This isn't actually about a literal or metaphorical smackdown-- it's more about a distinction in language, related to a number of the comments that have been made regarding Unscientific America. (Yeah, I know. I'll find something else to talk about soon.) The issue is most clearly laid out by Janet, who writes: In addition to the research, the grant writing, the manuscript drafting, the student training, the classroom teaching, the paper and grant refereeing, and the always rewarding committee work, academic scientists should be working hard to communicate with the public, to generate their…

The most unfortunate thing about the furor over Unscientific America is that the vast majority of the shouting concerns a relatively small portion of the actual argument of the book. Far too much attention is being spent on the question of whether Chris and Sheril are fair to Myers and Dawkins, and not nearly enough is spent on the (to my mind more important) sections about political and media culture. Which is a shame, because unlike most bloggers, they make some fairly concrete suggestions about what ought to be done to address the problems they describe. In particular, they make a fairly…

Bad Boys | Film | A.V. Club "From this rich central dynamic, all manner of hilarity springs. Smith is fastidious about the upkeep of his expensive sports car. Lawrence is a slob who gets his messy hamburger all over its glistening interior! How will they ever be able to work together? My curiosity was piqued! Incidentally, since Iâm writing about Michael Bay, I feel it is only appropriate to use as many exclamation points as possible, in a futile attempt to convey the mind-bogglingly extreme and in-your-face nature of Bayâs work. Whose face is Bay in? Mine. Yours. Societyâs." (tags: movies…

I am a fan of the New York Giants. I believe that they can win every game they play. I hope that they will win every game that they play. I get emotionally involved in their games to such a degree that my heart pounds and I get short of breath when they face a critical play in the fourth quarter. I yell at the tv, though I know that they can't hear me. When something goes wrong, I will punch things and curse. When they win, I will stay up late to watch highlights of a game I just watched. I will re-arrange my schedule so as to be able to watch their games as they happen. If I can't manage…

I've sometimes seen it said that in order to have a productive discussion, people on both sides need to be willing to change their minds. I think that's probably slightly overdetermined-- you can find examples of cases in which neither side was going to change, but they managed to sustain a mutually beneficial dialogue all the same. The physics example that comes to mind is Bohr and Einstein, who spent decades arguing with each other over the philosophical basis of quantum theory, but were nonetheless good friends. They pushed each other, forcing each of them to refine their arguments and…

Yesterday's Michelson Interferometer quiz was surprisingly popular-- as of 8:30 pm Tuesday (when I'm writing this), just under 1500 people have voted in the poll, three and a half times as many as in the next most popular poll I've done. Who says there's no audience for physics? So, what's the right answer, you ask? The correct answer finished a distant second (as of 8:30 it has 21% of the votes, to 52% for the leading wrong answer). The answer is that the light goes back where it came from. Bob Hawkins and MattXIV have the right explanation: on the return trip, half of each beam goes to the…

There was a bunch of discussion yesterday about a graph comparing the amount of money spent on veterinary expenses over the last twenty-odd years to the amount spent on human health care over that same span: There were a lot of dumb things said about this, but really, the worst part of the whole thing is that it's amazingly badly done. You've got the two series represented by different types of plot, gridlines for one vertical scale but not the other, the year labels floating in space down at the bottom, not associated with the tick marks in any obvious way... This is the work of a…

funny-pictures-cat-upsets-your-gravity.jpg (JPEG Image, 500x398 pixels) Finally, the problem with quantum gravity is revealed. (tags: pictures silly animals internet physics gravity quantum) Robert Wright: Why the "New Atheists" are Right-Wing on Foreign Policy "It must strike progressive atheists as a stroke of bad luck that Christopher Hitchens, leading atheist spokesperson, happens to have hawkish views on foreign policy. After all, with atheists an overwhelmingly left-wing group, what were the chances that the loudest infidel in the western world would happen to be on the right?…

It's been a while since I posted an update on the status of the book-in-production. Things are moving along-- the second (and hopefully final) pass proofs are in the mail now, and assuming those are ok, that's about it for the text. Then it's just a matter of waiting. I asked a friend at work who does photography on the side to take some pictures for possible use as an author photo, and he came through with some great shots of me and Emmy talking about physics: (The books were chosen to be amusing to the half-dozen people who will recognize them.) As you can see, Emmy is pretty photogenic.…

One of my favorite movie scenes:

I'm running way behind this morning for a variety of reasons, so I'm going to swipe another easy question and throw it back to the audience. this one's from Eric Lund, who asked: If you could attend a dinner with any major political figure in the world, who would it be, and why? The answer that makes this an easy question is "Barack Obama," who is currently the most major of world political figures, and comes off as almost too good to be true on tv. So I'd like to have dinner with him (after playing hoops for a while to work up an appetite), just to see if he's really that good. But that's…

Inspired by one of yesterday's easy questions, a pop quiz for you. The figure below shows a Michelson Interferometer: A laser falls on a beamsplitter, which allows half of the light to pass straight through, and reflects the other half downward. Each of those beams then hits a mirror that reflects it directly back where it come from. The beams are recombined at the beamsplitter, and then fall on the viewing screen at the top of the figure. When we add together the light from the two paths, we find that if the lengths of the two arms (that is, the distance from beamsplitter to mirror) are…

Confessions of a Community College Dean: College Prep "In some circles, 'college' is an undifferentiated term for a place that other people go to get the kinds of jobs that other people get. It's probably some kind of racket, though the exact workings are hard to detail. In some circles, 'college' is a place to find a mate, go to football games, and/or party. It's a sort of way station between childhood and adulthood, with no particular connection to the outside world. It's an expected stage of life â it's just what you do after high school â regardless of whether you have any idea what you…

As noted earlier, I'm not at my sharpest, thanks to this past weekend's festivities. Which means I don't have any deep-thinking blog posts in the queue, and the hundreds of posts piled up in Google Reader since later Thursday were just marked read without more than a cursory glance. Since I'm at a loss for material, here's your chance to program the blog: Leave a comment asking me a question, and I will answer it either in comments or in a post. The one important qualifier here is that the questions should be easy. I'm too tired for hard questions, today. There are no topic restrictions--…

As noted last Friday, I spent the weekend in Chicago with a bunch of friends from college, which kept me pretty busy-- some golf, ridiculously upscale steaks, improbably located Cajun food, a Cubs game (5-2 Cubs over Cardinals), ribs, and live blues music (from Joanna Connor and Duke Tumatoe). I think that's pretty much everything that you need to do in Chicago, save for pizza. I probably would've gotten pizza, had I had a later flight. Anyway, I had a really good time. Of course, this was all taking place in the context of a Darwinian program to evolve a better brain by pickling the less fit…

Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Beyond the Aryth Ocean: Part 1: A review of selected maps in fantasy novels "[L]etâs take a look at some of the great maps of fantasy literature. This is by no means a complete list of the great ones, or even the most well known. Rather, itâs a list of maps that Iâve pored over for hours during my childhood, and ultimately, have inspired me to imagine my own fantastic worlds." (tags: fantasy maps books blogs tor SF) Book review: Unscientific America. : Adventures in Ethics and Science "It struck me, while reading this book, that the…

If you're desperate for something to fill your Friday afternoon, and not the comment-leaving sort, you could do a lot worse than spending an hour and a half (give or take) with Chuck Klosternman and Bill Simmons in their two part ESPN podcast. It's nominally about sports, but they spend a good bit of time talking about Michael Jackson (in a sensible way, not a vapid-entertainment-reporter way), the effects of fame, the effect of writing for an audience, and a bunch of other interesting stuff. It's about a week old, but I only got around to it yesterday. It's worth a listen, though. It also…

I'm headed out of own for the weekend to play golf and re-live the past with some friends from college. If all goes well, I should be in Chicago by the time this posts. I wouldn't want to leave you starved for entertainment, though, so I'll follow many of the other ScienceBlogs folks (as usual, Bora has links) and ask: Who are you people? Today, it's all about you, so post something in the comments about yourself. Who are you, how did you get here, what keeps you reading the blog?

P.G. Wodehouse | Books | A.V. Club "Logistics and aesthetics stand in the way of anyone wishing to dive into P.G. Wodehouseâs canon. His work sprawls over 90 books published over 75 years, most of which are constantly sneaking in and out of print, many of which have different British and American publication titles. His short-story collections tend to overlap and make each other redundant. But the issue of distance from the material can be even more challenging for novices. People Gateways To Geekerycontinue to read Wodehouse primarily for the structural perfection of his farce plots and…

This is an action shot, but you can't really tell. An instant after this was taken, SteelyKid succeeded in getting Appa off the couch, and thumped down hard on her butt. This is also "Late-Wednesday Baby Blogging," as Kate and SteelyKid left for Readercon early this morning (well, Kate is bound for Readercon. SteelyKid is spending the weekend with her grandmother). It's awfully quiet in Chateau Steelypips right now. Almost... too quiet... No, wait, Emmy's barking at a dog outside. Not too quiet after all. That's a relief.