One of the less attractive features of the New York Times is its tendency to feature little profiles of horrible people. They're not presented that way, of course, but that's the effect-- I read these articles, and just want to slap everybody involved. Today's story on marital tensions caused by environmental issues is a fine example of the form: He bikes 12 1/2 miles to and from his job at a software company outside Santa Barbara, Calif. He recycles as much as possible and takes reusable bags to the grocery store. Still, his girlfriend, Shelly Cobb, feels he has not gone far enough. Ms. Cobb…

A comment on the earlier poll asked about regular series of departmental talks, which the author called a department seminar. We have such a series of talks, bringing in roughly one outside speaker per week, but we call it a colloquium. This calls for a poll to settle the question: An academic department has a talk by an outside speaker once a week. This is called:(surveys) If you have a particular reason for preferring one or the other, please feel free to explain it in comments.

Before leaving Austin on Friday, I had lunch with a former student who is currently a graduate student at the University of Texas, working in an experimental AMO physics lab. I got the tour before lunch-- I'm a sucker for lab tours-- and things were pretty quiet, as they had recently suffered a catastrophic failure of a part of their apparatus. Of course, there are catastrophic failures, and then there are catastrophic failures. Some dramatic equipment failures, like the incredible exploding MOSFET's when I was a post-doc, are just God's way of telling you to go home and get a good night's…

The always interesting Timothy Burke has a post on the economics of conference attendance, inspired by Brian Croxall's essay about why he didn't attend the MLA. The key problem for both of them is that the way the academic job market is structured inn the humanities forces job seekers to attend the MLA for "screening interviews," used to cut a long list of applicants down to the three or so who will be invited to campus. This is almost a two cultures moment, because this isn't the situation in my part of academia. It's not that the job market is any better, but there isn't the same automatic…

BOOK VIEW CAFE BLOG » It seemed like a good idea at the time: The Slushpile Smackdown "The traditional method of sifting slush is in-house - a job usually handed out to a junior because it's time consuming and occasionally injurious to mental well being. Why? Because anyone with a word processor can submit a novel and while many aspiring authors are professional, know how to follow guidelines and are eager to learn, many are just eager. And submit as soon as the last word hits the page, sometimes sooner. They're full of hope and convinced they've just penned the bestest of bestsellers. Cue…

Of special interest to Ohio-type readers: I'm scheduled to do an interview tomorrow, Monday the 18th with Jim Scott of WLW AM in Cincinnati. I'm scheduled to call in at 9:50 am, which looks like it's after the regular show hours, and thus probably a taped interview. It says LIVE in the schedule I was sent by my publicist, though, so I'm not quite sure. Anyway, if you're in the right area to pick this up, you might want to tune in to hear what I sound like on the radio. It looks like they have interviews archived on the web site, so I'll be spending a little time tonight listening to a few,…

The Barnes and Noble store finder finally indicated the presence of copies in the local stores yesterday, so we made a trip down to the Colonie Center, where they had a half-dozen face out in the Physics section, and probably 15-20 on the new releases table. Woo-hoo! (Now I can shift to fretting that they've got too many in the local stores, and will end up returning most of them...) Anyway, if you're in the Albany area, and want a copy, they have them in Barnes and Noble now. Miscellaneous other items: A nice plug from Derek Lowe How to Teach Physics to Your Dog catches the eye of another…

A couple of nifty bits of news from the British Commonwealth: The BBC's Magazine Monitor blog noted my Seed article. Better yet, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog makes Smriti Daniel's list of "the best books to emerge in 2009" in the Sunday Times of Sri Lanka. The other books on the list: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple, Drood by Dan Simmons, and Unseen Academicals by some guy named Pratchett. That's pretty awesome company to be in... So…

It's been a while since I did a basketball game recap here, mostly because it's been a while since I saw a whole game. Thanks to the DVR, I saw the whole Syracuse-West Virginia game today, in which Syracuse narrowly escaped Morgantown with a win. They had a ten point lead with two and a half minutes, but after Andy Rautins fouled out, West Virginia made a bunch of threes, and Syracuse made a bunch of minor errors, and the final score was a one-point win for the Orange. The minute Rautins went out, I had a horrible flashback to Maryland blowing a ten-point lead to Duke in the final minute…

News: Duncan Challenges NCAA to Change - Inside Higher Ed "Education Secretary Arne Duncan pulled no punches in a high-profile address here Thursday at the annual convention of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, proposing a series of policy changes that he said could rid college sports of the "tiny minority" of bad actors that "stains" its reputation. Duncan, former co-captain of Harvard University's basketball team and first-team Academic All-American, criticized the high-stakes recruiting wars that take place in sports like men's basketball and football. He wants further rules…

I'm just about finished packing up, then I'm meeting a former student for lunch, then heading off to the airport to spend the next eight hours or so making my way home to Kate and SteelyKid and Emmy. Which is a good excuse for a non-dorky poll: Are you checking any bags today?(answers) (Bag fees are not an option in this poll, because I'm flying Southwest. They're my airline of choice, precisely because they minimize the hassle of flying through things like not charging checked bag fees.)

Pondering a Ponderous Pendulum : Built on Facts "Why the long discussion about the period of a pendulum yesterday? Because we're actually going to take a look at a particular pendulum today. This one hangs in the central atrium of the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, which constitutes half of the beautiful and brand spanking new two-building complex now housing the Texas A&M department of physics." (tags: science physics blogs built-on-facts education history) Cocktail Party Physics: shameless self-promotion The Damn Book is finally…

Kate here: Since Chad's out of town, you get Substitute Parent Blogging today. It's with my non-DSLR camera (and also taken very fast before she decided she wanted the camera more than what she had), it's with something other than Appa, and it's eloquent of "I miss Daddy and want to be just like him." I tried to tell her that Chad doesn't actually wear those gloves to play hoop, but she wasn't having any of it.

Regular readers will know that I have a bit of a Thing about bad graphs used in the media and on blogs. When people use stupid presentation tricks to exaggerate features of data to make their argument look stronger, it bugs me. But what really irks me is when people use stupid presentation tricks to trample their own arguments. Today's exhibit for the prosecution is this graph by Mike Konczal via Kevin Drum comparing median wages to household debt over the last thirty years: The blue line is debt, the reddish one income (adjusted for inflation, I believe). Both data sets are normalized so…

Even when I'm on the road, I continue to be obsessed... A nice review at Lean Left that really gets Emmy's role in the book: The dog asks clear questions and Orzel uses those interjections well. They very often serve as a way to clarify, or to bring up questions that the readers probably has, or to deal with obvious tangents. It is a very effective tactic and it serves to lighten the prose at strategic times in the discussion. The dog' voice is skeptical, wise, incredulous and smug (and bloodthirsty. Much of the time, the dog is attempting to use physics to hunt down and, one presumes,…

"There was a lot of smoke." « Quantum Moxie That is how my son, who is in 3rd grade, described a class science experiment gone awry. The experiment involved electrical tape, a battery, lightbulb, and a piece of insulated wire with the insulation stripped off on the ends. Yes, amazingly simple, but it's 3rd grade. (tags: science physics electronics blogs education experiment) Announcing Open Lab, 2009!!! : Neurotopia If you're looking for some stuff to read while I'm out of town, you could do worse than this. A little thin on the physical sciences, maybe, but some good stuff. (tags:…

As I've mentioned before, I have a cell phone that's just a cell phone-- no data plan, no camera, no nothing. It's also a few years old, so the battery life isn't what it could be. I was a little concerned about that, so I made a point of plugging it into the charger last night before bed. And I am absolutely sure that it's still charged, mostly because I think it's still plugged into the charger in Niskayuna. Which won't do me a whole lot of good here in Austin... On the bright side, sine it's just a phone, I'm not missing that much, unlike most people with fancier phones, who rely on them…

Miscellaneous book-related items for you to read while I spend most of the day in transit to Austin: While I have yet to see a copy in a Barnes and Noble store locally, it's selling well enough in the national chain for them to have ordered more copies. Yay! Relatedly, the publisher has just ordered a second printing, woo-hoo! I'm not sure what the total number of copies on paper is, but if they've asked for more, that's definitely a good sign. I have a couple of radio interviews scheduled for next week, which ought to be an adventure. I'm taping an interview with Jim Scott of WLW in…

Official Google Blog: A new approach to China "These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to…

My flight to Texas tomorrow leaves ungodly early, requiring me to leave for the airport around 6:30 or so. That's earlier than I like to be up, but it's a bit late by my father's standards-- he always books flights that leave at 7am or thereabouts. This seems like a good topic for a poll: When do you like to fly?(surveys) This is an ideal-world situation, where you have your choice of flights leaving at any time of day, so don't leave comments complaining about the lack of "whenever the airlines say I can go."