drorzel | November 16, 2008
Information Processing: Central limit theorem and securitization: how to build a CDO
"[T]he mathematical concepts related to the current financial crisis leave over 95 percent of our population completely baffled. If your Ivy League education didn't prepare you to understand the following, please ask for your money back."
(tags: economics math statistics blogs)
Pictures of Numbers: Fixing Excel's Charts
It's really sad how many steps you need to go through to get halfway decent graphs out of Excel.
(tags: science math computing data-analysis)
slacktivist: How I beat the market
"[I]n…
drorzel | November 16, 2008When I'm in the right mood, I'm a sucker for really awful sci-fi movies. For example, Saturday night I stayed up far too late to watch the end of the tv-movie version of The Andromeda Strain, based on the book by the prolific and recently deceased Luddite Fiction writer Michael Crichton. It's been twenty-plus years since I read the book, but I recall it being a whole lot better than this piece of garbage.
Crichton's original novel about a crack research team dealing with a disease of alien origin is remarkable for being somewhat understated. The action focusses on the scientists attempting to…
drorzel | November 15, 2008
How the subprime good guys give home loans to poor people, strengthen communities, and still make a profit. - By Daniel Gross - Slate Magazine
"Since 2003, this for-profit firm based in Orange County--home to busted subprime behemoths such as Ameriquest--has issued $220 million worth of mortgages in the Golden State's subprime killing fields. More than 90 percent of its home loans have gone to first-time buyers, about half of whom are minorities. Out of 770 single-family loans it has made, how many foreclosures have there been? "As far as we know," says Bystry, "seven.""
(tags: class-war…
drorzel | November 15, 2008As mentioned briefly the other day, I recorded a Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation with Jennifer Ouellette on Thursday. The full diavlog has now been posted, and I can embed it here:
This was the first time I've done one of these, and it was an interesting experience.
I'm rocking the handset in this because of the aforementioned cell phone service problems, and because the whole thing was very hastily arranged, and I wasn't able to obtain a headset for the landline. If they ask me back again, I'm definitely getting one.
On the other hand, being tied to the handset did restrain…
drorzel | November 15, 2008Yesterday afternoon, SteelyKid and I dozed off in the living room recliner. When I woke up, it had been three hours since she last ate, roughly her usual between-feedings interval, but she was still sound asleep on my lap. Kate was due home in half an hour or so, though, so I wasn't sure whether to wake and feed the baby, or let her sleep until Kate came home.
I decided to call Kate's cell to confirm her ETA. Not wanting to wake SteelyKid by getting up to get to the landline, I pulled out my trusty cell phone, running on what an endless string of Verizon ads assure me is America's finest cell…
drorzel | November 14, 2008We filled up the last sheet on the legal pad we've been using as a baby-feeding log, which reminded me that it's been a while since I updated this:
Again, this is the feeding pattern for SteelyKid, with darker colors indicating longer duration. Bottle feedings are arbitrarily assigned to 20 minutes for 4 oz of milk or formula.
If you can find a pattern in this, you're doing a whole lot better than I am. In the last couple of weeks, especially, SteelyKid has stubbornly refused to establish any sort of pattern. She goes three hours between feedings during the day (more or less), but there are…
drorzel | November 14, 2008I got a great "Living in the future" kick out of the headline on the New York Times story about Thursday's big astronomical announcement: First Pictures Taken of Extrasolar Planets. The phrasing of the headline conjures images of pictures of clouds swirling on distant gas giants; alas, the reality is a little more mundane:
In scratchy telescope pictures released to the world Thursday in Science Express, the online version of the journal Science, the new planets appear as fuzzy dots that move slightly around their star from exposure to exposure. Astronomers who have seen the new images agreed…
drorzel | November 14, 2008It's seminar week over at Female Science Professor, and today she's polling her readers as to the best day and time for seminars.
Our departmental colloquia are generally held on Thursdays at lunchtime. We provide pizza and soda as an enticement for students (which doesn't work as well as you might think), and have the talks start about half an hour after the food arrives, in hopes that people will mostly have finished eating.
Of course, it wasn't always this way...
My first year or so here, we had colloquia on Fridays. This turned out to be a gigantic pain in the ass, both because it was…
drorzel | November 13, 2008
Dw. Dunphy On... Bob Mould | Popdose
A series of creative peaks that never translated into sales. Copper Blue remains an amazing album, though.
(tags: music review blogs)
scottberkun.com » Do we suck at the basics?
"The longer I'm on this planet, the more I think the problem with everything is someone's failure to get the basics right. "
(tags: blogs business stupid society)
drorzel | November 13, 2008Another Thursday, another picture with Appa. And SteelyKid throws her arms wide to say "I'm this big!"
She was nice and quiet earlier while I taped my half of a bloggingheads conversation that should hopefully appear on Saturday. She's been making up for that the last hour or so, demanding all sorts of attention as tribute.
drorzel | November 13, 2008Over at Dot Physics, Rhett has just completed a two-part post (Part I, Part II) on quantum physics arguing against the use of photons in teaching quantum physics. Part I gives a very nice introduction to quantum physics, which is why I linked it, but Part II goes a little off the rails. There's not as much physics content, and it ends with a list of phenomena that are able to be described by semi-classical models of light, leading up to a question:
So, if there are no photons, why are they in all the textbooks? That is a great question. I am glad I asked it. I really don't have a great answer…
drorzel | November 13, 2008Bora's beating the drum for submissions to this year's science blogging anthology. He doesn't seem to be suffering from a lack of submissions, but if you've got something you would like to see re-printed in dead tree form, submit it before December 1. I'm not clear whether this will be going through Lulu again this year, or if they have a regular publisher interested.
It's earlier than I would normally do this sort of thing, but Bora's post got me wondering about what I consider my best posts of the year. This isn't by any means a comprehensive list, just what I came up with in a few minutes…
drorzel | November 12, 2008
The Supreme Court grapples with the primordial ooze of the Summum case. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine
"[T]he current Third Aphorism of Religion Cases: Government establishment of religion is only impermissible when it freaks out Justice Stephen Breyer."
(tags: religion politics law silly society culture)
Backyard Nukes? | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
Sure to be a popular solution to the energy crisis...
(tags: nuclear energy physics environment blogs)
Unbelievable Job Candidates « Confused at a higher level
Tough competition for job seekers this year...
(tags: physics…
drorzel | November 12, 2008Speaking of departmental seminars, as we were, it occurs to me that this might be an amusing Dorky Poll question:
What's the craziest thing you've heard asked of a seminar speaker?
One of the nice things about academia is that lots of educational events are put on, free and open to all. The problem is, these all too often provide an opportunity for slightly unbalanced individuals to ask distinguished speakers questions that don't make any sense at all. And I'm not just talking about crazed questions from the faculty, either.
Anybody who has spent time around academia has heard some loopy…
drorzel | November 12, 2008The Female Science Professor is thinking about seminar series. Specifically, whether attendance should be mandatory for students:
Being required to attend the departmental seminar eliminates that pesky decision-making process about whether to go to seminar or not. But then, if required to attend, you might sit there in the seminar, seething with resentment about being forced to attend rather than being trusted to make the decision to attend, and your anger at the controlling professors who are oppressing you leaves you unable to appreciate the seminars, even the ones that aren't horrific…
drorzel | November 11, 2008
The Case of M. S. El Naschie | The n-Category Café
I wouldn't've started a blog if I'd known I could get Elsevier to give me my own journal...
(tags: science publishing academia journals stupid)
Backreaction: Technetium-99
"what a strange element is technetium in the first place, as without stable isotopes, it marks a gap in the middle of the periodic table?"
(tags: science physics nuclear atoms blogs)
Introduction to particle in a box | Dot Physics
"I am going to try and briefly describe the quantum nature of matter. I am then going to show how this relates to light. In the end, I…
drorzel | November 11, 2008Sometime commenter "Dr. Pain" asked, on a mailing list, for book recommendations for his son, who "wants to read up about physics, especially weird modern physics." He adds some qualifications:
Kid's books on physics are way too elementary for him, but the typical "naive adult" book is over his head. Does anyone have any good recommendations for something that would be an interesting introduction to physics at a young teen level?
I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I don't know anything to recommend for this. Partly because it's been so long since I was in middle school, and partly…
drorzel | November 11, 2008Edward Glaeser has an op-ed in the Boston Globe arguing for more education funding:
The clearest result from decades of education research is the importance of teacher quality. My colleague Tom Kane finds that students who are lucky enough to get a teacher in the top quarter of the teacher-quality distribution jump 10 percentile points in the student achievement distribution relative to children who end up with less able teachers. Improving teacher quality has about twice the impact on student outcomes as radically reducing class size.
[...]Attracting better teachers will also require much…
drorzel | November 11, 2008In the recent discussion of Many-Worlds and making universes, Jonathan Vos Post asked what science fiction treatments of the idea I like. The answer is pretty much "none," because most SF treatments are distractingly bad.
For example, last night I finished Neal Stephenson's Anathem, a whopping huge brick of a book setting up an incredibly imaginative alternate Earth, with a detailed intellectual history paralleling our own. It's got all sorts of great stuff, but it lost me when it started talking about parallel worlds, because it munges together the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum…
drorzel | November 10, 2008
Mars Lander Succumbs to Winter - NYTimes.com
Farewell, Phoenix, thou good and faithful servant.
(tags: space planets science astronomy news)
Deep Secrets of 'The Daily Show' - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com
"Mr. Remnick asked the writers and producers what a typical day at "The Daily Show" is like. Based on their responses, here is a summary:"
(tags: television politics news silly)
Spot.us - Home
"Spot.Us is a nonprofit project to pioneer "community funded reporting." Through Spot.Us the public can commission investigations on important and perhaps overlooked stories. "
(tags: news…