drorzel | September 16, 2008
Wondermark by David Malki ! - 442: In which Beth keeps her Books
"They will breathe with gills that make the sound of fluttering pages."
(tags: internet comics books kid-stuff)
Unsolicited Advice VII: Should I Have a Web Page? | Cosmic Variance
Yes, but for the love of God, keep it professional.
(tags: academia jobs science internet)
The Reality-Based Community: Quitting while you're behind.
"This really isn't what the McCain camp was hoping for today. They can't plausibly argue with Fiorina, both because she's on their team and because she is, after all, perhaps the world's leading…
drorzel | September 16, 2008(Over the course of this week, I'm going to post a handful of things about talks that struck me as particularly interesting at last week's conference. The order will be chosen based on how much time I think I will have to write them up, given SteelyKid's demands for attention...)
On Thursday, the Science in the 21st Century conference featured a lawyer. Well, a law professor, anyway-- Beth Noveck of the NYU Law School gave a talk on Science in Government 2.0 (FriendFeed microblogging). This wasn't as odd as you might think at a Web 2.0 kind of meeting, because she talked about her involvement…
drorzel | September 16, 2008Time for everybody's favorite morbid pop-culture game: as we all know, it's a standard joke that celebrity deaths come in threes. So, who completes this week's triad:
David Foster Wallace, Richard Wright, and ...?
drorzel | September 16, 2008Everybody's all abuzz about this picture:
This may be the first image of a planet around a sun-like star. May be, mind-- it looks likely, but there are still a lot of caveats. If it is a planet, and not a dim background star, it's got about eight times the mass of Jupiter, and is orbiting at eleven times the radius of Neptune's orbit. Those are a little hard to explain.
Still, isn't it cool to be living in the future?
Phil Plait has all the details.
drorzel | September 15, 2008
Lithwick: Put Palin on the Supreme Court | Newsweek Dahlia Lithwick on Legal Issues | Newsweek.com
"[I]f any branch of government is in need of a mother of five who likes shooting wolves from helicopters, the [Supreme] [C]ourt is it."
(tags: law politics silly US)
David Foster Wallace (Harper's Magazine)
Free downloads, in memoriam.
(tags: literature writing stories culture review society)
David Foster Wallace - Commencement Speech at Kenyon University
"I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going…
drorzel | September 15, 2008If you listen to people talking about (or read people blogging about) new ways of doing things, you'll frequently hear references to Science or Academia as if they were vast but monolithic entities existing in their own right. Statements like "The culture of Science does not reward open access..." or "Modern Academia does not reward high-risk research..." are quite common. They also are often paired with a call for external relief, usually through some government mandate-- "We need funding agencies to make this a condition of grant funding."
I always find these statements faintly annoying,…
drorzel | September 15, 2008The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about online literacy this week (time-limited link, look quickly), and I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn that the author is pessimistic. The article cites distressing findings from new research:
In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. The rest jumped around chasing keywords, bullet points, visuals, and color and typeface variations. In another experiment on how people read e-newsletters, informational e-mail messages, and news feeds, [Jakob] Nielsen exclaimed, "'Reading' is not even…
drorzel | September 15, 2008As you might have guessed from yesterday's tease, the folks at ScienceDebate 2008 have now managed to get answers from the McCain campaign (to go with Obama's froma few weeks ago). Which means that while you may never see them answering science questions on a stage together, you can put them head-to-head on the Web, and see which you like better.
Of course, the key question regarding McCain's answers is "How long does it take him to mention elements of his biography?" The answer: There are 186 words before you get to:
I am uniquely qualified to lead our nation during this technological…
drorzel | September 15, 2008Via Brian and John, John Cleese's take on genetic determinism:
All the best social commentary comes from comedians, these days.
drorzel | September 14, 2008I started watching the Giants-Rams game today with SteelyKid on my lap. The Giants marched right down the field, and scored a touchdown, and seemed to have the game well in hand. It was lunchtime, though, so Kate took SteelyKid upstairs, and the Giant offense sputtered after that, producing only two field goals.
In the third quarter, I went upstairs and retrieved SteelyKid, and resumed watching with her in my lap. After I brought her back downstairs, the Giants outscored the Rams 28-7, including an interception run back for a touchdown by defensive end Justin Tuck.
The conclusion is obvious…
drorzel | September 14, 2008Kate and I were talking about Garrett Lisi's utopian idea of a time-share netowrk for scientists (about which more later, maybe), and I mentioned the fine tradition of great discoveries being made while on vacation. It occurred to me, though, that there's a secret history story begging to be written about one of these.
Erwin Schrödinger famously discovered the equation that bears his name while on a skiing holiday in 1925. He was accompanied on this vacation by one of his many girlfriends, but which of them went on the fateful trip has been lost to history-- Schrödinger kept exceedingly…
drorzel | September 14, 2008One of my favorite writers, David Foster Wallace, apparently hung himself yesterday. His thousand-page novel Infinite Jest puts the magnum in magnum opus, but it's a spectacular piece of work, and in some ways, his nonfiction was better than his fiction.
Wallace was always a dangerous writer for me-- one of those people whose style I would end up unconsciously imitating whenever I read something new. He'd come out with a new collection, and I'd spend a week deleting footnotes from my emails and blog posts. I'm shocked and saddened to learn of his death, particularly in this manner.
drorzel | September 13, 2008
Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator: Make Your Own Palin Baby Name
"Chad Orzel, if you were born to Sarah Palin, your name would be: Bush Gator Palin"
(tags: politics US internet silly)
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / A Chance to Show Off: the first line game
"Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire, I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town."
(tags: books blogs games literature)
Op-Ed Contributor - The Origins of the Universe - A Crash Course - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com
Brian Greene explains what to expect from the…
drorzel | September 13, 2008Back in March, I noted that I had inadvertently done an experiment to see what kinds of posts bring the most hits. That week, I posted one peer-reviewed post every day, along with a bunch of other articles, and I looked at the traffic stats to back up my contention that hard-core science blogging is not what racks up the page views.
The question came up again at the conference this past week, which reminded me that at the time, some people argued that the science posts weren't a big immediate draw, but would build up more posts over the long term. I thought it would be interesting to go back…
drorzel | September 13, 2008A while back, at dinner, I made my usual complaint that Slacktivist doesn't get enough attention. Kate expressed some doubts, because he certainly seems to have a large number of readers and commenters.
The problem is, it's not read by the people who really need to be reading it, and today provides an excellent example. Steve Benen at the new and prolific Washington Monthly is mystified by Sarah Palin:
Let's not play games. Yes, there have been a variety of foreign policy maxims dubbed the "Bush Doctrine" over the years. If Sarah Palin heard the question and said, "Which one?" I would have…
drorzel | September 13, 2008Well, I'm back...
I was away for SteelyKid's 5-week birthday, but Kate was good enough to get the bison picture for the week. I got in late last night, and only got a bleary half-hour of baby-calming in at 2:30am, but even that was enough to reconfirm that she's the cutest baby in the universe.
While I was away, Kate and my parents (who came up to help with SteelyKid-- the canonization paperwork is in the mail) purchased a couple of crib mirrors, and she has apparently decided that these are the most fascinating thing in the entire world. I can't wait to see it.
I'll have a lot to say about…
drorzel | September 12, 2008
'Race and Class Matters at an Elite College' :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
"Elizabeth Aries explores the insights she gained by studying four groups of students at Amherst College: affluent white students, affluent black students, white students without a lot of money and black students without a lot of money."
(tags: academia class-war diversity race society culture)
drorzel | September 12, 2008The Science in the 21st Century meeting is being held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, which is in a really nice building in the middle of Waterloo. It's a building that was quite clearly designed with physicists in mind, as there are numerous little common spaces where people can sit around and argue, and there are chalkboards everywhere.
Most of the chalkboards are covered with bits of physics-- matrices, field equations, little diagrams, etc. It really enhances the sense of being in a place where people are working on the Big Problems.
And when I went for a walk outside…
drorzel | September 11, 2008
Fafblog! the whole world's only source for Fafblog.
"As a Jesus-fearing moose-hunting hockey-mom mother of five who hunts moose for Jesus, Sarah Palin is kin to the wild outdoors and appreciates its bountiful splendor as she is gunning it down from her airplane. "
(tags: politics blogs silly US)
Woot : 10 Things We're Looking Forward To Now That The Large Hadron Collider Is Running
"1) Suddenly much harder to get particle beams insured"
(tags: blogs silly physics particles)