drorzel | April 3, 2008Wow. I'm cranky today.
I really need to be more Zen about things. Here's a picture to meditate on:
This is the famous "Crane and Turtle" garden at Konchi-in in Kyoto. It's one of very few gardens absolutely known to have been designed by the great garden-desing master Kobori Enshu, out of the huge number of gardens attributed to him. It's really quite lovely-- I'm not sure the picture does it justice, but we spent a pleasant while looking at this while waiting for a tour of their art collection.
There, I feel better already.
drorzel | April 3, 2008Via Matt Yglesias, the Quick and the Ed offers an absolutely terrific article about the effect of class on access to college, using AJ Soprano as an example. On The Sopranos, AJ was a delinquent, who nevertheless got sent off to college because of the tireless efforts of his mother, and the family's money. Drawing on new data from the Department of Education, the authors show that this is all too real:
The fourth bar on the graph represents the A.J. Sopranos of the world, those who scored in the bottom 25 percent (the first achievement quartile) on standardized tests as high school sophomores…
drorzel | April 3, 2008I really had intended for Tuesday's dog pictures to be my only comment on the recent framing debacle (well, Monday's expertise post was an oblique commentary on it, but nobody got that, which you can tell because the comments were civil and intelligent and interesting to read). But Chris Mooney is making a good-faith effort to clear things up with his current series, including an effort to define common ground, and he's getting absolutely pounded, for no good reason.
I think Chris and Matt Nisbet have made some tactical errors in making their case to ScienceBlogs, chief among them forgetting…
drorzel | April 3, 2008Kevin Drum points to a report comparing international education systems from McKinsey and Company management consultants. The report (9.5 MB PDF) does double duty: it serves as a useful and important contribution to the study of education reform, and also as a case study in how to use PowerPoint to generate documents that are well nigh unreadable-- it's tarted up with so many pointless graphics that it makes even FoxIt run annoyingly slow.
Kevin's got the key conclusions, though: if you want better schools, you need better teachers, and if you want better teachers, you need to make education…
drorzel | April 2, 2008
Analytics According to Captain Kirk
A detailed statistical analysis of the Red Shirt Phenomenon in Star Trek.
(tags: articles economics math psychology statistics television SF silly science)
drorzel | April 2, 2008I have a doctor's appointment this morning, and then class, so here's another Dorky Poll inspired by the fact that I'm teaching intro E&M:
What system of units do you prefer for E&M: SI, or CGS?
This is even dorkier than usual, so I suppose I should provide some context...
The CGS system of units uses Centimeters, Grams, and Seconds as the base usints for everything, as opposed to the metere, kilograms, and seconds of the Systeme Internationale (also called MKS in some places). This doesn't make very much difference in mechanics, but it's a big deal in electromagnetism, because the…
drorzel | April 2, 2008One of the nice things about being a semi-pro blogger is that people send me tips about things that might be blogworthy. Most of these go into the daily links dump posts, but every now and then one hits at a time when I'm short of material, and looking for something to write about.
Such as the email that came in last night from KQED in San Francisco, plugging a video about the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, and the new Allen Telescope Array that's expected to speed the search up by a few orders of magnitude.
There's a lot to like, here. It's a well-made video, with…
drorzel | April 2, 2008In what is, alas, probably too deadpan to be an April Fools' joke, Mark Wilson offers a breathtaking suggestion on Inside Higher Ed:
I propose that all academics with research specialties, no matter how arcane (and nothing is too obscure for Wikipedia), enroll as identifiable editors of Wikipedia. We then watch over a few wikipages of our choosing, adding to them when appropriate, stepping in to resolve disputes when we know something useful. We can add new articles on topics which should be covered, and argue that others should be removed or combined. This is not to displace anonymous…
drorzel | April 1, 2008
Anil Dash: Your April Fool's Day Joke Continues to Suck
"The exception, of course, is if you're doing something truly hysterical or on a magnificent scale. But I fear we won't run into too many of those."
(tags: blogs internet society stupid)
Practical Jokes - Psychology - April Fool! The Purpose of Pranks - New York Times
"In a paper published last year, three psychologists argued that the sensation of being duped -- anger, self-blame, bitterness -- was such a singular cocktail that it forced an uncomfortable kind of self-awareness. How much of a dupe am I? Where are my
(tags: psychology…
drorzel | April 1, 2008It's weird how blogs go in cycles-- I'll blog nothing but science for a while, and then flip into Academic Mode, as I have this week, and blog about nothing but tenure issues and academic politics. But, that just seems to be how things work, and the stories catching my eye recently are all about academia.
Such as this disturbing tale from Baylor. It seems that they're trying to boost their status in academia, but the latest attempt has caused a little controversy:
That’s because, several university officials said, senior administrators have come to believe that departmental standards were not…
drorzel | April 1, 2008In which I steal post ideas from Kate: The following are two-word phrases from songs in my iTunes library that ought to be enough to identify the song in question. Leave your guesses in the comments:
Pre-Raphaelite curls
Chrome horse
Pink torpedo
Jasmine tea
Ashtray floors
Quartet practiced
Lickety splitly
Burnt sienna
Guaranteed personality
Danville train
Balalaikas ringing
Silicon chip
Silicone sister
Toadstool sandwich
Diamond car
Uninterrupted prosperity
Golden fiddle
I'll stop there, for now.
drorzel | April 1, 2008I've managed to avoid most of the recent fracas over Expelled and what Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney have said about it, mostly by unsubscribing from the RSS feeds for most of the participating blogs a few months back. Prescient of me, no?
I've kept my RSS subscription for Chris's blog, though, and I read his mea culpa post, and he's obviously quite sincerely bothered by what happened, and the way people on ScienceBlogs (both bloggers and commenters) have reacted to it. I can't say I really blame him.
Anyway, his post has motivated me to actually say something about the whole controversy. I'm…
drorzel | April 1, 2008I'm a Bad Blogger.
I got a free review copy of this book last summer, and it's taken me nine months to getting around to reviewing it. I started it as soon as I got it, but it seemd like it would be tempting fate to take it to St. John on vacation, and then I couldn't really justify lugging a hardcover to Japan on vacation, and then I was busy writing my own book, and so on-- I had good reasons for every postponement, I did, but the end result was an unconscionable delay. But, hey, I'm still getting this out ahead of the paperback edition...
This is the follow-up to The Republican War on…
drorzel | March 31, 2008
Hackers Assault Epilepsy Patients via Computer
People suck.
(tags: internet computing medicine evil stupid)
Word Munger » One-letter google searches
The alphabet, according to Google.
(tags: internet computing silly)
The Gashlycrumb Tinies
"M is for Maud who was swept out to sea/ N is for Neville who dies of ennui"
(tags: books comics silly art literature)
Researchers study why high school boys dodge 'Phys Ed'
'"Often boys who don't feel at ease are terrified to go to the locker room or class, fearing they will be mocked for their size, their lack of athletic prowess, or that they…
drorzel | March 31, 2008My post-tenure sabbatical, alas, is officially over today, as I begin teaching the honors section of the introductory E&M class. This will keep me busy for most of the morning, which makes it the perfect opportunity for a Dorky Poll:
Electricity or magnetism?
Yes, I know they're unified, and thus merely different manifestations of a single electromagnetic force. That's not the question-- you have to pick one or the other. Which one do you take?
Electricity would seem the obvious choice, given that the Internet isn't much good without it. Magnetism has that cool and counter-intuitive…
drorzel | March 31, 2008The latest issue of the Cult of the Purple Cow Quarterly-- er, I mean, the Williams Alumni Review has a story about a woman I knew in college (she was a senior when I was a freshman) who has started a non-profit organization called Quest for College, working to help prepare kids for college (annoyingly, the story is only available as a PDF file). The vehicle for this is a board game that she developed:
The game board features a student's path through high school, including points that colleges will consider in the application process. Four players or teams roll the die to move along the board…
drorzel | March 31, 2008Academics of all sorts are highly protective of their scholarly territory. It's an unavoidable consequence of the process of becoming an academic-- I've often joked that getting a Ph.D. requires you to become the World's Leading Expert in something that nobody else cares about. To make it through grad school, no matter what discipline you're in, you need to really like what you're doing, and that produces a tendency to angrily attack anyone who trespasses on "your" turf.
There's an interesting difference, though, in the way that scholars from the humanities and socials sciences approach the…
drorzel | March 30, 2008
Talk Like A Physicist | Talk Like A Physicist 3.14 » A water balloon not exploding in high-speed
Possibly even cooler than a water balloon exploding at high speed.
(tags: physics video youtube science)
THE FIVE WAYS OF PROVING SANTA CLAUS
After Aquinas.
(tags: silly humanities culture society religion)
Boing Boing's Moderation Policy - Boing Boing
How it's done, by the best in the business.
(tags: culture internet blogs society)
Twenty Sided » Blog Archive » DM of the Rings I:The Copious Backstory
The Lord of the Rings movies as a hack-and-slash D&D campaign.
(tags: comics…
drorzel | March 30, 2008Davidson's amazing NCAA tournament run came to an end today, as Kansas just squeaked past them, 59-57, when a shot at the buzzer went wide. The low score probably offends NBA fans, but to my mind, this game showed everything that's right about the NCAA tournament.
If you watched the game, it was clear that Kansas was bigger, stronger, and faster than Davidson at pretty much every position. And yet the Wildcats were able to hang with them, and even had a four-point lead in the second half-- not because they were chucking wild shots and getting lucky, but because they played excellent…
drorzel | March 30, 2008(Now that I look at the title, that sounds like an incredibly tepid harness-team command. "On, Moderation! Forward, with prudent speed!" I could clear that up by adding "Comment" in the middle, but I kind of like the image...)
Over at Boing Boing, Teresa Nielsen Hayden has posted a long explanation of the comment moderation policy in Q&A format. As you might expect, if you're a reader of Making Light, it's very well done, and as clear a statement of what good community moderation is about as you'll find anywhere. As you might expect, if you're a reader of the Internet generally, the…