drorzel | May 16, 2007Miriam Burstein points out the historical antecedents of the "Atheist Two-Step" discussed by Adam Kotsko and Brandon at Siris. This also ties in nicely with Fred Clark on sectarian atheists, as previously mentioned.
Also, speaking of historical screeds by Protestant preachers, Jerry Fallwell is dead. I really don't have anything to say about that, other than that I'm sorry for his family and friends.
drorzel | May 16, 2007One of the fun things about EurekAlert is that it allows you to trace the full life cycle of the publicization of science in a way that used to be impossible for a regular person. For example, take the recent "Ring of Dark Matter" story.
First, there's a rumor of a result. This first stage lasts about a week, and if all goes well, it manages to generate a little buzz, and maybe even some divination.
The rumor, warmed by the buzz, will then hatch, giving rise to a press release. Dependning on the species, you may get two, and for highly collaborative research, you can generate even more.
In…
drorzel | May 15, 2007Via Toby, a detailed proposal for floating colonies on Venus. I heard Geoff Landis talk about this at Boskone a while back-- the basic idea is that the Venusian atmosphere is so dense that you could easily build structures that would float high enough up in the atmosphere to be above the hellish temperatures. You still have to deal with the sulfuric acid clouds, but what would life be without its little challenges.
The post linked above adds an extra, counter-intuitive motivation to the picture:
There are many other reasons to colonize Venus. First and foremost, human survival is dependent…
drorzel | May 15, 2007As you may or may not have noticed, last week's silly dog post got picked up by, well, just about everyone. I think it probably started with a sidelight link at Making Light, then it showed up on Boing Boing, and Digg, and MetaFilter, and something like half the LiveJournals in the world, it seems. The site got just shy of 50,000 pageviews on Friday, and Saturday and Sunday would've been in the top five days, traffic-wise, had they happened a month ago.
So, I've achieved Nerd Fame, of a sort. I have to say, it's a kick, and I'm fighting the temptation to sit down and try to crank out a whole…
drorzel | May 15, 2007The recent discussion over the academic tenure system has sort of wound down, or at least, those parts of it that I feel I can contribute to have wound down. I really ought to note the posts by Bill Hooker and the Incoherent Ponderer, who correctly note that the biggest problem with the academic system is not so much what happens to assistant professors (save for a handful of insitutions with deeply insane policies, most people who come up for tenure reviews pass), but what happens a step before that. The big drop-off isn't between assistant professors and associate professors, it's between…
drorzel | May 15, 2007There's a big long Dennis Overbye article about the Large Hadron Collider in the Times today. The paginated version runs to seven or eight pages on the web, and Overbye is a good writer, so you can be fairly sure it's exhaustive and detailed and interesting.
I can't say that authoritatively, though, because I got about five paragraphs in, and gave up. I'm officially sick of rapturous articles about the LHC, which isn't going to turn on for several months yet, assuming everything goes smoothly.
Yeah, yeah, it'll address the most fundamental questions in physics, it'll provide an unprecedented…
drorzel | May 14, 2007Stuart Coleman of Daily Irreverence is going to be hosting the next edition of the physics blog carnival Philosophia Naturalis in the near future, and he's looking for posts.
So, if you've got physics blog material you'd like to see receive more attention, go over there, and send it to Stuart.
drorzel | May 14, 2007Two good "fundamentalism is stupid" posts over the weekend. First up is Scott Aaronson on rules of inference:
In the study of rationality, there's a well-known party game: the one where everyone throws a number from 0 to 100 into a hat, and that player wins whose number was closest to two-thirds of the average of everyone's numbers. It's easy to see that the only Nash equilibrium of this game -- that is, the only possible outcome if everyone is rational, knows that everyone is rational, knows everyone knows everyone is rational, etc. -- is for everyone to throw in 0. Why? For simplicity,…
drorzel | May 14, 2007Here's a picture of some pretty flowers:
These are from the ornatmental cherry tree in our front yard. Like all the other similar trees in the neighborhood, it's absolutely exploded over the past week.
Also, I rode my bike a bunch this weekend:
Saturday, I rode down to Lock 8, stopping for a few minutes to talk to another faculty member who was out with a group of students and community volunteers cleaning up one of the preserved locks of the original Erie Canal.
Total Distance: 17.41
Average Speed: 14.53
Maximum Speed: 24.62
Sunday, I went in the other direction on the bike path, and a…
drorzel | May 13, 2007Janet Stemwedel is marking everybody's favorite Hallmark holiday by posting an interview with her mother about going back to school to get a science degree. As Janet says, this was a major inspiration to her:
I would not be who I am or where I am today without my mom, Sally Stemwedel. Although I probably couldn't (or wouldn't) fully grasp it when I was a kid, when she went back to school in her mid-30s my mother opened up my understanding of the world of higher education and of science, and offered me a vision of a woman's work that the society at large did not.
It's a very nice tribute, and…
drorzel | May 13, 2007When I was an undergraduate, we had more or less annual alcohol crackdowns on campus. My sophomore year, it was a series of "open container" stings, with cops hiding in the bushes outside various dorms, and leaping out to arrest anyone who walked outside with an empty keg cup. My classmates and I were outraged.
My junior year, there were a couple of arrests for underage drinking, and a significant tightening of the alcohol policy. My classmates and I were outraged.
My senior year, the police got hold of a college-approved party plan for a couple of freshman entires that included kegs of beer…
drorzel | May 12, 2007Daniel Davies stakes out a controversial position at Crooked Timber:
I tend to regard myself as Crooked Timber's online myrmidon of a number of rather unpopular views; among other things, as regular readers will have seen, I believe that the incitement to religious hatred legislation was a good idea (perhaps badly executed), that John Searle has it more or less correct on the subject of artificial intelligence, that Jacques Derrida deserves his high reputation and that George Orwell was not even in the top three essayists of the twentieth century[1]. I'm a fan of Welsh nationalism. Oh yes,…
drorzel | May 12, 2007Mark Trodden gave a nice outline of the tenure process over at Cosmic Variance, laying out the general criteria used by most colleges and universities:
The typical criteria in physics are:
Excellence in research, as demonstrated through peer-reviewed publications and (by far the most important thing) letters of recommendation solicited from a selection of external referees, a few chosen by the candidate and many others not.
Funding of one's research at some level.
Competence in teaching, as demonstrated through peer review, innovations in teaching and, to a lesser extent, student evaluations…
drorzel | May 11, 2007As a newly minted Associate Professor, I sort of feel like I ought to say something about the recent tenure discussions. These were kicked off by Rob Knop's recent despairing post (though it should be noted that Rob's been worried about this for a while), and most of the discussion has taken place at Cosmic Variance, with the discussion expanding into comments about academia in general, via Sean's illustrative example.
Really, though, my chief reaction to most of this has been "Thank God we didn't have academic blogs back when I was an undergraduate."
As Mark Trodden notes, the discussion has…
drorzel | May 11, 2007The bizarre saga of Rusi Taleyarkhan (which I've mentioned before) keeps getting stranger. Previously, Purdue University had announced that it conducted an investigation of Taleyarkhan's work and cleared him of any misconduct, without saying, well, anything much about the investigation. Now, after pressure from Congress on the question, the New York Times reports that they're opening a new investiagation.
The letter from Congress that triggered this contains the first real details of the earlier investigation, including this absolutely boggling couple of paragraphs:
Up to now, Purdue has…
drorzel | May 10, 2007I'm sitting at the computer typing, when the dog bumps up against my legs. I look down, and she's sniffing the floor around my feet intently.
"What are you doing down there?"
"I'm looking for steak!" she says, wagging her tail hopefully.
"I'm pretty certain that there's no steak down there," I say. "I've never eaten steak at the computer, and I've certainly never dropped any on the floor."
"You did in some universe," she says, still sniffing.
I sigh. "I'm going to move the quantum physics books to a higher shelf, so you can't reach them."
"It won't matter. I've got Wikipedia."
"All right,…
drorzel | May 10, 2007The iPod giveth, and the iPod taketh away.
Back in the day, there was this technology called "audio tape," which people used to record music. On a typical tape, you could record maybe ten or elevent pop songs, and then you had to flip it over, and record another ten or eleven songs on the other side. As a result, mix tapes of that era tended to come in distinct "sides."
I always thought it would be amusing, in a just-about-as-dorky-as-the-guys-in-High Fidelity way, to make a mix tape where the two sides featured the same song titles in the same order, but with all the songs being different--…
drorzel | May 10, 2007Noted author Walter Mosley spoke on campus last night, and a spot opened up at the last minute for the dinner beforehand, so I got to spend an hour or so listening to him talk off-the-cuff in a small group. He's a very charming guy, and had a lot of interesting things to say about writing, politics, literature, and other subjects. Miscellaneous comments, in no particular order:
Asked about working with Hollywood (a couple of movies have been made of his books, and three more are in the works), he said "As long as you don't go in expecting to make money, it's fun." Really, that strikes me as…
drorzel | May 9, 2007The Zeitgeist for today highlights a little New York Times Q & A piece on atomic clocks, answering the question "Why is cesium used in atomic clocks?"
The striking thing about this, to me, is that they don't really answer the question. I mean, they talk about how atomic clocks work in very vague terms (I explained atomic clocks last August, in more detail), but the only thing they have on the "why cesium?" question is this:
It so happens, the United States Naval Observatory explains, that cesium 133 atoms have their 55 electrons distributed in an ideal manner for this purpose. All the…
drorzel | May 9, 2007Two more quick observations from last night's Wesley Clark event. Or, rather, one from the event, and one from dinner beforehand. Both strike me as fairly general principles about political discourse:
1) Your current political opinions are interesting in inverse proportion to the number of times you use the word "fascist" or variants thereof. Likewise "communist" and variants thereof.
2) A colleague observed at dinner that a really remarkable number of problems are, at their base, due to people failing to understand irony or metaphor. Or, in his more colorful phrasing, "People who can't…