drorzel | March 30, 2008North Carolina beat Louisville last night to reach the Final Four, in what was the first good game in a couple of days. Xavier never seriously challenged UCLA in the early game, and while it's nice to see Davidson win, there wasn't much drama in their whomping of Wisconsin on Friday.
That Times link is notable in large part for their choice of photo to illustrate the story:
I really wish I knew what led to the choice of this particular picture for the web site. Honestly, it's like an editor called somebody and said "For this game, I'd like a picture that makes everybody in it look as stupid…
drorzel | March 29, 2008
The 6 Cutest Animals That Can Still Destroy You | Cracked.com
Oh shit! Run!
(tags: animals biology psychology video science silly)
Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More - New York Times
Crazy people seek an injunction to keep the LHC from destroying the universe.
(tags: physics science stupid)
Of Two Minds : Science on Television : Ask a ScienceBlogs Reader
"If you could be in charge of a new program on the channel of your choice and had an unlimited budget what kind of show would you create?"
(tags: blogs science television society culture education)
The…
drorzel | March 29, 2008Over at Reassigned Time, "Dr. Crazy" offers a remarkably sane post on what tenure means to her:
Ultimately, this is the allure of tenure for me, and it's what I think is most positive about the way I see tenure working at my institution. This is not to say that the tenure process at some institutions isn't screwed up, or that even at my own institution that the tenure process plays out this way for all people. Tenure can mean that people check out entirely, or it can mean that people spread their poisonous negativity around because they no longer fear retribution or negative personal…
drorzel | March 29, 2008As noted many times, FutureBaby is due in July, which means we're at the point in the process where we need to start acquiring, or at least registering for, Stuff. Of which there is a frightening amount.
Kate's big on consumer research, so we picked up the Baby Bargains book that several people recommended (this being 2008, they also have a blog), and Kate has been going through it carefully. I'm more happy-go-lucky than she is, so I've been a little more casual about it, just reading the chapter-opening lists of essential information, and not the reviews of specific products.
I have to say,…
drorzel | March 29, 2008Over at Evolving Thoughts, John Wilkins pokes string theorists:
Ernst Rutherford, the "father" of nuclear physics, once airily declared "In science there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting". By this he meant that the theory of physics is the only significant thing in science. Such mundane activities as taxonomy in biology were just sampling contingent examples of physics.
So it is with some amusement that I note that in order to make sense of string theory, a group of physicists have been trying to do taxonomy over string theories.
I'm never sure who reads what blogs, but I…
drorzel | March 29, 2008
Anachronista: The Simpsons Bayeux Tapestry Couch Scene
It's missing the comet...
(tags: silly television video)
Good Math, Bad Math : Introduction to Linear Regression
The basics of data fitting.
(tags: science math)
Quantum Decoherence Reduction by Increasing the Thermal Bath Temperature
A counter-intuitive result.
(tags: physics quantum science theory articles)
Condensate Fraction in a 2D Bose Gas Measured across the Mott-Insulator Transition
Some quantum phase transition results from my old group at NIST
(tags: physics quantum optics low-temperature science experiment articles)…
drorzel | March 28, 2008There are fewer of them this time, so I'll keep them above the fold.
Graphene
makes for better optical displays - physicsworld.com
"According to the same group of
researchers that first fabricated the 2D sheets of carbon nearly four
years ago, graphene has the ideal optical properties to form the
transparent electrodes in liquid crystal displays (LCDs)."
(tags:
href="http://del.icio.us/orzelc/physics">physics
href="http://del.icio.us/orzelc/materials">materials
href="http://del.icio.us/orzelc/science">science
href="http://del.icio.us/orzelc/experiment">experiment
href="http…
drorzel | March 28, 2008My sabbatical is coming to an end, so I've begun prepping my class for the term that starts Monday. I'm teaching the honors section of introductory E&M, and for the intro classes, I lecture off PowerPoint. We're starting an entirely new syllabus this year, and I plan to use my spiffy tablet PC to do my lectures, so I've been making up new lecture slides.
At times like this, I wish I got paid an hourly wage, because I'd be tempted to send Microsoft a bill for the time I've wasted because of their redesign of Office. I spent an hour figuring out how to get things back to the way I want them…
drorzel | March 28, 2008Back in the comments of one of the "Uncomfortable Question" threads, Matthew Jarpe asked (as background research for a new novel):
If someone were to hand you the keys to your own particle accelerator and you could do any experiment you wanted, what would it be?
Well, if somebody just gave me the keys to CERN, and left for the weekend, I'd be sorely tempted to steal some vacuum pumps and digital electronics. Because, dude, they've got some awfully nice stuff, and they'd hardly miss it...
I assume that the question is really intended to be what sort of particle physics experiment would I do…
drorzel | March 28, 2008Most of my best ideas come from Kate, so I'll steal this one, too:
If you could only give me one piece of advice [regarding FutureBaby, due in July], what would it be?
If you've been itching to provide child-bearing or -rearing advice (and I know some of you have), here's your chance. Please limit yourself to one (1) piece of advice per comment, and one comment per person per day.
So, have at it. What should we be doing/ expecting/ buying/ fearing?
drorzel | March 28, 2008Today's question come to us courtesy of Ivy League white-reggae band Vampire Weekend:
So, who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma, anyway? Well, John Scalzi, obviously, but the real question is: why? Why does this simple piece of punctuation engender such strong negative feelings in people who are otherwise mostly sensible?
Personally, I lean toward using it, to avoid the "my parents, Ayn Rand and God" problem, but I can't say I feel strongly enough about that to go through an entire book manuscript "STET"-ing removed serial commas. So what gives?
drorzel | March 27, 2008You may or may not have noticed the absence of the "Links for [Date]" posts the last couple of days. There's been some sort of glitch at del.icio.us, and they didn't auto-post the way they usually do. You may or may not have missed them, but I do, so below the fold you'll find the big long list of stuff that would've posted, had things worked as usual (many thanks to Kate for cleaning up the HTML from the del.icio.us source)):
Physics
and Physicists: Accelerator in a Bowl
A nifty tabletop demonstration of a
particle accelerator, using a ping-pong ball and a salad bowl.
(tags:
href="http://…
drorzel | March 27, 2008The Dean Dad posted an interesting article about "national service" programs yesterday. He's against them, for class reasons:
The message that national service programs send strikes me as dangerous. The implication seems to be that rich kids can just jump right into higher ed and start moving up the ladder, but the rest of us have to do our time first. It's a sort of penance for not having wealthy parents. I know our society worships money, but there should be some kind of limits. It implicitly defines higher education as a purely private good, which I reject out of hand. (This isn't just the…
drorzel | March 27, 2008This is the second Takeshi Kovacs novel, sequel to Altered Carbon. Kovacs is a former UN Envoy, a generally amoral individual loaded up with a bunch of sophisticated mental conditioning, and sent out into the world to troubleshoot problem spots for the world government. And he's a guy who really puts the "shoot" in "troubleshoot"...
In Kovacs's universe, humantiy has expanded to the stars using dribs and drabs of technology gleaned from the leavings of an alien race, known colloquially as "Martians," because their first ruins were discovered on Mars. When the book opens, he's working for a…
drorzel | March 27, 2008David Horowitz is an idiot.
Granted, anyone with any sense has known this for a good while now, but now we can prove it with SCIENCE!!! Well, political science-- Inside Higher Ed reports on a study of student political views that finds that liberal faculty make no real difference:
One of the key arguments made by David Horowitz and his supporters in recent years is that a left-wing orientation among faculty members results in a lack of curricular balance, which in turn leads to students being indoctrinated rather than educated. [...]
A study that will appear soon in the journal PS: Political…
drorzel | March 27, 2008Matthew Hughes's Majestrum is part of a linked series of novels and stories set in a distant future in which the rational rules of logic and science governing our universe are beginning to weaken and give way toa new age goverened by "sympathetic association," better known as magic. He's been writing these for a while, and they've been bouncing around from one publisher to another, trying to find a home. He may well have found a niche at Night Shade Books, one of the high-quality small presses that have sprung up in recent years. It's not clear that what Hughes is doing will appeal to a…
drorzel | March 26, 2008I tried to get a copy of this at Boskone, but Larry Smith's whole stock sold out on Friday, before I hit the dealer's room at all. I'm not sure how many copies there were originally, but Melko was doing the Happy Dance at the Tor party, and deservedly so. I had to wait to get my copy until we got home, and hit a regular bookstore.
Singularity's Ring is the story of Apollo Papdopulos, who is actually a "pod," a group of five genetically engineered humans who bond together (via visual and chemical signals) to form a single individual. Each of the five has been engineered for a specific task:…
drorzel | March 26, 2008Timothy Burke has a typically excellent post about the problems with academic tenure. Not the usual "It's an abomination that prevents that Magic Power of the Market from working its wonders" complaint from outside, but problems from the academic side:
Oso Raro and Tenured Radical underline one of the biggest problems with the tenure system in academia: its mystery.
They’re both trying to write about a controversial tenure case at the University of Michigan, to understand the seeming mismatch between the public transcript of the candidate’s accomplishments and the private decisions of the…
drorzel | March 26, 2008Returning to logging the books next to my computer in the order in which they were read, Matthew Jarpe's Radio Freefall was one of the few books I picked up at Boskone (I think I got Larry Smith's last copy). I read most of it during our trip to DC a little while back, and I'm only just getting around to writing about it. (Which makes me officially a Bad Person, as he mentioned my talk at Boskone as part of the inspiration for his new book, which is way cool.)
Radio Freefall has some very odd jacket copy that gives a decent idea of the feel of the book, but a slightly skewed idea of the…
drorzel | March 26, 2008It's been ages since I did a booklog post here. I've been reading lots of stuff, I just haven't been blogging it. I really should do something about the books in the stack by my computer, though, so I'm going to try to write a short post about each, and then shelve them before they topple over onto the keyboard and break something.
Paul Shirley's Can I Keep My Jersey? gets to be first, because it's from the library. I picked it up as seasonally-appropriate reading material-- it's subtitled "11 Teams, 5 Countries, and 4 Years in My Life as a Basketball Vagabond," and is about, well, it's…