"American Music," the Violent Femmes "California Stars," Billy Bragg and Wilco "The City of New Orleans," Arlo Guthrie "Song to Woody," Bob Dylan "The Body of an American," the Pogues "Born in the USA," Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band "Fortunate Son," Creedence Clearwater Revival "American Idiot," Green Day "War," Edwin Starr "Buffalo Soldier," Bob Marley "Christ for President," Billy Bragg and Wilco "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song," The Flaming Lips "Walk on the Wild Side," Lou Reed "Paradise by the Dashboard Light," Meat Loaf "Lower 48," the Gourds "American Land," Bruce Springsteen and…

On the way in from the parking lot yesterday, I caught up with a colleague from Mechanical Engineering, who was on a bike, but had stopped to look at one of the local raptors. There are at least two red-tailed hawks living on campus, and one of them was on the ground only ten or fifteen feet from the sidewalk. It had some sort of small object in its talons, and pecked at it as I was walking up. The object in question turned out to be a pine cone, and while I was watching, it sort of hopped up into the air, and pounced on... another pine cone. This was at least the fourth pine cone to get…

There have been a number of true and non-silly stories about astronomy and cosmology recently, which I'll collect here as penance for the earlier silly post: Some theorists at Penn State have constructed a Loop Quantum Gravity model that they claim allows for an oscillating universe with no singularities. In one of those psychology-of-the-press moments, the PSU press release accentuates the positive, with the headline "What happened before the Big Bang?" Meanwhile, the IOP Physics Web news item goes negative: "'Cosmic forgetfulness' shrouds time before the Big Bang" (referring to the model…

The New York Times today has a story about a different sort of summer camp: Students with a passion for all things explosive and proof of United States citizenship pay a $450 fee that covers food, lodging and incidentals like dynamite. In the course of a week, the 22 students at this session set off a wall of fire, blasted water out of a pond, blew up a tree stump and obliterated a watermelon. They set off explosive charges in the school's mine and finished off the week by creating their own fireworks show for their parents. The Summer Explosives Camp actually feeds into a program at the…

WASHINGTON, DC (UP News Service)-- In a move that supporters say shows sensitivity and compassion, President Bush today commuted the sentence of the planet Pluto, which was demoted to a "dwarf planet" by the International Astronomical Union in August of 2006. Under the President's new order, Pluto will once more be regarded as a full-fledged planet, though he left unchanged the part of the decision in which the astronomical object must share its name with a cartoon dog. "Pluto's crimes have been well-documented," said the President in a short statement from the Oval Office, citing in…

It's really difficult to come up with new ways to frame crisis stories about the dwindling number of science majors in the US, but people keep finding them. The latest is from Marc Zimmer writing in Inside Higher Ed, who makes a number of biology analogies: The numbers indicate that the American scientist population is not healthy, especially not in comparison to scientists in other countries. This will impact America's ability to retain its place in the global (scientific and technological) food chain. What could be responsible for this decline? My money is on the changing habitat of the…

Between the concert last night and an afternoon cookout at the house of one of Kate's co-workers, we were out of the house for most of the day yesterday. This means light blogging today, as I struggle to deal with the stuff I really should've done yesterday. I do want to note, though, the New York Times Magazine article on amateur inventors competing for NASA prizes: When Peter K. Homer, an out-of-work director of a local community center in Maine, first heard that NASA was turning to America's backyard inventors to brainstorm new technologies for a possible return to the moon, he had an idea…

A while back, Kate and I saw Richard Thompson play a solo acoustic show at The Egg in Albany. Last night, he was back in town, this time with a band, touring in support of his new album, Sweet Warrior. Here are the band credits from the program: Michael Jerome: drums, percussion Taras Prodaniuk: electric bass guitar Pete Zorn: baritone, alto & sopranino saxes, bass flute, mandolin, acoustic guitar, vocals. I'd like to officially nominate Pete Zorn for the vacant title of "Hardest Working Man in Show Business," as some of the songs required him to play the sax, then sing backup, then go…

Kate's going to Readercon next weekend, and I'm not. I have three summer students at the moment, and some other projects that I need to work on, and I just can't spare the time. This means I'm going to have a whole weekend to do things that Kate doesn't enjoy, like go out for sushi and greasy Chinese food. It also means I'll have time to watch movies she wouldn't like (I should note that she doesn't forbid me to watch stuff she doesn't like, but on the whole, I'd rather watch movies with her than by myself). Now, I have at least one and possibly two Netflix rentals that I'll be able to use…

Via PZ, a blog on biology and science fiction is griping that biology gets no respect, and links to a Jack Cohen article complaining that authors and filmmakers don't take biology seriously I was particularly struck by this bit: Authors, film producers and directors, special-effects teams go to physicists, especially astrophysicists, to check that their worlds are workable, credible; they go to astronomers to check how far from their sun a planet should be, and so on. They even go to chemists to check atmospheres, rocket fuels, pheromones (apparently they're not biology....), even the…

My intention of reading all of the nominees for the Hugo Awards in the fiction categories hit a bit of a snag yesterday. I finished all the short fiction (novella, novelette, short story), and most of the novels, leaving only Peter Watts's Blindisght and Charlie Stross's Glasshouse. James Nicoll described Peter Watts as the sort of thing he reads when he feels his will to live becoming too strong, and the description of Glasshouse did not fill me with joy. Plus, my copy of Reaper's Gale by Steven Erikson just arrived (a birthday present), and I'd really rather read that. (I'll pause here for…

I'm still looking for charity suggestions to help prove that atheists aren't just cynical misers. Again, I'm offering to donate $200 to worthy non-religious charities suggested in comments. I've gotten some good suggestions already, but more are always welcome. On a less serious note, nobody has yet taken me up on my offer to endorse any candidate who will play me one-on-one in basketball. I'm coming off a knee injury that sidelined me for a couple of weeks, so now's the time to act. I'll even sweeten the pot-- if you beat me (game to fifteen, make-it-take-it), I'll contribute to your…

Lest I go two days without linking to Inside Higher Ed, there's a "Devil's Workshop" column from Wick Sloan today, in the form of a fake letter to Congress calling for higher taxes on higher education: Perhaps it's time for the nation to admit we are at war and to act accordingly. The immense Iraq war spending is the answer, not the obstacle, to helping millions of low-income students attend and finish college now. Via tax policy for donations and endowments alone, our nation allocates $18 billion in benefits to higher education. In a commendable bipartisan spirit, the Senate, this year and…

Steinn checks in from his Mediterranean vacation with not one, not two, but three reports from the conference on Extreme Solar Systems, and a hint of maybe more to come. The big news here, as far as I can see, is that they're starting to find more low mass planets, and more planets with long orbital periods. These are both the result of technical improvements-- the sensitivity of the planet-finding techniques has improved as people get more practice, enabling more low-mass detections, and as Steinn puts it, "things are piling up at multi-year periods as the searches go on for long enough to…

Via EurekAlert, next weekend will see a soccer demonstration by nanoscale robots at the RoboCup competition in Atlanta. This is "nano" in the usual sense of "hundreds if not thousands of nanowhatevers," of course, and they're not exactly playing soccer: The soccer nanobots (nanoscale robots) operate under an optical microscope, are controlled by remote electronics using visual feedback and are viewed on a monitor. While they are a few tens of micrometers to a few hundred micrometers long, the robots are considered "nanoscale" because their masses range from a few nanograms to a few hundred…

I'm going to drop back a bit, and steal an idea from Doug Natelson, who posted about Grand Challenges in condensed matter physics almost two weeks ago. This was prompted by a report from the National Research Council listing such challenges, including things like "How do complex phenomena emerge from simple ingredients?" and "How will the energy demands of future generations be met?" They're certainly grand, and challenging. So, the question for the audience is: What are the Grand Challenges in your own field? If you're a scientist, what are the big questions that need to be answered in your…

George Gamow was a Russian-born physicist who is known for, in roughly equal proportions, his work on nuclear physics, his popular-audience books, and his really weird sense of humor. He famously added Hans Bethe's name to a paper he wrote with his student, Ralph Alpher, just so the author list would be "Alpher, Bethe, Gamow," a pun on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet. When Robert Herman did some later extensions of the model, Gamow supposedly tried to get him to change his name to "Delta," to no avail. This book is a collection of two of Gamow's pop-physics books, Mr. Tompkins…

Presenting the hottest new product in the telecommunications sector: the rPhone: rPhone combines three delightfully diverse products into one awkward and cumbersome handheld contraption -- a revolutionary steam-powered satellite phone, a stylish French musicbox, and a vibrasonic multi-purpose tool that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a Sonic Screwdriver. rPhone is the first portable telephone constructed of materials you've come to associate with progressive technology... from its exquisite rosewood paneling to the handsome brass frame, it shouts "This is the 18th century!" and "Gee…

Not long before the Matthew Nisbet post about uncharitable atheists crossed my RSS feeds, I had marked a Fred Clark post about mission trips that has some really good thoughts about the mechanics of charity: But the point of these mission trips is not only to get [a rural school in Haiti] built. That's part of it, but it's not the only goal. The mission trip is also designed to give the American youth group a tangible, visceral stake in the fate of the Haitian community. This is vital for the people in Haiti too. The problem with the calculus above is that it presumes that the total level of…

Over at Framing Science, Matthew Nisbet notes a survey about poverty which finds, among other things, that atheists are less likely to take part in anti-poverty efforts. There are a number of good reasons to be skeptical of this survey, which I'll mention at the end of this post, but Nisbet seems to take it seriously, and speculates about why atheists might be less charitable than believers, giving three possible interpretations of the result. In the very first comment to the post, commenter "Roy" offers a fourth: bone-deep cynicism. Most of the religious 'charity' aimed at poverty actually…