drorzel | March 2, 2009
Foodie Politics | The American Prospect
"Good food -- the sort Waters features at her restaurant -- is considered a luxury of the rich rather than a social justice issue. As Waters frequently argues, no one is worse served by our current food policy than a low-income family using food stamps to purchase rotted produce at the marked-up convenience store. Her vision is classically populist: It democratizes the concrete advantages health, pleasure, nutrition -- that our current food system gives mainly to the wealthy. But her language is suffused with the values and the symbols of, well, the…
drorzel | March 1, 2009
The Neon Season - Why I Would Not Have Greenlit Dollhouse
"Last night I watched an episode of a show I had been avoiding due to issues I had with the premise, despite the creator having written some of my favorite TV shows. It had every single problem I would have expected it to have based on my knowledge of the premise, and I wondered why, apart from the Whedon name, executives would have greenlit a show so clearly destined for early cancellation."
(tags: television SF writing)
drorzel | March 1, 2009Kate's father passed away today. He's been battling cancer for while, so this was not unexpected, but the end was still surprisingly fast. He was at least at home with loved ones, including Kate and SteelyKid, who went down there yesterday.
He will be missed.
drorzel | March 1, 2009A partial list of phrases I would like bound to a macro key, to save myself typing them over and over again as I mark up student lab reports (not all of these apply to the current crop of students):
Not only were you able to [verb] the [noun], you did [verb] the [noun]. Say that directly.
You are describing an experiment that you did a week ago. That makes it a little odd to talk about what you "hope to find" in your report.
Do not talk about the educational purpose of the lab. Pretend that you did this experiment on your own, because you wanted to learn something, and not because I made you…
drorzel | February 28, 2009
Cowbirds in Love
Mad science vs. mad engineering
(tags: science comics silly)
Analysis of the price of a piece of a lego set | Dot Physics
There's nothing you can't do with a least-squares fit.
(tags: blogs math statistics kid-stuff toys dot-physics)
drorzel | February 28, 2009Because everybody could use some extra baby pictures, a reminder from SteelyKid that a baby's reach should exceed her grasp...
... but not for too long.
drorzel | February 28, 2009This week was Founder's Day at Union, one of the three big academic-procession events of the year (the others being Convocation in the fall, and Commencement in June), and this year's event had a clear theme about race and equality, with the keynote speech being given by James McPherson on Union's connection to the abolitionist movement in the early 1800's.
In addition to McPherson's talk, there was the official unveiling of a portrait of Moses Viney, an escaped slave who came to Schenectady and became a coachman and messenger for Eliphalet Nott, the towering figure of the College's early…
drorzel | February 28, 2009One of last year's physics majors is spending the year in rural Uganda working at a clinic/ school there. He's keeping a blog, which is intermittently updated by western standards, but remarkably up-to-date given where he is.
This week, he blogged about putting his physics education to use:
I have been doing a lot of electrical work the last two days. I connected a laboratory and rewired the whole system so that some safety switches would be in place and so that I would be the sole person with the knowledge and ability to decide who will have light. Actually, it is to break it up so that we…
drorzel | February 27, 2009
Setshot: Basketball for the Aging and Infirm: "That guy is better than he looks": Appearance vs. ability
"Here's a topic I think about all the time: What factors most affect opinions about players' skills, and by what process do those opinions change? In pickup basketball, there are often unknown players rotating into the playing roster. For purposes of team selection, shot distribution and defensive assignment, other players must evaluate them quickly and make uninformed assessments about their prospective abilities. It's like speed dating."
(tags: blogs sports basketball)
Change Into a…
drorzel | February 27, 2009Via email, Mike Steeves points me to an Ars Technica article about a Thomson Reuters report on the "decline in American science":
The US is beginning to lose its scientific dominance. That's
the message from Thomson Reuters, the people behind EndNote and impact factors.
According to a report in their publication ScienceWatch, the US' science
output is in a shallow decline at the same time that Asia is in the ascendancy.
If it sounds like you've heard that before, you've been
paying attention. Back in 2006 the National Science Foundation's biennial
Science and Engineering Indicators report…
drorzel | February 27, 2009The Dean Dad is annoyed with the New York Times, for an article about how the recession is affecting the humanities. The whole piece is worth a read, but he singles out a quote from the former president of my alma mater:
Some large state universities routinely turn away students who want to sign up for courses in the humanities, Francis C. Oakley, president emeritus and a professor of the history of ideas at Williams College, reported. At the University of Washington, for example, in recent years, as many as one-quarter of the students found they were unable to get into a humanities course.…
drorzel | February 26, 2009
362 - Greek To Me: Mapping Mutual Incomprehension « Strange Maps
""Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph?â Well apparently there has, even if only perfunctorily, and the result is this cartogram.
When a Hellenophone has trouble understanding something, his or her preferred languages of reference, as far as incomprehension is concerned, are Arabic and Chinese. And while for Arabs the proverbial unintelligible language is Hindi, for Chinese itâs⦠the language of Heaven."
(tags: culture silly language world)
Amazon.com…
drorzel | February 26, 2009For this week's Baby Blogging, SteelyKid shows off the latest look for the baby on the go:
In this picture, she's all set to face a busy day at day care. She's in her car seat, with the dangling toys on the handle (Left to right, a rattling snail, a butterfly with crinkly wings, and a flower with a squeaker in it. The difference between baby toys and dog toys is not all that large.). You can also see the fleece car seat cover for cold weather, and her little red dog, for when she's actually in the car, and the handle has to be flipped down out of the way.
This carrier car seat will not be…
drorzel | February 26, 2009ScienceWoman offers a good discussion question:
You are in a room with a bunch of other female faculty/post-docs/grad students from your university. You know a few of them, but most of them are unfamiliar to you. The convener of the meeting asks each of you to introduce yourself by answering the following question: "What is one aspect of your professional life that you are good at?"
It's a good topic that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with gender or the academy, so I will shamelessly steal it re-pose it without that frame:
What is one thing in your professional life that you do…
drorzel | February 26, 2009Prior to SteelyKid's arrival, the "Pasta with Butter, Sage, and Parmesan" recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything had become one of our staple recipes. It's dead simple to make, we always have the stuff on hand (I've been planting sage in pots outside for the last couple of years), and it's very tasty.
Unfortunately, SteelyKid reacts badly to dairy, even when Kate's the one eating the dairy. So, parmesan is right out, along with many, many other favorite foods. In an effort to preserve the sanity of the adults in the house, I've been trying to find ways to expand our repertoire of…
drorzel | February 25, 2009
The Problem of Pretension. « The Internet Food Association
Is it pretentious to insist on fresh food for school lunches?
(tags: food politics class-war)
the physics arXiv blog » Blog Archive » Calculating the cost of dirty bombs
Basically the same analysis that's in "Physics for Future Presidents," with some added financial figures. Bottom line: Don't worry too much about "dirty bombs."
(tags: science physics politics war nuclear)
Lovely Steampunk-esque Science Teaching Instruments. - Boing Boing
BoingBoing discovers TeachSpin, makers of high quality scientific demonstration…
drorzel | February 25, 2009Over at Dot Physics, Rhett is taking another whack at photons. If you recall, the last time he did this wasn't too successful, and this round fares no better:
So back to the photon. In my original post I made the claim that the photoelectric effect is not a great experiment to show photons. Maybe that is not how it came off, but that is what I meant. The photoelectric effect can be explained quite well with the classical electromagnetic waves model and a quantum nature of matter. Of course there is a quantum nature to light as well.
I think the biggest problem with the photon is that the…
drorzel | February 25, 2009Now that we have a President who is smart, articulate, and has the best interests of the country in mind, I feel compelled to actually watch his major speeches, like last night's not-really-the-State-of-the-Union address.
It's a small price to pay for having a President who speaks to the nation as if we were rational adults, but it does cut into my ability to do other things.
Anyway, consider this an Open Thread for commentary about the speech, in the unlikely event that you don't feel you have any other place to talk about it.
drorzel | February 24, 2009
slacktivist: Saving newspapers
"I'm glad at least though that Time and Isaacson are trying to deal with the question of newspapers' survival. That's more than I can say for many of the newspapers themselves. Take for example my employer, the largest newspaper chain in the country. They own dozens of newspapers, small and large, which puts them in an ideal position to experiment with various approaches and business models to figure out what is and isn't working. But they don't seem interested in such experimentation -- instead remaining focused on uniformity throughout the chain, as though…
drorzel | February 24, 2009The winners of the American Physical Society's Science Writing Awards for 2008 were announced today:
Ann Finkbeiner won in the Journalist category for The Jasons, her book about a secretive groups of scientists who work on classified problems for the US government.
Gino Segre won in the Scientist category, for Faust in Copenhagen, about the early days of quantum mechanics.
Julia Cort won in the Broadcast category for the NOVA ScienceNow episode Asteroid, about whether a giant asteroid will kill us all in 2036.
Alexandra Siy and Dennis Kunkel have won in the Children's category, for their…