I got a new stereo installed in my car on Friday, so I can plug the iPod in directly rather than using one of those stupid FM transmitter gadgets, and the installation guy said it would take a few hours. So I did a little shopping, and then went to see the Coen Brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. The one-sentence review is basically "Just like Fargo, only set in Texas and not funny." As with any Coen Brothers movie, it's beautifully done on a technical level-- the camera work is great, the shots are set up very well. There's great acting as well, particularly…

The best music of 2007 | The A.V. Club The top 25 albums, as voted on by AV Club writers. (tags: music review)

On our first day in Kyoto, Kate and I went to a bunch of temples, including one that was showing a bunch of really cool paintings featuring Buddhist temple accessories come to life and chasing monsters around. They had a sort of demented whimsy to them, and you can get a little flavor of it from the background images in this poster: Of course, neither of us can read a word of Japanese (well, that's not quite true-- I can spot the character for "temple" in the group at the upper left), so we have no idea what the artist's name is, or anything at all about the show. I'm sure that somebody out…

IKE 'BEATS' TINA TO DEATH Kind of pushing the limits, even for the New York Post (tags: music news journalism) slacktivist: Charlie's Angels Why does Chuck Colson hate little kids at Christmas? (tags: religion politics US gender) Ten Top Physics Stories for 2007 -- Physics News Update 850 The AIP's opinion (tags: physics news)

It's mid-December, which means it's time for the annual run of "Best Noun of 2007" stories in every major media outlet. Being kind of a mid-major media outlet, ScienceBlogs doesn't produce an official list, but there'll be a lot of discussion here about the top science stories of the year. This will mostly involve wrangling about stem cells and global warming and suchlike, which I'm happy to leave to my colleagues, while we take up the really important question: What was the most significant development in physics or astronomy in 2007? Was it Garrett Lisi's Exceptionally Simple Theory for…

I took a much-needed Luddite Day yesterday, shutting down the computer and spending the afternoon loafing on the couch reading. I had meant to have a new stereo installed in my car and do some Christmas shopping while I waited, but we got a moderately significant snowstorm yesterday afternoon, so I pushed the installation and shopping back to today, rather than waiting for the roads to get really bad and then trying to come home from the mall. This means I'll be spending today doing some Christmas shopping while my car stereo is upgraded. So it'll be a day of open threads, a serious one to…

Here's where things on the Tree of SCIENCE!!! start to get more interesting, and somewhat more obscure: Yes, that's a small wooden Christmas tree ornament hanging on our full-size Christmas tree. What's this have to do with SCIENCE!!!? Well, obviously, it represents recursion. recursion, as you know Bob, is an extremely useful technique in computer programming, whereby you define a function in terms of itself. The classic example of this is the factorial function: n! = 1*2*3*...*(n-1)*(n) You can write a program to calculate the factorial of a number by defining a function f(n) that has two…

Chris Blattman's Blog: How to get a PhD *and* save the world Advice for Econ/ PoliSci types who are interested in social change and graduate school both. (tags: economics academia politics humanities social-science) A Month of Writers, Day Ten: Wil Wheaton A look back at the glory days of Star Wars action figures. (tags: blogs movies toys nostalgia)

1) I downloaded the demo version of Corel's Grafigo program, which a colleague really likes on his tablet, and earlier this week, I spent a short time playing around with it. A very short time, because there are controls on the top menu bar that simply disappear when you have the tablet in portrait mode-- they're off the screen to the right. These include "Settings" and "Help," making the program significantly less useful. I won't be buying that. 2) A few days ago, I tried to buy a bunch of new music at iTunes. After successfully adding two or three albums to the shopping cart, it suddenly…

Today's ornament from the Tree of SCIENCE!!! might seem like a repeat, but it's not: I know, you're saying "Dude, you already did life sciences..." True, but this glittery polar bear doesn't stand for life sciences, he stands for climate science and environemntal science. This little guy had an icecap, but somebody be stealin' his icecap. That's why he looks so sad. That, or he's just out of Coke. Tough call. I'm not sure where we got this one-- I think it was a gift. It's a little awkward as an ornament, because the hook is not above the center of mass, so it hangs a little crooked, but it'…

[0712.1649] Warp Drive: A New Approach "In this paper we demonstrate that a sufficiently advanced civilization could, in principal, manipulate the radius of the extra dimension to locally adjust the value of the cosmological constant." (tags: physics theory science silly articles) The Associated Press: Maine Newborns to Get $500 for College "A foundation started by the late Harold Alfond, founder of Dexter Shoe Co., will give new parents an opportunity to sign up for a $500 down payment for their young son or daughter's college education." (tags: academia education economics news US)…

There's another Mars article in the Times this morning, which I wouldn't bother to note in a full post save for one thing: the way they got the results. The right front wheel of Spirit stopped turning in March 2006. Since then, the rover has been driving backwards, dragging the lame wheel along. This May, scientists noticed a bright spot in the trail of overturned dirt. They turned Spirit around for a closer look, finding high levels of silica, the main ingredient of window glass. They then aimed the rover at a nearby rock, wanting to break it apart to determine if the silica was just a…

EurekAlert had a press release yesterday regarding a new study on the training of middle-school math teachers. It's not pretty: Middle school math teachers in the United States are not as well prepared to teach this subject compared to teachers in five other countries, something that could negatively affect the U.S. as it continues to compete on an international scale. [...]MT21 studied how well a sample of universities and teacher-training institutions prepare middle school math teachers in the U.S., South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Bulgaria and Mexico. Specifically, 2,627 future teachers were…

Over at Page 3.14, they're marking the launch of the German-language site scienceblogs.de (for real, this time) with a poll about language skills: they want to know what languages other than English ScienceBlogs readers speak, and what you think they should target next. Current sentiment is running in favor of French or Spanish next, but personally, I'd go for Japanese or Chinese-- we've already got some presence in Europe, but Asia is wide open. I wouldn't be able to read a word of it (not that I get much out of the German site), but it'd be cool to see Seed and ScienceBlogs move into a…

Today's picture from the Tree of SCIENCE!!! is a two-fer: That's a glass star and a wooden crescent moon, and together, obviously, they stand for astronomy and planetary science. Really, that's so easy and obvious that I don't need to say any more.

One of the alternately entertaining and depressing things about the culture wars in the US is the existence of a sort of parallel academic universe, in the form of vanity universities like Oral Roberts University, Bob Jones University, and Jerry Fallwell's Liberty University. These provide both a thin veneer of credibility for pseudo-academic nonsense and a launching point for hilarious academic misconduct. There's really nothing comparable on the militant atheist side. But here's your chance, Pharynguloids: Myers University is for sale: Don't write the obituary for Myers University yet. The…

Malaria - Vaccine - Mosquitoes - Research - Medicine and Health - New York Times A profile of efforts to make a vaccine for malaria. (tags: biology medicine animals economics drugs) Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Campus Fight Club Dorm-room boxing, yet another brilliant student idea I wish I hadn't heard about. (tags: academia stupid)

Dave Ng over at the World's Fair is at it again, asking what sort of science background Santa Claus has: So the premise is that Santa is at least several hundred years old, and you've got to assume that somewhere along the line, he spent some time in academia and probably got a degree or two. Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that he is a man of science, but I guess the question to ask is in what way specifically? Now, you might think that there are lots of ways to go with this. You could note the flying reindeer, and say that they're clearly the product of either genetic…

Faith in theory and curve-fitting, at least... Tommaso Dorigo reports some new results, which are based on a figure that could be titled "Why I Am Not a Particle Physicist #729": "What's the problem?," you ask, "There's a nice big peak there, looking a little like a black-body spectrum." Ah, but that's not the signal. The green shaded region in the big plot is all background. The signal is in the tiny little gap between the green background line and the blue data points on the right-hand side of the enormous background peak. Now, this is actually a pretty solid result, as you can see from…

I have a good deal more synmpathy for the plight of religious scientists than most of my fellow ScienceBlogs bloggers. For example, I'm willing to believe that people can both have sincere religious faith and be practicing scientists, without assuming that they're either brainwashed or evil. I really find myself feeling sorry for Richard Colling, then, who Inside Higher Ed reports has been barred from teaching introductory biology because of his religious beliefs. "Boy," you might be thinking, "I bet the Discovery Institute and the Christian Law Association must be all over that..." Not so…