What Kate said, basically. The visuals are spectacular, the plot is pretty silly, the gender politics are kind of irritating. The director, Guillermo Del Toro, is supposedly going to direct The Hobbit, and given the impressive look and feel of this movie, I'm sure he'll do cool things with Middle-Earth. Kate remarked on the way home that it would be pretty difficult to screw up the gender politics of The Hobbit, given that there are basically no women in the book at all. I think she's selling Hollywood short.

Thin-film dyes boost solar cells - physicsworld.com "Scientists in the US have shown how to multiply the power output of photovoltaic (solar) cells by up to ten times using organic dyes to concentrate sunlight." (tags: science physics optics chemistry energy environment news) Swans on Tea » The Right Tool For the Job See also: Five-Minute-Epoxy. (tags: physics science experiment silly) Not Exactly Rocket Science : Scientists heart journalists? Plus a quick guide to dealing with the media "[F]or readers who are keen to get the most out of your flirtations with the press, here's a quick…

A couple of links about things that have turned up in my email recently: -- As a follow-on to yesterday's post about grad school, I got an email a little while ago about Graduate Junction, a social networking/ career building site aimed at graduate students. I'm coming up on ten years of being out of their demographic, but it looks kind of cool. If you're a grad student, you might check it out. -- The Union of Concerned Scientists is running a cartoon contest for the best editorial cartoon about the politicization of science. They've selected a dozen finalists, and now want your vote as to…

The Quantum Pontiff : Ways To Do Fundamental Theoretical Physics I like option three... (tags: science theory silly physics blogs) » It's post-a-rejection-letter Friday! >>Nostalgia For Infinity: Literature, Gaming, Punk Rock (and all that) "Apropos of the ridiculous focus on whether or not posting rejection letters is common practice/professional/legal/cuddly/appropriate/blue rather than on the exposure of crude and offensive racist language, I'm officially declaring it Post A Rejection L (tags: writing SF silly race society politics)

Matt at Built On Facts spots an Inside Higher Ed article that I missed, showing that grad students at South Carolina get $9,500 a year, and uses it as a starting point to comment about grad school salaries: The difficulty of living as a graduate student varies heavily on what you're studying. Take at the law school model, for instance: you don't get paid at all, and tuition is very expensive and not waived. But the upside to that is that you're not in school very long, you can live comfortably on loans, and once out you can probably get a high-paying job which can pay down your debt fairly…

Tobias Buckell brought the whole sordid racist rejection letter episode to my attention a couple of days ago. This has apparently decided to become the "Violet Blue" episode for this week, and today, Toby dredges through the sewers of the Asimov's forums to find a few real gems of sexist and racist filth. I hadn't previously been aware that Asimov's hosted forums, and I can't say that this has inspired me to sign up. Toby does make one important comment, though: I know this stuff feels tiring, but there are a lot of cool people out there in the blogosphere who are just as annoyed by this.…

The Reality-Based Community: Economics and Fundamentalism "A very hard puzzle for the intellectual historians of the future will lie in determining how economics remained the queen of the disciplines when it made so many wrong or simply irrelevant predictions." (tags: academia economics social-science society)

I'm currently revising the book chapter based on the original "Bunnies Made of Cheese" post, which deals with virtual particles and Quantum Electro-Dynamics. The best proof of the power of QED is the measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron, where experiment and theory agree to something like thirteen decimal places. In double-checking things this morning, I find that the Gabrielse group has released yet another improved measurement of the electron g-factor since the last draft of this chapter. I've updated the current draft accordingly, and continue to be amazed by the…

Via Matt Yglesias, the following pair of pictures purports to show that "an equal number of people can fit into a vastly smaller space if they're riding a bus than if they're in single passenger cars." See if you can spot the problem: Answer below the fold: The bus picture is on a vastly different scale than the car picture, greatly exaggerating the size of the effect. I'm not denying the effect, mind-- just lamenting the deceptive photo editing used to make it look larger than it is. And the hell of it is, it's pointless stupid photo editing. The same point would be made by properly cropped…

In Grad Admissions, Where Is Class? :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs "A study just published in PS: Political Science and Politics suggests that in graduate departments, class may be nowhere to be found in admissions decisions." (tags: academia class-war social-science humanities science) Dennis Overbye -- Talk to the Newsroom -- The New York Times -- Reader Questions and Answers - Question - NYTimes.com Q&A with one of the best in the business. (tags: science journalism) Uncool, man. Just uncool. at Tobias Buckell Online "I've since learned…

The Corporate Masters have launched a new group blog, Next Generation Energy, that will be providing regular commentary on energy issues and possible new sources of energy. The authors include a few people already on ScienceBlogs (William Connolley, James Hrynyshyn, and Sheril Kirshenbaum), along with some researchers on sustainable development and alternative energy. They haven't posted about perpetual motion (view the source before commenting) yet, but the blog is still young...

Vital Statistics - Summer Sports Are Among the Safest - NYTimes.com "The snowboarding accident rate is higher than the rate for summer pastimes like boating, camping, fishing, hiking, mountain biking, swimming, and water-skiing -- combined." (tags: statistics medicine sports science) stand up for REAL science "We have an obligation to our children to pursue only the best available science. We should accept nothing less than REAL science in our public school science classrooms." (tags: science education academia society politics) Cite Check :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's…

As a sort of palate-cleanser after the quantum chicanery discussed in the previous post, let me recommend Donald Simanek's Museum of Unworkable Devices, a wonderful collection of failed ideas for perpetual motion machines, including explanations of why they don't work. I'm tempted to turn a couple of these into exam questions, the next time I teach mechanics...

The final chapter of Bunnies Made of Cheese: The Book is currently envisioned as a look at the misuse of quantum mechanics by evil squirrels: qucks and hucksters of various sorts. As a result, I spent a good chunk of yesterday wading through the sewers of alternative medicine books on Amazon, using the "Search Inside This Book" feature to locate good manglings of quantum theory in the service of quackery. I feel vaguely dirty. I also spent some time on the web page of Bob Park's favorite shills, BlackLight Power, which provides another example of the appropriation of quantum concepts for…

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Ask and Ye Shall Receive... Wise and worldly advice about academic job hunting. (tags: academia jobs education) My Semester With an Asperger Syndrome Student :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs I am somewhat uncomfortable about the fact that this article is based entirely on an assumed diagnosis, rather than any official notification. (tags: academia education psychology ethics) Bloomberg.com: U.S. Why are so many Ivy League grads in jail? (tags: academia society law culture education silly) www.kansascity…

John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy is one of those classics of the field that I've never gotten around to reading. I've been thinking more about these sorts of issues recently, though, so when the copy I bought a few years ago turned up in our recent book-shuffling, I decided to give it a read. Unfortunately, I probably would've been a lot more impressed had I read it when it first came out in 1988. Most of the examples used to illustrate his point that people are generally very bad with numbers are exceedingly familiar. They appear in How to Lie With Statistics, and the recent The Drunkard's…

Kate and I are giving away books. Not all of them, mind, and they're not totally free-- you need to pay shipping-- but a couple hundred duplicate/ disliked/ never-going-to-get-read books are being discarded. If you would like any of them, there are simple instructions on Kate's LiveJournal. Don't worry that this will leave us bereft, though: That's the first section of the hardcover collection, which continues: (that's the same wall of shelves as the first picture, from the other end...), and ends on the other wall: Note the ample space for new additions on most if not all of the shelves…

From yesterday's snail mail: On behalf of President Bush, thank you for your correspondence about the President's Fiscal Year 2009 Budget. We appreciate hearing your views and welcome your suggestions. So, there you go. I'm appreciated and my suggestions are welcomed. Of course, it took me a while to figure out when I might've contributed anything to the White House budget process... I think this was a response to the form letter I sent as part of the annual DAMOP letter-writing campaign. Since that was aimed at obtaining some supplemental science funding, I suppose you can say that it got…

"2. Ever repeat a word so much it starts to lose its meaning? Writing a book is like that, only with 90,000 words." Quantum quantum quantum, quantum quantum. Quantum.

What a drag: Arago's Experiment (1810) « Skulls in the Stars "[I]t was a failed experiment, based on incorrect theories of light propagation, which was interpreted incorrectly by Fresnel, but this incorrect interpretation helped lead to the (correct) view that light has wavelike properties!" (tags: physics history optics astronomy precision-measurement relativity)