Japan Fights Crowds of Crows - New York Times "This is the Crow Patrol of utility company Kyushu Electric Power, on the hunt for crows whose nests on electric poles have caused a string of blackouts in [Kagoshima] on Japan's southern island of Kyushu." (tags: Japan animals travel) Breaking Murphy's Law "There are a lot of things that can go wrong when you're a presenter (or when you are supporting someone else's presentation). This site is going to try to help you break Murphy's Law so Murphy's Law can't break you." (tags: meetings academia education science)

As seen in a recent links dump, gg at Skulls in the Stars posted a fun challenge for science bloggers: My "challenge", for those sciencebloggers who choose to accept it, is this: read and research an old, classic scientific paper and write a blog post about it. I recommend choosing something pre- World War II, as that was the era of hand-crafted, "in your basement"-style science. There's a lot to learn not only about the ingenuity of researchers in an era when materials were not readily available, but also about the problems and concerns of scientists of that era, often things we take for…

Writing in Scientific American, Mark Alpert argues that we need more novels about science: A good work of fiction can convey the smells of a laboratory, the colors of a dissected heart, the anxieties of a chemist and the joys of an astronomer--all the illuminating particulars that you won't find in a peer-reviewed article in Science or Nature. Novels such as Intuition, with their fully fleshed out characters and messy conflicts, can erase the ridiculously sinister Dr. No cartoons. And most important, these books can inspire readers to become scientists themselves. As you might imagine, this…

For all the ranting people do about the evils of PowerPoint, it seems to me that people are missing the one bit of technology that is most responsible for incomprehensible presentations in science: the laser pointer. Having watched a bunch of student talks last week, I was reminded once again of just how useless laser pointers really are. Unless you have a really bright pointer, with a fresh set of batteries, the dot of light is almost completely invisible. And I have reasonably good (corrected) vision-- I doubt that anybody who's red-green colorblind can pick them up at all. The widespread…

Swans on Tea » Doomed to Fail "A thought experiment that finds a contradiction has only shown that the transforms have not been properly applied -- the author has made a math error, or made a bad assumption" (tags: physics relativity science education) Dark Matter Searches at Colliders - part III « A Quantum Diaries Survivor "[T]he final part of a long post on the searches for new particles that may be the solution of a long-standing problem in astrophysics today: the missing mass in our Universe." (tags: physics astronomy science experiment) Decorum at an Academic Interview…

Speaking of YA literature (as I was, briefly, in the previous post), I would be remiss if I didn't note that Cory Doctorow has put up a Little Brother section on his web site, promoting his new book. As with all of his books, it's available for free download, so if you'd like to read it but don't want to pay for it sight unseen, you can check it out. You may or may not remember, but I enthusiastically reviewed it back in March (I got an ARC at Boskone): Little Brother is Cory Doctorow's bid for a place on this year's list of banned books. It's a book that not only encourages kids to hack…

A few days back, John Scalzi posted a piece celebrating YA books and authors, which included some reading recommendations. In the comments, a few people said that as childless adults they were reluctant to go into the YA section of the store, lest people think they were creeps looking for kids to prey upon. I can honestly say that that would just never occur to me. I can't really imagine how skeevey somebody would need to look before I thought "Gee, I wonder if that guy is really a pedophile creep?" rather than "There's a guy looking for books for his kid." Of course, the sad thing is that…

The latest book by Iain M. Banks proudly proclaims itself to be a Culture novel-- part of a loosely connected series of novels and stories about humans living in a vast and utopian galactic civilization-- which makes its opening in a castles-and-kings milieu somewhat surprising. Well, all right, technically it opens with a prologue in which a woman called Djan Seriy Anaplian and her drone companion Turminder Xuss disrupt a medieval-level army with very little effort (she's an agent of the somewhat disreputable Special Circumstances, the group within the Culture that meddles in the affairs of…

Closure in an Ethics Case :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, and Views and Jobs Common sense prevails, for once (tags: academia ethics stupid) Ohmigosh fonts A big step up from Comic Sans (tags: comics computing silly language) Jacks of Science â Using Adobe Photoshop for Research and Profit "As you can see, Photoshop is such a powerful tool it's no wonder it cost $1000 to purchase!" (tags: science statistics pictures computing silly) Déjà Vu Dining - New York Times ""Surprisingly decent" was the consensus among nine reviewers who visited chain restaurants in…

The sports talk shows today were all abuzz with chatter about the death of second-place finisher Eight Belles at the Kentucky Derby, with no end of hand-wringing and moralizing about the nature of horse racing. I have to admit, I find the whole thing a little puzzling. I'm not puzzled that people are upset-- I get that bit. What has always baffled me about this is the sheer fragility of horses-- I've never understood why the "Horse" chapter of the vet textbook is all "Shoot," as the famous Far Side cartoon has it. So, bio types, help me out, here. Why is it that a broken ankle is fatal for a…

As I'm driving down the street, a squirrel darts out into the road a block or so ahead of me. From the back seat, the dog says "Gun it!!!! Hit the squirrel, hit the squirrel, hitthesquirrel!" "Will you sit down and be quiet?" We're having some work done on the house, and I'm taking her to work with me so she's not underfoot for the contractors. The squirrel makes it to the other side of the road, and up a tree to safety. "Awwww," says the dog. "Dude, you totally could've gotten that one. This car is way faster than a stupid squirrel." "That may be, but I have a class to teach today. I don't…

Jake Young points to a Bloggingheads conversation between Dan Drezner and Megan McArdle about, among other things, whether academics are bitter and why. This mostly comes out of a post Megan wrote (link is a leap of faith-- the site is down as I type this), and serves as a lead-in to a discussion of John Yoo. I found this somewhat annoying, for a couple of reasons, chief among them that I just don't like videoblogging very much. I could read a transcript of this conversation in about a fifth of the time that it takes to watch it, and that would also enable me to quote it accurately. As it is…

I collect and grade lab reports electronically, and both classes I'm teaching this term had labs due yesterday. I've also agreed to be on a faculty committee to evaluate proposals for a fellowship program, and they had a preliminary application deadline yesterday or today. As a result, I'm spending a lot of time downloading Word files from GMail. Every time I click on the download link, Firefox pops up a little dialogue box asking me if I'd like to open the file with Word, or Save it to disk. It also includes a helpful little checkbox saying "Do this automatically for files like this from now…

Open Left:: The Fear Before the Launch "[T]here's just something weird about putting two years of your life into something - from traveling, to reporting, to editing, to re-editing, to proofing, etc. - and then having it all be in one neat place, all laid out and ready to be consumed by the pu (tags: writing publishing books) theweaselking: Monkey teasing a dog You can't trust primates... (tags: animals biology silly video)

I'm typing this on the tablet in my in-laws' kitchen, while Kate sleeps in-- we're in Boston for a wedding, heading back home this afternoon. I need some sort of post to keep things going on our travel day, and I see Scott doing the guess-the-lyrics thing, so that's as good a topic as any. The following songs are taken from the FutureBaby playlist on iTunes. I'm not doing the first line of each, because the first lines aren't necessarily memorable enough to identify, and because I'm too lazy to go through all of the tracks and confirm the lines. Internet fame and glory will accrue to those…

As a sign of what an enormous geek I am, here's what I did to pass the time while Kate was getting ready for the wedding we went to yesterday: Yes, I amuse myself by making graphs. If I knew Python, I'd be an xkcd character. Anyway, that's the monthly traffic for this blog from January 2006 (when I moved to ScienceBlogs) to the present. As you can see, April 2008 was the third best month since the move, thanks to Reddit picking up my post on What Everyone Should Know About Science, and in influx of crazy people. Thank you, Reddit, thank you crazy people. The really interesting thing about…

Closing the achievement gap in math and science "The latest results from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Math and Science Partnership (MSP) program show not only improved proficiency among all elementary and middle school students, but also a closing of the achievement gaps between both African (tags: science education academia race) Computational modeling « Confused at a higher level "That I am 'modeling' nature in my studies was not entirely obvious to me until I spent some time collaborating with Randy Hulet as well as with Barry Dunning when I was at Rice." (tags: physics…

The Bohr paradox - physicsworld.com "Pais also reports a distinguished younger colleague asking with puzzlement and scepticism "What did Bohr really do?"." (tags: history science physics quantum) Mind the hack - physicsworld.com "But are the public and other scientists entitled to know about discoveries like this as soon as possible? Or is it right that research is embargoed, so that all journalists have an equal chance to report on it accurately?" (tags: science publishing journals journalism society news)

I'm going to be busy all day (more or less) at the Steinmetz Symposium, listening to talks about the fantastic things our students have been doing with their research projects. So it's going to be a "talk among yourselves" day here at Uncertain Principles, for the most part. For this one, I'll crib from Popdose, as seen in the links dump: Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert? For extra credit: Stephen Douglas or Frederick Douglass?

I'm going to be busy all day (more or less) at the Steinmetz Symposium, listening to talks about the fantastic things our students have been doing with their research projects. So it's going to be a "talk among yourselves" day here at Uncertain Principles, for the most part. It's been a little while since I ran a Dorky Poll thread, mostly because I'm running low on topics. Here's one that may be a little too esoteric, inspired by looking at the diploma on my wall: Chemical Physics, or Physical Chemistry? For bonus points, what's the difference between them? Also, are there other pairs of…