drorzel | September 26, 2008
Primer: TV Detectives | The A.V. Club
"A brief history of--and notable highlights from--television's long-term love affair with procedurals, mystery stories, and the colorful characters who figure out whodunit."
(tags: television review culture avclub)
drorzel | September 26, 2008God help me, I watched all of the debate tonight. I'm not sure why, but I did, and I'll say something about it in an overall sense tomorrow. It occurs to me, though, that one moment after the debate sums up everything that has gone wrong with this country over the last N years.
I watched on PBS, so as to get the minimum possible amount of wanker punditry, but the amount was not zero, and they had Mark Shields and David Brooks commenting on the debate immediately afterward. One of them-- I don't recall which-- said (approximately) of the overall tone:
These two acted like they were having a…
drorzel | September 26, 2008October is almost upon us, which means that we've been subjected to a bunch of long segments on Mike & Mike about baseball. These serve to remind me just how little use I have for baseball, and baseball statistics.
I've long thought that baseball fans are stat-obsessed dorks, but my opinion changed somewhat when I started learning the definitions of those statistics. Now, I think they're foolish stat-obsessed dorks.
It's a shame, because baseball is one of very few sports where you have a chance of doing meaningful statistical analysis, owing to the approximately three billion games…
drorzel | September 26, 2008At the time of this writing, it's still not clear whether the scheduled presidential debate will take place this evening. If you'd like to be prepared, just in case, here are a couple of links that might help you get through it:
FreePress.net is offering a "Rate the Debates" service, where you can sign up to express your opinion of the debate and the debate coverage, and have your opinion conveyed to the media.
If that's too serious, Mother Jones (the new home of Kevin Drum) is offering a bingo card/ drinking game for download on their fundraising page. A few beers might help make the whole…
drorzel | September 25, 2008
Good Math, Bad Math : How Mortgages Turned into a Trillion Dollar Disaster
"The question is, if mortgages are at the root of the current economic disaster, how can it possibly result in close to a trillion dollars worth of losses?"
(tags: US politics humanities math diversity stupid)
Easily Distracted » Blog Archive » Trade Secret of Teachers
"Watching Palin's interview with Katie Couric felt like being in a classroom with a bad bluffer. In fact, a bad bluffer at their worst moment, which is about five minutes before a final examination is about to begin."
(tags: academia US politics…
drorzel | September 25, 2008At my 15th class reunion this past June, I agreed to become the class secretary for the next few years, writing up little news updates for the Cult of the Purple Cow Quarterly, so my classmates can read about the achievements of their fellows. In that spirit, I feel I should note an accolade that won't be likely to appear in the next Alumni Review:
Yes, that's right, William Bennett (Class of 1965, and a rugby player, to boot) was dubbed "Alpha Dog of the Week" by Stephen Colbert, for having the balls to mock intellectuals. This, from a man with a BA from Williams, a Ph.D. in Philosophy, and…
drorzel | September 25, 2008In email this morning from the American Physical Society, a call for a financial bailout:
Congress has not passed any FY 2009 appropriations bills and is now
finalizing a Continuing Resolution (CR) that will keep the government
operating when the new fiscal year begins on October 1, 2008. The
House is expected to consider the bill on Thursday or Friday of this
week. The CR, according to the latest information, will remain in
effect until March 6, 2009 and would keep all federal programs
operating at FY 2008 levels, except those granted waivers. At this
time, science is not on the waiver…
drorzel | September 25, 2008Behold, the incredible expanding baby:
The "Smart Cookie" onesie she's wearing was also featured in the Week 4 picture, and now, it basically doesn't fit her any more (it's not fully buttoned under the blanket). We've already had to retire a couple of boxes of little-baby clothes, and she never did get to wear some of her newborn-sized outfits.
There are definite advances in other areas, too. She's awake and alert for longer periods, now (as you can see in the picture), and somewhat more frequently. She's also greatly expanded the range of little baby noises she makes, to include a bunch of…
drorzel | September 24, 2008
Dynamics of Cats : how to buy a house
A first-order approximation.
(tags: economics society US politics)
Good Math, Bad Math : Bad Probability and Economic Disaster; or How Ignoring Bayes Theorem Caused the Mess
"One of the big questions that comes up again and again is: how did they get away with this? How could they find any way of taking things that were worthless, and turn them into something that could be represented as safe? The answer is that they cheated in the math."
(tags: " economics politics math statistics stupid)
Point/Counterpoint: Gov. Palin Has No Experience vs. Please…
drorzel | September 24, 2008The dog marches up to my computer as I'm checking my morning email. "What the heck is the deal with relativity?!?"
"Well, good morning to you, too. How are you this fine morning?"
"I'm fine, but I'm confused about relativity." Sarcasm is totally lost on her.
"What are you confused about?"
"Well, you've got Special Relativity, right, and also General Relativity. Special Relativity is all about clocks that run slow when you're moving, and bunnies that get smaller when you chase them, and General Relativity is all about bowling balls on rubber sheets."
"Actually, that's just an analogy for the…
drorzel | September 24, 2008So, the LHC has been shut down until next year, after a major helium leak in on section. This means it will be March or April of next year before collisions in the ATLAS detector create dragons that will eat us all.
Now you know why I didn't make a big deal of the "start-up" a couple of weeks ago. (Well, also, I was in Canada at a conference...)
If you're worried that this will delay the march of progress, though, fear not:
The failure occurred as the accelerator's two proton beams were being ramped up for a test run at 5 TeV. CERN had then planned to use the winter shutdown to make final…
drorzel | September 23, 2008
Playing the odds at the LHC: the luminosity frontier « Shores of the Dirac Sea
"The chances (odds) of one proton hitting another in such tight conditions... are almost as bad as having to win a lottery three times in a row."
(tags: physics particles science blogs education math)
The Best of YouTube - bestofyoutube.com
This will do wonders for my productivity.
(tags: blogs video youtube internet silly)
Matthew Yglesias » Rounding Errors
Ah, the innumeracy of Harvard-educated pundits...
(tags: US politics math blogs silly)
Easily Distracted » Blog Archive » Not Even Wrong
"[A]…
drorzel | September 23, 2008Derek Lowe has posted an article about X-ray lasers in chemistry, which amused me because of the following bit:
Enter the femtosecond X-ray laser. A laser will put out the cleanest X-ray beam that anyone's ever seen, a completely coherent one at an exact (and short) wavelength which should give wonderful reflection data.
This is funny to somebody in my end of the science business, because we usually think of femtosecond lasers as have an extremely broad spectrum, not an "exact wavelength." It's a striking example of something I see all the time with chemists-- what chemists think of as "…
drorzel | September 23, 2008One full day of the Science in the 21st Century meeting wound up being devoted to what might be characterized as defining what we mean by Science. This started off with a talk by Harry Collins (microblogging, video), a sociologist of science who has done a great deal of work on the nature of expertise, then there was a remote presentation by Steve Fuller (no video, alas, but here's the microblogging), followed in the afternoon by Lee Smolin on "Science as an Ethical Community" (microblogging, video).
The talks by Collins and Smolin have a high information density, but are well worth a look.…
drorzel | September 23, 2008Two new articles appeared yesterday on the topic of science blogging and academic science:
GrrlScientist posted the text of an article she wrote titled "Science Blogs Can Advance the Academic Process".
ScienceBloggers Shelley Batts, Nick Anthis, and Tara Smith have a new article in PLoS Biology, titled "Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy".
Check 'em out.
drorzel | September 22, 2008
Submission Form
"Use this form to nominate a blog post for The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2008. "
(tags: science blogs books)
BuyMyShitPile.com: Hey Washington, can you buy my bad investments too?
"Use the form below to submit bad assets you'd like the government to take off your hands. And remember, when estimating the value of your 1997 limited edition Hanson single CD "MMMbop", it's not what you can sell these items for that matters, it's what you think they are worth."
(tags: politics economics internet silly)
xkcd - A Webcomic - Tones
"One stand on which I'…
drorzel | September 22, 2008Baby push-ups!
She can't maintain it for all that long, but SteelyKid can manage to push herself up and take a look around, when placed on her stomach. This is definite progress from a week or so ago.
drorzel | September 22, 2008I meant to follow up on some of the comments to my post calling for more science majors last week, but we had some Issues Thursday night, and I didn't get to it on Friday. There were a number of people making negative comments about things that weren't quite what I was saying, though, and I do still want to respond.
Happily, Johan Larson gets it:
[I]t seems to me that for a large portion of undergrads what they study doesn't seem very important, for several reasons: they don't know what they want to do with their lives, their preferred employers require a college degree but don't much care…
drorzel | September 22, 2008Your must-read academic link of the week is today's Inside Higher Ed article by Gary Lewandoski, with the provocative title: Stop Trying to Get Tenure and Start Trying to Enjoy Yourself. His thesis is pretty much clear from the title:
When I started my own tenure-track position I had the same questions. I perused published sources and quizzed colleagues to gain insight. I believed that by identifying the right steps to take, people to meet, ways to teach, scholarship to pursue, committees to seek out, and committees to avoid, I would bring clarity to the ambiguity of the tenure process.…
drorzel | September 21, 2008
Making kinematics graphs in Excel | Dot Physics
Important tips on making a graph with Excel.
(tags: physics education computing blogs science)
Robert Hughes on Damien Hirst's upcoming Sotheby's auction | Art and design | The Guardian
"Where you see Hirsts you will also see Jeff Koons's balloons, Jean-Michel Basquiat's stoned scribbles, Richard Prince's feeble jokes and pin-ups of nurses and, inevitably, scads of really bad, really late Warhols. Such works of art are bound to hang out together, a uniform message from our fin-de-siècle decadence."
(tags: culture review art)
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