teams based on their players' ability to mimic a gut-shot Tim Roth in…

In my write-up about the Hidden Dimensions panel, I mentioned in passing that: I also would've liked to see an experimental physicist up there, to provide a little more grounding about what the actual problems are, and how you might hope to look for something. But then, I always think there should be more experimental physicists involved in everything. I'm going to be traveling today, so I thought I would throw up a filler post offering a list of things that would be improved by the inclusion of an experimental physicist. Then I realized that that would be kind of difficult, as everything is…

A great clip from his World Science Festival appearance the other night, especially the bit toward the end: "One thing I think that as a nation we should be embarrassed by is that the scientists-- you can do this experiment yourself, I've done the experiment-- the scientists, by and large, know more liberal arts than the science that is known by liberal artists." Or you can read my longer, less funny version from a couple of years ago. Either way, it's an important message: It should be exactly as embarrassing in educated company to say "I'm no good at math" as it would be to say "I'm no…

You might not know this, because I've been so shy about mentioning it here, but I'll be signing How to Teach Physics to Your Dog at 1:30 pm today as part of the Authors Alley program at the World Science Festival Street Fair. It's true. It looks (at least in the tiny patch of sky I can see out our hotel window) like a beautiful day here in Manhattan, so if you're in the area, it would be a great day to come by an outdoor science festival. And given the stuff they were setting up last night, and the atmosphere at the events we've attended so far, it should be plenty festive, even if you're a…

Since I was going to be down here anyway to sign books at the World Science Festival Street Fair, Kate and I decided to catch one of the Saturday events at the Festival. It was hard to choose, but we opted for the program on Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace (Live coverage was here, but the video is off), because it was a physics-based topic, and because I wrote a guest-blog post on the topic for them. (No, we didn't go to the controversial "Science and Faith" panel, opting instead to have a very nice Caribbean dinner at Negril Village, just around the corner. I'll take excellent…

Over at Tor.com, Kate has a Lord of the Rings re-read post about the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, which includes a shout-out to me that I missed because I was driving to NYC: Ãomer is "scarely a mile" away when the standard unfurls and is clearly seen to bear the White Tree, Seven Stars, and a high crown. If I were at home, I could ask the resident scientist to tell me how big these elements would need to be to be visible at a mile, but I'm finishing this post on the train down to New York City (vacation! Woo! I'm going to try and write the next post while I'm there, too, so as to make up…

We missed the formal presentaion at the World Science Festival stargazing event last night, and it was cloudy enough to prevent actual stargazing, but the giant mock-up of the James Webb Space Telescope is giant and cool even in the dark. More importantly, Neil deGrasse Tyson is awesome. We got there around 9:30, and he was taking questions from an informal group of people having around where the presentation had been. When we left at 11pm, he was still going strong. More amazingly, I don't recall seeing him drink anything. He may be a robot. A really awesome robot who is amazingly generous…

IPN announces Ninth Annual Bastiat Prize Competition | International Policy Network "For the ninth year, International Policy Network (IPN) is accepting submissions for its annual Bastiat Prize for Journalism. The Prize is open to writers anywhere in the world whose published articles eloquently and wittily explain, promote and defend the principles and institutions of the free society. Submissions must be received on or before 30 June 2010. In addition to the Bastiat Prize for Journalism (First - $10,000; Second - $4,000; Third - $1,000), we are again awarding the Bastiat Prize for Online…

Over at Inside Higher Ed they have a news report on complaints about the content of required reading for students entering college. This comes from the National Association of Scholars, a group dedicated to complaining that multiculturalism is corrupting our precious bodily fluids pushing aside the shared heritage of Western civilization, so most of it is pretty predictable. I was surprised by one thing in their list of commonly assigned books this year, though: What are the freshmen reading? Based on the report's analysis of 290 programs (excluding books that are required parts of courses),…