This was delayed a day by yesterday's ranting, but I wanted to explain the significance of the people in Monday's lesser-known quantum mechanic smackdown. I'm happy to see that, as of this morning, three candidates have rallied past the "unique flower" option. In reverse order of popularity: Hendrik Kramers was a Dutch physicist who spent a long time working as a student and assistant to Bohr, and thus was involved in a lot of the early attempts to make a working quantum theory. He's best known for work in condensed matter physics, and for being the "K" in the WKB approximation. Arnold…

Pimp My Novel: Self-Publishing: Great Idea... or Worst Idea Ever? "Very occasionally, a self-published novel will be something that was somehow overlooked by the publishing industry as a whole and is actually quite good and/or salable. 99%+ of the time, however, these books are either written by the functionally illiterate, are tangled messes of inane plot and one-dimensional characters, do not appeal to the vast majority of readers, are way too long or way too short, or some combination of all of these. In short, most self-published novels are crap." (tags: books publishing writing…

As a veteran of Usenet, I've only grudgingly come to accept the practice of putting all responses to an email in a lump at the top, with the quoted text below. I much prefer to have the responses interleaved with the original points being responded to. I've pretty clearly lost this one, though, and I've learned to live with it. One consequence of this practice that continues to drive me nuts, though, is the way that people have become conditioned to believe that nothing below the first quote header exists. This is exacerbated by things like GMail, which explicitly hides quoted text. Thus, I'm…

It's probably a good thing that I don't have full-text access to Mark Slouka's article in Harper's, with the title "Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school." Just the description in this Columbia Journalism Review piece makes me want to hunt down the author and belt him with a Norton anthology: According to the article itself, the dehumanizing element of the school system (especially universities) is actually its focus on producing businesspeople and "ensuring that the United States does not fall from its privileged perch in the global economy." But "nothing speaks more clearly to…

Infinite Summer » Blog Archive » Join the Tunnel Club "It's decision time now, though (it takes at least a month to line up Guides, guests, and so forth). And while I continue to have no solid plan, I am slowly tumbling to the realization that I am going to continue the site, at least for a while. Right now I'm trying to figure out what direction to go after IJ. I am well aware that Infinite Jest is a unique artifact, and that Infinite Summer may implode without it at the core. That said, it seems to me there are a few distinct paths the site could take from here:: (tags: books literature…

One of the nice things about being a parent is getting to introduce SteelyKid to my own obsessions. Like, for example, the great game of basketball: "You want me to throw this how high?" Maybe we'll stick with something a little smaller for now: (Hey to Todd Clark, who gave us the toy hoop...)

SteelyKid's day care is closed today, meaning that I will be spending the day chasing her in circles in a variety of different places. this doesn't allow a lot of blogging time, so you get a poll to pass the time. We'll go back to the historical physics thing for this one. The following poll lists a bunch of less-well-known physicists (that is, not Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Pauli, etc.) who contributed to the development of quantum mechanics. Which of them was the best? Which of these less-well-known quantum pioneers was the best?(surveys) While these are quantum pioneers, we're still…

LOLSaints | Saints with a Smile Even religious iconography can be improved by strategic misspelled text. (tags: religion blogs culture silly pictures art history) Making Light: Flash of insight: swift, blinding, pointless "Saints were the Pokémon of the Middle Ages." (tags: history culture art religion television games kid-stuff silly making-light) Flickr Photo Download: Mythical Creatures Categorized in convenient Venn diagram form. (tags: animals art history science biology silly sf pictures)

I finished re-reading Infinite Jest this week. I'm a few weeks ahead of the Infinite Summer crowd, which is a little frustrating, because I really want to see what they say about the later bits, but they won't get there for a while yet. Anyway, this is a tough book to summarize, because it's both a very large book, and a very expansive one. You could write elevator pitches about it that would put it in a bunch of different genres-- thriller (terrorists and government agents search for a movie that destroys the brain of anybody who watches it), school story (dope-smoking tennis prodigies try…

Here's some cute to get your Sunday off to a good start: the first 55 weeks of Thursday Baby Blogging pictures strung together into a movie showing the growth of SteelyKid: (Thursday of week 20 was Christmas Day, and there are limits to even my geekery. I don't know what happened to Week 41.) It's really pretty amazing to watch them all together like that...

SteelyKid shows off the latest in clothes for geeky toddlers: It's not really the official Twitter logo bird, but it's pretty close. After this was taken, we spent a good half hour playing a rousing game of "Clueless Mail Carrier": She picked up the padded shipping envelope that the memory card for my camera came in, and walked around and around the house with it, setting it down, picking it back up, and occasionally stopping to squint at the label like she was trying to read the address. It was great fun. (Whatever works, man...)

The Corporate Masters are considering some steps to take ScienceBlogs more in a community/ social network/ Web 3.14/ whatever direction, and have asked us our opinions of various potential features. I have opinions on the subject, but they're ultimately less important than the opinions of you, the readers. So here's an attempt to generate some reasonably concise feedback (all of the proposed features would be totally optional-- they're not talking about mandatory registration, and I will fight it tooth and nail if they do): Which of the following community features would improve the…

slacktivist: Vincible GooFiness "Set aside the edges of the bell curve -- the innocent fools and the diabolical Becks and Limbaughs and the rest of their kind. The vast, vincible middle is constituted of people who, like the GooFies, are to some degree simultaneously innocent victims and deliberate charlatans, simultaneously deceived and deceiver. They don't know any better because they have decided not to know any better. They ought to know better. And they need to know better. What they require, in other words, is both liberation and repentance. The former must be extended to them. The…

The Female Science Professor is thinking about what advisors owe their students: When I got my PhD and went out into the great big academic world, I felt that I had the respect of my adviser, but I knew not to expect anything more from him in the way of support in my career other than the standard recommendation letter. I never minded because he was that way with all of his students. He had a sink-or-swim philosophy of advising, and this continued after students graduated. Now that I am an adviser with former students of my own, I think his approach makes some sense because it is a very fair…

Dave Munger on Twitter drew my attention to this blog post on college costs, and I really wish he hadn't. The post in question is really just a recap-with-links of an editorial by John Zmirak, blaming the high cost of college on an unlikely source: [W]hat if universities began to neglect this basic charge, and instead turned into featherbedding, unionized factories that existed to protect their overpaid workers -- who were impossible to fire? What if these factories botched the items customers paid for, and spent their energy generating oddball inventions no one wanted? That is exactly what…

Roger Ebert's Journal: Archives "In my case, I haven't taken a drink for 30 years, and this is God's truth: Since the first A.A. meeting I attended, I have never wanted to. Since surgery in July of 2006 I have literally not been able to drink at all. Unless I go insane and start pouring booze into my g-tube, I believe I'm reasonably safe. So consider this blog entry what A.A. calls a "12th step," which means sharing the program with others. There's a chance somebody will read this and take the steps toward sobriety." (tags: drugs booze blogs movies psychology medicine) Infinite Summer »…

SteelyKid says "Pose with Appa? No way! I'm a baby on the go!" I actually did get a couple of reasonable Appa-for-scale shots (one is below the fold), but I like the action quality of this one. It's an accurate representation of what she's like at the moment, too. I'm already up to 178 pictures on the new camera, and while many of those are just repeated shots of the same objects with different camera settings, to see what the new camera can do, you can bet there will be a bunch of baby pictures turning up here in the next week or two...

I'm feeling slightly better, but still a little wobbly, so here's what may be the dorkiest Dorky Poll yet: How do you like your quantum mechanics?(trends)

One of the most remarkable things I've ever seen was the posthumous rehabilitation of Richard Nixon about fifteen years ago. Here was a man who resigned as President before Congress could throw him out, whose whole term in office was characterized by an all-consuming arrogance and a contempt for the law that wouldn't be matched for at least thirty years, and yet all the news-network obituaries somehow managed to airbrush that out, and talked about his greatness as a statesman, etc. It was bad enough that Hunter Thompson's over-the-top anti-eulogy was actually kind of refreshing. The only…

Why Our Analemma Looks like a Figure 8 : Starts With A Bang "We got a good number of thoughtful comments, many of which are on the right track, and many of which have some misconceptions. Let's clear them up, and then let's give you the explanation of what gives us our figure 8, and why other planets make other shapes." (tags: science astronomy blogs starts-with-bang) Are recent developments in scholarly communication relevant to undergraduates? « the Undergraduate Science Librarian "I am very excited about these changes, and I spend some of my time checking out real-time science blogs…