drorzel | November 30, 2007This could easily be a Links Dump item, but it's so good that it deserves more prominent placement. Inside Higher Ed has a spoof Editor's Note from an imaginary US News & World Report ranking of churches:
In thanking those who took the time to write, I would remind all in the community of believers that our rankings are intended as a public service to aid spiritual consumers in making one of life's highest-impact personal choices. We claim no infallibility in our rankings. We strive to provide accurate, user-friendly data to allow seekers of quality worship to do their homework and grasp…
drorzel | November 30, 2007One of the strangest things about reading a lot of blogs is the way it's broadened my view of the world. Which is "more or less at random."
I don't follow a lot of mainstream news sources any more, because they mostly just piss me off, so I end up getting most of my news from an assortment of blogs and LiveJournals and other web sites, which means that I have a weirdly spotty understanding of what's going on in the world. I know more than I really need to about Australian and Canadian politics, but I'm kind of fuzzy on events that took place twenty miles from where I sit to type this.
It also…
drorzel | November 29, 2007
Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Spray-Painting Pynchon
"The quality of them is not the greatest. This is obviously not a professional tagger," he said. "English majors and graffiti artists generally don't seem to be the same demographic."
(tags: silly literature books academia)
drorzel | November 29, 2007The first half of Maryland's 69-61 win over Illinois was as ugly a half of basketball as you'd ever want to see. It actually resembled our lunchtime pick-up games in some ways-- lots of really clever passes being throw to guys who weren't ready, weren't able to catch the ball, or just weren't on the same team as the guy throwing the ball. Basketball is a simple game, and when you complicate it unnecessarily, it gets ugly, fast.
They didn't get a whole lot better in the second half, but they did at least start hitting some shots. Maryland hit a few more shots than Illinois, and managed to pull…
drorzel | November 29, 2007In comments to my earlier cranky post about the New York Times, Carl Zimmer pointed out that they hadn't released their "Ten Best Books" list, so there was still an outside chance of a science book turning up. They posted the list today, and there's nothing on it that wasn't also on the Notable Books list, so no dice.
Another common response to my complaint was along the lines of "Do they ever list science books?" I was looking for a way to kill a little time at one point yesterday, so I went back through the last few lists and counted science books. The tallies for 2003-2006 (using a fairly…
drorzel | November 28, 2007
Lucas: More evidence of the talent gap between the Big Ten and ACC
"Instead of the annual bloodletting, otherwise known as the Big Ten/ACC Challenge, maybe a Big Ten/MEAC Challenge would help bolster the ego"
(tags: basketball)
Spoof London Underground Announcements - Emma Clarke Voiceover and Writer
"We'd like to remind our American tourist friends that you are almost certainly talking too loud."
(tags: silly)
Student research makes the pages of top scientific journal
Example 1 in the class on "How Not to Write a Useful Headline for a Press Release." The actual paper is about geology,…
drorzel | November 28, 2007Today's lesson:
Lead bricks are really heavy.
That is all. Carry on.
(I had a student working on a project involving radiation over the summer, in a shared lab space. A colleague needs to use the space next term, so I was moving the summer project stuff across the hall to a more permanent home. I got a hand cart to move the lead bricks, stacked a whole bunch of them up, and then had to un-stack most of them in order to move the cart...)
drorzel | November 28, 2007You may have thought you saw some other posts here earlier in the day. You didn't. Pay no attention to the vanishing posts about things I wasn't supposed to post about.
This means, though, that I don't have any content on the blog, other than a cranky note about an idiot radio host, so, ummmm....
OK, so, this past weekend, the New England Patriots narrowly beat the Philadelphia Eagles to get to 11-0. On Monday, the Miami Dolphins lost a miserable sloppy game to the Pittsburgh Steelers on a last-second field goal, to get to 0-11 on the season.
Which team, the Patriots or the Dolphins, is more…
drorzel | November 28, 2007I generally listen to ESPN radio in my office in the morning, because I like the Mike & Mike show. Unfortunately, they're followed by Colin Cowherd, who is a world-class pinhead.
He's currently holding forth on the death of Sean Taylor, with his basic position being that Taylor had it coming because he had a checkered past. If you were reading back in April, you can probably guess how happy I am to be hearing this line of argument.
In support of this brilliant insight, he's just touted his track record in correctly assessing high-profile public legal cases by noting that he didn't believe…
drorzel | November 28, 2007Over at Unqualified Offerings, "Thoreau" offers some musings about peer review. I saw this and said, "Aha! The perfect chance to dust off an old post, and free up some time..." Sadly, I already recycled the post in question, so I feel obliged to be less lazy and contribute some new content.
I generally agree with most of what he says, but I would raise one quibble about his list of criteria:
What scientists are looking for when we evaluate a paper is whether the paper clearly addresses 3 points:
1) What is the question or issue being studied in this work?
2) What are the methods being used,…
drorzel | November 27, 2007
John Cusack | The A.V. Club
"You try to make it as good as you can, but with an action movie or whatever it is, you're doing it so you can get leverage to go do Grace Is Gone or whatever these other ones are. So there's a ceiling on how good you can make something."
(tags: movies culture)
Carnegie's Vera Rubin to receive Richtmyer Award
A well deserved astrophysics prize
(tags: astronomy physics science news)
'High Q' NIST nanowires may be practical oscillators
Micron-scale wires that vibrate for more than a million oscilaltions before damping out.
(tags: physics materials science news…
drorzel | November 27, 2007Over at Backreaction, Bee has a long and thoughtful post (they don't do any other kind) about the interaction between science and the popular imagination. She says a lot of interesting things, but I think she comes to the wrong conclusion at the end, when she writes:
However, despite this general trend, what worries me specifically about popular science reporting is how much our community seems to pay attention to it. This is a very unhealthy development. The opinion making process in science should not be affected by popular opinions. It should not be relevant whether somebody makes for a…
drorzel | November 27, 2007Scott Eric Kaufman draws my attention to the fact that the New York Times has posted its Notable Books for 2007 list. The list is divided into "Fiction & Poetry" and "Non-Fiction," and Scott correctly notes that the "Fiction & Poetry" books all have terrible blurbs, but I'd like to point out a much larger problem with the list, relating to the "Non-Fiction" category:
There is not a single science book on the list of "Notable Books" for the year.
There are books on history, books on politics, personal memoirs, collections of critical essays, but nothing about science. There are…
drorzel | November 26, 2007
Alliance Announces 2nd Annual High School Essay Contest | Alliance For Science
Write about evolution, win money (if you're a high school student, anyway).
(tags: science education biology politics)
Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Benefits for Pets, Not Partners
A new low in contemptuous policies towards gays
(tags: politics gender academia)
Do middle-school students understand how well they actually learn?
Rule of thumb: If the title is a quest-on, the answer is "no."
(tags: education news psychology science)
newsrack blog
Are the His Dark…
drorzel | November 26, 2007I distinctly recall reading a quote from somebody talking about the debates between Bohr and Einstein, in which Einstein invented ingenious thought experiments to measure two non-commuting observables (position and momentum, or energy and time) and Bohr poked holes in them. The comment was something along the lines of "Of course, Einstein was much smarter than Bohr, but Bohr won every argument because he had the advantage of being right."
Unfortunately, my google-fu is weak, and I can't turn up a source for this. It's too good a line to pass up, if it's a real quote, but I don't want to quote…
drorzel | November 26, 2007The infamous Davies op-ed has been collected together with some responses at edge.org, and one of the responses is by Sean Carroll, who reproduces his response at Cosmic Variance. Sean's a smart guy, and I basically agree with his argument, but I'm a contrary sort, and want to nitpick one thing about his response.
He builds his response around the question, raised by Davies, "Why do the laws of physics take the form they do?" He considers and discards a few responses, before writing:
The final possibility, which seems to be the right one, is: that's just how things are. There is a chain of…
drorzel | November 26, 2007I said I wasn't going to write anything about the Paul Davies thing, but it's been the hot topic for the last day or two, and I've found myself reading a bunch of the responses in blogdom. I basically agree with most of what various science bloggers have said, but being a contrary sort, I can't help poking at a couple of points in the responses that seem a little iffy to me.
The main argument has centered around Davies's claim that science has its own form of "faith:"
All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist…
drorzel | November 25, 2007
outside the (toy) box » Little Man. Watching My Son's Socialization. or "Gender - it's wicked constructed"
Gender socialization through toys.
(tags: gender society toys)
Giro.org » The Big Scary Idea
A modest proposal for bringing the SF magazines into the Century of the Fruitbat
(tags: books SF)
Looking for 'Green' Lights in the Suburbs - New York Times
I am shocked-- shocked!-- to learn that suburban zoning restrictions are often a barrier to sensible development.
(tags: US politics environment energy society)
kidcyclone: How to Be A Topp Fledgling (With apologies to Molesworth)…
drorzel | November 25, 2007... or, Emmy's Best Thanksgiving Ever!
We did the traditional turkey-and-trimmings dinner Saturday with both sets of parents. Again, we brined the turkey overnight, following the Good Eats recipe, and other than a small glitch with the thermometer placement, everything went very well. The turkey was nicely roasted, moist, and juicy.
And that's where the problem started. Or, if you're the dog, that's where this started to be the best Thanksgiving EVER...
Neither Kate nor I really eat gravy, and it has the reputation of being fiddly to make, so we didn't do anything with the juices that…
drorzel | November 25, 2007There are two things creating some buzz at the moment on ScienceBlogs that I don't intend to write about because I've already commented on them. They're oddly similar, too, though they're being approached in different ways.
One is this op-ed by Paul Davies, which is basically a shorter and more contentiously worded version of one of the arguments in Cosmic Jackpot. I reviewed the book back in January, and I really don't have anything to say about this Cliff's Notes version that I didn't say then.
The other is this silliness from the Telegraph about shortening the life of the Universe by…