drorzel | November 11, 2009
Faraday's Cage is where you put Schroedinger's Cat - Why you might want to live in ND...
"My rural area friends have commented on this same trend. Most kids don't do anything unsupervised in cities and spend all of their time indoors. School is making this worse. Kids are being given ever more homework at younger grades, seat work is now taking place in kindergarten, etc. Contrast this with my rural area friends and relative whose kids play outside a lot, understand how things work, aren't afraid of dirt, and, forgive me for saying this, are a fairly skinny lot. They're also fairly…
drorzel | November 10, 2009I failed to write something on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall yesterday, partly because I think the other six million blog posts on the subject had it pretty well covered. Another factor, though, was the fact that I don't have the sort of crystal-clear recollection of where I was and what I was doing on that night. I can reconstruct where I must've been-- I was a college freshman, so I would've watched it in the tv room on the second floor of Fayerweather-- but I don't clearly recall the event itself. It's all mixed together with the endless discussions of What It All Meant…
drorzel | November 10, 2009Syracuse head basketball coach Jim Boeheim won his 800th game last night. Fittingly, it was a thirty-point win over an overmatched New York school.
Since winning the NCAA tournament in 2003, Boeheim has finally started to get some respect in the college basketball world. Before that, he was regarded as a choker who couldn't win the big games. Which is a little unfair, but that's the coaching business for you. And, of course, everybody regards that 2-3 zone as a bit of a gimmick defense, despite the fact that they consistently win with it. With a title under his belt, though, all of a sudden…
drorzel | November 10, 2009
A New Spacecraft to Explore on Waves of Light - NYTimes.com
"About a year from now, if all goes well, a box about the size of a loaf of bread will pop out of a rocket some 500 miles above the Earth. There in the vacuum it will unfurl four triangular sails as shiny as moonlight and only barely more substantial. Then it will slowly rise on a sunbeam and move across the stars."
(tags: science space technology overbye)
News: Engaged or Confused? - Inside Higher Ed
"[The National Survey of Student Engagement] "fails to meet basic standards for validity and reliability," writes Stephen R.…
drorzel | November 9, 2009I am curious as to what people at other institutions think about "Greek organizations," the slightly confusing catch-all term for fraternities and sororities (very few of whose members are ethnically Greek, and very few of whom know more Greek than a handful of the letters of the alphabet). Thus, a totally scientific poll on the subject:
Fraternities and sororities are:(survey software)
I don't have any particular agenda, here, I'm just curious and it seemed like a reasonable subject for a post.
drorzel | November 9, 2009There's a nice post over at "The World in a Satin Bag" on the important things editors do. The emphasis is on fiction publishing, but most of it applies to non-fiction as well:
Editors make you into a better writer. Emphasis on better. They don't make you into the greatest writer ever, but they certainly teach you a few things. Ask anyone published by a major publisher or even a small press. Ask them if their editor taught them anything. They did, didn't they? I thought so.
This won't make any impact on the "Blogs Rule, Olde Media Drool" crowd, but it's always nice to see somebody else who…
drorzel | November 9, 2009
The Mid-Majority : The Old Ways
"Once the Union was preserved forever, the United States stopped worrying splitting into two. So with the late 1800's came the combat-in-context of professional and amateur sports. If you're looking for a reason why the South never rose again, it's probably because it was too busy learning how to play American-style football."
(tags: sports basketball journalism media history blogs mid-majority)
Cocktail Party Physics: batteries not included
"The explosion of portable computers (laptops, smart phones, etc) has brought the problem of battery power to the…
drorzel | November 8, 2009OK, fine. Today's nice weather is well within the range of seasonal variation for New England. But after a chilly week or two, it was nice to get a chance to go to the park with SteelyKid, who definitely enjoyed it:
Of course, after a bunch of swinging, sometimes you just need to sit quietly and contemplate an acorn:
And then go home for a nice bottle and a nap.
Sadly, Daddy isn't allowed to take a nap, but has to try to take advantage of SteelyKid's napping to get some work done before the Giants game. No matter how much he would like to doze on the couch for a while...
drorzel | November 8, 2009Via somebody on a mailing list, Eric Whiteacre's virtual choir:
The post I got this from doesn't contain any details, nor does it contain useful links to the making of this particular video, but looking around the top level of the blog it's fairly clear that this was put together from a large number of individual videos of people singing just one part of the song. He's got another piece underway, and you can see some of the individual parts.
This is one of those really cool and impossible-to-predict things you get with the modern Internet. And I think this stuff is ultimately a lot cooler…
drorzel | November 8, 2009
On Denialism and the role of science in America. (1) - By Chris Mooney and Michael Specter - Slate Magazine
A fourpart discussion on science, the media, and American society, featuring the authors of _The Republican War on Science_ and _Denialism_.
(tags: science politics media journalism society culture medicine)
The Peril of Palatability - Reason Magazine
"Kessler fearlessly accuses major restaurant chains of a crime they brag about, relying on unnamed "insiders" to reveal that comestible pushers such as Cinnabon and The Cheesecake Factory deliberately make their food delicious--or, as…
drorzel | November 7, 2009We subscribe to Locus, the SF review and news magazine, and every month when it arrives, I flip through it quickly to look at the ads. This is a useful guide to what's coming out from various publishers, but it's also kind of fascinating to see how the different publishers market their stuff.
In particular, it's interesting to see how Baen pitches their books, because they are aimed with laser-like precision at people who aren't me. I'm sure their ads work very well for their target audience, but they make their forthcoming books sound absolutely horrifying to me. This month's ad may be the…
drorzel | November 7, 2009
WIPP Exhibit: Message to 12,000 A.D.
"This place is not a place of honor.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Nothing valued is here.
This place is a message and part of a system of messages.
Pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us.
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture."
(tags: science social-science nuclear energy culture)
Best Books of 2009: Science Top 10
"Welcome to our Best of 2009 top 10 lists for Science. We've put our editors' picks and our 2009 bestsellers for each category on the same page together, so you can easily compare. Click on…
drorzel | November 6, 2009"It's a question of character, of friendship. Hell, Leo, I ain't afraid to say it, it's a question of ethics." --Giovanni Gaspari
I'm back to lunchtime hoops after a two-week layoff due to teaching responsibilities. And this has reminded me of one of the great character tests that sports provide. Imagine that you're playing basketball, but are too tired to keep running with the fast break in both directions. You can't quit without pissing everybody off, though, and there's no-one you can have sub in for you. What do you do?
What do you do when you're too tired to run the floor in a…
drorzel | November 6, 2009Today's Quantum Optics lecture is about quantum computing experiments, and how different types of systems stack up. Quantum computing, as you probably know if you're reading this blog, is based on building a computer whose "bits" can not only take on "0" and "1" states, but arbitrary superpositions of "0" and "1". Such a computer would be able to out-perform any classical computer on certain types of problems, and would open the exciting possibility of a windows installation that is both working and hung up at the same time.
There are roughly as many types of proposed quantum computers as…
drorzel | November 6, 2009
Philip K. Dick | Books | The A.V. Club
"Why it's daunting: Science fiction and fantasy get a lot of mileage out of taking their readers to new worlds, but most classic genre fiction is really about making new worlds seem like home. The Lord Of The Rings would lose a lot of its appeal if the hobbits had no Shire to return to, and Isaac Asimov's Foundation series wouldn't be nearly as effective if the heroes weren't bent on protecting a sane, prosperous status quo. Philip K. Dick doesn't play by the same rules. While his work has clear genre roots, using such familiar tropes as androids, time…
drorzel | November 5, 2009For this week's Baby Blogging, we have a shot of Kate helping SteelyKid with her new favorite game:
It's called "Take off my shoes, and put them back on." She can play this for hours. It would be even cuter if she could do the putting on and taking off herself, but alas, she's still kind of unclear on the solidity of objects, and doesn't really grasp that her feet can only get into the shoes from the open end. She'll get there, though.
SteelyKid officially moved out of the infant room at day care this week. She's now in the next age/ development group, termed "Waddlers" (an intermediate step…
drorzel | November 5, 2009I have a lab all morning, so I won't get to more substantive blogging before this afternoon. The Yankees won their 27th World Series title last night, though, and given their status as the most polarizing team in baseball, this seems like a good excuse for a poll:
What do you think about the Yankees winning the World Series?(surveys)
Choose only one.
drorzel | November 5, 2009It's not getting as much press as the "X Prize" for private rocket launches, but NASA has quietly been running a contest for work toward a "space elevator," offering up to $2 million for a scheme to transmit power to a small robot climbing a 1km cable. Yesterday, the team from LaserMotive, including certified rocket scientist and friend of the blog Jordin Kare, successfully powered a robot up a 900m cable using diode laser arrays to send power to solar panels on the robot. They managed an average speed of 3.73 m/s, which doesn't get them the full $2 million prize, but qualified them for the $…
drorzel | November 5, 2009
TPM: The Philosophers' Magazine | My philosophy: Alan Sokal
"Physicists, when they do philosophy, often do it badly. They're often confused about the conceptual foundations of their own physics, because sometimes you can compute and get the right results even if you don't understand conceptually very well what you're doing. That's a criticism that not only philosophers but also mathematicians make of physics. Because I'm half a mathematician I respect that criticism too. So it's absolutely true that physicists often make a botch of the conceptual foundations of physics, especially when it…
drorzel | November 4, 2009It's November now, which means we're edging into winter, and my morning ritual has been expanded to include scraping the frost off the cars when I get back from walking the dog. I've had to do this half a dozen times already, and I've noticed a puzzling pattern.
Our driveway is aligned almost exactly east-west, with the cars facing east when they're pulled in at night. This means that one set of side windows faces north, and the other south. And here's the thing that puzzles me: the frost layer is significantly thicker on the south-facing side windows than on the north-facing side windows. I…