drorzel | January 4, 2009The posts selected for the 2009 edition of The Open Laboratory, collecting the best writing on science blogs for the year, have been announced. My We Are Science post made the list, which is nice.
Amusingly, this showed up in my inbox at the same time that the ScienceBlogs front page is featuring this Bloggingheads episode featuring George Johnson and John Horgan. Johnson, you might recall, riled everybody up a couple of weeks ago with a bit of a dyspeptic rant about science bloggers compared to science journalists. They spend a good fifteen or twenty minutes on the topic again this week, and…
drorzel | January 4, 2009Fannish regions of the Internet are all abuzz today, with the introduction of Matt Smith as the next actor to play the lead role in Doctor Who. Sadly, this is not the Matt Smith I went to college with (who would've been a really unusual choice for the part...)-- he's still comfortably obscure to anyone not receiving fundraising letters from the Class of '93.
This is probably as good an occasion as any to make an admission/ provocative statement: I don't get Doctor Who. Probably to an even greater extent than I don't get Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I've watched it on occasion since the days when…
drorzel | January 3, 2009
TheStar.com | Entertainment | Cultural resolutions: bigger, better, closer, stronger
"No offence to those of you who buy all your books online, but whenever anyone asks why I invariably prefer to purchase my reading matter in a bricks-and-mortar establishment, I have one simple answer: because I don't want to live in a world without bookstores."
(tags: economics society culture books)
Iron Man, physics and g-tolerances | Dot Physics
"My attack will center on the scene where Tony Stark (Iron Man) escapes from captivity with his home made iron man suit. He uses some type of rocket boots to…
drorzel | January 3, 2009A couple of smallish items that came up in recent days, that can be grouped together under the general heading of "data presentation oddities." First, over at Crooked Timber, Kieran Healy tries out a semi-hemi-demi-log plot for a graph of WPA expenditures.
The problem he's trying to address is the gigantic difference in magnitudes between the billions spent on road construction and the mere millions spent on public art. His solution is to split the chart into regions corresponding to different orders of magnitude. They're each graphed linearly, but there's one section for millions, another…
drorzel | January 3, 2009The world is a very strange place:
An intruder received a taste of divine reckoning as he was chased from the Edinburgh flat he was breaking into by a man dressed as the Norse god Thor.
The housebreaker leapt from the first-floor window of the building to escape Torvald Alexander who was dressed-up for a New Year's fancy dress party.
Mr Alexander, 39, said the man may have been intimidated by the costume he made of the god of thunder out of tin foil.
[...]Mr Alexander said the man landed on a pitched roof outside the window which broke his fall, before making his escape.
He left behind his…
drorzel | January 2, 2009
Refuted economic doctrines #1: The efficient markets hypothesis at John Quiggin
"I'm starting my long-promised series of posts on economic doctrines and policy proposals that have been refuted or rendered obsolete by the financial crisis. [...] Number One on the list is a topic I've covered plenty of times before (in fact, I was writing about it fifteen years ago), the efficient (financial) markets hypothesis. "
(tags: politics economics social-science society)
Robert Donoghue - 'This guy gets a blanket'
"I discovered Donald Westlake in high school, when I was randomly raiding the local…
drorzel | January 2, 2009Many years ago, when I was a kid growing up, I used to be a regular at the Mary Wilcox Memorial Library in town, and tore through most of their kids' books before mounting an assault on the adult section. The librarian at the time, Mrs. Sinclair, was a terrific woman who knew pretty much everybody in town, and what they liked to read.
One time when I went in to look for new stuff, she handed me a copy of Castle in the Air by Donald E. Westlake. "I think you'll like this," she said, "He's really funny."
She was right, and over the twenty-ish years since then, I've read dozens of his books.…
drorzel | January 2, 2009Because there's no better form of procrastinatory blogging than making traffic graphs:
That's how you know it's Science!
Unlike the last couple of years, 2008 did not see any gigantic spikes in traffic, despite a couple of posts that I thought would really have some juice. Shows what I know.
The first half of the year pretty much fit in with a steady upward trend since the move to ScienceBlogs (see below). In early June, though, it all got to be a bit too much, and I cut way back on posting (less than half as many posts in June as in the previous few months), leading to a major drop in…
drorzel | January 1, 2009
So it goes.: A Day in the Life
"I wake up to the sun's early morning glow or from the Luganda streaming through my mosquito net, which I'm not sure. It is another day in Uganda, a handful of kilometers beneath the equator. I can easily recall the first days in Africa when the sun did not wrestle me out of bed at dawn and when the Luganda was strange and invoked loneliness. But now, 5 months in, I slip out of bed and into the day easily. "
(tags: education academia society culture charity world)
Biocurious: Edge World Question 2009: What will change everything?
"The 2009 Edge World…
drorzel | January 1, 2009Captain's Log, Stardate 010109
USS BabyPod
Space Commander SteelyKid reporting
"Our mission to explore the dining room is progressing well. It is almost time for Baby Blogging, and--"
"Commander, sensors have detected a ship!"
"On screen!"
"What the heck is that?
"It's an alien space raider! Battle stations, everyone! Prepare for evasive action!"
"Hard to starboard!"
"Now back to port, and blast 'em! Eat laser death, space monkeys!"
"Ha! Got 'em! Well done, everybody. This sector is now safe for babykind."
"A job well done. Mr. Sulu, you have the conn. If anybody needs me, I'll be in…
drorzel | January 1, 20092008 was a rotten year for a lot of people, I know, but I'll always have a soft spot for it, because it marked the beginning of the SteelyKid Era. There was plenty that sucked about 2008, but not nearly enough to outweigh that.
(There will be Baby Blogging later today, but the Empress of Eastern New York would not deign to pose this morning, so you'll have to wait a bit for a cute photo.)
2009 has been dubbed the International Year of Astronomy. Well, it's probably been dubbed the International Year of a lot of things, but the relevant one for ScienceBlogs is Astronomy. It comes a little too…
drorzel | December 31, 2008
slacktivist: Clean shoes
"Getting down on his knees and taking unclean things in his hands was more than just a pattern with Jesus -- it was something like an obsession. This goes beyond a mere motif or refrain in the Gospels. Jesus looked at the purity codes and the holiness codes and the long lists of people and things that were unclean and never to be touched and he treated these like he was collecting points on a scavenger hunt."
(tags: society culture religion history war charity slacktivist)
snarkout: a world he never made
"Steve Gerber died this February. His fascinating and…
drorzel | December 31, 2008Terry Pratchett knighted:
Terry Pratchett, the author of the Discworld series of novels that have sold more than 55 million copies worldwide, said he was "stunned, in a good way" after receiving a knighthood in the New Year's Honours List.
The 60-year-old writer, below, whose first book was published in 1971, told The Independent last night: "I'm having difficulty fitting it into my head. I'm very pleased indeed. It cheers me up no end." He added: "It will also impress some of my American friends, who started calling me 'Sir' after I received my MBE, which was a little embarrassing."
[...] "I…
drorzel | December 31, 2008This is going around again (I think Kottke is Patient Zero), so here's a list of places where I spent at least one night in 2008 (other than Niskayuna, where we live):
Albany, NY (I spent four nights in a smoking room-- I get to count it on the list)
Boston, MA
Lewisburg, PA
State College, PA
Tewksbury, MA
Waterloo, Ontario
Whitney Point, NY
Williamstown, MA
I feel like I must be forgetting something, but I can't think what. We really did cut back on travelling this year, because of SteelyKid showing up in August.
Where did you go this year?
drorzel | December 31, 2008Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau calls out unnamed ScienceBloggers for cognitive dissonance:
I think scientific training is of great intellectual and practical benefit to students with the interest and ability to pursue it. I would like to see more people choose to study science (whether at the undergraduate level or beyond). However, I am amused that otherwise intelligent and highly analytical people can simultaneously discuss the following ideas without displaying any awareness of the tensions: The competition for science faculty jobs is too intense, it's bad when people leave the…
drorzel | December 31, 2008I generally enjoy Gregg Easterbrook's football writing-- he gets a little repetitive, and the shtick is starting to overwhelm any insight, but he makes some good points, and is usually entertaining. For example, I really enjoyed his take on the Dallas Cowboys at the end of this week's column (schadenfreude is a powerful thing).
Easterbrook's problem is that he insists on using his football column as a platform from which to launch bizarre digressions in all sorts of directions. See, for example, this week's weird and pointless foray into cosmology. Or, better yet, his lengthy excursion into…
drorzel | December 30, 2008
Auto Destruct
"[F]or all of Detroit's mistakes, it is also a victim of something it did right: ensuring a middle-class lifestyle for bluecollar workers. When the carmakers, pushed by unions, agreed to provide workers with a steady level of purchasing power, comprehensive health benefits lasting into retirement, and various forms of workplace rights, they were promising something that all Americans covet. And, while the financial costs and managerial constraints associated with that effort have helped bring domestic carmakers to the edge of collapse, ultimate responsibility for this…
drorzel | December 30, 2008Inside Higher Ed has an article on athletics and admissions based on an investigative report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The report compares the SAT scores of football and basketball players to those of other students, but what it really highlights is the difference between science and journalism.
The basis of the report is pretty simple: the paper got the test score reports for 55 major colleges and universities, from data that they are required to file with the NCAA. They compared the average scores for football and basketball players to the scores of other athletes and students…
drorzel | December 30, 2008ScienceWoman has a post about plans and publications that opens with a comment about what makes a dissertation that struck me as odd:
Three papers, an introductory chapter and some broad conclusions. Those are the ingredients of a Ph.D. dissertation in it's simplest form.
[...]My first PhD paper was published in 2006, shortly after I defended. The second paper came out earlier this year. The third paper goes back to the editors on Monday, at the end of what hopefully is its last ever set of revisions. If all goes well, the editors give it their blessing and we move on to proofs and…
drorzel | December 29, 2008
The Quantum Pontiff : A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Introduction
"Gladwell's books are fun, but I find myself often disagreeing with his analysis, so I thought it would be entertaining to take my time reading his latest and jot down my thoughts as I progress. "
(tags: science social-science society culture medicine books)
Throwing a football with air resistance - angle for maximum range | Dot Physics
"When throwing a football, there is some air resistance this means that 45 degree is not necessarily the angle for the greatest range. Well, can't I just do the same thing as…