drorzel | April 16, 2008Via Sheril, I see that the National Science Board has released a report on Science and Engineering Indicators 2008. It's chock full of useful and interesting information, particularly if you start poking around with the tables and figures, which are available for download.
This ought to produce all sorts of discussion around here, especially given that only 43% of respondants to a public survey correctly responded that humans evolved from other animals. This will undoubtedly be seen as evidence that the creationists are winning, and we must redouble our efforts to call them idiots on the…
drorzel | April 15, 2008
Meeting Announcment HTML Email
Including the classic anti-quack essay "DRIVE THE PSEUDOS OUT OF THE WORKSHOP OF SCIENCE," by the late J. A. Wheeler, albeit in a nearly unreadable format.
(tags: science stupid medicine psychology physics quantum)
Fighting Gossip With Graphics :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, and Views and Jobs
Princeton accentuates the positive.
(tags: academia education society culture internet)
Large Hadron Collider - Risk of a Black Hole - Dennis Overbye - Physics - New York Times
People who aren't crazy think about the odds.
(tags: physics…
drorzel | April 15, 2008Back when I was a kid, and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I spent about a week one summer staying with a great-aunt in Arlington, VA. I don't remember exactly when-- some time in the early 1980's-- and I don't remember where my parents and sister were at the time. I recall that they came down later and picked me up at the end of the trip, but not what they were doing while I was there by myself.
Anyway, since I was in the DC area, and nerdy as hell even as a pre-teen, I wanted to see a bunch of the Smithsonian museums. My great-aunt never had any interest in that sort of thing (she did take me…
drorzel | April 15, 2008Mike Huckabee spoke on campus last night, to the second-biggest crowd I've seen for an on-campus speaker (the biggest was Maya Angelou, back in the fall, where a few hundred people were turned away). It was a very good speech in a lot of ways, but ultimately, the whole thing was kind of frustrating, both because of Huckabee himself, but also because of the audience.
As a speaker, Huckabee amply justified his reputation as the one Republican candidate with charisma. He was charming, funny, and self-deprecating, and knew enough not to give a regular stump-type speech with obvious predetermined…
drorzel | April 14, 2008Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee will be speaking at Union tonight. This has provoked the predictable huffy reaction from the usual suspects, but I expect it will be an interesting event, and certainly better than David Horowitz or Pat Buchanan, who I'm told were the first two suggestions of the students pushing to invite a conservative speaker.
I'm not sure if he'll do a Q&A period after the talk, but if he does, I'm tempted to try to ask a question. My inclination would be something about the Republican governor (Alabama? Mississippi?) a few years ago who realized that…
drorzel | April 14, 2008Going off to a rugby alumni weekend generally requires entering a 48-hour news blackout, at least for me. Of course, the outside world doesn't stop just because I'm enjoying myself, so I emerge from my fog this morning to find that John Archibald Wheeler passed away. The New York Times obit is here, and Daniel Holz at Cosmic Variance offers a personal tribute, and I'm sure you'll see more.
(This is not, by the way, the first time that a notable public figure has died while I was in Williamstown carousing-- the last time, it was Richard Nixon, whose death was offered as a karmic explanation…
drorzel | April 13, 2008In honor of my weekend, here's Larry Miller on the Five Stages of Drinking. This is one of my all-time favorite comedy bits, and it's defintiely in the "funny 'cause it's true" category.
Details will, of course, need to remain scarce to protect the political careers of those involved, but it was a great weekend. I played a little rugby, sang a few songs, drank a lot of really terrible keg beer, and nobody was seriously injured or arrested.
Of course, now my sleep schedule is completely screwed, and I have almost no voice left, which is going to make tomorrow's lecture... interesting. And on…
drorzel | April 11, 2008Seth Godin offers a parable about toasters and web sites:
We recently acquired what might be the worst toaster in the history of the world. It's pretty fancy and shiny and microprocessor controlled. And it makes toast.
But here's what I have to do to use it:
[list of 10 steps]
He goes on to draw a parallel between the excessive demands of his toaster and paying a $6 bill to EBay, which requires 11 clicks.
My response: Yes, YES, YES!!! What he said!!
There are more examples of this than I can count, starting with the dreadful interface of the new Microsoft Office. The academic "content…
drorzel | April 11, 2008With the "Vox Day" business winding down (one way or another), it's time to unwind with something less contentious and controversial: Framing! No-- seriously. Most of the really loud opponents have publically washed their hands of the whole topic, so I expect this will be relatively non-controversial. What could possibly go wrong?
Anyway, Janet is thinking about "framing" and the example of stem cells given in the Nisbet and Scheufele article in The Scientist (PDF here). She identifies three "core values" that framers on one side or the other might be trying to reach:
cures for diseases are…
drorzel | April 10, 2008
A thought -- Words Words Words -- The Dream Cafe Weblog
"If President Bush has sunk lower than others, it is only because he is being stood on by giants."
(tags: US politics silly)
Mythbusters' Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage | The A.V. Club
Zombie Feynman says it's science, and that's good enough for me.
(tags: science television education society culture gadgets experiment)
Poll results: look who's doping : Nature News
"One in five respondents[ to a poll in Nature] said they had used drugs for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory."
(tags: science news…
drorzel | April 10, 2008I'm feeling pretty harried this week, because I'm teaching using a new curriculum, which requires all-new lecture slides and notes and homework assignments. I'm also going away this weekend, to Williamstown for the celebration marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of my college rugby club.
As a result, I've been losing more mental processor cycles than usual to thinking about my own college days, and remembering the lyrics to the dozens and dozens of songs I used to know. So, because it's on my mind anyway, and because the mixing of college sports and alcohol would really cheese off…
drorzel | April 10, 2008I'm not sure whether he's making some kind of obscure point, or just trolling, but John Scalzi gave a recent installment of his "Big Idea" series over to the witterings of "Vox Day," talking about his book The Irrational Atheist. Curse you, Scalzi, for getting me to even look at that.
And it's not just me-- John undoubtedly has readers who had never encountered Mr. "Day" before. Don't you know that exposing innocent people to "Vox Day" has been classified as a war crime, and earnes you ten thousand years in Purgatory?
Anyway, having spent a bunch of time recently complaining about a lack of…
drorzel | April 10, 2008Inside Higher Ed notes in passing that several NCAA Presidents are complaining about alcohol advertising during the NCAA Tournament. The source for this is a study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest:
According to CSPI's analysis of broadcasts of the semifinal and championship basketball games, the NCAA is exceeding the limits on beer ads it set for itself in 2005 of not more than 60 seconds per hour or not more than 120 seconds in any telecast. During the UCLA versus Memphis broadcast, CBS aired 200 seconds of beer advertising comprised of 15-, 20-, and 30-second spots for Bud…
drorzel | April 9, 2008
Satisfying application of physics
Another great idea for an intro mechanics lab.
(tags: physics academia education experiment science)
Michigan laser beam believed to set record for intensity
Includes a great lab-porn picture of the laser in action.
(tags: science physics optics news experiment)
'U.S. News' Adds Surveys That Could Alter Methodology :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, and Views and Jobs
"The magazine has sent out surveys to 1,600 high school counseling offices asking them to evaluate colleges, and the results may be used in next year's rankings. Or…
drorzel | April 9, 2008Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne waxes rhapsodic about her calculator, a HP-15C. This is such an obvious Dorky Poll topic that I can't believe I didn't think of it earlier:
What sort of calculator do you use?
My students, particularly the future engineers, are always shocked by my answer:
I use a TI 30Xa. Actually, I don't know that off the top of my head-- I had to dig it out and look at it to come up with the model number. I think of it as "A $10 scientific calculator that I bought at Safeway."
This does everything I need, though-- it adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides, does square…
drorzel | April 9, 2008The much-promised peer-reviewed research post is going to slip by another day, becuase I had forgotten about a talk by Neil Lewis last night on campus. Lewis is an alumnus of Union, and a writer for the Times best known for writing about the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and he was speaking as part of the Alumni Writers Series.
He had prepared remarks, but his speech still had a very off-the-cuff feel, and he tried to get through the prepared stuff quickly to get to a more open Q&A period. He talked about Guantanamo here four years ago, and joked that he was going to re-use that…
drorzel | April 9, 2008The College maintain an "OnCampus" page, intended to serve as a clearinghouse for electronic resources on campus. I have it set as the home page for all my campus computers, because it lets me access a lot of stuff very quickly-- Blackboard, course rosters, academic calendars, etc.
This page has always consisted of two bands of pictures on the left and right edges, with the center of the page being a two-column list of links in a very large font. The links were grouped into ares primarily of interest to students, primarily of interest to faculty, and a third category whose name escapes me.…
drorzel | April 8, 2008
Most powerful laser in the world fires up
"The Texas Petawatt laser reached greater than one petawatt of laser power on Monday morning, March 31," Good thing, or they'd feel pretty dumb about the name.
(tags: physics optics science news)
Cats Laughing
Everybody's favorite band of SF authors, on the Intenet.
(tags: SF music internet)
Affirmative Action Challenged Anew :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, and Views and Jobs
(tags: academia diversity race education politics US law)
Researchers take step toward creating quantum computers using entangled photons in…
drorzel | April 8, 2008(This is the second of two background posts for a peer-reviewed research blogging post that has now slipped to tomorrow. I started writing it, but realized that it needed some more background information, which became this post. And now I don't have time to write the originally intended post...)
Making a quantum computer is a tricky business. The process of quantum computing requires the creation of both superposition states of individual quantum bits (in which the "qubit" is in some mixture of "0" and "1" at the same time) and also entangled states of different qubits (states where the state…