drorzel | June 18, 2009Another arbitrary numerical signifier for Daddy! Yay!
Not the best Appa-for-scale picture, so here's one from earlier this morning:
Appa likes having his belly rubbed, I guess.
And that's it for me for tonight.
drorzel | June 18, 2009If I were to start using Twitter, what's the best way to go about that? That is, what interface to the service makes it the least annoying to use?
It would be a nice bonus if the package in question could handle multiple accounts, too. I will probably sign up as myself to try things out, but the real point will be to create a Twitter account for the dog, for book promotion purposes. It'd be nice to be able to post things from either account without having to switch programs.
(That's not a deal-breaker, but it would be nice...)
drorzel | June 18, 2009Kevin Drum commented on a charter school study a couple of days ago, which made me go look through the report (available from this ultra-minimalist page-- seriously, you can't even be bothered to cut and paste some of your introductory boilerplate into an HTML file to give people an idea of what's behind those PDF links?).
The summary message is kind of bleak. From Drum's post, quoting the LA Times:
The study of charter schools in 15 states and the District of Columbia found that, nationally, only 17% of charter schools do better academically than their traditional counterparts, and more than…
drorzel | June 18, 2009(Alternate post title: "Hey to James Nicoll")
Via John Dupuis, our clever neighbors to the North has come up with a possible (partial) alternative to rockets:
"For decades, scientists have been grappling to find a more efficient means of getting payloads into space," says Brendan Quine (right), professor of space physics and engineering in York's Faculty of Science & Engineering, who is heading the project. A paper detailing the design was recently published in the journal Acta Astronautica; it is co-authored by York space engineering Professor George Zhu and graduate student Raj Seth.
"…
drorzel | June 17, 2009
Miracle Diet Through Physics! : Built on Facts
"This immediately suggests a tempting diet plan, if not a very lucrative one: drink lots of cold water. Your body burns calories warming up the H2O, you lose weight without much effort. Plausible?"
(tags: science food blogs physics built-on-facts)
Career Advice: Fast Tracking a Ph.D. - Inside Higher Ed
"To finish in three years, there are important pieces that must fall into place. You must have an adviser/committee chair who is willing to support you in this goal and work with you. Itâs important to ask your adviser, âCan this be done?â Is…
drorzel | June 17, 2009Over at Tor.com, they've unveiled the new Tor.com store, enabling you to buy your books via your favorite SF publisher. It's pretty bare-bones at the moment, so the most worthwhile feature is probably the special picks feature, where they collect together lists of books recommended by their most popular bloggers. Such as, for example, Kate's Lord of the Rings related recommendation list.
In a similar vein, something I only noticed today (via an ad on my own blog) that may have been around for a while is the Seed store, collecting all the books reviewed by the Corporate Masters over the past…
drorzel | June 17, 2009Whether because I'm a blogger, or because I'm a previous recipient of their money (I suspect the latter), I recently got email from the Research Corporation announcing their new Scialog 2009: Solar Energy Conversion program:
Scialog will focus on funding early career scientists and building research teams to undertake groundbreaking studies in solar energy conversion. This initiative will be entitled Scialog 2009: Solar Energy Conversion.
Scialog 2009 will accept proposals describing fundamental research at the molecular and nanoscale level that show high potential to impact advanced energy…
drorzel | June 17, 2009One of the PDF-only studies that I complained about earlier is a hand-wringing report from the NEA on how public appreciation of art is on the decline. As summarized by Inside Higher Ed:
Compared to the NEA's 1982 survey, the steepest decline was in ballet, which that year was seen by 11.0 percent of college-educated adults, but in 2008 was seen by only 6.3 percent. Declines were seen in every type of art considered: jazz (from 19.4 percent to 14.9 percent); classical music (33.1 percent to 20.1 percent); opera (8.0 percent to 5.2 percent); musicals (40.5 percent to 32.7 percent); non-…
drorzel | June 17, 2009There have been a half-dozen stories in the past few weeks that looked interesting, but didn't even make it into the Links Dump for the day. Why not? Because the stories or studies were only available as PDF files.
I have no idea if this is actually getting worse, but I'm finding this more irritating than ever. It's particularly annoying as there's usually no good reason for presenting the information in question in PDF form-- you could perfectly well present it as an easily linkable and quotable HTML page. Take, for example, this NEA report on the arts-- the one-paragraph note on Inside…
drorzel | June 17, 2009Two announcements landed in my Inbox yesterday and are worth passing along:
1) The Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism is now accepting nominations:
# Articles must have been published for the first time between 1 July 2008 and 30 June 2009.
# Entries must state clearly the website where each article appeared and the date that each article was published.
# Consideration will be given to the articles on the following criteria: intellectual coherence; persuasiveness; wit and relevance; clarity and simplicity; wider impact (as indicated by additional information provided by entrants in the…
drorzel | June 16, 2009
World Science Festivities | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
"Iâm back from the World Science Festival, which was a rousing success, leaving thousands of smiling attendees chattering excitedly about the mysteries of the universe as they dispersed through the streets of Manhattan. So naturally I want to talk about how it could be improved. Writing about oneâs travels can be one of the least compelling arrows in the bloggerâs quiver, but it would be great if the science-festival idea caught on more widely, so perhaps there is something to be learned from the experience."
(tags: science…
drorzel | June 16, 2009The recurrent timeout problem in the comments has been dragging on and on, but I'm not sure how much of a problem it is for you, the end user, as opposed to me, the guy who has to endure six timeouts while clearing out Turkish dating service spam. Of course, I can't very well ask people to leave comments about how messed-up the comments are, so I've been forced to resort to something higher-tech:
The commenting problems at ScienceBlogs are:(polls)
I'm torn as to whether to use this for Dorky Polls in the future-- the ease of clicking might make people more likely to respond, but half the…
drorzel | June 16, 2009Female Science Professor is revisiting an old topic, namely, the academic novel:
I was thinking about the general topic of academic novels because I was looking for some books to read and was looking through the lists in the links above. And then I wondered: Why do I want to read an academic novel during the summer? Why do I want to read an academic novel at all? What is it that I like about (some of) them?
This seems like a good opportunity to both have a discussion and do some science. There are three steps to the experiment:
Leave a comment here saying what your favorite academic novel…
drorzel | June 15, 2009
The dark side of animation
"To test their hypothesis, the team recorded two versions of a PowerPoint lecture. The presentations differed only in the presence of animation to incrementally present information. They then showed students either the animated or non-animated lecture and then tested the students recall and comprehension of the lecture.
The team found a marked difference in average student performance, with those seeing the non-animated lecture performing much better in the tests than those who watched the animated lecture."
(tags: education technology academia social-science…
drorzel | June 15, 2009Google the title phrase, and you'll find a bunch of New Age twaddle. This is a physics blog, though, so here's a reliable scientific method for finding the location of a rainbow, such as this one seen over Chateau Steelypips after the thunderstorms that went through earlier this evening (it was much brighter half a minute before the picture was taken, but faded as the camera was fetched):
Stand so you can see your shadow in front of you.
Spread the fingers on both hands, and hold them so your thumbs just touch.
Hold your hands so one pinky finger is just on the head of your shadow.
Keeping…
drorzel | June 15, 2009The main speaker at yesterday's Commencement was Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve Chairman (the guy before Alan Greenspan) and current chair of President Obama's economic advisory council. As you would expect from somebody of his background, the bulk of the speech was about the current economic crisis. The full speech is online, but the relevant-to-ScienceBlogs bit is this:
The past couple of decades have been seen as a triumph of finance - new and more complex financial instruments, a huge growth of financial institutions, enormous compensation for traders, speculators, and finance…
drorzel | June 15, 2009Martin Perl, a 1995 Nobel laureate in Physics for the discovery of the tau lepton, was awarded an honorary degree yesterday at commencement. Perl actually has a significant Union connection-- he started his career as a chemical engineer, and was working for GE making vacuum tubes when they sent him to take classes in calculus and atomic physics at Union. His physics professor, Vladimir Rojansky, convinced him that he was more interested in physics than chemical engineering, so he changed careers.
Saturday night, I had dinner with Perl, two other faculty members, and three students. He's just…
drorzel | June 14, 2009
Flying Flux: The Dullness of Details
"Short sentences; active voice; keep the audience in mind; draw clear diagrams; minimize jargon; use paragraphs; spell correctly; conjugate verbs; employ diacritics properly; use metric; resist idiomatic speech; avoid overusing semicolons; write in English. All very helpful tips that I've gathered over the years, if you want to totally ensure that no one will ever want to read what you write. I think it behooves writers to make technical documentation fun by embedding a few surprises here and there for the unsuspecting reader. "
(tags: science technology…
drorzel | June 14, 2009As the faculty started down the steps into the area where the families and friends of the Class of 2009 were seated, somebody in the crowd yelled "Thanks for passing most of our kids!" that may be my new favorite audience comment.
Last night, it was looking as though we might need to go to the "Deluge" contingency plan (Kate said "They didn't really use the word "Deluge," did they?" They did.), but really, you couldn't've asked for a nicer day for graduation. It was sunny, but not brutally hot, and there was enough of a breeze that even the student section wasn't as bad as it sometimes gets.…
drorzel | June 13, 20091) If you search Amazon for my name, you get four results: the book-in-production, two books where I'm mentioned in the acknowledgments, and a fourth book where I am apparently cited as a source for the "assume a spherical cow" joke.
2) Weirdly, I have a fan site, of sorts. I have no idea who's responsible for that.
3) The publicity copy on the inside cover of the bound galleys starts out:
In the New York Times bestselling tradition of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, author Chad Orzel uses the seemingly ordinary-- a family pet-- to explore and explain the complex and deeply cool world…