drorzel | May 30, 2007John Scalzi is asking for discussion of the Hugo Award nominees, noting that other than a brief controversy over the fact that only one nominated work in the fiction categories is by a woman, there hasn't been much discussion. This reminded me that it would be good to put in another plug for the foolproof solution to the problem:
Buy a membership to next year's Worldcon, and vote for whatever you like.
The membership rates will go up after tomorrow, but for right now, $40 will get you a supporting membership, which carries full voting rights for the next round of Hugos, and I believe gives…
drorzel | May 29, 2007A commenter in the "Bunnies Made of Cheese" thread points out a graphic that's too good not to put on the front page (click for the original large image):
Nobody tell the dog, ok?
drorzel | May 29, 2007A bit over a month ago, "framing" was the hot argument in these parts (see here, here, and here, and links therein), with zillions of comments about how difficult it was to understand what Mooney and Nisbet were advocating. Today, Matt Nisbet appears to endorse a suggestion made in a letter to Science, namely that graduate schools should offer formal instruction in science communication. Somewhat weirdly, this hasn't generated any comments at all.
Their suggestions are pretty clear and concrete:
From this experience, we strongly encourage other graduate programs to implement science…
drorzel | May 29, 2007Only four songs from the Memorial Day music post remain unguessed, so here are some additional hints:
1) "So, she said it's time she goes, but wanted to be sure I know she hopes we can be friends."
2) "And as we sort out the who said, you said, who said, I said, I only wish I came a little better prepared."
3) "I can't stop/ The way I feel/ Things you do/ Don't seem real."
11) "She said you are the perfect stranger she said baby let's keep it like this."
#2 is legitimately kind of obscure, but the others are among the best-known songs by the artists in question. #3 gets line breaks indicated…
drorzel | May 29, 2007There's a nice article in Inside Higher Ed today by a faculty member suddenly working in admissions:
Whole sections of the admissions and recruitment process might not even be part of the division of academic affairs, but part of an enrollment services division, staffed by people who are experts in marketing, admissions, financial aid and more conversant in "yield management" than in the language of academia. Faculty often talk about admissions, financial aid, and recruiting, but rarely run across or seek out the people responsible, and are not often involved enough in the process to…
drorzel | May 29, 2007Ethan Zuckerman offers a recap of the latest developments in sumo:
The May basho at Ryogoku Kokugikan ended yesterday with a clash between two profoundly talented rikishi. One was Asashoryu, who has been the sole Yokozuna - grand champion - of the sport since Takanohana retired in 2003. The other was Hakuho, who held an Ozeki rank (one rank below Yokozuna) and defeated Asashoryu to win his second Emperor's Cup in a row.
The criteria to be promoted to Yokozuna aren't exact, but it is generally accepted that winning two tournaments in a row as an Ozeki is sufficient for promotion. So unless the…
drorzel | May 29, 2007While poking around to double-check the lyrics for several of the songs in the previous post, I stumbled across SongMeanings.net, which turns out to be fairly entertaining.
As the name suggests, it's a site where you can find a pretty comprehensive list of song lyrics by different artists, with notes attached regarding the meaning of the lyrics. The thing is, these are basically comment threads, so most of the people posting are just throwing out wild-assed guesses, not drawing on any particular knowledge.
This leads to some interesting discussions when applied to famously inscrutable…
drorzel | May 28, 2007For most people in the US, this is a day off. For most academics in the US, this is already summer. Not so for us-- we're on trimesters, so we're still in session, and have classes scheduled. This tends to undercut the solemnity of the occasion.
There's also an Admissions event today, and then I'm having a class over for dinner, so I'm going to be pretty busy. In addition to being a solemn official holiday, this is also the semi-official start of the sumnmer season, so I thought I'd acknowledge that aspect with a little pop-culture thread...
Stretching the Memorial Day theme a bit, these are…
drorzel | May 28, 2007It's Memorial Day in the US, which is the official public tribute to the dead of our various wars. This is marked with parades, and ceremonies at cemetaries in towns all across the country.
When I was a kid, we always went to the parade in town, which went from the center of town out to the main cemetary, where they would have a short ceremony in which the American Legion chaplain would lay a wreath at a representative grave, and they would fire guns in tribute. When I was in junior high and high school, I used to play "Taps" for them on the trumpet.
There was also always a reading of the…
drorzel | May 27, 2007Saturday, I went for a good long bike ride before it got hot, making it all the way to the end of the Erie Canal portion of the bike path. There's a "detour" that takes you to further path via some dirt roads, but I opted instead for the quiet stretch of path along the canal, that dead-ends at some railroad tracks.
It was a good choice, because I got to see a blue heron in flight along the path. They're really remarkably graceful birds, and, for the record, can happily cruise through the air at 14 mph.
Sunday's ride got off to a good start, and I was farther down the path than I've gone…
drorzel | May 26, 2007I'm not particularly pining for WisCon, but for those who are, let me throw out a movie topic for discussion:
Three Strikes and You're Out: Why Do Third Movies Suck So Much?
It's a well-known phenomenon in genre film: in a series of movies, the third movie is almost always where the series goes off the rails. Examples abound: X-Men 3, Superman 3, The Matrix Revolutions, Return of the Jedi. What are some of the reasons for this problem? Are tthere examples of film series that avoid it? Can the Star Wars prequel trilogy be thought of as following this trajectory in reverse?
Comments are open.…
drorzel | May 26, 2007There's a popular science fiction convention going on this weekend in Madiscon, WI. Of course, not everyone can make it to these things, so some people in LiveJournal Land have put together BitterCon, and online event for those unable to attend WisCon.
Kate's jumped right in, providing space for a bunch of panels in the form of comment threads:
The Napoleonic Wars in SF/F
Risky Narrative Strategies
Levels and Limits of Metafictionality
Thieves Guilds and Other Criminal Societies
Wish Fulfillment
(She's got a convenient BitterCon tag as well, in case she adds more stuff later...)
So, if you…
drorzel | May 25, 2007One of the many after-hours events contributing to my exhaustion this week was the annual Sigma Xi award and initiation banquet, at which some fifty students were recognized for their undergraduate research accomplishments.
The banquet also featured a very nice presentation on visualizing a four-dimensional cube by Prof. Davide Cervone of the Math department here. He went through a bunch of different ways to picture a four-dimensional object through analogies to lower-dimensional objects. It was as close as I've ever come to feeling like I understood how to think about higher dimensional…
drorzel | May 25, 2007Courtesy of EurekAlert:
physicists Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer from Vanderbilt University predict that trillions of years into the future, the information that currently allows us to understand how the universe expands will have disappeared over the visible horizon. What remains will be "an island universe" made from the Milky Way and its nearby galactic Local Group neighbors in an overwhelmingly dark void.
You can always count on astrophysics to brighten your day.
Or, if you'd prefer something actually amusing for your Friday blog-reading, you…
drorzel | May 25, 2007Philosophia Naturalis #10 is now up, providing all sorts of physics-bloggy goodness. I particualrly liked mollishka's explanation of the Lyman-alpha forest and Scott Aaronson's math-free explanation of Shor's factoring algorithm is a classic, but there's lots of good stuff there.
drorzel | May 25, 2007Something old, something new, on the topic near and dear to every academic.
The old is a post by Doug Natelson from a couple of weeks ago, giving advice on how to get tenure, as a response to the recent flurry of tenure discussions on science blogs.
The new is an article by Lesboprof at Inside Higher Ed, giving advice on how to get tenure, in the wake of passing her own tenure review. She's pseudonymous (obviously) and cagey about her research field, but what's striking is how consistent the advice is between the two. And it's excellent advice, so if you're starting out on the tenure track,…
drorzel | May 25, 2007Via John Lynch, Fark brings us LOLPresidents:
There's some good stuff, along with the usual rubbish. I also liked this motivational poster:
I'm easily amused, and it's been a really long week.
drorzel | May 24, 2007The Female Science Professor has a nice post about high and low tech data acquisition:
An MS student has repeatedly questioned why he/she has to use a low-tech method to acquire, somewhat tediously, some data that could be acquired more rapidly with a higher-tech method. I say 'more rapidly' because the actual acquisition time once the machine is on and ready for analysis can be fairly rapid, but this technique becomes much less rapid when the substantial (and tedious) preparation time is considered. In any case, with the low-tech method, you can get data any time you want, and the amount of…
drorzel | May 24, 2007A discussion in the back-channel forums reminded me about all the many things I've learned how to do badly in the course of my scientific training. My junior high shop teacher probably sprained something laughing the first time he heard that I was doing machine shop work as part of a research project, but it's part of experimental science, so I know a little bit about how to work a milling machine these days.
It's a crazy busy week for me, and today will be largely taken up by hosting Jennifer Ouellette, who's visiting campus to tell us about the physics of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So, I've…
drorzel | May 24, 2007Somewhere between yesterday's posts about uselesss junk and useful antiques, there's this. The picture to the right is a tragedy in progress, though is might not look that way: It's an FTIR spectrometer left behind by the previous occupant of my lab.
It's a top-of-the-line instrument, a Bomem DA-8 spectrophotometer, and a new one will set you back better than $100,000. It's no use to me, though, as it's designed to make measurements of spectra in the far infrared-- wavelengths of a couple of microns or more, well past the 800 nm sort of range where I work. So it sits there in the lab, next to…