Speaking of dubious and oft-cited "Laws", I've run into a number of citations of "Clarke's Laws" recently. Of course, these were apparently subliminal mentions, because I can't seem to locate any of them again, but it put the subject in my mind, which is partly why I was primed to be annoyed by the subject of the previous post. Anyway, "Clarke's Laws" are statements by the noted science fiction writer (and, no doubt, personal friend and mentor of Jonathan Vos Post, which I really don't want to hear about in comments) Arthur C. Clarke: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that…

Despite efforts to avoid such foolishness, Kevin Beck inadvertently drew my attention to what people are calling "Blake's Law," which apparently briefly had its own Wikipedia page, but now appears to redirect to the Pharyngula page. Blogdom really needs a killfile. Anyway, the Internet "Law" in question is stated as: In any discussion of atheism (skepticism, etc.), the probability that someone will compare a vocal atheist to religious fundamentalists increases to one. This is notable mostly for being a really beautiful piece of-- wait for it-- framing. The "Law" is consciously formulated to…

Everybody is all abuzz about Harry Potter these days, what with the release of the final book coming this weekend. Scott McLemee takes up the really important question, though: what do professional academics think about everybody's favorite boy wizard? In the years since the author introduced her characters to the public, they have become beloved and meaningful; and not to children only. At present, the catalog of the Library of Congress records 21 volumes of criticism and interpretation on the novels, in six languages. A collection called Harry Potter and International Relations, for…

I've never been a big fan of Michael Vick as a football player, and his indictment for running a dog-fighting business pretty much wipes out any chance he ever had of winning me over. Steve Verdon notes that, if convicted, Vick could be fined up to $350,000 and face as much as six years in prison, and that would be getting off easy. I think Jim Henley put it best: A dog is a great big furry ball of trust, even a dog that has been trained into meanness and savagery. To traduce that trust is unforgiveable. It is inhuman. It'll be interesting to see what the NFL does about this. They've been…

A comment I made at a meeting yesterday that I think is worth reproducing out of context: A big part of making it from junior faculty to tenure is deciding which bits of unsolicited contradictory advice you're going to ignore.

Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study of Ph.D. completion rates by discipline. The original data are available as PowerPoint files that I haven't looked at, but IHE provides a summary in tabular form. Because everything looks more scientific as a graph, I cranked them into Excel and after the requisite ten minutes spent undoing all of Excel's horrid default graph options, ended up with this: There's really not a whole lot surprising here: Scientists and engineers finish their degrees faster (in a bit more than six years), and humanists take much longer (just under 50% have finished in ten…

While on vacation in Michigan, I played a round of golf, which I do a few times a year. I shot reasonably well, when you consider that it was my first round of the year, and it was pouring rain. I even birdied one hole, by chipping in from about thirty feet off the green, so go, me. The course we were playing is a fancy club in a resort area, and so the rental clubs were nicer than the clubs I own. In particular, they had one of those oversize drivers, and now I understand how it is that people come to believe that there's no problem in golf that can't be solved by spending money. I generally…

Having finished all of the fiction nominees, I'm now basically ready to submit my votes for the Hugos. Though it occurs to me that I've actually seen two of the five movies up for "Best Dramatic Presentation," so I might Netflix the others, and check off yet another category. At any rate, I'm sure you're all dying to know how I plan to vote, so here you go: Best Novel Rainbows End Vernonr Vinge His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik Eifelheim, Michael Flynn Blindsight, Peter Watts No Award Glasshouse, Charles Stross This ended up being an odd category for me. The Vinge wound up being the clear…

Rob Knop is leaving academia to design galaxies for Second Life (or some such). On his way out, he's getting a lovely parting gift: a share of the Gruber Prize in Cosmology. Stop by and offer congratulations, or condolences, or both, as you feel appropriate.

The Paper of Record today features an interview with Eric Mazur of Harvard, a physicist who is probably best known for his pedagogical work. He talks aabout how typical science teaching sucks, and why we need to change it: From what I've seen, students in science classrooms throughout the country depend on the rote memorization of facts. I want to change this. The students who score high do so because they've learned how to regurgitate information on tests. On the whole, they haven't understood the basic concepts behind the facts, which means they can't apply them in the laboratory. Or in…

The Powers That Be at Seed were kind enough to send all the ScienceBlogs bloggers copies of the new book by Natalie Angier, The Canon, which is being pushed fairly hard by the publisher. I've been reading a lot more pop-science stuff recently, for self-interested reasons, and this was pretty attractive, so I carried it around for a while, reading bits and pieces in restaurants while Kate was away, and eventually finished it during our Michigan vacation. The book is subtitled "A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science," and Angier has set herself a large task: to present the…

Kate and I went out to Michigan this past weekend, to unwind a bit at the summer home of some friends from college. It was an Internet-less weekend for me-- there was Internet access at the house, but I fought through the incipient datastarve, and resisted the temptation to log in. (This means that a handful of comments to posts from last week were trapped in moderation for a few days, and I apologize for that... I've shaken them all loose now.) Anyway, I came back to close to 1000 new posts in my Bloglines feeds, and dealt with them in the usual manner: I hit "Mark All Read," and started…

This is the final Best Novel Hugo nominee of this year's field, and given James Nicoll's immortal description of Watts's writing ("When I feel my will to live getting too strong, I pick up a Peter Watts book" or words to that effect), I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about picking up Blindsight. I was on something of a roll, though, and took it along to read on the plane to our Internet-less vacation weekend in Michigan. In the end, I think my reaction to the book was colored by James's comment, but it wasn't as bad as it might've appeared. Blindsight is narrated by Siri Keeton, who had a…

"Darkmatter," Andrew Bird "21st Century (Digital Boy)," Bad Religion "Some Fantastic," Barenaked Ladies "Desolation Row," Bob Dylan "Total Eclipse of the Heart," Bonnie Tyler "Gravity Fails," the Bottle Rockets "Protons, Neutrons, Electrons," The Cat Empire "Alien," Chris Whitley "Under the Milky Way," the Church "White Russian Galaxy," the Crimea "Ziggy Stardust," David Bowie "Monkey to Man," Elvis Costello "Laser Show," Fountains of Wayne "I Am a Scientist," Guided by Voices "Satellite," Guster "Galileo," Indigo Girls "The Future Soon," Jonathan Coulton "Satellite of Love," Lou Reed "Elvis…

Via Big Media Matt, a video that's too good not to share: I have a lot more respect for Pat Leahy now. I wouldn't've been able to respond to that without a few F-bombs.

Inside Higher Ed today features an opinion piece by a lecturer about the excruciating awkwardness of job interviews: [T]he banal yet innocuous questions faculty members do ask -- "Where was I from?" "How did I get interested in this topic?" -- become loaded with a significance out of proportion to their actual content. Together, my answers formed me into a certain candidate shape, one which may or may not be the proper and notorious "fit" that search committees frequently resort to in making their final decision. And I realized that despite our hopes to be judged according to what we have…

Via Backreaction, I find that there's a paper on the Arxiv titled "Hollywood Blockbusters: Unlimited Fun but Limited Science Literacy," whose authors feel that the best way to counter bad pop-culture science is with equations: (That's from a section discussing the bad physics in the ending of the first Spiderman movie. There are places where the math is thicker, but this gives a sense of the subject as well.) It's a fairly long paper (28 pages, single column), and analyzes seven silly movie scenes in some detail. I normally hate this sort of thing, as I think it needlessly contributes to the…

There's a new paper in Nature announcing the detection of water vapor in the atmosphere of a "hot Jupiter" orbiting a distant star. There's also a story on Physics Web and a press release from the Spitzer Telescope group, if you'd like some stuff you can read without a subscription to Nature. The idea here is that the planet passes between its star and Earth every couple of days, causing a dimming of the light from the star. The researchers looked at the first part of that dimming, which is when the light is passing through the edge of the atmosphere, and measured the amount of light in a few…

Peter Steinberg is lecturing at a summer school in Florida, and has posted the slides for the three lectures he gave about recent work at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. The first lecture is linked from that post, and the other two are available (at the moment) from links on the sidebar. These are gigantic PDF files-- the first one especially, which clocks in at 32.4 MB-- but the first lecture is a very nice introduction to the physics they're exploring at RHIC. I haven't looked at the other two yet, but if they're as good as the first, they'll be worth the long download.

The Weasel King posted a link to the classic Five Geek Social Fallacies essay, which you have no doubt already read. If you haven't, and you're reading blogs, you really should, because you're bound to recognize some of what it says. Of course, that article dates from 2003, so it wouldn't be worth noting, had one of the commenters in LJ-land not misread the title: I first read this as "Five GREEK Social Fallacies" because boy howdy, the entire fraternity/sorority system is built on almost all these fallacies. Except Greeks don't see this as a problem. What follows is a great spoof, and funny…