Locus magazine has come out with its "Recommended Reading" list of science fiction and fantasy published in 2008. There are, as always, some annoying quirks-- several of the books making the list have been published only in the UK or by small presses, so I've never even seen them-- but it's a reasonably good consensus list of what people on the literary end of SF think was good. As usual, I've only read a smallish fraction of these. Somewhat unusually, I've read more of the science fiction list than the fantasy list-- 4/20 science fiction novels (Matter, Pirate Sun, Anathem, and Implied…

The Arxiv blog highlights a post on John Scalzi's favorite science question: the Fermi Paradox: We have little to guide us on the question of the existence intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. But the physicist Enrico Fermi came up with the most obvious question: if the universe is teeming with advanced civilizations, where are they? The so-called Fermi Paradox has haunted SETI researchers ever since. Not least because the famous Drake equation, which attempts put a figure on the number intelligent civilisations out there now, implies that if the number of intelligent civilisations…

Feministe » A Story in Pictures See if you can spot the difference. (tags: politics news gender pictures law history) Fafblog! the whole world's only source for Fafblog. ""The earth will quake and the sea will boil and the moon will be as blood and every knee shall bow before the coming of the Fafblocalypse!" says Giblets. "Or we could take the bus home," says me." (tags: silly SF fafblog) Gender bias found in student ratings of high school science teachers "Researchers at Clemson University, the University of Virginia and Harvard University have found that, on average, female high…

Via Janet, the LA Times gets snooty about titles: "Ordinarily when someone goes by doctor and they are a PhD, not an MD, I find it a little bit obnoxious," Sullivan said. "But it makes me smile because it's a reminder that she's her own person. She wasn't there as an appendage; she was there as a professional in her own right." Newspapers, including The Times, generally do not use the honorific "Dr." unless the person in question has a medical degree. I've had a low opinion of the LA Times since I was in Long Beach when Bill Phillips, Steve Chu, and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji won the 1997 Nobel…

There's a mini media blitz underway promoting Denis Dutton's new book The Art Instinct. He was on the Colbert Report last week, he's reviewed in the Times, and he's featured in this week's Bloggingheads Science Saturday: While it's kind of entertaining to listen to John Horgan struggling to get a word in edgewise, I'm kind of skeptical about the book. Dutton's argument is that human aesthetics are, contrary to the claims of the academic art establishment, more universal than socially constructed, and can best be understood through evolution. Or, to be more precise, through evolutionary…

In Friday's installment of his ongoing examination of Left Behind: The Movie, Fred Clark points out some gaps in the movie-Antichrist's plan, where it departs from the loopy prophetic cosmology of the Left Behind books. He then notes how they could've done better: If Team Nicolae had really done their homework, they'd have consulted with groups like the Canaan Land Restoration of Israel, Inc., to make sure they had all their ducks in a row before trying to launch their apocalypse. The frustrating thing for Nicolae at this point has to be that it's already too late for him to get in touch with…

Misha Lemeshko's blog: The greatest math problem ever "This is a problem, which can be easily solved by children before entering elementary school. If you want to give it a try, please forget everything you have ever studied." (tags: blogs math silly) The terrifying prospect of an America without lawyers. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine "So the question one wants to pose to Howard in the wake of all this lawyerly liberation is whether the country was better off for it. Did America achieve any of the benefits he predicts? Howard urges, for instance, that liberating ourselves from law…

Theorem: The set of students who can learn the material of a course without attending lectures or working homework problems is always smaller than the set of students who think they can learn the material of a course without attending lectures or doing homework problems. Years of intense study have so far failed to produce a counterexample to this theorem, but no airtight formal proof has yet been devised, either. The closest attempt attempts to prove it by assuming the opposite, and finding a contradiction, arguing that were the set of students who think they can learn without homework of…

SteelyKid is running a bit big for her age-- she'll be six months next weekend, but she's outgrown all her six-month size clothes-- but she's still tiny. At least, I think so, and Kate has the pictures to show why. (I look awfully smug in that picture, mostly because it's only in the last week or two that I've regained the ability to get her to go to sleep while I'm holding her. For weeks and weeks, every time I tried to get her to go to sleep, she'd scream and kick and thrash until I had to give up and either hand her over to Kate, or put her in the sling. That was a serious bummer, so I'm…

I'm getting twinges in my neck indicating that I've been spending too much time looking at the computer, and I've got some computer-heavy work coming up in the next couple of weeks, so expect reduced blogging in the next few days. I couldn't let this essay in the New Yorker (via Matt Yglesias) pass without comment, though. It's arguing for a model of endowment-supported nonprofit journalism, but along the way it takes a shot at my alma mater: Not to pick on any one institution, but, from a constitutional perspective, how did we end up in a society where Williams College has (or had, before…

This week's lab (well, half of it-- the class is so big that I have to run two experiments in parallel) is somewhat controversial, so I thought I would throw this out to my wise and worldly readers to see what you all think. The problem is this: we have two different set-ups for doing a photoelectric effect experiment. One of these is a PASCO apparatus with the phototube wired to a circuit inside an actual black box. You shine light into the tube, press a button, and the output of the box rises to the stopping potential for that frequency in a more-or-less exponential manner. This gives very…

I'm not sure what the BBVA Foundation is, but they've awarded a Basic Science prize to Ignacio Cirac and Peter Zoller: The Basic Sciences award in this inaugural edition of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards has been shared by physicists Peter Zoller (Austria, 1952) and Ignacio Cirac (Manresa, 1965), "for their fundamental work on quantum information science", in the words of the jury chaired by Theodor W. Hänsch, Nobel Prize in Physics. Zoller and Cirac's research is opening up vital new avenues for the development of quantum computers, immensely more powerful than those we…

US LHC Blog » Can We âPointâ the LHC, Too? "[C]ould we put up some kind of page where people could vote on what kind of physics we would study over the course of some particular week? Maybe a choice between searching for Supersymmetry, or a high-mass Higgs boson, or a low-mass Higgs boson? " (tags: science physics silly internet particles) Abstruse Goose » The Secret Lives of Photons Life for photons can be harsh. (tags: physics comics silly optics relativity) The Little Professor: Just add zombies and stir "The LibraryThing Blog kindly--or unkindly, take your pick--points us in the…

Today was a pretty rotten day in a lot of little ways that aren't worth going into. A smiling, happy baby does a lot to make up for that, though: This week's picture was actually taken last night by Kate. The height differential between us accounts for the fact that neither SteelyKid nor Appa are fully in the frame. Still, it's a good illustration of just how darn cute SteelyKid is when she's happy.

I was thinking of trying to post something really erudite about science today, but a series of minor catastrophes has completely derailed that plan. Now, I'm just hoping to get through my afternoon lab without punching anybody. So, in place of the science stuff, here's a pop music topic. While on the way to pick up SteelyKid from day care the other day, I heard "Live and Let Die" on the radio, which famously includes the phrase: "this ever-changing world in which we live in" A few hours later, the cable tv music channel brought up "Small Town" by John Mellencamp (I don't recall whether there…

As noted in the previous post, I'm supposed to be moderating a panel at Boskone the weekend after next, with the title: Global Warming: Facts and Myths, (and all that jazz) This is not my usual line, but then, I don't have to provide expert commentary, I just need to steer the discussion. Still, it would be good to have some idea where to steer it, so I will throw this out to the larger ScienceBlogs community: What should I make sure to talk about in a panel on global warming facts and myths? Of course, there are some additional constraints: 1) I'm looking for general discussion topics, not…

Boskone, the Boston-area SF convention that Kate and I go to every year, is the weekend after next. Once again, I'll be doing a few panels and one talk. For those who might be attending, or who care about this for some reason, here's my preliminary schedule: Saturday10am Physics: What We Don't Understand Geoffrey A. Landis Mark L. Olson Chad Orzel Karl Schroeder Ian Tregillis In 1999 John Cramer wrote a column in Analog describing seven big unsolved problems in physics (including the nature of dark matter, the origin of ultra-high…

Astronomers get a sizzling weather report from a distant planet "The researchers used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to obtain infrared measurements of the heat emanating from the planet as it whipped behind and close to its star. In just six hours, the planet's temperature rose from 800 to 1,500 Kelvin (980 to 2,240 degrees Fahrenheit). " (tags: science astronomy news planets) Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Real world reading for fantasy writers "Yesterday, on the Deerskin thread, Mary Frances passed on Lois Bujoldâs recommendation of Womenâs Work: The First 20,000…

Physics World's news aggregator had a story yesterday with the headline Chilly solution to neutrino mass problem, and the one-sentence teaser Ultracold atoms could be used to measure the mass of the neutrino. This creates a wonderful image of somehow turning a magneto-optical trap or a Bose-Einstein Condensate into a neutrino detector, which is a nice thought, but highly improbable. Even a BEC has a density a million times less than the density of air, and a volume that's way too small to catch any neutrinos. So what's going on? The answer is cool in its own right, and the path from the…

Over at Dot Physics, Rhett is pondering grading curves: Should you grade on a curve or not? If you are student, the answer is clear: go by whatever the instructor does. Otherwise, you have a choice. I don't like to tell other instructors or faculty what to do because I respect their freedom. For my classes, there is no curve. Why? Well, the question really is: "why grade on a curve?" I don't know the exact reason for particular instructors, but I can come up with some possible reasons. My first few years teaching, I worried about this quite a bit. I talked to different faculty in the…