drorzel | March 19, 2009While the DVR piles up enough basketball to allow me to fast-forward through CBS's nine-minute commercial breaks, here's this week's Baby Blogging picture:
SteelyKid has been in an amazingly good mood this evening, and here you see her obligingly stretching out to her full length so you can see how much she's grown.
drorzel | March 19, 2009The final exam for my modern physics class is this morning, which means I'll have a bunch of time to kill while I proctor the test. This will likely involve a lot of brainless time-wasting, but I need to be on hand both as a formal guard against cheating, but more importantly to answer questions about the test should any come up.
Our sections are small enough that I don't worry too much about cheating, but it's a much bigger worry at lots of other places, and there are all sorts of ways of dealing with it. So here's a possibly entertaining question to pass the time:
What's the most amusing…
drorzel | March 19, 2009I'm giving an exam this morning, then taking the afternoon off for my annual hoops overdose, so there won't be much physics commentary here for the next few days. If you want hot physics news, though, there are a bunch of bloggers at the March Meeting, providing summaries on the Internet:
Doug Natelson has two reports, plus scattered other commentary.
His Holiness is putting everything in one post
Ian Durham has a summary of the first couple of days
Andre at BioCurious has highlights of the biophysics talks
If I'm missing anything, leave a link in the comments.
drorzel | March 19, 2009Mike Dunford has a post up titled You Almost Have to Feel Sorry for Jim Tedisco, about the special election that's being held to fill Kirsten Gillibrand's House seat. The title alone is enough to tell you that Mike doesn't live in this area any more. Nobody who has to listen to the multi-media saturation bombing that's going on regarding this election could feel sorry for either of the participants.
Though, to be fair, the worst of the advertising is actually from the National Republican Congressional Committee, one of the groups that Tedisco is trying to distance himself from. They've got a…
drorzel | March 19, 2009
Idle Question of the Day
"Exactly what bad consequences would follow if laws were passed by the relevant countries rendering credit default swap contracts void henceforth? (That is, canceling all the outstanding wagers because the bookies went bust.) "
(tags: blogs politics economics social-science business)
Basketball news: No, I don't think that it's better to be down by one point than up by one point at halftime. Or, to put it in statistical terms, 1.3% (with a standard error of 2%) is not the same as 7.7% - Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Soci
A little more detail on why…
drorzel | March 18, 2009Over at the New York Times' Freakonomics blog, Justin Wolfers gets into the March Madness spirit by reporting on a study of basketball games that yields the counter-intuitive result that being slightly behind at halftime makes a team more likely to win. It comes complete with a spiffy graph:
Explained by Wolfers thusly:
The first dot (on the bottom left) shows that among those teams behind by 10 points at halftime, only 11.8 percent won; the next dot shows that those behind by 9 points won 13.9 percent, and so on. The line of best fit (the solid line) shows that raising your halftime lead by…
drorzel | March 18, 2009I needed to generate an electronic recommendation letter for a former student yesterday, and printing the letter on paper and scanning the paper copy seemed a little too... 1998 to be worth doing. As a result, I spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling around with Microsoft Word to come up with a template that looked like the official department letterhead.
Of course, there's nothing in the many pre-installed templates that could easily be modified to suit, because Microsoft employees have the aesthetic sense of a syphilitic squirrel, but I was surprised to discover just how many absurdly…
drorzel | March 18, 2009Yesterday's bad graphic post spurred me to finally get around to doing the "Why Does Excel Suck So Much?" post I've been meaning to do for a while. I gripe about Excel a lot, as we're more or less forced to use it for data analysis in the intro labs (students who have taken the intro engineering course supposedly are taught how to work with Excel, and it's kind of difficult to buy a computer without it these days, so it eliminates the "I couldn't do anything with the data" excuse for not doing lab reports). This is a constant source of irritation, as the default settings are carefully chosen…
drorzel | March 18, 2009In an effort to wrest something positive from the smoking ruins of the fannish precincts of LiveJournal, a number of people (Kate included) have put together a community to raise money to provide financial assistance to fans of color who want to attend Wiscon or some other convention. They're auctioning off a lot of interesting stuff, from books to artwork to personal services.
The community is Con or Bust, and information about how the thing works is also available. If you're interested in supporting this project, either by bidding or offering items for bid, head on over and check it out.
drorzel | March 18, 2009
bs / 17 / 03 / 2009 / News / Home - Inside Higher Ed
"[A] panel at the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication considered the question of âEmpty Rhetoric and Academic Bullshit: Strategies for Compositionâs Self-Representation in National Arenas.â In the discussion, participants differed on how much of a problem their language is â and because this is a meeting of language and rhetoric experts, the discussion referenced issues that were personal to scholarsâ work and values."
(tags: education academia writing humanities inside-higher-ed)
Two Cents on AIG Â…
drorzel | March 17, 2009Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau offers a provocative comment on class and higher education:
Today (OK, yesterday, but I didn't really sleep on the plane, so it's still yesterday, or tomorrow is also today, or something) a friend offered (without necessarily endorsing) the theory that one reason why we try to get everyone to go to college is because it legitimizes a class system: If everybody gets the chance to try college, then their failure to attain economic success must be their own fault.
It's an interesting idea. I'm not sure I agree with it (though I'm not sure I agree with…
drorzel | March 17, 2009I was busy with other stuff when this hit the blogs, but I did want to at least comment in passing on Fermilab's announcement that it still hasn't found the Higgs Boson. Detailed commentary is available from Tommaso Dorigo and John Conway.
If you're not a physicist, or even just not a particle physicist, it might seem a little surprising that "We still haven't found the Higgs" is worthy of a press release, let alone actual excitement. The important thing about the result is that they have been able to say (relatively) definitively that the Higgs boson does not exist in a certain range of…
drorzel | March 17, 2009Nobody is ever going to mistake me for Edward Tufte, but whenever I run across a chart like this one:
(from Matt Yglesias, who got it from Justin Fox where it was merely one of many equally horrible plots), I find myself distracted from the actual point of the graph by the awfulness of the presentation.
I mean, look at this thing. The numerical labels for the horizontal axis are up at the top, rather than at the bottom where they usually go. The label that states what's actually plotted on that axis is down at the bottom of the graph, where it appears to be just a stray bit of text labelling…
drorzel | March 17, 2009
The Mid-Majority: The Court and the Conference Room Â
"Back when I was in college, there wasn't a day I loved more than Selection Sunday. I would sit in front of the television as the details were leaked out, tried to keep up by scratching excited team acronyms and codes on my blank bracket. I felt that euphoria of emotional overload that only comes when incoming information overwhelms the brain's ability to process it. It was a relevation of order from chaos, the bridge between darkness and light, every gift-giving holiday wrapped into one big and glorious package."
(tags: blogs sports…
drorzel | March 16, 2009The NCAA men's basketball tournament bracket was announced yesterday, which has kicked off the usual round of people "predicting" the outcomes based on totally silly criteria like the Academic Progress Rate of the schools in question.
This is, of course, completely frivolous. What you really need is solid, relevant information. Like predictions based on the ranking of physics graduate programs:
(Click for a slightly larger image.)
The algorithm used to fill this in was simple:
The school with the higher-ranked physics program wins
Schools with no physics program ranking lose to schools…
drorzel | March 16, 2009Scientific American has an article by David Albert and Rivka Galchen with the New Scientist-ish headline Was Einstein Wrong?: A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity and the sub-head "Entanglement, like many quantum effects, violates some of our deepest intuitions about the world. It may also undermine Einstein's special theory of relativity."
An alternate title for this post might be "Son Of Why I Won't Make It as a Philosopher," because I really don't know what to make of it. The authors make authoritative-sounding references to a bunch of papers I haven't read, but then they also drop in…
drorzel | March 16, 2009The Dean Dad takes a question from a reader on a topic of perpetual interest:
How do other teachers remember their students' names? I confess, I am AWFUL with names. My wife and I have gone to the same small church for 20 years and I still go blank on names of people we've been friends with for all that time. ("you know who I mean honey, the tall guy who always wears that corduroy jacket. His wife is in the choir. You mean Tom? yeah, Tom!")
This is a real difficulty for me in the classroom, even with a light teaching load. I have one class this semester (I am an adjunct) and only 32…
drorzel | March 16, 2009EurekAlert offered a press release from the American Physical Society over the weekend that may indicate that someone in the press office has won a round of drinks:
The American Physical Society (APS) is elated that the Senate has approved the FYO9 Omnibus Bill, which will allow scientists to continue cutting-edge research that will lead to innovation, job creation and economic growth for the United States.
"Elated" is not a word I expect to see in a press release. I suspect. Somebody in the press office may just have won a bet.
drorzel | March 16, 2009
Book Vs. Film: Watchmen | Books | A.V. Club
Moore and Gibbons vs. Zach Snyder
(tags: comics movies literature books avclub)
First Lensman (1950), by E.E. âDocâ Smith | Books | A.V. Club
"First Lensman combined a lot of elements that, over the course of reading classic science fiction, have come to drive me nuts: Flat characters, shadeless morality, breathlessly detailed battle scenes, oh-yeah-then-this-happened pacing, and a prose style thatâs functional at best. At the heart of the story are Virgil Sammsâthe First Lensman of the titleâand Rod âThe Rockâ Kinnison. You wonât find two more…
drorzel | March 15, 2009I've lost a lot of sleep this weekend staying up late to watch Syracuse games, so I'm only getting to some of the Friday articles in my RSS feeds now. I don't want to let this utterly worthless column by William Rhoden of the New York Times pass without comment though. It's ostensibly about the Syracuse-UConn six-overtime epic on Thursday night, but the actual description of the game is limited to two paragraphs at the very beginning that could've been written after twenty minutes of watching SportsCenter Friday morning.
The vast majority of the article-- seventeen of the twenty paragraphs--…