drorzel | May 13, 2008Kate and I have been discussing possible names for FutureBaby when he or she ceases to be a baby in potentia and becomes an ActualBaby. We've also talked a bit about the issue of FutureBaby's Internet identification-- specifically, whether I should refer to him or her by name in the eventual blog posts (and oh, yes, there will be blog posts...), or adopt some sort of pseudonym to preserve a tiny bit of privacy in this Google age.
At the moment, we're leaning toward adopting a pseudonym for blog-reference purposes. Which raises the important question that I will throw open to you, oh wise and…
drorzel | May 12, 2008
Confessions of a Community College Dean: False Economies
"[S]elf-defeating efforts at cost control" See also "deferred maintenance."
(tags: academia economics stupid politics)
Maths plus 'geeky' images equals deterred students
This week, in the Journal of Unsurprising Results.
(tags: math science psychology society culture education academia)
Quantized conductance seen in graphene - physicsworld.com
"This phenomenon will allow researchers to achieve various quantum effects in graphene for fundamental research and for technological applications,"
(tags: physics materials science news…
drorzel | May 12, 2008The Corporate Masters are holding a workspace photo contest:
Now hard at work on the next issue, Seed editors want to see the typical or not-so-typical places where you do science. For the chance to get your scientific work space featured in Seed, please send a photo of it to art@seedmediagroup.com by Tuesday, May 13th at 5:00pm EST. Please write "Where I Do Science Photo Submission" in the subject line, and send as high a resolution image as you can. In the body of the email, please include: your name; what kind of science you do; and the location of the photo.
My office is moderately…
drorzel | May 12, 2008Charles Kuffner reports on an "Innocence Summit" in Texas last week, and points to two more reports from Grits for Breakfast that provide more colorful detail. The news story already says most of what needs saying, though:
AUSTIN -- Nine wrongfully convicted men who spent a collective 148 years in Texas prisons met with a select group of prosecutors, judges and police chiefs in the Senate chamber Thursday to urge the state to establish a commission to investigate claims of innocence.
"I'm crying out for mercy today for someone who may still be in prison," said James Curtis Giles, who served…
drorzel | May 12, 2008Matt Nisbet points to a new Pew Survey about global warming showing very little change in public opinion on the subject in recent years. It seems that An Inconvenient Truth didn't really cause a radical change in public opinion, after all.
(Of course, it does appear to have brought climate change to the attention of media elites, which is probably more important than general public opinion, in the end...)
The really interesting thing about this, as usual, is a tidbit near the end of the summary (and shown in the graphic Matt posted:
Among Republicans, similar percentages of college graduates…
drorzel | May 12, 2008There's been a lot said and written about Cyclone Nargis recently, and reading the coverage by Chris Mooney and others makes me feel a little like a Bad Person for not saying anything myself. But, really, what is there to say? It's a gigantic disaster, and the deplorable political situation in that part of the world isn't helping anything.
In an effort to do something halfway constructive, I'll pass along a link from my email, to Mercy Corps's Myanmar Cyclone page. They're one of the organizations that I sent money to after last summer's atheist charity search, and from all reports are an…
drorzel | May 11, 2008
The Neon Season: Theatre Tag
Hilarious tales of disasters on stage.
(tags: theater silly society culture)
Making Light: A new holiday, rarely celebrated
"Happy Voice of Command Day, in honor of all of those people in our lives who were irrefutably right."
(tags: culture society religion silly)
Crooked Timber » » Economic fundamentalism and the minimum wage
"What economics has done is to take the models of the supply and demand of consumer goods and apply them to the supply and demand of labor. This, I believe, is fundamentally wrong-headed. "
(tags: academia economics social-science…
drorzel | May 11, 2008Kate and I made a run to Babies "R" Us today, and looked at a bunch more baby stuff. We got a little punchy after a while, so it was perhaps not surprising that I was tremendously amused by the idea of Penguin Bowling.
On further reflection, though, it's really only natural. After all, the toy is really nothing more than a child's introduction to the study of physics. It's really an educational tool that captures the very essence of physics: we learn about the world we live in by throwing things at other things, and seeing what happens when they collide. Sometimes we throw photons at atoms,…
drorzel | May 11, 2008Jacques Distler asks the question that every blog-reader has asked at some point:
Did all of this exist before the Web? Or have people just gotten a whole lot weirder in the past 15 years?
(I'm not even going to attempt to describe what triggered the question...)
I tend to think that the weirdness was always there, and the Internet has just made it easier for the weird people to find each other. You can find antecedents of the social Internet in things like mimeographed fanzines and nineteenth-century magazine letter columns, so I suspect that for any modern weirdness, there are probably…
drorzel | May 10, 2008
Solve Puzzles for Science | Fold It!
Protein Folding: The Game! It has to be better than listening to seminar talks about it...
(tags: chemistry games science computing internet news)
drorzel | May 10, 2008Via Swans On Tea, I see that Comedy Central has put up the video of George Johnson's appearance on the Colbert Report. Or, I should say, they claim to have put it up-- their video player didn't work worth a damn on my computer.
I saw this on the day-late rerun, and it was hilarious. Not because Johnson is at all witty or amusing-- he's not. But toward the end it turns into an xkcd comic, and achieves a sort of accidental brilliance.
Check it out, if you can get it to play.
drorzel | May 10, 2008There's been a lot of talk about REM's decision to finally sound like a rock band again for their new album, Accelerate. I rather like the first single, "Supernatural Superserious," which sounds like the REM I remember, rather than some bloodless adult contemporary act.
So I bought the album, and it's been of shuffle play with a bunch of other stuff for a few weeks now. And you know what? The rest of it is pretty tedious. It is a departure from their recent stuff in that it's at least loud and tedious, rather than adult-contemporary tedious, but I'm not liking it all that much.
I just wanted…
drorzel | May 9, 2008
slacktivist: L.B.: Speakerphone
"If you're a book editor, you should own a copy of Left Behind to take along to your annual performance reviews. Just open to a random page, have your boss read it, and then remind them that this is why you're worth every penny and then some."
(tags: books writing politics religion stupid publishing)
http://www.teeful.com/product_p/abc-23.htm
I judge you when you use poor grammar
(tags: language academia education silly)
drorzel | May 9, 2008Timothy Burke has some interesting thoughts about the College of the Atlantic, which represents a real effort to build interdisciplinarity on an institutional level. "Interdisciplinary" is the buzzword of the moment in large swathes of academia, and the College of the Atlantic, which doesn't have departments and works very hard to make connections between disciplines, is sort of the apotheosis of the interdisciplinary movement.
Toward the end of his post, Burke relates a story from earlier in his career:
When I was briefly at Emory at the start of my career, I was in a workshop on…
drorzel | May 9, 2008There's a news piece in Physics World this week titled "Atom laser makes its first measurement" and you might think this would be right up my alley. Mostly, though, it serves to remind me that the term "atom laser" has always kind of pissed me off.
This is somewhat ironic, as it's a beautiful piece of "framing," the sort of thing I've spoken in favor of numerous times here. I have a principled technical objection to the term, though, in that I think the analogy it draws is deliberately misleading.
I should stress that there's really nothing wrong with the analogy on the face of it. The basic…
drorzel | May 9, 2008You have no idea how hard it is to be the Queen of Niskayuna. Between the talking about Relativity, and the people working on the house, and the nice weather, and the squirrels, and the cleaning service coming by, and the inferior dogs in the neighborhood, well, she's just wiped out:
She was too tired to even arrange her pillows in a satisfactory manner last night. She managed on Wednesday, and the resulting picture is much cuter:
There are probably two more weeks to go on the construction project, so life won't get any easier for Her Majesty. I'm sure she'll find a way to muddle through,…
drorzel | May 8, 2008
Solar System Visualizer
Look at those planets and moons go!
(tags: astronomy planets science computing internet gadgets)
Polar vortex replicated in a bucket - physicsworld.com
"The centre of the vortex is usually circular, but occasionally it assumes a triangular or even a square shape. Now researchers in Canada claim to have replicated this behaviour for the first time in the laboratory -- using nothing more than water in a c
(tags: science physics pictures news)
The Quantum Pontiff : In Probability We Trust?
"How well has classical probability theory been tested?"
(tags: physics…
drorzel | May 8, 2008I've been grading lab reports in two different classes, and I've been struck once again by the way that students attach mystical properties to anything with a digital readout. The uncertainty used in calculations is invariably put down as half of whatever the least significant digit displayed was, even in cases where the readout visibly fluctuated during the measurement.
Even better, any experiment involving length measurements will inevitably produce lab reports suggesting that the uncertainty could've been improved if they had had a caliper with a digital readout, rather than a vernier…
drorzel | May 8, 2008The video that accompanies this PopSci.com article is pretty impressive. A bunch of college kids show off their ability to hit trick shots with ping-pong balls, bouncing them off walls, doors, floors, moving skateboards, people, and items of furniture and into beer cups. As the PopSci piece notes, there's a good deal of physics in this-- if every student put half as much effort into learning the material as these guys put into practicing trick shots, the world would be a better place.
The title of the piece, however, is "The Physics of Beer Pong," which brings us to today's non-dorky poll…