drorzel | May 23, 2007As sort of a counterpoint to the previous entry, here's a more positive poll question:
What's the most useful antiquated tool you keep around?
That is, what dusty old relic do you keep around because there's no modern alternative that works as well for what it does?
In one of the pictures in the previous post, you can just make out the edge of a chart recorder. That's there for a reason-- it isn't often that I want to use a chart recorder, but when you need one, there's nothing else that will do the job. When it comes to long-term monitoring of electronic signals over periods of hours,…
drorzel | May 23, 2007Welcome to the laboratory graveyard:
This picture shows the back room in one of the labs, and most of the gear in it is broken or useless. There's a computer that's so old it has a 5 1/4" floppy drive, the skeleton of a vacuum evaporator, a crappy student STM system, and an electrometer that's so old it has a nicely carved wooden frame. Actually, that last one probably counts as an antique, and might be worth something on that basis. It's certainly not being used, though.
And yet, we keep this stuff around, because we can't bear to throw it out. Which brings us to the Dorky Poll question:…
drorzel | May 23, 2007Matthew Yglesias has a couple of posts on opposition to the US News college rankings, the first noting the phenomenon, and the second pointing to Kevin Carey's work on better ranking methods. The problem with this is, I think he sort of misses the point of the objections.
Matt writes:
All that said, the very best way to deal a death-blow to this scheme would be for America's colleges and universities to work together and with third parties to try to come up with some meaningful metrics for higher education performance. All magazines make lists, but the reason the college rankings are such a…
drorzel | May 22, 2007Every day, a handful of physics news items pass through my RSS feeds, and every few days, one of them looks interesting enough that I check the little box to keep it unread, so I can comment on it later (I don't blog from work if I can avoid it). Of course, most of the time, I don't get around to commenting, so these press releases and news squibs tend to pile up.
It's starting to get a little silly, so I'm going to clear them out, and post a brief comment about each one, and why I thought it looked interesting here. This probably tells you something about the state of the field, but mostly,…
drorzel | May 22, 2007I'm taking the unusual step of tarting up a booklog entry with a cover image, just for the "Advance Reading Copy-- Not For Sale" box on the cover. A few weeks back, when Kate and I were in New York, we dropped by the Tor offices to meet Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and I was admiring the cover on the book display in their front office.
"Actually, we just got a box of the ARC's in," Patrick said. "Do you want one?"
I was a huge fan of Spin, so of course I said yes. And I was almost halfway through the book before we left The City the next afternoon...
Axis is a slightly indirect sequel,…
drorzel | May 21, 2007So, back in November, I bought a new car, which came with a six-month free trial of Sirius Satellite Radio. That's about to run out, and while it does have its good points, I'm not really interested in paying money to listen to the radio.
What I would prefer is to be able to play my iPod in the car. Which I can do at the moment, using one of those little FM transmitter things. The problem with this is that it requires a clear FM frequency to work, which means it's essentially useless in any major metropolitan area (or at least in Boston and NYC, which are the cities we visit most frequently…
drorzel | May 21, 2007So, over the course of Saturday and Sunday, I watched the first eight episodes of Season Five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, through a combination of general boredom and wanting to give the show a fair shot. So, does this mean I'm now hooked?
Well, when Kate got home, I was just starting episode 12 ( the other one specifically recommended by the guy who loaned me the DVD's). "What happened to 9, 10, and 11?" she asked. "I'm getting a little tired of this," I replied.
On the positive side, the execution improved dramatically from the first few episodes. The cast are clearly much more…
drorzel | May 21, 2007Top choices from the recent acquisitions playlist:
"Sly," Cat Empire. I bought this because of the 75 or Less review, which asks the important questions: When did G Love become the bandleader for the Blues Brothers? And when did they add reggae and Latin influences? And why are my feet doing this stupid dance under my desk?" This is my favorite track off the record, just for the trumpet line after the chorus.
"What's Goin' On," Detroit Cobras. I heard this on KEXP, and wrote down the artist and title right away. Unfortunately, the samples for the rest of the album didn't sound that good, but…
drorzel | May 20, 2007Saturday was a miserable cold and rainy day, and today wasn't a whole lot better. I took advantage of a brief spot of sun in the afternoon to get a short ride in, but it was awfully windy with dark clouds on the horizon, so I just rode around on local streets, so as not to end up five miles from home in a thunderstorm.
Total Distance: 5.39 miles
Average Speed: 13.4 mph
Maximum Speed: 27.56
Year-to-date totals:
Total Distance: 86.5 miles
Maximum Speed: 32.0 mph
Better luck next weekend, I guess...
drorzel | May 20, 2007For the last several years, Schenectady has been trying to get a movie theater in the downtown area, as part of an ongoing urban renewal project. This week, it finally opened, and one of the first movies on the bill is Hot Fuzz, from the people who did Shaun of the Dead, which I wanted to see anyway, so I caught a matinee show yesterday.
Simon Pegg plays P.C. Nicholas Angel, the very best cop in London, with an arrest record is 400% better than any other officer's. The problem is, he's making everyone else look bad, so they transfer him to a sleepy little village called Sandford, which has…
drorzel | May 19, 2007Eductaion reform is a contentious topic, and everybody has their own ideas about the best ways to improve the teaching of basic skills. Some people favor a "whole language" approach, others think we should go back to teaching phonics and memorizing grammar rules. I've heard people speak of "diagramming sentences" as absolutely the worst idea ever, while others think it's the key element missing from our students' preparation.
It take a real outside-the-box thinker like Ann Althouse to suggest that the silver bulet is to eliminate fiction reading from schools:
And why does reading even need to…
drorzel | May 19, 2007Jennifer Ouellette is coming to campus this week to give a talk about her book The Physics of the Buffyverse. Having never been a Buffy fan, and not seen more than snippets of a few episodes here and there, I figured I should at least watch a few representative episodes before the talk, just to have some context. Accordingly, I got the first two discs of Season 1 from Netflix, and asked a colleague who is known to be a huge fan for recommendations (he loaned me his Season Five DVD's, and particularly recommended Episodes 5 and 12).
Kate and I watched the first two episodes last night. She…
drorzel | May 18, 2007I'm mired in lab grading at the moment, which is sufficiently irritating that I usually have to decamp to someplace with no Internet access, or else I spend the day blogrolling instead. Or, really, just hitting "Refresh" over and over on Bloglines, hoping that somebody in my RSS subscriptions has posted something new.
A big part of the problem is that a large number of people have a badly mistaken view of science writing. I'm not sure where they get this from-- the first-year students in the intro course already have a fully developed case, but many of them claim not to have written lab…
drorzel | May 18, 2007Closely related to the idea of order-of-magnitude estimates is the idea of Fermi Questions, a type of problem that demonstrates the power of estimation techniques. The idea is that you can come up with a reasonable guess at an answer for a difficult question by using some really basic reasoning, and a few facts here and there.
The classic example of a Fermi Question is "How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?" This has never really worked for me, though, because I don't know anything about pianos, and I have no real way of knowing how often they're tuned, or any of the other estimates. So…
drorzel | May 18, 2007Dave at the World's Fair is asking ScienceBloggers to show off their coffee mugs. I don't usually have a camera at work, but my signature mug was bought via the Internet, so I snagged the image from the CafePress Store.
It's a "Still Not King" mug, a reference to the famous Very Secret Diary of Aragorn. To the best of my recollection, nobody has recognized this reference and asked about it.
Of course, it's been over a year since I drank tea, thanks to my stomach problems, and I never liked coffee, so at the moment, the mug is holding a couple of pens and a thermometer. But if I were to start…
drorzel | May 17, 2007Via Steinn, the Smithsonian's Astronomy Abstract Service has an index entry for some book called De revolutionibus orbium coelestium by some Polish guy. They've got a scanned electronic version available for free, but the stupid thing is in Latin, and who speaks that these days?
Also, it's only got two citations, and both of those are more than ten years old. Boy, this guy will never get tenure...
If you have access to JSTOR, you can also read a cranky letter from some guy at Cambridge. The more things change...
As Steinn says, "I love those intertube thingies, may they never be clogged."
drorzel | May 17, 2007Ages and ages ago, Jennifer Ouellette commented on the start of the Basic Concepts series with a list of topics she'd like to see done. One of these was "Size and Scaling:"
First, let's tackle the jargon problem: Just what the heck is an order of magnitude? I use the phrase all the time now, after years of hanging around physicists, but as a budding science writer, I found the term a bit opaque, and I'd wager the average person on the street is a bit unclear on the specifics, too. Second, this is one of those areas where a picture really can be worth a thousand words -- or, barring that, it…
drorzel | May 17, 2007As regular readers know, my friend Paul is a journalist based in the Middle East, and spent a year working as a reporter in Baghdad. He finished that a little while ago, but he's back, and has sent another of his intermittent dispatches.
I've been posting these to the blog when I get them. This one, I'm putting entirely below the fold, because it's a little more disturbing than some-- it's a story about a guy getting killed in a sniper attack. It's not the sort of cheery story that makes you think our little Mesopotamian adventure is going to end well, and it's a little graphic, so read on at…
drorzel | May 16, 2007I have a big stack of exams and lab reports to grade, so I need to go off someplace where I don't have Internet access and do that. In my absence, here's a Dorky Poll question inspired by recent news:
Which Nobel laureate (in any field) is the craziest?
There's no real shortage of scientists who have won the Nobel Prize for something or another, and then gone completely goofy. But which Nobel laureate is the most goofy?
In physics, it's hard to top Brian Josephson, who was recently cited as a noble defender of Rusi Taleyarkhan against the mean folks at Nature.
The problem is, he has a couple…