drorzel | September 30, 2009Over at SciFi Wire, the house magazine of the Polish syphilis channel, Wil McCarthy has a piece with the eye-catching headline "Is Mysticism Overtaking Science in Sci-Fi?"
What really excites me right now--and not in a good way!--is the recent spate of superficially sci-fi movies that are not merely scientifically illiterate, not merely unscientific or antiscientific in their outlook, but that actually promote mysticism as a superior alternative to science.
Leaving aside the irony of this being sponsored by the Dumb-Ass Horror Movie Channel (not that there's anything wrong with dumb-ass…
drorzel | September 30, 2009
Oscar-O-Meterâ¢: The A.V. Club's third annual guide to the fall prestige movies, part one | Film | A.V. Club
"Provided you take our word for it and don't go back into the archives, the A.V. Club's Oscar-O-Meter feature has quickly become the definitive tool for Oscar prognostication. Through a rigorously scientific process, our writers have quantified each prestige movie based on a set of criteria: Is it a literary adaptation? Is it topical without being too controversial? Risky without actually being provocative? Does it feature a star who lost weight, gained weight, or made some sort of…
drorzel | September 29, 2009SteelyKid has a bit of flu, so we're all a little discombobulated in Chateau Steelypips. I'm going to be trying to get a full day's worth of work before noon, which won't leave room for much blogging.
But here's something for you to think about/ comment on: the day after tomorrow is October 1, which means another year's DonorsChoose blogger challenge. Last year, I famously got $6,000 in contributions by offering to dance like a monkey, but I'm not sure what would follow that. So,
What should I offer to do if I manage to reach the overall challenge goal of several thousand dollars in total…
drorzel | September 29, 2009I've grown thoroughly disgusted with most of the science-vs-religion stuff in blogdom, mostly because my views on the matter are kind of moderate, and don't fit well with the rather extreme positions taken by most of the bloggers and commenters who focus on this issue. This dooms me to either being ignored, or called names as some sort of collaborator, and I have better ways to spend my time, so I've pretty much given up on being an active part of those... discussions.
I do occasionally feel guilty, though, as if I'm letting down my side (well, my part of the squishy middle) by not speaking…
drorzel | September 29, 2009
YouTube - LittleDog Clips and Outtakes
Very cool walking robot footage.
(tags: robots video youtube technology gadgets science)
Essay - Why Good Writers Can Be Bad Conversationalists - NYTimes.com
"Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I'm writing. I don't claim this merely because there is usually no one around to observe the false starts and groan-inducing sentences that make a mockery of my presumed intelligence, but because when the work is going well, I'm expressing opinions that I've never uttered in conversation and that…
drorzel | September 28, 2009This book is, in some ways, a complement to Unscientific America. Subtitled "Talking Substance in an Age of Style," this is a book talking about what scientists need to do to improve the communication of science to the general public. This is not likely to make as big a splash in blogdom as Unscientific America, though, both because Randy has generally been less aggressive in arguing with people on blogs, and also because while he says disparaging things about science blogs, he doesn't name names, so nobody is likely to get their feelings hurt.
Olson is a scientist-turned filmmaker, who…
drorzel | September 28, 2009It's that time of year again, when the Nobel Prizes are announced-- the official announcements will be made starting next Monday. And, as usual, people are speculating about who will win, on both an amateur and professional basis.
Meanwhile, as we've done in the past, I will offer a valuable prize to anyone who predicts the winners of any of this year's Nobel prizes:
Leave a comment on this post predicting the winner(s) of one of this year's Nobel Prizes. Anyone who correctly picks both the field and the laureate will win a guest-post spot on this blog.
Rules and conditions are the same as…
drorzel | September 28, 2009
Smarter people go to college, so average university students less intelligent? : Gene Expression
"Remember that a substantial proportion of college graduates are less intelligent than a substantial proportion of those without college degrees. While the proportion of the population with college degrees increased, and that increase was disproportionately from the higher end of the distribution, it was not such perfect sorting. "
(tags: social-science education academia blogs)
Sex, Drugs, Music, Mud
"I was slightly disappointed to be missing Woodstock until the nightly news reported that it…
drorzel | September 27, 2009There has been a fair amount of discussion of Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom-- Peter Woit reviewed it on his blog, the New York Times reviewed it a couple of Sundays ago, Barnes and Noble's online review did a piece on it, etc.. Nearly all of the press has been positive, and while it's taken me a while to work my way through the book, that's entirely a function of having a day job and a baby. The book itself is excellent, and kept me reading alter than I should've several times, which is not something I can say about a lot of biographies…
drorzel | September 27, 2009
Fantastical Conceits and Turbulent Souls - The Barnes & Noble Review
"[O]ne of the field's premier independent publishers, NESFA Press, has just embarked on a six-volume set, The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, consolidating all of Zelazny's fiction shy of novel length, as well as all his poems and non-fiction, chronologically sorted. (Available now, Volume One is titled Threshold and Volume Two is Power & Light. ) Story notes and annotations, as well as fresh biographical and critical matter, round out the enterprise, which resurrects many obscure minor gems in addition to the…
drorzel | September 26, 2009
Zoom-Whirl Orbits in Black Hole Binaries
Title of the week from PRL.
(tags: science physics articles theory gravity)
Phase-Slip Interferometry for Precision Force Measurements
"We demonstrate a novel atom interferometric force sensor based on phase slips in the dynamic evolution of a squeezed-state array of degenerate 87Rb atoms confined in a one-dimensional optical lattice. The truncated Wigner approximation is used to model our observations."
(tags: science articles physics atoms optics low-temperature experiment theory precision-measurement)
Bose-Einstein Condensation of Alkaline…
drorzel | September 25, 2009So, who are the people in yesterday's poll about theoretical physicists, and why should you know them?
Three of the four shared a Nobel Prize for developing quantum electrodynamics. In reverse order of voting:
Julian Schwinger was an American physicist who came up with a very formal, mathematically rigorous way of describing the behavior of electrons interacting with light. This turns out to be a hard problem, because any attempt to calculate an electron's energy by simple, straightforward means ends up giving an infinite answer. Schwinger helped "renormalize" the theory, getting rid of the…
drorzel | September 25, 2009We're working on moving SteelyKid from formula to milk (which isn't going all that well-- dairy seems to make her gassy). This has led me to switch over to cereal in the mornings, since we're buying milk anyway, which frees up the time otherwise spent waiting for the toaster.
Cereal-wise, I tend to alternate between Cheerios (which we also buy for SteelyKid) and Raisin Bran-- my parents never bought sugary breakfast cereal, so I never developed a taste for any of those things. Being the ridiculous geek that I am, I've noticed something about the relative amounts of milk and cereal I use for…
drorzel | September 25, 2009
The Microhistorical Unknown « Easily Distracted
"One thing that frustrates me at times about "big history", world history or large-scale historical sociology is the extent to which historians writing in those traditions tend to assume that it's turtles all the way down, that the insights of big history extend symmetrically to the smallest scales of human life, that microhistory contains no surprises or contradictions for the macrohistorian. "
(tags: humanities history blogs easily-distracted society culture)
Confessions of a Community College Dean: The White Glove Test
"I'm thinking it…
drorzel | September 24, 2009SteelyKid says, "Daaaad! This is no time for Baby Blogging!"
"Appa and I are reading Dinosaur vs. Bedtime. Come back and take a picture later!"
SteelyKid has started to get interested in books, though as you can tell from the orientation of this one, she doesn't exactly have the reading thing down. She loves turning pages, though, and looking at the pictures.
Sadly, she also loves to crinkle the pages up, and try to rip them out. This copy of Dinosaur vs. Bedtime is down a page or two already. She'll learn, though.
drorzel | September 24, 2009I'm nearly done with Graham Farmelo's biography of Dirac (honest), which discusses the major attempts to understand the behavior of electrons in quantum mechanics. this calls for a dorky poll:
Which theorist of the electron was the best?(poll)
Try not to base your selection on which of these historical physicists has the best biography written about them.
drorzel | September 24, 2009One of the photo caption contest winners, Nick O'Neill, has finished his galley proof, and posted an early review of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
Casual physics intro books are quite possibly the hardest subgenre of physics books to write. Textbooks and further upper-level reading have expectations both of what you already know and how quickly you should pick up new material. Generally, those who pour through these types of books will read and reread until they've figured things out, regardless of how well the text actually explains things. Casual intro books, on the other hand, exist…
drorzel | September 24, 2009
$6/Kg to orbit -- KarlSchroeder.com
"The fact is, there is only one problem worth speaking about in space development, and that is the problem of cost-to-orbit. It currently costs around $10,000/kg to launch anything at all.
That price will never come down as long as chemical rockets are the only technology we use. "
(tags: space economics science technology blogs karl-schroeder)
The Real Cost of Medmal | Mother Jones
"Unfortunately, the real problem with our medical malpractice system isn't that it costs too much. The real problem is that it's a lottery. Some people get money they…
drorzel | September 23, 2009I usually try to stay out of religious wars, but there's one that is affecting my teaching this term, and it struck me as a good topic for a blog poll:
Which do you prefer for low-tech presentations?(surveys)
So, what's your favorite low-tech presentation technology?
drorzel | September 23, 2009
Infinite Summer » Blog Archive » Summer's End Roundtable, Part I
"How about that ending, huh? "
(tags: books literature blogs infinite-summer)
US LHC Blog » Relationships in Physics Graduate School
"Doing a quick poll of graduate students in our department showed the following:
* Atomic Physics: 5/10 grad students are married (2 of those have kids)
* Particle Physics (CMS group): 1/10 grad students are married (none of those have kids)"
(tags: science physics atoms particles silly academia)
Physics Buzz: Is a Nobel laureate smarter than a fifth grader?
"George Smoot, a UC…