drorzel | February 29, 2008After reading my LiveJournal friends list, I wander downstairs to talk to Kate. "I have an important question. Are we going to let FutureBaby read those agonizing kids books where the dog dies at the end?"
"I certainly hope not!" says the dog. "We don't like those books. Books where the dog dies. We don't like those books at all."
"Well," Kate says, "I don't know how we'll avoid it. They keep assigning them in schools, after all."
"That's a good point." We're quiet for a minute, except for the dog, who mutters darkly about the bad lessons taught to young humans.
"I suppose we could claim some…
drorzel | February 28, 2008
The Mentoring Gap for Women in Science :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education
"[W]omen do not perceive that they are receiving the same level of advising and mentoring as men."
(tags: academia science social-science psychology)
On being a scientist and a woman : Where, oh where, can I find my future grad students?
Help Alice Pawley recruit students for the School of Engineering Education.
(tags: academia education science)
McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Abstinence-Only Driver's Ed.
"Fear not, kids: there's a time in your life when driving a car will…
drorzel | February 28, 2008Yesterday's cheery hypothetical came about because I've agreed to do a guest lecture in a Science Fiction class in the English department. I'm going to be talking about Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," whose connection to the hypothetical should be obvious to people who have read it, but is a spoiler for those who haven't.
My guest spot will be this Friday, and I sat in on a class last week (where they discussed a Zelazny story and one of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles) to get an idea of what the class is usually like. This will be a different experience for me. It's been fifteen years…
drorzel | February 28, 2008EurekAlert tossed up a press release from the University of Minnesota yesterday with the provocative title: "U of Minn researchers find primary alcohol prevention programs are needed for 'tweens'" and the even more eye-popping subtitle "Study recommends that prevention programs occur as early as third grade." What, you may ask, is the problem this is intended to solve?
The study found that adolescents who already use alcohol are less receptive to prevention programs aimed at all students. Intervening at earlier ages, specifically between third and fifth grade, would allow for truly universal…
drorzel | February 28, 2008William F. Buckley is dead, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden is glad to see him go. I can't say I'm all that broken up, either.
I saw Buckley speak once, when I was in college. I remember very little about the context-- not even what year it was-- but he came to campus at the invitation of the college Republicans (one of whom was a good friend of mine), and gave a short talk to a packed house, then spent a long time doing Q&A. The talk was mostly just him throwin ideas out, and the only specific thing I recall was his suggestion that we ought to legalize the sale of all druge-- alcohol, pot,…
drorzel | February 27, 2008
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Ask the Administrator: Suggestions for Research?
What should people be studying about community colleges?
(tags: academia social-science economics science)
Buying a Spot on the Syllabus :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education
"The gift in question was $1 million to Marshall's business school, from the BB&T Foundation [...] [T]he funds would support a lecture series and an upper level course that would focus on the principles of Atlas Shrugged "
(tags: academia economics humanities social-science stupid)
How…
drorzel | February 27, 2008Say you were offered the chance to be introduced to the great love of your life, your absolute perfect soul mate. The two of you will be perfect together-- compatible personalities, the same taste in movies and books, sex so good you'll temporarily lose the power of speech-- but you'll only be together for five years. At the end of five years, your partner will die, absolutely and inevitably-- you'll be told the time, place, and manner of their death, and nothing you do can stop it.
This person is perfect for you, but there is absolutely no way you will ever meet by chance. The only chance…
drorzel | February 27, 2008I'm very happy with my 2007 Ford Freestyle, but there's one major design flaw that drives me nuts. It's only a problem in the winter, though, which makes me wonder what the hell the folks in Detroit are smoking.
If you look at the picture, you can just make out the antenna, on the passenger side of the windshield. It's attached to the car just an inch or two from the lower right-hand corner of the windshield, seen from inside the car.
Now, take five seconds, and think about what you would need to do, and where you would need to stand, in order to remove snow or ice from the windshield. Do you…
drorzel | February 27, 2008We haven't had a good navel-gazing kerfuffle around here in a while, but not to worry-- Bayblab comes to the rescue with a broadside against the current state of science blogging, as epitomized by ScienceBlogs:
If you examine the elephant in the room, ScienceBlogs, the trend is maintained: politics, religion books, technology, education and music are tagged more often than biology or genetics. This suggests that their primary motives are entertainment rather than discussing science. Why? Because it pays. Seed Magazine and the bloggers themselves profit from the traffic. That's right, Seed…
drorzel | February 27, 2008Scott McLemee writes about the shelving of books, spinning off Matt Selman's list of rules for shelving books
RULE #1: THE PRIME DIRECTIVE -- It is unacceptable to display any book in a public space of your home if you have not read it. Therefore, to be placed on Matt Selman's living room bookshelves, a book must have been read cover to cover, every word, by Matt Selman. If you are in the home of Matt Selman and see a book on the living room shelves, you know FOR SURE it has been read by Matt Selman.
(has anyone ever seen Selman and Mike Kozlowski in the same place?) and Ezra Klein's…
drorzel | February 26, 2008
quantum-entanglement.gif (GIF Image, 650x374 pixels)
Toothpaste for Dinner identifies the first application of large-scale quantum teleportation.
(tags: comics physics silly quantum)
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"Take Bigfoot. You only ever see him in campgrounds and parks: he's clearly on vacation."
(tags: basketball comics silly)
Stretching - Muscle Soreness - Injury - New York Times
"Research suggests that stretching does not affect soreness or risk of injury during exercise." I love studies that support my lazy bad habits.
(tags: sports science)
The…
drorzel | February 26, 2008The local fraternities and sororities hold occasional dinners/ discussions with faculty, to demonstrate that they're engaged with the intellectual life of the college. One of my students invited me to dinner at the Change in Kinetic Energy fraternity tomorrow night, and I agreed to do a discussion of physics and politics.
That's a vague topic, because I didn't have anything really definite in mind for it, other than that it seems better suited to a dinner and discussion than any of my regular presentations, which tend to be PowerPoint lectures. That doesn't really seem appropriate, so I…
drorzel | February 26, 2008On the subject of silly things said about academia, Matt Yglesias does a quick pass over "assessment,", and in the process recommends Alan Kruger's research that claims the benefits of elite colleges are all from selection effects. He links a Newsweek article on the topic, which contains this paragraph:
Dale and Krueger then compared graduates who had been accepted and rejected by the same (or similar) colleges. The theory was that admissions officers were ranking personal qualities, from maturity to ambition. Students who fared similarly would possess similar strengths; then, Dale and…
drorzel | February 26, 2008For some reason, the infamous "Don't Become a Scientist" rant by Jonathan Katz has bubbled up again, with Scott Aaronson giving his take. I commented on this a while back, and the intervening year and a half hasn't really improved my opinion of the piece.
The discussion in Scott's comments is better than the rant really deserves, and includes a link to another piece of academic catastrophilia, Phillip Greenspun's Women in Science, which I also remarked on back in the day. I didn't make any substantial comment about his time-line then, though, and that's what really jumped out at me:
The…
drorzel | February 26, 2008That "post three sentences from page 123 of the book closest to you" Internet "meme" has come around again, with Bora calling me out in hopes of getting a short preview of Bunnies Made of Cheese (or whatever the book ends up being called). Unfortunately for him, I blog from a desk heaped with books, and that's not the closest physical book to me.
The book at the top of the nearest stack is Volume I of Matter and Interactions by Chabay and Sherwood, and the relevant sentences are:
Tarzan hangs from a vine, swining back and forth in a gentle arc. At the moment when he reaches his maximum…
drorzel | February 25, 2008
SMU's Deal With Bush :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education
'"What self-respecting university would accept a censored library?" said Rev. William McElvaney, a professor emeritus of preaching and worship at SMU's theology school, and one of the leading critics of the library.'
(tags: US politics academia stupid)
Crystal bells stay silent as physicists look for dark matter
Still nothing, at higher sensitivity than ever before.
(tags: astronomy physics science news)
Engineers demonstrate a new type of optical tweezer
A press release crippled by typography,…
drorzel | February 25, 2008There's been some discussion recently of ScienceBlog reader get-togethers, and the question was raised of what ScienceBlogs ought to do to facilitate this. Of course, this is exactly the sort of thing that Facebook is useful for, and there is, in fact, a ScienceBlogs Facebook group. If you're a Facebook user, and interested in that sort of thing, join the group.
(I occasionally toy with the idea of making an Uncertain Principles group (or a Quantum Mechanics for Dogs group), but then, I don't really know what I would put on it at this point... The book is still a long way off, and it's not…
drorzel | February 25, 2008Over at evolgen, RPM is wondering about the disciplinary distribution of bloggers:
I have an intuition, backed up by absolutely no evidence, that my particular area of interest (evolutionary genetics) has more faculty blogging about stuff related to their research than other fields. This is most likely the result of my interest in those blogs, and, hence, my increased awareness of them compared to blogs of faculty in other research areas.
[... list of half-a-dozen blogs...]
That's not a lot of blogs, but it's also not a huge field. How does that compare with faculty who blog in your research…
drorzel | February 25, 2008Thanks again to all the people who left congratulations and well-wishes on last week's ultrasound picture post. The positive thoughts are much appreciated, especially since it's been a bit of a roller-coaster here in Chateau Steelypips.
As you can guess from the fact that the ultrasound looks fairly baby-ish, we've known about this for quite a while-- that's an 18-week ultrasound, and we told our parents about the pregnancy at Christmas. Things took a somewhat unpleasant turn in early January, though-- all appears to be well now, but there were a couple of really unpleasant weeks in there.
In…
drorzel | February 24, 2008
Starship Kimchi: A Bold Taste Goes Where It Has Never Gone Before - New York Times
"Three top government research institutes spent millions of dollars and several years perfecting a version of kimchi that would not turn dangerous when exposed to cosmic rays or other forms of radiation and would not put off non-Korean astronauts with its
(tags: food space science)
Kenyon College - Musings: On Being Wrong
"Almost all of our ideas, in fact, turn out to be wrong. The fun and the profit lie in demolishing them as quickly as possible."
(tags: academia science physics)