drorzel | February 24, 2008There was some back-channel talk about the Academy Awards this past week, in which another ScienceBlogger opined that the Oscars were stupid and that we, as Serious Intellectuals, ought to have better things to talk about than a pop-culture award show. I think that's well over on the "pompous ass" side of things, so here's an Oscar post, just for spite.
Of course, I'm somewhat hampered here by, um, not actually having seen many movies this year. In fact, I've only seen one of the Best Picture nominees, No Country for Old Men. Which you might think argued for the irrelevance of the award, but…
drorzel | February 24, 2008
Here we see the mighty hunter returning from a successful pursuit of the elusive Red Snow Squid.
(It's a nice sunny day, here, and the snow storm of a few days ago left a nice coating in the back yard. It occurred to me that the snow makes a nice contrast with Emmy's black coat, and I still need some more good pictures of her for the book, so we romped around in the back yard for a while with a squeaky toy (a Kong Wubba), taking pictures.)
(That was half an hour ago, and already Her Majesty is flopped on the floor in the pose of the Most Neglected Dog in the History of the World, because we…
drorzel | February 23, 2008
The Field » Texas Early Voting Wave as Reaction to Systemic Disenfranchisement
Prairie View students shut down a highway in order to march seven miles for early voting.
(tags: academia politics race US)
Unruled Notebook » Blog Archive » Guilty of Plagiarizing Seventy Research Papers
A chemist published seventy plagiarized papers in three years, despite the fact that "The instruments cited in his papers did not exist in the department "
(tags: academia chemistry publishing plagiarism ethics science)
Not-So-Normal Mode Decomposition
Love the title.
(tags: physics science optics…
drorzel | February 23, 2008Because I'm a Bad Person:
(Context here, here, and here, Flickr group here.)
drorzel | February 23, 2008I had to do a couple of tests yesterday that required me to start something in the lab and then leave it alone for an hour, so I wandered over to a talk sponsored by the History department. Spencer Crew, the former director of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, OH was in the area to speak at a conference being held in Albany, and came to campus to tell us that we're all Philistines.
Well, OK, that was just his half-serious opening. His main point was to talk about the Underground Railroad (you can get an outline from Wikipedia, of course), and particularly the…
drorzel | February 22, 2008
sillybean » Translation from Aburt-speak to English of selected portions of his SFWA presidential platform[1]
"I don't understand why people on the internet are so mean to me, but I fully expect that my patronizing approach will bring them to their senses."
(tags: SF writing silly politics)
Why We Banned Legos - Volume 21 No. 2 - Winter 2006 - Rethinking Schools Online
"Exploring power, ownership, and equity in an early childhood classroom."
(tags: culture economics education ethics games toys society politics)
The God Particle - National Geographic Magazine
Blah, blah, Large Hadron…
drorzel | February 22, 2008A reader writes in with a literary query:
I was asked to teach a 400-level course on Nanotechnology at my U. In addition to the usual technical content, I would like to include a critical view of how nanotechnology is portrayed in popular culture. So I am looking for suitable works that can be examined. Naturally, Stephenson's Diamond Age and Crichton's Prey come to mind. You know of other examples that would make for meaty discussion by a bunch of engineers? [...] I want to stress that most of the course will focus on technical content, so whatever work we pick has to have *some* basis…
drorzel | February 22, 2008The Hugo Award nomination deadline is fast approaching, so I've been doing a bunch of reading to make sure I've covered a reasonable range of potential nominees. I've been really bad about book-logging recently, but I thought I'd at least post some brief comments on my crash reading here, for those who are just dying to know my thoughts on the awards this year.
Recently read books:
Undertow by Elizabeth Bear: A professional assassin on a corporate-controlled frontier planet gets involved with a group of people who want to help the exploited indigenous aliens. I probably would've liked this…
drorzel | February 22, 2008Inside Higher Ed reports on this week's candidate for Dumbest Administration Ever: Arkansas Tech:
After the Virginia Tech murders a year ago, Yale University banned the use of stage weapons in a student theatrical production -- infuriating actors and educators who believed audience members could distinguish drama from real life. After a few days of ridicule, Yale backed down.
A year later, after another gun tragedy, college officials are still trying to figure out how to make their campuses safe -- and theater still is a target. A student production of Assassins, the award-winning musical,…
drorzel | February 22, 2008Over at Arcane Gazebo, Travis talks about commuting, based on an Ezra Klein post:
Longtime readers know my obsession with the way we overvalue positional goods like money, prestige, and real estate and undervalue non-positional goods like social connections, walking to work, and health. But the evidence really is clear that you need to make a whole dump truck of money to outweigh the happiness offered by being only a 15 minute stroll from the office, and that that extra room for your old guitars isn't going to make you nearly as ecstatic as you think it will.
Lo these many years ago, I saw a…
drorzel | February 21, 2008
Scientists probe fireballs with X-rays - physicsworld.com
"Theories put forward so far suggest that this "ball lightning" is either a moving electrical discharge or that it is some kind of self-contained object. Now, research from an Israeli group is making the latter seem more likely. "
(tags: physics science news experiment)
The 2008 Tournament of Books by ToB Staff - The Morning News
"The tournament doesn't begin until Friday, March 7--we'll announce the judges and brackets a week or so before that--but we like to release the book list early so the audience can start its reading and…
drorzel | February 21, 2008Over at Terra Sigillata, Abel Pharmboy has live-blogged his own vasectomy.
Why did he do this? Your guess is as good as mine.
Why am I linking to it? Misery loves company. Until I figure out a way to scrub that knowledge out of my brain, the best I can do is make sure that the rest of you suffer, too...
drorzel | February 21, 2008Janet Stemwedel is blogging, as is her wont, about questions of ethical behavior in science. She had a post Monday giving advice on how to counter unethical behavior, which all seems pretty good to me.
Unfortunately, the people who read and comment on blogs about academic culture tend to start at "corrosively cynical," and get more misanthropic from there, so Janet has been deluged with negative commentary about how nothing she suggests will work. Feeling beleagured, she has issued a call for comments from senior scientists, asking for stories of how they deal with ethical issues:
I keep…
drorzel | February 20, 2008
xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe
"What do you want me to do? LEAVE?"
(tags: comics internet silly)
Researchers create 'self-healing' rubber - physicsworld.com
"If the material is snapped in half, the two torn pieces can be made to mend themselves simply by bringing the broken surfaces back in contact with each other "
(tags: science materials physics chemistry news)
Kids Today Have It So Easy... | The A.V. Club
"These days, kids have their own talking, moving, $300 robot dinosaurs that are big enough to ride."
(tags: toys stupid gadgets…
drorzel | February 20, 2008Regular commenter Johan Larson writes with a suggested blog topic:
The Human Genome Project (yes, you have to pronounce those capitals) cost about $3 billion. If $3 billion were yours to spend on scientific research, how would you spend the money?
That's a great question, and a great topic for a Dorky Poll. I'll narrow my response a little, because if I had to choose from all areas of science, it's a no-brainer to throw all the money at public health-- eradication of malaria, cures for major diseases, etc. For the sake of variety, let's restrict it to your own particular subfield, so, for…
drorzel | February 19, 2008
Can Scientists Dance? -- Bohannon 319 (5865): 905b -- Science
A contest to see who could do the best interpretive dance based on their Ph.D. thesis.
(tags: academia music science video silly)
Conservatives Just Aren't Into Academe, Study Finds - Chronicle.com
"Conservative students, however, put more value on personal achievement and orderliness, and on practical professions, like accounting and computer science, that could earn them lots of money."
(tags: academia education politics statistics marriage social-science society jobs)
Photo Basement » 41 Hilarious Science Fair Experiments…
drorzel | February 19, 2008Another tidbit from Boskone. At the Sunday afternoon panel on global warming, one of the panelists brought up the fact that the Second Law of Thermodynamics ensures that power generating systems always generate a great deal of waste heat. He wondered about how the waste heat released into the environment compares to the effects of greenhouse warming from CO2 emissions. Or, to put it another way, if you could develop some sort of magic carbon sequestration program that would capture every gram of greenhouse gas emitted by a coal-fired power plant, would you still have a problem because of the…
drorzel | February 19, 2008An interesting tidbit that occurred to me in thinking about the "unexpected uses of technology" panel (well, along with the "Total Eclipse of the Heart" thing): In a certain sense, my entire professional career is derived from unexpected uses of technology.
I'm not talking about the physics-with-the-dog thing, though that's pretty unexpected, but rather my research career. I work in atomic physics, specifically the subfield of laser-cooled atoms, and the most important paper I wrote involved Bose-Einstein condensates of rubidium. In fact, I got my start in the field as a skinny undergrad…
drorzel | February 18, 2008
Cocktail Party Physics: built for speed: part deux
Part two of the interview with the author of "The Physics of NASCAR"
(tags: physics books sports education science)
A Gut Check Moment for SFWA
Pass the popcorn...
(tags: writing SF stupid publishing books)
Mike the Mad Biologist : Bunny Rabbits Kick Ass
Don't let Emmy see this video...
(tags: animals video youtube silly)