drorzel | August 20, 2009I tagged Steinn's post on publishing a comment a few days ago, because I thought it was pretty funny. In the interim, it's been picked up by the usual suspects as more evidence of the need to completely discard the current publishing model in favor of something more blog-like.
None of the subsequent discussion has answered what, to me, seems like the most obvious problem with the original story. Namely, why the insistence on publishing this as a Comment in the first place? I mean, here's the start of the saga:
1. Read a paper in the most prestigious journal in your field that "proves" that…
drorzel | August 20, 2009
Cosmological Gravitational Radiation : Dynamics of Cats
Steinn explains what the LIGO null results mean
(tags: science astronomy cosmology blogs cat-dynamics)
PaulCornell.com: Thirty Comics for Hugo Voters
"The Hugo Awards for 2009 are going to be presented at the World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne in September next year. The Best Graphic Story category is only a year old, and I think SF fans might benefit from a broad brush introduction to some of the many comics out there that they might consider nominating. I'd like this to be the first of many such articles, from many…
drorzel | August 19, 2009Kate recently signed up for Facebook, and I was talking to her earlier about some of the options for wasting tons of time entertaining yourself with Facebook, and mentioned the ever-popular trivia quizzes and "personality tests" and the like. Of course, I had to caution her that most of the quizzes are really lame, because the people making them up don't know how to make a good quiz.
Making up good questions is a skill that takes time to master. The key elements that the people behind most Facebook quizzes are missing are good distractors-- the plausible-sounding wrong answers that lead…
drorzel | August 19, 2009The results, however, are amusing for the rest of us:
It's nice to see somebody in a safe district taking advantage of essentially having tenure. We could use more of this.
drorzel | August 19, 2009
Regifting Robin. How does it work? | Dot Physics
The simple math behind a silly game.
(tags: science blogs math silly dot-physics)
As 81-year-old Mubarak heads to Washington, Egyptians wonder about their leader's health -- latimes.com
An update from Uncertain Principles Senior Middle East Correspondent Paul Schemm.
(tags: news politics world)
Making graphene in a flash - physicsworld.com
"In a video released by the group, brown, transparent sheets of graphite oxide can be seen to blacken and expand, accompanied by a loud popping sound. Huang's team describes the resulting black material…
drorzel | August 18, 2009One of SteelyKid's birthday gifts from my parents was a wheeled wooden penguin on a stick. If you roll it along the ground, the wings flap, with a very satisfying clacking noise. It took SteelyKid a little while to get the hang of it, but she's got the idea now:
Really, I don't have anything to say here, other than "Look at the silly flappy penguin toy!"
drorzel | August 18, 2009One of the blogs I hyped at the science blogging panel at Worldcon was Built on Facts, Matt Springer's blog explaining introductory physics concepts. You might not think that you want to read a blog that goes through freshman physics problems in detail-- I would've been dubious on the concept, had you explained it to me that way-- but it's really excellent stuff.
He's recently completed a series of posts on Maxwell's Equations, with one post for each of the four equations, plus one bringing them all together: Gauss's Law for Magnetism, Gauss's Law for Electricity, Faraday's Law, and the…
drorzel | August 18, 2009The New York Times yesterday had a story with the dramatic headline DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show, explaining that, well, there are nefarious tricks you can pull to falsify DNA evidence, provided you have access to a high-quality biochemical laboratory. The story is a great boon to conspiracy theorists everywhere, especially with this sentence:
Dr. Frumkin is a founder of Nucleix, a company based in Tel Aviv that has developed a test to distinguish real DNA samples from fake ones that it hopes to sell to forensics laboratories.
"See! They're selling fake DNA samples to…
drorzel | August 18, 2009
slacktivist: The IndigNation
"That's an example of what's often missing today in dealing with the IndigNation. These people are offended and outraged and so politicians and journalists respond by trying not to further offend or enrage them. As though that were possible. Indignation is their raison d'etre. They will take offense whether or not it is given. There is no point trying not to offend them. There is no point in trying not to make them angry.
An appropriate response isn't to be more offended or more offensive, but it should involve going on the offense. The IndigNationalists are…
drorzel | August 17, 2009Caught on video:
It's very difficult to decide which of the many, many toys in the toybox is the right toy...
drorzel | August 17, 2009The results of the estimation contest are in. There were 164 serious entries (I excluded the $12,000 and $1,000,000 "guesses" from the final data). The mean value guessed by commenters was $83.30, and the median was not far off, at $77.12. The standard deviation was high-- $43.10-- but as you would expect with a large sample, the standard error (or standard deviation of the mean) was small, $3.37.
Or, in convenient graphical form:
That's a histogram with $20 wide bins showing the number of guesses in a given range. A pretty nice distribution, on the whole.
The red line indicates the actual…
drorzel | August 17, 2009Via I-no-longer-remember-who (the tab's been open for several days), there's a list of What You Might Not Know About Scientific Journals, outlining some of the facts about scientific publication. There's some good stuff, but as you can tell from my title, a lot of it is fairly specific to biomedical journals, and doesn't really apply in my usual context of physics. For example:
The most popular articles in a journal are reviews, editorials, letters, etc. and not research papers. Consequently, journals contain more narrative reviews than genuine research. It's what keeps them in business.
The…
drorzel | August 17, 2009I mentioned a few times that one of our physics graduates from 2008 was spending a year in rural Uganda, working at a clinic and school there as part of a college-run fellowship program (with Engeye Health Clinic. Steve is back in the US now, and headed to graduate school in Seattle in Atmospheric Sciences.
Steve's replacement in Uganda turns out to be another physics major, Tom Perry, who is now in Uganda and blogging about it. This is purely coincidence, by the way-- there's nothing physics-specific about the position, we just happened to have two really good physics majors in consecutive…
drorzel | August 17, 2009
In a Queens Park, Duke Riley Leads a Battle on the Low Seas - NYTimes.com
"This was an art exhibition -- a term that perhaps conjures a more subdued event. But the art in this show, called "Those About to Die Salute You," involved humans in motion, boats on water and those tomatoes. It was the creation of Duke Riley, whose work skews aquatic and unpredictable: He once built a wood and fiberglass submarine, floated it too close to the Queen Mary 2 and was arrested.
His vision for Queens on Thursday night was a Roman-style staged naval battle among representatives of museums in four New York…
drorzel | August 16, 2009As a parent of a newly mobile one-year-old, I have a can't-fail suggestion for a toy product that would fuse two popular technologies: realistic infant simulators (baby dolls that cry, wet themselve, etc.) and vacuum-cleaning robots.
All you need to do is mount a baby doll on a Roomba chassis, and use the same random-walk algorithm they use for the vacuum cleaners. Have the doll wander around completely at random, occasionally bumping into things. Anything small on the floor gets picked up, and stuck in the doll's mouth. For bonus realism points, have it stop at random intervals for no…
drorzel | August 16, 2009
Rick Perlstein -- Birthers, Health Care Hecklers and the Rise of Right-Wing Rage - washingtonpost.com
"The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest."
(tags: politics stupid evil media society culture US)
drorzel | August 15, 2009
Making Light: Panels and parlor games
"So all you lucky devils went to Worldcon and I didn't. And now I get to read panel reports, which are always both fun and tantalizingly vague.
So let's have a game of it. What fictional characters would you put on a panel, what would you have them talk about, and how would the panel go, do you think?"
(tags: SF conventions games blogs making-light)
Alternate history | Books | A.V. Club
"British essayist William Hazlitt once observed that only mankind is capable of noticing the difference between how things are and how they might have been. It's both…
drorzel | August 14, 2009This wooden box sits on top of my dresser, and every afternoon when I come home, I dump the change from my pockets into it. It's getting close to full, as you can see:
I've got a couple of extra galley proofs kicking around, so here's a contest:
Guess the total dollar value of the change in this box.
Leave your guess in the comments. I will take the box to the bank next Monday, and have the change converted to folding money. At that time, the commenter whose guess is the closest to the actual dollar value of the change in the box (above or below) will receive a galley proof copy of How to…
drorzel | August 14, 2009I have a thousand things to do today, and blogging isn't high on the list. So here's a dorky poll to pass the time, because it's been a while:
What's your favorite Law of Thermodynamics?(polls)
We're working in the classical limit, here, so you're not allowed to choose a linear superposition of all four laws. Pick one as your favorite.
drorzel | August 14, 2009A cosmologist, a science writer, three best-selling science fiction authors, a best-selling mystery novelist, and a Nobel laureate walk into a bar--
Oh, wait, that's not the opening to a joke. That's the list of people who have provided blurbs for my book... Kind of an eclectic bunch, but I'm pretty psyched. I'm not quite sure why the final list of blurbs gets locked in this early-- we don't even have the cover copy written yet-- but it's set now, and they look pretty good:
"Chad Orzel teases out the mysterious and seemingly incomprehensible side of advanced physics and makes it…