drorzel | August 1, 2008You know, my opinion of "No Child Left Behind" style attempts to measure "failing" schools is as low as anybody's, but even I think this new Ohio State study sounds ridiculous:
Up to three-quarters of U.S. schools deemed failing based on achievement test scores would receive passing grades if evaluated using a less biased measure, a new study suggests.
Ohio State University researchers developed a new method of measuring school quality based on schools' actual impact on learning - how much faster students learned during the academic year than during summer vacation when they weren't in class…
drorzel | August 1, 2008The Borg assimilates another quality blogger: Built On Facts is joining ScienceBlogs. If you haven't been reading Matt's blog, it's one of the best basic physics blogs around, with math and everything.
It'll be good to have another non-philatelic scientist around. Update your blogrolls accordingly.
drorzel | August 1, 2008Well, OK, that's a stretch, but there is water, according to the latest Phoenix results:
"We've now finally touched it and tasted it," William V. Boynton, a professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona and the lead scientist for the instrument that detected the water, said at a news conference on Thursday. "And I'd like to say, from my standpoint, it tastes very fine."
No word yet on whether they've managed to figure out how to turn on the alien atmosphere-generating machine. That'll probably have to wait for the next mission.
Update: Here's a bonus link to…
drorzel | July 31, 2008
UKTV: About UKTV: The world's ten oldest jokes
"Modern puns, Essex girl jokes and toilet humour can all be traced back to the very earliest jokes identified in this research."
(tags: silly history)
TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect
"[D]id any other random black people who like Barack Obama say something that offended you today?"
(tags: politics race US stupid)
Favre: I've Always Had A Passion For Stopping Things, Then Starting To Do Things Again | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
"I guess you could say I'm a guy who quits, then realizes I don't know the meaning of the word…
drorzel | July 31, 2008The other day, the Dean Dad remarked on one of the quirks of academic technology:
Last week I saw another iteration of something I still don't really understand. People who are perfectly civil in person are often capable of firing off incredibly nasty and hateful emails. Sometimes they'll do that with cc's all the way up the chain, as a way of spreading the manure over the most ground with the least effort. Yet, when confronted, they're surprised that anybody would take offense, and they revert to their perfectly civil selves.
It is, indeed, mystifying, and seems to be more common in…
drorzel | July 31, 2008"The Internet is silly!"
I turn around from the computer. "Yes it is," I say to the dog, "But what, specifically, makes you say that?"
"All these posts about physics theories. Comparing them to women and men and stupid wizards, and relationships. It's silly."
"Yes, well, it does seem to be the diversion of the moment."
"Anyway, they've got it all wrong. Physics theories are like my toys."
"oh, god..." I was afraid of this.
"Go on, name a theory, and I'll tell you how it's like my toys."
"Do I have to?"
"Yes! Go on, name a theory!"
"Fine. Classical mechanics."
"Oh, that's easy. Classical…
drorzel | July 30, 2008
Cassini instrument confirms liquid surface lake on Titan
'"We can see there's a shelf, a beach, that is being exposed as the lake evaporates," Brown said.'
(tags: astronomy science planets news space)
Prelude to the Higgs: A work for 2 bosons in the key of Z
"The properties of the ZZ diboson make its discovery an essential prelude to finding or excluding the Higgs boson at the Tevatron."
(tags: physics particles experiment science news)
Dynamics of Cats : Physics Made Magical
"Electromagnetism is Snape.
You must master E&M, but so many have irrational fear or hatred of it."
(tags:…
drorzel | July 30, 2008Over at Backreaction, Bee has a nice post about uncertainty, in the technical sense, not the quantum sense. The context is news stories about science, which typically do a terrible job of handling the uncertainties and caveats that are an essential part of science.
Properly dealing with uncertainty is one of the hardest parts of science. Which is why I'm particularly impressed by people who spend their whole careers measuring nothing but uncertainties-- looking for an electric dipole moment for the electron, or parity non-conservation, or Lorentz violation, or any of a bunch of other things…
drorzel | July 30, 2008A colleague emailed me yesterday with the following question:
As I have mentioned the other day, [Prof. Firstname Lastname] of Comp. Sci. is putting together an exciting course "Can Computers Think?" (Intro to Comp. Sci.), and she hopes to use Sci Fi short stories (and movies, and TV series) to bring ethics into the course. If you have a minute, please let me know if you have any suggestions on the following topics:
Technology and Privacy
Sustainability
Ownership and intellectual property rights
Threats and possibilities of A.I.
Some of these are pretty obvious-- "Technology and Privacy"…
drorzel | July 29, 2008
The Nature of Glass Remains Anything but Clear - NYTimes.com
"David A. Weitz, a physics professor at Harvard, joked, "There are more theories of the glass transition than there are theorists who propose them.""
(tags: physics materials science)
Medium Large
It's back! Maybe the best Web comic going.
(tags: comics internet silly)
Game Over: Scrabulous Shut Down on Facebook - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog
What am I going to use for procrastination now?
(tags: internet games stupid law)
Laser beams are entangled in space - physicsworld.com
"[P]hysicists created two entangled…
drorzel | July 29, 2008Currently in heavy rotation at Chateau Steelypips (links to last.fm):
"Do the Panic" by Phantom Planet. I'm a sucker for the "Ba ba ba" chorus...
"Sequestered in Memphis" by the Hold Steady. "We went to some place where she cat-sits." I had to Google that.
"Glad It's Over" by Wilco. "I hate you one hundred percent/ I mean that kindly."
"I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You," by the Black Kids. Not that I could teach anybody how to dance...
"Lost in the Light," by the Heavenly States. Because I have to list at least one song that's not on the radio...
"Aluminum Park," by…
drorzel | July 29, 2008In the Reader Request Thread, Ian asks:
I'd like to hear what you think we'll learn (if anything!) when the LHC comes online next month.
Well, that sort of depends on the time scale. I'm not a big accelerator guy, but my sense from reading the blogs of people who are is that we're not likely to learn anything at all this year, other than the answer to the question "do the components of the LHC work?" They've got a few weeks of preliminaries before they start any particles going through, and then a whole bunch of sanity checks and calibration tests to do, and a scheduled shut-down in December…
drorzel | July 29, 2008I tagged this for del.icio.us, but on reflection, it deserves better than to be buried in a links dump. It's so rare that the New York Times notices physics that doesn't cost billions of dollars, that Kenneth Chang's article on glass deserves its own post.
Peter G. Wolynes, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, thinks he essentially solved the glass problem two decades ago based on ideas of what glass would look like if cooled infinitely slowly. "I think we have a very good constructive theory of that these days," Dr. Wolynes said. "Many people tell me this is…
drorzel | July 29, 2008Because I am a Bad Person who thinks and types relatively slowly, I have been lax about following up to the many excellent posts that have been written in response to this weekend's two cultures posts. Let me attempt to address that in a small way by linking a whole bunch of them now:
My rant was actually anticipated by this post at "It's The Thought That Counts,", which was pointed out to me in comments.
Janet had the first direct response, with a later follow-up speculating about the reasons for the divide. As I said in one of my own comment threads, I think a lot of it has to do with…
drorzel | July 28, 2008
The Font Sizes of the Planets | Orbiting Frog
The Solar System as a Wordle. You can get it on a T-shirt, too.
(tags: astronomy planets science silly)
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Thoughts on Service
"[T]he path of least resistance is lip service to service, with a tacit understanding that we don't really mean it."
(tags: academia education)
WEIRD TALES: magazine of the gothic, fantastic & bizarre » Blog Archive » Weird Tales writing contest!
"Write a flash-fiction story -- under 500 words -- based on a spam you've received."
(tags: writing SF internet silly)
The…
drorzel | July 28, 2008In the Reader Request thread, Mary Kay writes:
I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on becoming a father. Both before and after the actual event.
I mentioned this to Kate, and she asked whether I thought there was a difference between "fatherhood" and "parenthood." I'm not that attuned to such things, so it had never really occurred to me that there is a difference-- I'm becoming a parent, and I have a Y chromosome, thus "parenthood"="fatherhood." She sees some differences in expectations between "parenthood" and "motherhood," and I suppose that "fatherhood" does suggest a little more…
drorzel | July 28, 2008Last week's Reader Request Thread produced a bunch of good suggestions, some of which I'll be responding to this week as I put the last touches on the book draft and send it off. We'll start with a good physics question from Moshe:
So, what do you think about graphene? the next big thing, or just the latest fad?
Doug might be a better person to answer this, as it's a little closer to his field. It's unquestionably the latest fad, the question is whether it's a fad with legs or not.
Graphene, for those not up on the subject, is basically just carbon in one-atom-thick sheets. It's two-…
drorzel | July 28, 2008The New York Times front page yesterday sported an article with the oh-so-hip headline "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?." This turned out to be impressively stupid even by the standards of articles with clumsy slang in the headlines:
Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.
As teenagers' scores on…
drorzel | July 27, 2008A question raised in comments to yesterday's rant about humanities types looking down on people who don't know the basics of their fields, while casually dismissing math and science:
[I]t occurs to me that it would be useful if someone could determine, honestly, whether the humanities professors feel the same sense of condescension among science and engineering professors.
This is obviously not a question I can answer, but I agree that it would be good to know. So, how about it?
drorzel | July 27, 2008Richard Reeves is probably best known for writing biographies of American Presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan), so it's a little strange to see him turn his hand to scientific biography. This is part of Norton's "Great Discoveries" series (which inexplicably lacks a web page-- get with the 21st century, already), though, so incongruous author-subject pairing is part of the point.
Some time back, there was a "meme" that went through the science side of blogdom asking people to post about their favorite historical scientist. I didn't contribute, mostly because I didn't really have a favorite…