drorzel | June 6, 2009SteelyKid attempts to show off her street cred:
Of course, her attempt at looking tough is kind of undermined by the Princess Tutu type duck on her hoodie...
That's ok, though, because it's all fun:
Getting pictures taken for the blog is funny...
drorzel | June 5, 2009
Diary of a Trade Book (Newton and the Counterfeiter) 7.1: Rewards and Bribes « The Inverse Square Blog
"[W]hen sheer love of words and sentences and ideas canât carry you through, what can you fall back on?
Bribery."
(tags: writing books levenson)
Matthew Yglesias » Book Launch 2.0
As someone who created a Facebook page for his dog as a way to promote a book project, I definitely appreciate this.
(tags: internet books publishing marketing youtube video)
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Assessing Professional Development
"Since it's looking like we'll be short of funds for some…
drorzel | June 5, 2009This may be too late in the day to generate much action, but I thought of it just a little while ago. Two questions:
1) If you were writing a letter of recommendation for a student, would you refer to them as "Firstname" or "Mr./Ms. Lastname"?
2) Does your answer depend on the level of the student? That is, would you refer to an undergraduate the same way as a graduate student?
I've seen both, and have a definite opinion on the subject, but I'm curious as to what people think.
drorzel | June 5, 2009Physics World posted a somewhat puzzling story a few days back, headlined Ultra cold atoms help share quantum information:
Scientists in the US have demonstrated a novel "light-switch" in an optical fibre that could become a new tool in the communications industry. The device created by Michal Bajcsy at Harvard University and colleagues could be developed to share both classical and quantum information.
Quantum information systems could bring a revolution to global data-sharing, by encrypting, processing, and transmitting information using the properties of quantum mechanics. However, as…
drorzel | June 5, 2009Physics World reports on the awarding of a major French prize in science:
A physicist has been awarded France's top science prize for his work on atomic physics and quantum optics. Serge Haroche -- one of the founding fathers of cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) -- was presented with this year's "gold medal" by the French national research council (CNRS) at a press conference in Paris yesterday. Haroche currently heads the electrodynamics and simple systems group at CNRS's Kastler Brossel Lab in Paris.
Previous physics recipients include the Nobel Prize winners Albert Fert and Claude Cohen…
drorzel | June 4, 2009
Swans on Tea » Going UP (Very Precisely)
"Ignoring that weâre working in English units, which scientists donât really do very much, the big thing that pops out to the budding, fully-bloomed, or dying scientist is the misuse of significant digits. Do we really believe the estimate of the houseâs weight is exact? No, itâs probably good to 2 digits, at best â the house could easily weigh several thousand pounds more or less than the estimated value. So the answer is that it takes 1,500,000 cubic feet of Helium to fill the balloons. You canât specify it any better than that. The same mistake…
drorzel | June 4, 2009My mom was in Saratoga Springs for a meeting, and stopped by tonight to make a guest appearance in this week's Baby Blogging. Here, SteelyKid shows off how she can haul herself into a standing position on the big tub of outgrown baby clothes sitting in the living room:
"How do we know she did that herself?" you ask, you skeptical baby-doubter, you. "Her grandmother is holding her up!" Well, this picture should remove any doubt:
"Look, Internet people! No adult support needed!"
This, like most developmental milestones, is both exciting and terrifying. She's crawling all over now, and hauling…
drorzel | June 4, 2009Tom Levenson has another excellent piece in his series on the writing of his forthcoming book on Newton, this one on hitting a wall:
The one bit of history specific to the Newton and the Counterfeiter project came when I hit a wall. I had written about a quarter of the manuscript by the autumn of 2006 - I'd even submitted a chunk of it to the departmental committee pondering my tenure case, which is as those of you in the academy will know, something of a fraught moment.
But as I tried to make the turn out of what was in essence back-story, my account of Newton's life up to the point of his…
drorzel | June 4, 2009When this first came out, I didn't pick it up, despite a glowing recommendation from Jennifer Ouellette, because NASCAR is one of the few things on ESPN that interests me less than baseball. I didn't really think I'd be interested in reading a whole book on the subject.
I saw Jennifer and Diandra on Bloggingheads a little while back, and she made it sound pretty interesting. And then I saw that she was giving a public lecture at DAMOP, and figured it would be good for airplane reading on the way down and back.
The Preface gives a nice description of how she came to write the book:…
drorzel | June 3, 2009
kitchen table math, the sequel: alternate universe
"While visiting schools in a variety of districts, I began to notice something that puzzled me. Some of these schools, particularly those with large numbers of poor and minority children, are working against daunting â some would say unreasonable â expectations for improvement in test scores. In more affluent schools, those pressures are much less evident. Yet the kinds of instructional problems that surface in both types of schools are strikingly similar."
(tags: education academia class-war society politics social-science)
Infinite…
drorzel | June 3, 2009For reasons that don't really matter, I learned yesterday that there is a marathon in Antarctica:
On December 12th, 2009, the fifth Antarctic Ice Marathon will take place at 80 Degrees South, just a few hundred miles from the South Pole at the foot of the Ellsworth Mountains. This race presents a truly formidable and genuine Antarctic challenge with underfoot conditions comprising snow and ice throughout, an average windchill temperature of -20C, and the possibility of strong Katabatic winds to contend with. Furthermore, the event takes place at an altitude of 3,000 feet.
That's one of the…
drorzel | June 2, 2009
slacktivist: Killing in the name of
"In 1973, most evangelicals regarded opposition to abortion as a Catholic Thing -- and therefore vaguely suspect, as though it might lead to praying to Mary or something. But throughout the 1970s and into the '80s, that changed. The person most responsible for that change was Francis Schaeffer. He persuaded evangelicals to adopt this issue and to get so angry about it that it would come to replace even evangelism as their hallmark concern and their pre-eminent defining characteristic. The language, the rhetoric and arguments, the moral reasoning,…
drorzel | June 2, 2009I'm in a line of work where I have to listen to a lot of graduation speeches-- at least one per year. Yesterday, though, I got a phone call asking me to give one at my old high school's graduation in three and a half weeks.
This is kind of a weird situation, because while it has been 20 years since I graduated (twenty years this year, in fact), and I have had a fairly successful career to this point, I'm not sure I can distill any generally applicable advice from that. I've been very lucky in a lot of things, and most of the coolest stuff I've had the opportunity to do has been through some…
drorzel | June 2, 2009I'm eligible to vote for the Hugos this year, as a paid-up member of Anticipation. As such, I got the free packet of nominated works that they put together for the voters, and have started working my way through the short fiction (I've read all the novel nominees that I'm going to). Whether you're eligible to vote or not, you can get links to most of the nominated works here.
I've only read the Short Story nominees so far, and I have to say, I would vote for "No Award" five times if it was a choice between that and "Article of Faith" winning. I really could've sworn that this vein of crap was…
drorzel | June 1, 2009
Silence Is The Enemy | The Intersection | Discover Magazine
Today begins a very important initiative called Silence Is The Enemy to help a generation of young women half a world away.Why? Because they are our sisters and childrenâthe victims of sexual abuse who donât have the means to ask for help. We have power in our words and influence. Along with our audience, weâre able to speak for them. Iâm asking all of youâbloggers, writers, teachers, and concerned citizensâto use whatever platform you have to call for an end to the rape and abuse of women and girls in Liberia and around the…
drorzel | June 1, 2009Two noteworthy things in the meta-blog category:
1) The 3 Quarks Daily science blogging prize nominations are up, and it's a great list of sciencey bloggy goodness. If you're looking for a way to procrastinate, you could kill several days reading all 171 entries.
Once you're done reading them, go vote for your favorite. The top 20 vote-getters will be the shortlist given to Steven Pinker to choose the winners from.
2) Not on the list yet, but sure to provide some quality entries next year is the brand new X-Change Files blog from the Science and Entertainment Exchange. They're providing…
drorzel | June 1, 2009Before there was such a thing as Uncertain Principles, let alone Thursday Baby Blogging, there was this:
Still the best call I ever made, seven years on.
drorzel | June 1, 2009Today is the first day of the last week of class, hallelujah. Unfortunately, it's also the first class on rotational motion and angular momentum. This is unfortunate because it's the hardest material in the course-- angular momentum doesn't behave in as intuitive a manner as linear momentum, and the math involved is the most complicated of anything we do in the course.
This mostly has to do with the vector product, or "cross product." Angular momentum can be written as the product between the position vector from the axis of rotation to the moving object and the linear momentum of the moving…
drorzel | May 31, 2009
The Boston Terrier Break Dance | The Intersection | Discover Magazine
A photo essay.
(tags: dog animals silly pictures)
Vagabond Scholar: Anti-Terrorist Fantasy Dream Team on the Case
""I believe a fictional threat is best met with decisive fictional force," explained President Obama. "Jack Bauer and Wolverine are among the very best we have when in comes to combating fantasy foes." Mr. Bauer said, "We're quite certain that our prisons are secure. Osama bin Laden and his agents wouldn't dare attempt a break-out, and would fail miserably if they tried. But I love this country. And should…
drorzel | May 30, 2009
Off the Kuff: Saturday video break: Literally!
"Mullet with headlights?"
(tags: music silly video youtube nostalgia)
Career Advice: Preparing for the Non-Academic Interview - Inside Higher Ed
"People assume the only reason to earn a Ph.D. is to become a professor to the exclusion of all other careers. They donât realize there are at least three categories of Ph.D. candidates looking for work outside academe: 1) those who have no intention of seeking academic work, 2) those who thought they wanted to be academics until they experienced graduate school, and 3) those who wanted to be…