drorzel | November 18, 2007I've been thinking off and on all day about the Jon Sobel post I mentioned in the previous post. I think he's got a point, but something about it strikes me as slightly off. To get this out of my system, I'm going to babble about it a bit here, and see if anything coherent emerges.
Sobel's jumping-off point is the fact that thrity-year-old music is still used at sporting events and in tv commercials, which he finds amazing given the origin of the form:
If you had told me, back in the 1970s when I was in high school, that the records my friends and I were playing at our parties would still be…
drorzel | November 18, 2007Following on yesterday's post about books, I started thinking about the best pop music for the year. Since getting iTunes, I've been able to do this quasi-scientifically, by putting together playlists of the top-rated songs for the year, which provides an easy guide to what I liked best. My first impression, thinking back, was that this was kind of a weak year, and the four- and five-star playlists for the year confirm it.
I initially had only ten songs on the five-star playlist, and while reconsideration of the four-star list managed to bump that up to 18, that's still the lowest by far of…
drorzel | November 17, 2007
Backreaction: Universal Scaling at Deadlines
"[Physicists] have analysed the distribution of registrations for two conferences...[and] they can describe this distribution by a simple model, assuming that the 'pressure to register' is inversely proportional to the time left before the deadline."
(tags: science silly physics meetings)
Dinosaur Interactive - National Geographic Magazine
An interactive guide to "bizarre" dinosaurs and their features. Via Laelaps.
(tags: animals science dinosaurs)
'Nanosoldering' makes a clean contact - physicsworld.com
I can barely cope with the normal-…
drorzel | November 17, 2007An email from Amazon arrived yesterday announcing their Best Books of 2007 lists. This is an earlier-than usual opening of the "Year's Best" season, in which every publication in the universe produces a list of the N best Whatever of the past year, but with the Christmas shopping season now starting before Halloween, I suppose this is only to be expected.
Amazon helpfully provides both a list of bestsellers, and an Editor's Picks list of the Best Books of 2007:
A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (…
drorzel | November 17, 2007Kevin Drum is thinking about debate formats:
Now, there's nothing wrong with a few beachballs. Giving every candidate a couple of minutes to simply explain their healthcare plan -- or whatever -- without interruption is fine. But then what? Do we really want several months of "debates" in which candidates do nothing but rattle off bits and pieces of their stump speeches endlessly?
The problem here is that he's asking the wrong question. There are far too many words in that last sentence, which really ought to be shortened to:
Do we really want several months of "debates?"
The answer is "no…
drorzel | November 16, 2007
Court Rejects Fuel Standards on Trucks - New York Times
The decision is not what I expected, given that headline, but hey, it's the Ninth Circuit...
(tags: environment news politics)
YouTube - Not The Daily Show, With Some Writer
"What do the writers of the Daily Show think of the ongoing writers' strike? If only there were some way to find out..."
(tags: youtube news politics video culture silly class-war)
Bruce fills stage, thrills devoted -- Page 1 -- Times Union - Albany NY
The local media weighs in on the concert Kate and I saw, including pictures. Look quickl, before it goes…
drorzel | November 16, 2007As you're probably aware, a cyclone hit Bangladesh yesterday, and has wreaked a good deal of havoc on what is already a fairly fragile country. Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum have been all over this, and are urging people to contribute to relief efforts in both text and video.
So, well, consider this an extra ecouragement to help out. If you'd like to donate, Chris says that the Red Cross/ Red Crescent is in the best position to help. If you prefer to give to charities without religious symbols attached, you can check out this summer's posts on non-religious charities, and the resources…
drorzel | November 16, 2007Turnabout, after all, is fair play.
An easy answer would be to just copy the worst reason for doing just about anything else: "Chicks dig it." Ironically, it's also one of the more effective ways of getting guys to do things, particularly college-age guys...
But I'm sure somebody else can come up with some entertaining snark, so have at it.
drorzel | November 16, 2007Inside Higher Ed has an article on yet another study of why there aren't more conservatives in academia:
Colleges have been increasingly competing to offer "family friendly" policies -- in the hopes of attracting the best academic talent from a pool of Ph.D.'s that includes both more women than ever before as well as many men who take parenting responsibilities seriously. A new study suggests that such policies may be important for another group that believes its needs aren't fully addressed in academe: conservatives.
The study -- "Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don't Get Doctorates" --…
drorzel | November 16, 2007Kate and I went to see Bruce Springsteen last night in Albany. The show was listed as starting at 7:30, but it was 8:25 before the band took the stage. At about 9:30, they were playing "Devil's Arcade," one of the slower and more political songs off the new record, which gave me time to look at my watch. "Huh," I said. "Must be getting near the end of the set."
They finished "Devil's Arcade," and went into "The Rising." "Well," I thought while singing along, "This is a good song to end the set on." They finished, and went right into "Last to Die." "Bold call, ending on a track from the new…
drorzel | November 15, 2007
Environment plays key role in children's readiness for school
"Genetic factors played a significant role in the children's core abilities underlying the four components of school readiness, but the environment shared by twins of the same family remained the most important factor overall."
(tags: education science news)
White children more positive toward blacks after learning about racism, study shows
It's amazing how many education research results seem to come from the "Journal of Well, Duh!"
(tags: education science news)
phishhook.com :: View topic - Charts and graphs of rap song…
drorzel | November 15, 2007Via email, a plug for the newish site 60 Second Science, which is a project from Scientific American built around a podcast featuring one-minute explanations of, well, science.
The email was specifically highlighting their new project, a set of video podcasts going by the name of Instant Egghead. The first video (also the only one so far) is a one-minute explanation of how we know there's dark matter using items found in editor George Musser's office.
It's a well-done video, and a nice explanation of galaxy rotation curves using coffee, crumbs, and a CD. I do have one quibble about the…
drorzel | November 15, 2007Over at Good Math, Bad Math, Mark explains "Proof by Contradiction," a common mathematical technique that doesn't translate all that well to politics. Whenever proof techniques come up, I always think about one of the very few things I remember from my graduate class on Math Methods.
We were talking about some sort of complex analysis technique-- I don't remember what it was-- and the professor was drawing diagrams and doing contour integrals on the board to demonstrate whatever it was that he was talking about, and at one point he drifted into Proof by Invocation:
"So we integrate along this…
drorzel | November 15, 2007It's been a while since I did one of these, so here's your book progress update for the last couple of weeks, with the obligatory dog picture. This is probably the halfway point for the first draft, more or less.
Introduction
Current Revision: 1
Total Words: 430 (dialogue only)
Chapter 1: Particle-Wave Duality
Current Revision: 5a
Total Words: 5,279
Chapter 2: The Uncertainty Principle
Current Revision: 7
Total Words: 4,499
Chapter 3: The Copenhagen Interpretation
Current Revision: 2
Total Words: 4,801
Chapter 4: The Many-Worlds Interpretation
Current Revision: 3
Total Words: 4,869
Chapter 5…
drorzel | November 14, 2007
Freshman's 3-Pointer Helps Lift Syracuse - New York Times
A typical beginning of the season
(tags: basketball)
Relativity passes new test of time - physicsworld.com
Precision spectroscopy of lithium ions in a storage ring confirm time dilation. That's a relief.
(tags: physics science experiment news relativity)
Donate to the Jhereg Foundation
Steven Brust needs money to pay medical bills. Also, you should buy his books.
(tags: books medicine)
Negative refraction 'could trap rainbows' - physicsworld.com
A proposal of a scheme for "stopping" light inside a negative-index metamaterial…
drorzel | November 14, 2007Over at the World's Fair, Dave is asking people for their scientific eponyms, that is, the formula they would like to have named after themselves. These are, of course, entirely made up.
Here's my contribution, from the scientific study of pick-up basketball: the Orzel Teammate Desirability Factor (TDF):
The Factor ranges between positive and negative infinity and is a quantitative measure of how much I want to have a given player on my team. The components going into this are:
P is the average number of points scored per game
ρ is the player's career shooting percentage
A is the average…
drorzel | November 14, 2007I'm currently getting trounced in Scrabble on Facebook, though I'm playing the game under protest: How can they possibly say that "ZA," "KA," and "AE" are English words, but "KABOOM" is not? The stupid thing is rigged.
Anyway, I've been playing around with this social network business for a little while now, and it's kind of weird. Because I'm well past the target demographic, I've got a really strange distribution of "friends"-- a total of 67, with no more than 5 in any one network. It's an odd assortment of people I know from work, people I know from Usenet, bloggers and blog readers, and a…
drorzel | November 14, 2007What's a mid-size breed of dog with a reputation for laziness? I need a slow-moving dog to contrast with a hyperactive husky, and I already used "basset hound" in a different context. Ideally, it should have about the same mass as a husky.
drorzel | November 14, 2007Dave Bacon watched "Judgement Day" last night, and has a question:
It's not like, you know, there aren't people who think quantum theory is wrong or that quantum theory is somehow related to the Vedic teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. So why is it that quantum theory (which after all is "just a theory" wink, wink, nod, nod) doesn't illicit courtroom battles of such epic scope as the Dover trial?
The answer: Because quantum physics involves math, and Math Is Hard.
If you want to construct a cockamamie theory that can pretend to be an alternative to quantum mechanics, it needs to have…
drorzel | November 14, 2007So, in case you missed the splashy banner ads that have been running here for the last week, NOVA ran a show about the Dover, PA "Intelligent Design" trial last night. You can find all manner of commentary on ScienceBlogs, for example here, here, and here.
I'm not as, shall we say, personally invested in the issue as many of my fellow bloggers, but this did look interesting to me, so I watched it last night (with occasional flipping over to the Syracuse basketball game). It was... pretty good. I doubt it would change anybody's mind, in the unlikely event that any "Intelligent Design"…