drorzel | October 30, 2008Today marks twelve weeks of SteelyKid:
I spent pretty much the whole day at work, trying to get stuff done in advance of Kate's return to work tomorrow, which will see me left home alone with SteelyKid all day for the first time. I'm a little apprehensive, to be honest.
As for the picture, Kate took it, so if there's any particularly interesting context, I don't know what it might be.
drorzel | October 30, 2008
ICA Supreme Cuisine | Wii⢠& DSâ¢
Iron Chef America: The video game
(tags: food games television computing silly)
Setshot: Basketball for the Aging and Infirm: Careers: A 73 year-old college basketball player!
There's hope for me yet...
(tags: sports basketball blogs silly)
Mr. Dawkins, please report to the nearest shark tank, water skis in hand § Unqualified Offerings
More or less what I would've written, so thank Thoreau for sparing you my post.
(tags: religion politics books sf stupid)
Still Searching :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
"…
drorzel | October 30, 2008Steinn responds to yesterday's post about his comments about science blogging. I'm going to continue the tradition of responding here, rather than in his comments, because, well, I need something to post today.
He concedes that outreach is a worthy purpose of blogging, but continues to be concerned about blogging as a tool for more traditional science:
Is blogging enabling collaborations?
Is blogging leading to new initiatives? New directions in research? Providing connectivity which would not otherwise have happened? Conveying information that is important to research and otherwise hard to…
drorzel | October 30, 2008Via Facebook, of all things, a message reporting a conversation with Representative Bill Foster (D-Fermilab), talking about the best ways to encourage Congress to take science seriously. First, he addressed what's been done in the past:
On the effectiveness of the APS letter-writing campaign:
*Recently I sent my chief of staff to a meeting of about 70 House chiefs of staff. He asked, how many of them were aware of the APS letter-writing campaign. Only two others were aware of it.
*These campaigns are a form of spam, and there are lots of groups involved in them. For many small-group issues…
drorzel | October 29, 2008In a move that I'm sure will surprise, oh, three or four people, the editors of Seed have officially endorsed Barack Obama for president.
I doubt any regular reader of this blog will be surprised to hear that I agree with their endorsement. In fact, I'm on record as saying that I will not vote for any Republican for any office at any level, so long as the national party is run by the current gang of autocrats, theocrats, and con men. The McCain campaign has not given me any reason to change this stance, so I'll be voting for Obama, and everybody else on the Democratic line.
I might be open to…
drorzel | October 29, 2008Last week, I wrote about ion traps as a possible quantum computing platform, which are probably the best established of the candidate technologies. This week, I'll talk about something more speculative, but closer to my own areas of research: neutral atoms in optical lattices.
This is a newer area, which pretty much starts with a proposal in 1999. There are a bunch of different variants of the idea, and what follows will be pretty general.
What's the system? Optical lattices use the interaction between atoms and a standing wave of light to produce a periodic array of wells in which individual…
drorzel | October 29, 2008Steinn asks a provocative question:
has science blogging done any good?
I can think of science policy issues where blogging has made a contribution, and the general spread of information and communication done by blogs has probably had some impact, but has any actual science been directly impacted by blogs, or discussion on blogs? I am hard pressed to think of concrete examples.
I think this is a badly framed question. That is, I think it's a mistake to define "good" for science to exclude science policy questions and the general spread of information. It's a very common mistake, mind, and…
drorzel | October 29, 2008
The Frontal Cortex : Dangerous Models
Why investment bankers are like cod fishermen
(tags: economics social-science science environment animals blogs computing theory)
Fear and Humiliation as Legitimate Teaching Methods :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
Teaching lessons from World of Warcraft. Seriously.
(tags: academia education games internet psychology social-science)
Eight Ways To Survive The Next Eight Days Without Losing Your Frigging Mind - 236.com - News
"Force Yourself To Engage In One Non-Election Related Activity Every Day"
(tags:…
drorzel | October 28, 2008The closing narrative of the McCain campaign is apparently going to be "Obama's a pinko commie socialist who wants to raise your taxes," which means it's time for all good liberals to bust out the graphs to show why this is false. Well, graph, singular. You know the one:
I don't remember who first posted it (I got it here), but it's been everywhere this campaign. It shows a head-to-head comparison of the consequences of the McCain and Obama tax plans for various income groups.
I hate this graphic.
Not because of the information it contains, mind-- that's fine. I hate this graph because it…
drorzel | October 28, 2008There have been a whole bunch of stories written about the idiot skinheads who were busted for a ludicrous plot to kill a whole bunch of black people, including Barack Obama: the AP version, the Washington Post, the New York Times. They're all pretty similar, and they're all notable for one thing: the word they don't contain.
Terrorist.
By any reasonable definition of the word, these guys were wannabe terrorists. Their plan called for shooting 88 people and beheading another 14 (because idiot skinheads are big on Kabbalistic numerology, apparently)-- that's a terror plot. Not a terribly…
drorzel | October 28, 2008Over at Dot Physics (which might be the best physics blog in the world at the moment), Rhett Allain has a pair of posts exploring the physics of Fantastic Contraption.
The posts don't really lend themselves to excerpting, so you need to go over there and read them, but I think they're brilliant, and deserve better than just a spot in a links dump. These may be the best example of the scientific mindset that you'll find on a blog.
What he does is to set out to determine whether the world of Fantastic Contraption obeys a consistent set of physical laws, by coming up with ingenious experiments…
drorzel | October 28, 2008
Cognitive Daily: Should you let your toddler watch TV?
No, you dolt.
(tags: science psychology television kid-stuff)
The Bill Clinton President School - World Wide Web Homepage
"Aren't you tired of not being president?"
(tags: us politics onion silly internet)
Microsoft Ad Campaign Crashing Nation's Televisions | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
"The Microsoft ads, which began airing earlier this week, are being blamed for generating critical system errors in more than 70 million televisions."
(tags: onion microsoft silly internet computing)
Slate's interactive swing voter…
drorzel | October 27, 2008One of my service activities at the moment is serving on the committee that determines our nominees for the Watson Fellowship. Participating institutions are allowed to nominate up to four students, and we've just selected this year's nominees, who are a really interesting bunch.
The Watson, for those who haven't heard of it, is, as it says on their web site,
A one year grant for independent study and travel outside the United States awarded to graduating college seniors nominated by participating institutions.
It's not a grant to study at any particular place-- in fact, Watson winners are…
drorzel | October 27, 2008As has already been noted by people with too much free time, my DonorsChoose challenge stands at $6,254. This is a big jump, and happened because somebody emailed to ask whether a donation of theirs had been counted; when I logged in to check, I found that there was $715 in account credits, which I believe are donations that didn't get made to a specific project. I'm not sure how that happened.
Anyway, even though I'm not sure of the origin of those (it's possible they're left over from last year), I put them toward the current challenge projects, because it seemed the honest thing to do. If…
drorzel | October 27, 2008
Corruption in textbook-adoption proceedings: 'Judging Books by Their Covers'
Richard Feynman on the idiocies of the textbook selection process.
(tags: science math education books politics culture publishing)
What does it all mean -- Crooked Timber
"There are two big economic ideas that look substantially less appealing in the light of the current crisis."
(tags: economics social-science politics history)
Cocktail Party Physics: paradigm shift
"There has been much weeping and gnashing of teeth in recent years bemoaning the "death of science writing," but it's really just the demise of…
drorzel | October 26, 2008Another day, another DonorsChoose incentive claimed. I'm actually late in responding to this one-- I missed my self-imposed 24-hour deadline because we're visiting Kate's parents outside of Boston, but I'll try to make up for it with the answer. Anyway, Helen asks:
How did Emmy become part of your household?
We decided we wanted a dog, and spent a bunch of time talking to local rescue groups and visiting animal shelters. We didn't have much luck, because people kept getting to the dogs we wanted before us, but persistence paid off eventually. The Mohawk and Hudson River Humane Society had a…
drorzel | October 26, 2008I tagged Ethan Zuckerman's post abpout video "windows" to other places in a links dump recently. The idea is to put big video screens and cameras in fast-food restaurants around the world, and provide virtual "windows" into other restaurants in other countries. In talking about the idea, Ethan threw out a great aside:
(If I were Cory Doctorow, say, I'd write a short story about the idea rather than wondering how to build it, where a group of kids in Brazil befriend another group in China that they meet randomly over the monitor. The keep returning to the restaurant at pre-agreed times, hoping…
drorzel | October 26, 2008
5 Presidential Elections Even Dumber Than This One (Somehow) | Cracked.com
Hard as it may be to believe...
(tags: politics history comedy US silly internet)
drorzel | October 24, 2008
Roe vs. Wade? Bush vs. Gore? What are the worst Supreme Court decisions? - Los Angeles Times
Legal experts weigh in.
(tags: law politics us history society)
Quantum Hyperion | Cosmic Variance
Is Saturn's moon there when nobody's looking?
(tags: science quantum physics astronomy planets)
...My heart's in Accra » Woices, and weird windows on the world
"I want to build windows between these spaces. We'd place videoconferencing systems unobtrusively in walls within these spaces - possibly something no more complicated than a flat-screen monitor and a webcam. They'd connect, at random, to…
drorzel | October 24, 2008This week's department colloquium was Roel Snieder of the Colorado School of Mines on The Global Energy Challenge. I have to admit, I was somewhat rude, and spent a lot of the talk futzing with my tablet, but really, while his presentation of the material was very good, the material itself wasn't new to me-- if you read ScienceBlogs, you've probably heard it all.
It's a colossal ball of woe, too. You know the story-- demand for energy is increasing, supplies of oil are dwindling. The planet is warming, the ice caps are melting, the oceans are rising. Everything is on the verge of collapse.…