drorzel | August 8, 2007
The "Ankle-Breaker Crab" (Coenobita iversonii) is a species of carnivorous land crab found in the Caribbean Islands. It closely resembles the ordinary Caribbean hermit crab (Coenobita clypeatus), but is distinguished from its more common cousin by its habit of living in special titanium-reinforced shells, and its diet, which consists primarily of hikers.
Coenobita iversonii are most commonly found at altitudes of 150 m or more above sea level, living in colonies of 100 or more in the underbrush near hiking trails. They are the only arthropod known to feed primarily on humans, and they hunt…
drorzel | August 8, 2007While I was out of town, there was a nice article in the New York Times Education section about the Minerva House system that Union has set up recently.in an attempt to (among other things) reduce the dominance of fraternities over the campus social scene:
"You'd see that these were very prominent places, and a lot of social activity was concentrated around them, day or night," says Thomas D. McEvoy, Union's dean of residential and campus life. Today, the houses convey a decidedly different message. The fraternity brothers have moved, and their former homes, together with several other newly…
drorzel | August 7, 2007In case you can't pick up his direction from the subtitle of The Theory of Almost Everything ("The Standard Model, the Unsung Triumph of Modern Physics"), Robert Oerter lays it all out for you in the second paragraph of the Introduction:
the Standard Model has a surprisingly low profile for such a fundamental and successful theory. It has deeper implications for the nature of teh universe than chaos theory, and unlike string theory, which is purely speculative in nature, it has a strong experimental basis-- but it is not as widely known as either. In physics news itesm, the Standard Model…
drorzel | August 7, 2007Here's the second in a series of vacation-picture posts, this one providing pretty much what you would expect of a vacation in the Caribbean: it's all about the beaches, baby:
Well, actually, our trip to the Virgin Islands was really mostly about the snorkeling:
but you don't get a lot of really good pictures from that (not without an underwater camera, which I don't have), and anyway, on St. John you mostly snorkel from the beach...
The beach shown above is Honeymoon Beach, a ten-minute hike from Estate Lindholm, and it's pretty much everything you expect from a Caribbean beach: soft white…
drorzel | August 6, 2007This week has been declared International Blog Against Racism Week, so if you're looking for something serious and worthwhile to do with your blog, you might want to check out the many interesting things being posted, and even contribute something. Unless you post comments under the handle "Uncle Al," in which case, I'd really rather not hear your thoughts on the subject, if that's all right.
I really don't have anything to say about this at this time, but there are lots of people who don't have that problem. For example, Kate. Or Tobias Buckell, a bit early, not to mention Scalzi and his…
drorzel | August 6, 2007While I was out, John Scalzi had an interesting post about the changing economics of short story writing. Back in the day, Robert Heinlein made a living selling stories at a penny a word:
As I was reading this again I was curious as to what at penny in 1939 would rate out to here in 2007, so I used the Consumer Price Index Calculator from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis to find out. Turns out that to you'd need fifteen cents in today's money, more or less, to equal the buying power of that 1939 penny. Dropping Heinlein's $70 into the calculator, you find that it was the equivalent of…
drorzel | August 6, 2007I took a rather large number of pictures on the recent trip, and I'm very happy with at least some of them. I'm uploading the raw images to Flickr, but I'm also cropping and tweaking them in GIMP for posting here. Because, well, it's my blog, and if I want to try to make you all jealous of my tropical vacation, I can do that.
This is the first post in what will be a series of vacation-picture posts, from our recent trip to St. John in the US Virgin Islands. This time out, I'll just talk about where we stayed, just outside of Cruz Bay:
Our rooms were at Estate Lindholm, a small B&B on a…
drorzel | August 5, 2007So, after an Internet-less week in St. John, USVI, I come back to find over 1600 articles in the RSS feeds of blogs that I follow regularly. And if you think I'm going to wade through all of that, well, you need to work on your thinking skills a bit.
So what, if anything, do I need to read out of all that? Leave pointers in the comments to any real gems from the blogosphere since last Friday.
(I also avoided all newspapers, tv, and radio on the trip because, really, all they're likely to do on a typical day is piss me off. I'll catch up on the major stories from that stuff-- I've heard about…
drorzel | August 5, 2007Because for the past week, this has been the view from my balcony:
We're back in the Capital District now, after a travel day about which the less said the better, but for a week there, damn, life was good.
drorzel | August 3, 2007I'm on vacation this week, and taking this opportunity to clear out a large backlog of news items that I flagged as interesting, but never got around to commenting on. I'll group them thematically, just to spread things out over a few days, and this post lumps together some results from biophysics and astrophysics that didn't make it into the previous posts:
GZK cutoff confirmed: from Backreaction, a report on new observations of highly energetic cosmic rays. These are subatomic particles with energy roughly equaly to the kinetic energy of a tennis ball on a volley that hit the upper…
drorzel | August 2, 2007I'm on vacation this week, and taking this opportunity to clear out a large backlog of news items that I flagged as interesting, but never got around to commenting on. I'll group them thematically, just to spread things out over a few days, and this lot is a bunch of articles about fiendishly difficult experiments to make or detect something really hard to see:
This one's from email: ages ago, Geoff Koch from Michigan State sent me a pointer to an experiment in which they produced the heaviest isotope of silicon ever detected. I keep forgetting to post something about it, because I'm a bad…
drorzel | August 1, 2007I'm on vacation this week, and taking this opportunity to clear out a large backlog of news items that I flagged as interesting, but never got around to commenting on. I'll group them thematically, just to spread things out over a few days, and this lot is a bunch of articles about new developments in the study of solid state systems:
"Are Doubly Charged Particles Lurking in High-T Superconductors?": I don't know. Are they? Exactly what mechanism leads to electron pairing and superconductivity in the high-temperature ceramic superconductors remains a mystery, and this reports on a new…
drorzel | July 31, 2007I'm on vacation this week, and taking this opportunity to clear out a large backlog of news items that I flagged as interesting, but never got around to commenting on. I'll group them thematically, just to spread things out over a few days, and this lot is a bunch of articles about nifty new widgets made in various labs:
"NMR Gets Seriously Small": a French group has managed to demonstrate NMR spectroscopy on tiny solid samples. This has been a problem in the past because the small signal gets washed out by thermal noise, but they've played some tricks to allow NMR on nanoliter-scale samples…
drorzel | July 30, 2007I'm on vacation this week, and taking this opportunity to clear out a large backlog of news items that I flagged as interesting, but never got around to commenting on. I'll group them thematically, just to spread things out over a few days, and this post highlights a couple of new things in the quantum optics field:
"Single atom entangles two photons": pretty much what it sounds like. The Rempe group in Garching has used a single atom trapped in an optical cavity to produce an entangled pair of photons by sequential interaction between the atom and a couple of laser pulses. Like everything…
drorzel | July 27, 2007I'm off for a much-needed vacation, and will be Internet-less for the next week. Woo-hoo!
The plan of the moment is to set up a handful of physics "news" items to appear next week (the scare quotes are because some of these items are weeks old), but otherwise there won't be any updates. If you're wholly dependent on this blog for your daily entertainment needs, use this opportunity to get a frickin' life, will you?
If you find yourself desperate for something to do, somebody has set up a stub ScienceBlogs page at Wikipedia, which could stand to be upgraded with more information about the…
drorzel | July 27, 2007That's the conclusion of a new study from Harvard and the University of Virginia, anyway:
Researchers at Harvard University and the University of Virginia have found that high school coursework in one of the sciences generally does not predict better college performance in other scientific disciplines. But there's one notable exception: Students with the most rigorous high school preparation in mathematics perform significantly better in college courses in biology, chemistry, and physics.
This is not terribly surprising to me, as the biggest weakness I see in entering students is usually in…
drorzel | July 27, 2007DonorsChoose, the educational charity we ran a fundraiser for last year, has made it to the final round of five in the American Express Members Project charity giveaway, and they're looking for votes to help them win $5 million.
They're up against some stiff competition, and really, it'd be churlish to complain about any of these organizations winning the money. If you have an AmEx card, though, and are liable to be swayed by the urgings of a blogger, go over there and vote for DonorsChoose, who are doing some really good work.
drorzel | July 26, 2007It's been a few days since I linked to Inside Higher Ed, and the Internet itself was threatening to collapse. They're got a provocative article today about university endowments, though, so disaster is averted. The author, Lynne Munson, compares colleges and universities to private foundations, and doesn't like what she sees:
A recent survey of 765 colleges and universities found they are spending 4.2 percent of their endowments' value each year. Meanwhile, private foundations -- which are legally required to spend at least 5 percent of their value annually -- average 7 percent spending.…
drorzel | July 26, 2007No, this isn't about the theological component of NASCAR (though the popularity of auto racing is perhaps best explained by sophisticated brainwashing techniques)-- it's much more important: A story on ESPN.com about the Williams-Amherst rivalry:
Although the unusual history of the two schools inspired the rivalry, the annual success of both programs certainly has turned up the heat. And since schools in the New England Small College Athletic Conference don't participate in postseason football, the Williams-Amherst matchup has decided more than a few conference championships.
The 1997 season…
drorzel | July 26, 2007There's a story about theft of supplies at NASA in the Times today. It's an eight-paragraph wire service blurb, which wouldn't be worth a mention, but for this:
In one instance documented by the accountability office, an unidentified worker explained the fate of a missing laptop, worth $4,265:
"This computer, although assigned to me, was being used on board the International Space Station. I was informed that it was tossed overboard to be burned up in the atmosphere when it failed."
That's absolutely brilliant. If you're going to steal overpriced laptops from the government, do it with style…