Here's an extremely dorky Dorky Poll topic. I can't believe I haven't used this one before: What sort of particles do you prefer?(poll) Choose only one.

Op-Ed Contributor - Bring Back Basketball's Little Big Men - NYTimes.com "[I]f the N.C.A.A. truly cared about improving colleges instead of settling for the extra year before eligibility that Stern is talking about, it should use its considerable influence to demand that both the N.B.A. and N.F.L. foot the college's bill for training pro athletes by paying a given amount each year for each player successfully drafted from college. The money would go into a fund for academic scholarships at the colleges these players attended. It wouldn't perhaps turn young superstars into student-athletes,…

There's a new release today that everyone's talking about. A perfect topic for a poll: New Jordan book by Sanderson! Your reaction?(survey) Your opinion is important to us, so please choose carefully. You think I'm kidding about the ruptured disc thing? Look at the size of this thing: Today's depressing thought: The Eye of the World is copyright 1990. Which means I've been reading this series for longer than some of my students have been alive. Sadly, I'm not able to do the full-on "party like it's 1995" thing-- I think the college would frown on my sleeping in and skipping class because I…

FriendFeed and Twitter are a terrific source of articles about how New Media technologies are Changing Everything. The latest example is Sebastian Paquet's The Fate of the Incompetent Teacher in the YouTube Era, in which he declares that the recorded lectures of Salman Khan are the beginning of the end for bad teachers: Even assuming, conservatively, that Khan's calculus videos are only slightly above average, roughly half the students taking calculus this semester would save time and pain by watching his lessons instead of paying attention to the mediocre teaching happening in front of them…

Elements I Have Yet to Use. In the Pipeline: "I wrote about this topic a few years ago, and thought I'd update it. Many chemists find themselves looking at a periodic table and wondering "How many of these things have I personally handled?" My list is up to nearly 45 elements (there are a couple that I've got to think about, one-off catalyst reactions from twenty-two years ago and the like). And there are at least 29 that I hope to never use at all, since they're radioactive and I'm generally not in the mood for that. So what does that leave me?" (tags: chemistry medicine industry blogs in-…

I'm kind of in a fog today, which I'm choosing to attribute to airport lag (it can't be jet lag, because I didn't change time zones, but you get some of the same disorientation from spending too much time in airports and on planes), because the other option is incipient flu (half a dozen students in my classes have taken ill with flu-like symptoms, and been sent home or quarantined). I have too much to do to bag the whole day, though, so I'm going to resort to stealing a blog post topic from Chuck Klosterman. In one of the essays in his new book Eating the Dinosaur, he writes: Here's a…

Historians Reassess Battle of Agincourt - NYTimes.com "Agincourt's status as perhaps the greatest victory against overwhelming odds in military history -- and a keystone of the English self-image -- has been called into doubt by a group of historians in Britain and France who have painstakingly combed an array of military and tax records from that time and now take a skeptical view of the figures handed down by medieval chroniclers. " (tags: history humanities war) Swans on Tea » It ... Moves Boom de yada, boom de yada. (tags: video silly swans-on-tea xkcd comics) What the crappy…

My panel on "Communicating Science in the 21st Century" was last night at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute. I haven't watched the video yet-- Canadian telecommunications technology hates me, and I'm lucky to get a wireless connection to stay up for more than ten minutes-- but if the video feeds I've seen from other talks are an indication, it should be really good. The panel wound up being primarily about journalism, which is understable given that the other four participants are all very distinguished journalists. I did my best to uphold the honor of the New Media…

Quantum Physics in 60 Minutes Damian Pope's talk at the Quantum to Cosmos festival. I'm tempted to steal the grain of sand thing. (tags: science physics video education quantum) Atlas Sucked -- Crooked Timber "[I]t does raise the question of whether there are any genuinely good, genuinely political novels out there. Since we're coming up on the weekend, I'll throw this out as an open thread (I have a few nominations myself, but don't want to bias the sample). Have at it." (tags: books politics literature history philosophy blogs crooked-timber) No Einstein in Your Crib? Get a Refund -…

Deep Physics : Built on Facts You can think of the earth's surface in New Mexico as subject to two superimposed sinusoidal periodic heat pulses. One has a period of 24 hours and corresponds to the heat rising and falling over the day/night cycle. The other has a period of 1 year and corresponds to the average heat changing through the seasons. Clearly this approximation is quite rough, but we can take it as a starting point for some mathematical spelunking of our own. (tags: science physics thermo math education blogs built-on-facts) Gravity, evolution, and a peek at Bill Maher : Thoughts…

I'm heading to the airport right after my second class today (I'm doing two weeks of our first-year seminar class), to appear at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. This promises to be a good event-- I had a great time at the Science in the 21st Century workshop last fall, and they've got a great program lined up for the festival. I'm most likely going to attend tonight's tv broadcast, and tomorrow's "Quantum Physics in 60 Minutes" lecture (I have a professional interest in seeing how the competition does things), but I'm making the trip in order to appear…

You sometimes hear people say that it's good to make a splash when embarking on a new media project. David Sloan Wilson has apparently taken this to heart, and tucks himself into a tight ball as he leaps off the high board into the ScienceBlogs pool: Thinking of science as a religion that worships truth as it god enables me to praise its virtues and criticize its shortcomings at the same time. In my previous blogs, I have played the role of scientific reformer for two major issues. The first is the "new atheism" movement spearheaded by the so-called four horsemen: Richard Dawkins, Daniel…

An Inside Look at the Physics GRE | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine "I am sworn to secrecy about a lot of the details, for good reason, but let me try to tell you from my perspective as an exam writer how to study for this dreaded event in your physics education." (tags: science physics academia education blogs cosmic-variance) Living Like Fitzgerald « Whatever "To flag my own genre here, "Six cents a word," should sound vaguely familiar to science fiction and fantasy writers, as that's the current going rate at the "Big Three" science fiction magazines here in the US: Analog (which…

"Hey, SteelyKid, whatcha doin'?" "Nothin'. You know, hangin' out." "'S'cool." Just 63 weeks old, and already she's got the exaggerated casual thing down... Happily, she's not too cool to occasionally pose with her father: She's a great big baby, but she's still small to me.

This year's DonorsChoose challenge is doing pretty well, with the total standing at a bit over $2,200. Thanks to all who have donated thus far. There's a new development in this year's challenge, which is that Hewlett-Packard is going to donate $200,000 to DonorsChoose, which will be divided among Social Media Challenge blogs in proportion to each blog's share of the total Challnge proceeds. Currently, the Social Media Challenge as a whole has raised $250,000. Which means that the Uncertain Principles challenge is in line to get just under 1% of HP's donation, or not quite $2,000. That's…

I've been buried in lab grading for a lot of this week, but I'm finally down to the last few stragglers. The experience has me thinking a bit about what we're doing here, and talking to people in other departments, and it seems like a good question for my wise and worldly readers. At the moment, we run on 10-week terms, and in a ten-week term, we typically do seven labs (the other three are canceled to make time for exams, or to avoid doing labs in the first or last week of the term. Some fraction of those seven labs are full formal reports, with an abstract, introduction, procedure, results…

I've been up late all this week grading things, and I have lab all morning, so I'm not going to do any detailed blogging about subtle aspects of physics. So here's something from the pop culture side: I was listening to Bill Simmons's ESPN podcast with Chuck Klosterman yesterday, and at one point, they talk about the question of what modern act will be deemed sufficiently old and safe to play the Super Bowl halftime show. Klosterman has some amusing things to say, but this also seems like a perfect topic for a blog poll: Who will play the Super Bowl halftime show in 2020?(polls) Klosterman…

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: What to Expect: The Third Decade. "By thirty-years-old, your adult will probably be able to... Feed and maintain a house pet, Hold down a job, Maintain eye contact while speaking, Refrain from discussing high school, Cook a meal (three-course), Make small talk, Forgive his family, Acknowledge other viewpoints (social), Detect and respond to ambiguity, Finish school" (tags: psychology kid-stuff silly) Physics Buzz: Theater for physics fans, and physics for the rest of us "Brad Carroll, a professor of physics and chair of the physics department at Weber State…

As mentioned on Twitter, I spent much of yesterday reading and rating a huge number of grant proposals. As such, I've looked at a lot of CV's and resumes, and the contrast is striking. People who work in industry tend to use a resume format that is mostly just a list of jobs and degrees, while academics... well, we do go on. "CV" stands for "curriculum vitae" which is Latin for "every damn thing I've done in my life." It's a much more comprehensive listing than you find on a corporate resume, including not just the important events and publications of a person's career, but everything. Where…

Chairs : The Quantum Pontiff "Michael Green is the new Lucasian chair of Mathematics replacing the esteemed Stephen Hawking. Green helped sparked the great optimism in string theory by discovering with John Schwarz the Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation mechanism. Elsewhere, the Perimeter Institute has named ten new distinguished research chairs, among them a host of the quantum computing afflicted" (tags: science academia physics quantum blogs pontiff) FemaleScienceProfessor: On Not Being There "It can be difficult to balance a typical research university professor teaching load with a…