drorzel | March 10, 2009A few weeks ago, Neil DeGrasse Tyson was on the Daily Show telling stories about Pluto, and mentioned getting a letter from a little kid who added the postscript "Please write back, but not in cursive, because I can't read cursive yet." We were talking about this in the car yesterday, because Kate's been reading one of these books, and I realized that I don't think I could write a letter in cursive, even if I wanted to.
I did learn how to write in cursive, back in the day, but my handwriting was always borderline illegible, and I switched back to printing pretty much as soon as the teachers…
drorzel | March 10, 2009
The Business of Academic Publishing
"This statement by Deutsche Bank is an astonishing comment on the profitability of the industry. The notion that Elsevier, and therefore the other commercial publishers, add âlittle value to the publishing processâ and cannot justify the high profit margins is significant. This statement by Deutsche Bank, while aimed towards investors, reveals the skepticism of investment analysts regarding the value that Elsevier, and therefore other firms with similar business models, claim to add to the publishing process.
If the large publishers provide little value…
drorzel | March 9, 2009Why in hell is there soy in Italian soft rolls?
Parents of sensitive-stomached babies everywhere would like to know.
drorzel | March 7, 2009The Flamewar That Ate LiveJournal continues its livejournophagy (I've only caught the edges of it, and that alone is a carnival of suck-- if you want to know more, Jo Walton's recent post gets the feel, and contains links to more). In one of several efforts to bring something positive out of this, Kate has created a LiveJournal community:
This community is meant to be a place that rounds up the anti-derailing efforts in a central location for the benefit of those who want to continue the conversations about cultural appropriation, racial diversity and multiculturalism in SFF fiction and…
drorzel | March 7, 2009It's March now, which means that we're at the absolute peak of the college basketball season. Small conferences have already started their tournaments, playing for the one shot those teams have of getting into the NCAA's. Big conference tournaments start next week, with the Big Dance the week after.
So, of course, ESPN and all its variants are devoting all of their energy to... speculating about Terrell Owens and Alex Rodriguez. Because, apparently, those two have signed-in-blood contracts with Satan ensuring that not one week passes without one or the other being the lead story on…
drorzel | March 6, 2009
Michael Faraday, grand unified theorist? (1851) « Skulls in the Stars
"The common thread of many of these discoveries is their goal: demonstrating that all the physical forces of nature are but different manifestations of a single, âuniversalâ force. This idea was a surprisingly modern one for Faradayâs time, and is known today as a unified field theory. Such research was likely on the minds of many researchers of that era, however: once Ãrsted discovered that a magnetic compass needle could be deflected by an electric current, the notion that all forces might be related was a…
drorzel | March 6, 2009Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau is bemused by his students' reaction to unusual numbers:
[I]t is fascinating how we condition people to be used to numbers in a certain range, and as soon as a number is either very big or very small it becomes disconcerting. On one level, I'm glad that they are able to do the conversion and that they at least realize that numbers need to be checked. I've had people happily measure the dimensions of an object in millimeters, get their conversion to meters wrong, and cheerfully tell me that their tiny metal cylinder has a volume of 27 cubic meters. At…
drorzel | March 6, 2009The much-promoted science blogging anthology is now complete, and available in paper or electronic format from Lulu. If you're dying to have dead-tree copies of the best science blog posts of last year, here's your chance.
drorzel | March 6, 2009SteelyKid turned 30 weeks yesterday, and to celebrate this arbitrary numerical milestone, she shows off what a big strong baby she's become:
"Look at me! I can lift a whole bison by myself!"
drorzel | March 5, 2009
For Free Throws, 50 Years of Practice Is No Help - NYTimes.com
"Since the mid-1960s, college menâs players have made about 69 percent of free throws, the unguarded 15-foot, 1-point shot awarded after a foul. In 1965, the rate was 69 percent. This season, as teams scramble for bids to the N.C.A.A. tournament, it was 68.8. It has dropped as low as 67.1 but never topped 70."
(tags: sports statistics basketball)
Chu Seeks Global Effort on Cleaner Coal Plants : ScienceInsider
"Secretary of Energy Steven Chu wants the United States to join with other countries on a "true engineering…
drorzel | March 5, 2009I'm looking travel arrangements for this year's DAMOP meeting in Charlottesville, VA in May, and, boy, do the options suck.
Flying into Charlottesville itself involves at least one stop, and undoubtedly one of those ridiculous little prop planes that require me to spend the whole flight in something close to a fetal position. Driving would take better than eight hours, according to Google, which isn't something I'm fired up to do (it's better than a prop plane, though, and wouldn't take all that much longer once you figure in time sitting in airports).
Probably the best option is to fly into…
drorzel | March 5, 2009Two announcements of science-related festivals have turned up in my email in the last week or so:
The second annual World Science Festival will be held in New York June 10-14 this year. They feature an impressive array of speakers again, including Nobel laureates (Physicists David Gross, Frank Wilczek, and William Phillips), well-known authors, distinguished scientists, and actors. Last year's festival was a huge success, by all reports, and let's hope this year's is as good. And, hey, it's not during DAMOP this year, so I might even be able to make the trip down if anything looks…
drorzel | March 5, 2009EurekAlert had a press release yesterday titled Quantum paradox directly observed -- a milestone in quantum mechanics, which sounds like it ought to be great. The actual release, though....
For one thing, the description of the actual experiment is so vague as to be completely useless. It's not easy to quote without copying the whole thing, but it's short, so go read it yourself. Do you have any idea what's going on?
Second, it doesn't provide a complete citation for the article-- it gives the title, authors, and journal, but not the relevant page and volume information, which you need in…
drorzel | March 4, 2009
The Verne Gun â KarlSchroeder.com
"I call it the Verne gun because frankly, a name like THE ATOMIC CANNON would just not go over well in certain circles. In any case, the principle is the same as Verne's original idea, but using modern technology: you set off a nuclear charge underground where the blast, heat, radiation and fallout can all be contained, and use Orion-type technology to direct its energy into orbiting a very big, very heavy spacecraft. This vessel would experience hundreds to thousands of g's of acceleration--you couldn't put humans in it. But Wang calculates that a 10…
drorzel | March 4, 2009A couple of weeks ago, I moderated a global warming panel at Boskone. The panel was recorded by Richard Amirault, who has now posted the video on his Boston fandom website (Episode 41, if it moves off the front page before you click that link). I haven't watched the video, but I listened to the audio while grading papers, and it's pretty good.
So, if you're kicking yourself for not getting to that panel, here's your chance to see what you missed.
drorzel | March 4, 2009I spent a few hours Sunday afternoon interviewing students for positions in the Minerva House program, a student life initiative that I'm involved with. The interviews were don by a panel-- me and four students-- and we tried to mix in a few oddball interview questions with the serious stuff.
The most successful of these was "What are five things you can do with a straw?" One of the students kept trying to ask "If you could be any Pokemon, which would you be, and why?" but we're apparently not drawing from a nerdy enough pool of students, because most of them couldn't think of anything.
I…
drorzel | March 4, 2009I went to a panel discussion yesterday on teaching critical thinking skills. It was more of a panel presentation than a panel discussion-- the panelist-to-allotted-time ratio was too high to allow much discussion-- but it was interesting to see how different disciplines approach the task of teaching students to think critically, and support arguments with evidence.
I thought the best comment of the panel was from a chemist, who said that the best test of the development of critical thinking skills is involvement with undergraduate research. This is a big emphasis for us, and one of the things…
drorzel | March 3, 2009
Science in the open » What is the cost of peer review? Can we afford (not to have) high impact journals?
"I believe in post-publication peer review because it reduces the costs and time wasted in bringing work to community view and because it makes the filtering and quality assurance of that published work continuous and ongoing. But in the current context it offers significant cost savings. A significant proportion of published papers are never cited. To me it follows from this that there is no point in peer reviewing them."
(tags: science blogs publishing journals)
Built on Facts :…
drorzel | March 3, 2009Having complained about the lack of recognition for good physical science writing recently, it would be bad form for me not to note Dennis Overbye's story about the Kepler spacecraft in today's New York Times:
Presently perched on a Delta 2 rocket at Cape Canaveral is a one-ton spacecraft called Kepler. If all goes well, the rocket will lift off about 10:50 Friday evening on a journey that will eventually propel Kepler into orbit around the Sun. There the spacecraft's mission will be to discover Earth-like planets in Earth-like places -- that is to say, in the not-too-cold, not-too-hot,…
drorzel | March 3, 2009Back before things went pear-shaped this weekend, Jonathan Zasloff had a good post about why "clean coal" is important:
I think it's terrific that the Coen Brothers are making funny, effective ads against relying on "clean coal" as part of the US energy program. But I worry that the clean energy community is really missing the boat here.
Clean coal research and development is absolutely crucial in fighting climate change not for us, but for India and China. India has the fourth largest reserves of coal in the world -- most of it very dirty, with high ash content. It currently imports 70%…