I've caught the intestinal thing that was making Kate's life miserable the last couple days, and the less said about that the better. Happily, my new camera arrived (Canon Rebel XSi/ 450D), giving me something to play with while I try to remain hydrated. And I have to say, it's a nice new toy: I didn't do anything to that other than cropping and scaling it (4272x2848 pixels being a bit much for the Web), and that turned out nice. I like this toy. Emmy is being remarkably patient with me, as I play with the various settings (of which there are many). The continuous-drive shots will wait until…

Janet is currently exploring the implications of the California university furloughs. If you haven't been paying attention, California is so grossly dysfunctional that the state government has had to order all employees-- including university faculty-- to take 9% of their work time off as unpaid "furlough" days, in order to cut costs enough to have an approximately balanced budget. Janet's comments, and the stories about the impact on scientists reminded me of the Great Government Shutdown of 1995, when I was a grad student working at NIST. That shutdown was the result of a game of "chicken"…

For my birthday, my parents got me two tickets to see Bruce Springsteen play in Saratoga Springs last night. The idea was that Kate and I would go, and they would come up and spend an evening with the grandbaby. Unfortunately, Kate had some sort of intestinal bug (which I now have, joy), and couldn't make it out, so my father came along with me. The show was scheduled for 7:30, and we walked in the gates at about 7:20, having been forced to pay for parking when a traffic cop suddenly declared that the giant empty field for free parking was full, and steered everybody into the $10 lot. The…

News: Flu and Football Season - Inside Higher Ed "Personally, I don't see any major college or professional sporting events being canceled as a result of H1N1," said Bronson Hilliard, a spokesman for the University of Colorado at Boulder, where eight probable cases of the virus have recently been identified. "Right now, the virus is smaller in its impact than the seasonal influenza. I mean, every year we have the seasonal influenza, and we don't cancel basketball games because of it. Still, if we were considering canceling an event, that decision would be made on health considerations for…

I'm doing better today, but still a little wobbly, and trying to conserve my energy for the Bruce Springsteen concert tonight. Thus, a poll: Imagine you have a light switch box containing multiple switches, like to one at right. These switches control lights in adjoining areas of the house-- say, the living room, and the light on the stairs up to the bedrooms. At least one of these switches is part of a pair-- say, there's another switch at the top of the stairs controlling that light. The question is this: when you go to bed at night, turning off all the lights, what should the position of…

NPR last week had a story about the changing kilogram: More than a century ago, a small metal cylinder was forged in London and sent to a leafy suburb of Paris. The cylinder was about the size of a salt shaker and made of an alloy of platinum and iridium, an advanced material at the time. In Paris, scientists polished and weighed it carefully, until they determined that it was exactly one kilogram, around 2.2 pounds. Then, by international treaty, they declared it to be the international standard. Since 1889, the year the Eiffel Tower opened, that cylinder has been the standard against which…

Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Making Lists: Mindblowing SF by Women and People of Color "[S]ince someone always finds a way to claim that they just don't know where to find such or who the women and/or people of color writing in the genre are, I hope that this list will go a long way toward alleviating that problem." (tags: sf race gender blogs tor books literature) Eeyore and the Unintended Consequence « Easily Distracted "I'm all for accepting that the gap between intent and practice will inevitably be quite wide, and that in that gap, all sorts of devils can…

"So what do I need to do, again?" "First, you have to pick a username. So people know who you are." "OK. How about 'Emmy the Magnificent, Queen of Niskayuna and Surrounding Regions.' That should do the job." "Ah, no. That's 64 characters. Nobody would ever reply to you with a username that long. How about 'emmy_orzel'?" "You just want to get your name in there, and hog all the credit. How about 'Queen Emmy'?" "Fine, queen_emmy it is." "OK, so now what? When do I get bunnies?" "What bunnies? It's a Twitter account. There are no bunnies on Twitter." "Birds, then. This will help me catch…

I'm suffering through a wretched cold at the moment, which will limit my blogging activity. If you're looking for something to do, though, you might want to check out the Revolutionary Minds blog set up by the Corporate Masters. This is basically a short-form online version of a feature from Seed, in which they ask smart people to discuss Big Questions-- a more limited version of those Edge questions that John Brockman does every year. The current question is: The boundaries of science are continually expanding as scientists become increasingly integral to finding solutions for larger social…

Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Goodbye, Dortmunder: Donald Westlake's Get Real "There couldn't really be a conclusion to these books -- what could it possibly be? The gang will just keep on forever looking for one more job to keep them going. The regulars in OJs will keep on having their senseless conversations. Dortmunder hasn't aged and now he will never die, because the one person who could have killed him chose to spare him. Dortmunder is immortal now, and in this last adventure, he smiles twice in one day." (tags: books literature mystery crime culture review tor…

Jo Walton has a very nice review of Karl Schroeder's Permanence over at Tor.com, which contains a terrific summary of what makes Schroeder great: The problem with talking about Permanence (2002), or any of Schroeder's work really, is that it's too easy to get caught up in talking about the wonderful ideas and backgrounds and not pay enough attention to the characters and stories. I think Schroeder's one of the best writers to emerge in this century, and his work seems to me to belong to this century, to be using newly discovered science and extrapolating from present technology, not just…

Via Bora on FriendFeed, a cute little art project from MIT that takes a name, scans the Web for mentions of that name, and produces a color-coded bar categorizing the various mentions of that name. Here's what you get if you put my name in: You can click on it for a bigger image, that makes the labels easier to read (these are screencaps edited in GIMP, because in true MIT Media Lab fashion, the whol site is a Flash thing with no way to link directly to anything). It's nice, and all, but there's something a little bit funny about it. Something... missing. Let's see if we can't illuminate the…

Dan Brown tops Oxfam's chart of most-donated books | Books | The Guardian "But as secondhand bookshop shelves flood with battered editions of Angels and Demons and Digital Fortress, Brown can comfort himself with the fact that he's also Oxfam's second most bought author: there are, apparently, still readers out there who have yet to follow the adventures of the dapper symbologist Robert Langdon. There's no such consolation for Grisham, whose legal thrillers fail to make Oxfam's bestseller charts at all." (tags: books literature business silly) A modest proposal for improving football: the…

It's that time of year again, when the US News rankings come out (confirming my undergrad alma mater as the Best in All the Land) and everybody in academia gets all worked up about What It All Means. There are always a few gems in there with all the pointless hand-wringing, though, and Timothy Burke of Swarthmore has some of the best advice you'll ever read on choosing a college: I sometimes join a faculty panel to talk to prospective Swarthmore applicants, and one of the first things that I say is that a college applicant and family can only have strong control over a few really basic…

The Dean Dad had a great post about staff yesterday: Politically, hiring office staff is a harder sell than hiring faculty. Faculty are conspicuous, and the tie to the classroom is obvious. Back-office support staff are inconspicuous, and show up in public discussion as 'overhead' or 'administrative bloat.' But their work is necessary, as anyone whose financial aid package got lost in the shuffle can attest. And the relative lack of romance in back-office work means that good people aren't willing to accept adjunct-level wages to do it; adding staff means full-time salaries with benefits. (…

So, I was checking to see that last night's Baby Blogging post had posted properly, when I noticed something unpleasant in the right column: I recognize that this is the price we pay for being ad-supported, here at ScienceBlogs. It's unreasonable to expect every ad company on the Internet to perfectly screen all their content before serving ads to our blogs, especially given the sheer number of crank ads that are out there. I am within my rights, however, to call out garbage when I see it. Particularly quantum garbage (though I'm no fan of fly-by-night Internet pseudo-universities, either),…

Liberal Arts Rankings - Best Colleges - Education - US News and World Report The annual clown show begins anew. Williams is #1, Union #43, for those who care. (tags: academia education silly us-news) Francis Collins' "Five Themes" for the NIH : Respectful Insolence "In the end, I don't give the proverbial rodential posterior what Francis Collins' religious views are, as long as they don't directly impact NIH science policy, and I see no evidence from his track record that there's any reason to be concerned that he'll be somehow injecting them into the NIH or using them to determine policy…

This week's Baby Blogging breaks new ground: Outdoor Baby Blogging! SteelyKid says "Stop mugging for the camera, Daddy! This is about me!" This picture also serves to show off her new stroller. It's less collapsible than the previous one, but more maneuverable, and has a larger carrying capacity in the bottom bin, which is nice when we take an evening stroll over to the store to get staple foods that are running low. As we did tonight.

I have a bunch of errand-running to do today, so I will leave you with a Dorky Poll question for entertainment, this time regarding the work of the great Sir Isaac Newton: Which of Isaac Newton's Laws is your favorite?(trends) We're still dealing with classical physics, here, so superpositions of results are not allowed. Pick one and only one answer.

... to write a guest post at the Science and Entertainment Exchange blog. So I did, on science communication: I was asked to write a guest-blog post about "increased incentives for scientists to develop their communications skills." I'm happy to oblige, but in typical ornery-blogger fashion, the first thing I want to do is take issue with the question's phrasing. While it's commonly believed that scientists lack communication skills, that's very far from the truth. It is almost impossible to be a successful scientist without also being a good communicator. Communicating results to other…