drorzel | September 16, 2009Alternate title: Notes Toward a Taxonomy of Bad Meetings.
The Meta-Meeting: Your organization faces problems X, Y, and Z. Therefore, you are planning an all-day workshop on addressing X, Y, and Z. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: To have a meeting about how to organize the workshop to address X, Y, and Z, without talking about how to address X, Y, and Z.
The Required-By-Statute Meeting: Your organization needs to change the official written procedure for Process A, to match the way you have actually been doing Process A for the last N years. Everybody is happy with how Process A…
drorzel | September 16, 2009
Infinite Summer » Blog Archive » Sincerely Yours, David Foster Wallace
"[F]rom where I now stand-9/10ths of the way through and surveying the path I have trod thus far-it now seems obvious to me what the book is "about". Infinite Jest is a novel about sincerity.107
The question now becomes: why does it take so long to realize this? Surely this does not reflect well on Wallace, that he so thoroughly buried the lede that someone could abandon the tome 800 pages in and still not know the point. In fact, it seems as though those with only a superficial knowledge of the book-having read only…
drorzel | September 15, 2009In reading a theoretical paper on electric dipole moments (well, OK, skimming through it looking for numbers), I ran across several Feynman diagrams with an "X" on one of the particle arrows. The caption contains the presumably-intended-to-be-helpful note "The cross denotes a mass insertion."
I have no idea what that means, and neither does the local person I ask to help me interpret such things. None of the undergrad-level nuclear/ particle texts we looked at contained an explanation, either.
This almost certainly means that it is some subtle technical point that is vastly beyond the level…
drorzel | September 15, 2009The ArXiV Blog and several other sources last week linked to a new paper titled Towards Quantum Superposition of Living Organisms:
The most striking feature of quantum mechanics is the existence of superposition states, where an object appears to be in different situations at the same time. Up to now, the existence of such states has been tested with small objects, like atoms, ions, electrons and photons, and even with molecules. Recently, it has been even possible to create superpositions of collections of photons, atoms, or Cooper pairs. Current progress in optomechanical systems may soon…
drorzel | September 15, 2009We'll keep up the chemical theme that we've been following lately with another Dorky Poll to pass the time while I'm in lab all morning. We're not going to do all of the columns of the periodic table (does anybody really have a favorite transition metal?), but a couple more demand opinions. So, what's your favorite halogen?
What's your favorite halogen?(poll)
Your opinion is important to us. Please choose only one.
drorzel | September 15, 2009
Fafblog! the whole world's only source for Fafblog.
""Giblets is detached," says Giblets. "Where is the warmth of the heart of the fiery fires of the human experience? Giblets demands more feeling!"
"And though their love was deep and fierce and right and true it was doomed from the start," says me, "for she was only a lowly scullery maid, and he had been trampled to death by elephants.""
(tags: fafblog silly stories blogs)
Pricing the Priceless Class « Easily Distracted
"I think every academic I know agrees that in the last instance, how much it costs to teach in a particular way or to…
drorzel | September 14, 2009Over at the Science and Entertainment Exchange, they have a nice post about the Darwin movie, which also appears in today's Links Dump, with John Scalzi addressing the putative controversy about the movie's distribution. John's suggestion for how to attract major US distribution-- Will Smith, explosions, and Jennifer Connelly's breasts-- reminded me of The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin, a movie that figures prominently in Robert Charles Wilson's latest:
Act One was called Homology and it dealt with Darwin's youth. In this Act young Darwin meets the girl with…
drorzel | September 14, 2009Over in Twitter-land, Eric Weinstein is visiting the AMNH at the same time as a bunch of Orthodox Jews, and takes the opportunity for a little Q&A:
Me: Excuse me, but how is the phylogenetic tree reconciled with Torah.
Modern Orthodox Man: Lorentzian time dilation. It's a head hurter.
This is an interesting attempt to square the six-day creation story with modern science, and raises one obvious question: How fast must God have been moving for the six days of creation to last 13.7 billion years?
This is veering into Built on Facts territory, but the relevant formula is:
For six days (5.…
drorzel | September 14, 2009
They Should Have Called It "Darwin: The Revengination" « Whatever
"Maybe if Charles Darwin were played by Will Smith, was a gun-toting robot sent back from the future to learn how to love, and to kill the crap out of the alien baby eaters cleverly disguised as Galapagos tortoises, and then some way were contrived for Jennifer Connelly to expose her breasts to RoboDarwin two-thirds of the way through the film, and there were explosions and lasers and stunt men flying 150 feet into the air, then we might be talking wide-release from a modern major studio. Otherwise, you know, not so much.…
drorzel | September 13, 2009Dan Meyer, like most people, has long wondered whether there was a good way to predict which check-out line at the grocery store will be the fastest. Unlike most people, he used science to find an answer: "I spent ninety minutes last week just watching, counting, and timing groceries as they slid across a scanner." This produced a graph showing a roughly linear relationship between items in a cart and time spent checking out.
The conclusion: Each item adds 2.9 seconds on average, but each person adds 48 seconds on average. So you would rather be on line behind one person with a full cart than…
drorzel | September 13, 2009
A Smoove Evening | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
"The plan to seduce Michelle Obama in both body and soul has also not moved forward during the last few months. She and her people have stopped returning Smoove's phone calls, and his letters, and the elaborately arranged fruit sculptures he has assembled from the earth's most exotic produce.
Also, I think I am on some kind of FBI watch list now. "
(tags: onion silly sex)
YouTube - I Am a Paleontologist - They Might Be Giants with Danny Weinkauf
Because dinosaurs are awesome.
(tags: dinosaurs music video youtube kid-stuff)…
drorzel | September 12, 2009I almost forgot about yesterday's anniversary-- I didn't think of it at all until the fulsome tribute before Thursday night's football game. I actually waffled for a bit about whether to put up the annual moment-of-silence post. It's been eight years, everybody's concerns have shifted to other things, and September 11, 2001 doesn't loom quite as large as it did a few years ago.
I decided to go with it, though, for the same reasons as always. How long will I keep doing this yearly? Probably until this stops making me cry. Gonna be a few years yet...
Screw this depressing stuff. Here's a happy…
drorzel | September 12, 2009
Sorority Row | Film | A.V. Club
"Late in the dire college slasher flick Sorority Row, the killer takes some time away from impaling hateful victims to explain why the world will be a better place without all the awful people who didn't survive the movie. And you know what? The psychopath has a point. Nobody in Sorority Row has a shred of decency--it's like the school from The Rules Of Attraction with a lobotomy and a botched boob job--so the maniac in the black robe can't help but emerge as the sole sympathetic character by bumping off soulless sorority sisters one by one, mercifully…
drorzel | September 11, 2009
slacktivist: Vampires & crosses
"Most vampires don't believe in the cross, but that hardly matters. It's the idea of the thing that gives them fits. The cross confronts vampires with their opposite -- with the rejection of power and its single-minded pursuit. It suggests that no one is to be treated as prey -- not even an enemy. The idea of the cross, in other words, suggests that vampires have it wrong, that they have it backwards, in fact, and that those others they regard as prey are actually, somehow, winning.
This notion is incomprehensible for vampires. The one thing they're…
drorzel | September 10, 2009SteelyKid is cutting a couple of molars at the moment, and Cathy at day care mentioned that she was getting some relief by using a pretzel rod as a sort of edible teether that could reach all the way to the back of her mouth. So we picked some up, and they've been a big hit. Here we see SteelyKid offering to share her pretzel with Appa:
Cathy did also mention that the eating of a pretzel was a long and messy process. And really, you have to see it to understand. Still, it makes her happy, and we don't argue with a happy baby...
drorzel | September 10, 2009A couple of things that I'm not excited to blog about, but sort of feel like I ought to say something about:
1) The Washington Monthly article about StraighterLine, an online program that lets you take college courses for $99/mo. The article is all breathless excitement about the revolutionary transformative power of technology, but it leaves me cold.
The stories of working people putting themselves through accelerated degree programs through self-study are inspiring, and all, but there's nothing really new here. There has never really been any question about whether hard-working and…
drorzel | September 10, 2009
NASA Unveils Images From Repaired Hubble Telescope - NYTimes.com
"Dr. Weiler noted that the telescope was now in the best shape of its 19-year life in orbit, far surpassing the ambitions of its founders, and that it could last for at least another five years.
"Hubble gets better and better and better," he said."
(tags: science astronomy space news overbye)
Clip-Clopping Across the Bridge « Easily Distracted
"A lot of folks back then disagreed with my point, saying that there was no surer way to check the influence of the fringes than to expose and mock their craziness. Can I just ask:…
drorzel | September 9, 2009One of the odd things about the C-list celebrity life of a semi-pro blogger is that I get a bunch of requests to review books on physics-related topics. Some of these take the form of a book showing up out of the blue, others are preceded by a polite request from the author. Aaron Santos's How Many Licks? is one of the latter, which helps bump it up the list of things to do...
This is a short little book-- 176 pages total-- built around the idea of Fermi Problems, the order-of-magnitude estimates that Enrico Fermi was famous for. The idea is that, with a little basic knowledge and some really…
drorzel | September 9, 2009The Dean Dad and the Tenured Radical are having a really good discussion of service responsibilities, or as TR puts it, the "Just Say No" problem:
The Just Say No (to everyone but me) issue is a problem that, frankly, untenured people, adjuncts and visitors are not responsible for managing; and that achieving tenure can make worse, not better. If you belong to the untenured masses, it is not unreasonable -- nor does it represent a failure of maturity -- to choose a senior colleague, even better the department or program chair, to help you manage the demands on your time. How many advisees is…