drorzel | May 9, 2007I was expounding on my dislike of the routine questions being asked of Wesley Clark last night (see previous post) to a colleague from Math, who suggested "Which do you prefer, C or Fortran? And if you use Fortran, do you declare all your variables?" as an alternative to boring policy questions that produce nothing but rehearsed answers. Clearly, this is a niche that needs to be explored, thus today's Dorky Poll:
What great geek controversy should Presidential candidates be asked about?
Because, really, how could you consider voting for a man (or woman) without knowing his (or her) position…
drorzel | May 9, 2007As previously mentioned, Wesley Clark spoke on campus last night. The speech was pretty much what you'd expect from a once and future (?) Presidential aspirant with his background: he mostly talked about military matters, stressing that George Bush bad, Americ good, puppies and apple pie, yay! OK, not so much the puppies and apple pie, but, you get the idea.
A student had warned me earlier in the day that some students were planning to protest Clark's appearance, but I apparently got there too late to catch them (I came in only a couple of minutes before the talk started). I did read one of…
drorzel | May 8, 2007We had our annual undergraduate research symposium this past weekend, which included presentations from students doing work in all different disciplines. We have enough physics and astronomy majors these days that I spent most of the day Friday listening to them talk, but I did have a break in the morning when I saw a few engineering talks, and it's always nice to see work in other fields.
At lunchtime, there were two things I wanted to do: see the dance performances (which included a couple of physics students), and have lunch at the student-run organic food cafe, which I really enjoy, but…
drorzel | May 8, 2007One of the other ScienceBloggers is prone to complaining in the back-channel forums that we don't have enough bloggers who work in some subfield of biology or another-- we need more left-handed shrew ecologists, or some such. This is, of course, patently ridiculous. What we need is a physics blogger from the condensed matter world, so we'd have somebody to explain what's up with "supersolid" helium:
Superfluidity was discovered in the liquid phase in 1938, when Pjotr Kapitsa - who shared the 1978 Nobel prize for the work - found that liquid helium-4 suddenly behaves as if it has zero…
drorzel | May 8, 2007It's spring here in suburbia, which means my neighbors were all out this weekend hastening the doom of the planet by running their gas-powered lawn mowers. Not me-- I was, um, paying our neighbors' teenage son to mow our lawn. With a gas-powered lawn mower.
OK, I'm not exactly staking out the Moral High Ground, here, and anyway, the amount of gas burned in lawn mowing is pretty trivial, all things considered. But it did occur to me to wonder about how we got to where we are with this, and what will happen in the future. Could it be that the widespread use of gasoline powered mowers and…
drorzel | May 7, 2007I was buried in work last week in part because of the annual Steinmetz Symposium, in which we cancel a day of classes and have students report on their undergraduate research projects. Both of my students were giving talks, and there was all sorts of running around involved in the preparation.
One of my students was very fired up to switch from PowerPoint on the PC to KeyNote on the Mac for this talk, and who am I to get in the way of constructive enthusiasm? His talk was the best I've heard him give, which is saying something. Of course, I would've been happier with a different opening joke…
drorzel | May 7, 2007Former general and presidential candidate Wesley Clark is going to be speaking on campus tomorrow night. I don't expect there to be a lot of question time at this, but I'm fairly good at getting a chance to ask questions at these things, so if anyone has a suggestion of a really good question to ask him, leave it in the comments, and I'll see what I can do.
drorzel | May 7, 2007Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll is pining for the good old days:
I'm going through one of my "I would kill for some new SF" phases, SF in this case being defined in a narrow and idiosyncratic way. In particular, I want the modern version of those old SF stories where SF writers, having just read some startling New Fact [Black holes could be very small! Mercury isn't tide-locked! The Galilean moons are far more interesting than we thought!], would craft some thrilling tale intended to highlight whatever it was that the author had just learned.
I suspect this is mostly due to James's…
drorzel | May 6, 2007In the two weeks since the previous report, I managed only two round-trips to campus, for a total of 9.6 miles. Either the weather was lousy, or I had things I needed to do that precluded riding the bike. I got a good ride in today, though:
Total Distance: 16.6 miles
Maximum Speed: 30.1 mph
Average Speed: 14.7 mph
The higher maximum speed reflects the presence of a really big hill at the start of the bike path (as does the ache in my legs when I climb the stairs)-- I probably could've gotten another mph or two out of that, if not for two people walking their inferior dogs on the path in…
drorzel | May 6, 2007It's common in math and computer science for people to prove important theorems sort of in passing, on the way to some other result. At least, it looks that way to an outsider-- Fermat's Theorem and the Poincare Conjecture are the high-profile examples that come to mind.
In that spirit, Scott Aaronson helpfully distills all of academic research into two paragraphs in the course of making a handy Frequently Asked Questions list for people who might want to hire him:
I know I'm not supposed to say this in an interview, but I don't have a vision. I have this annoying open problem, that…
drorzel | May 6, 2007Yesterday's New York Times features an article about SF conventions, in the travel section, of all places.
Officially, the 25th annual staging of MidSouthCon, a three-day-long celebration of science fiction, role-playing games, fantasy artwork, medieval weaponry and just about every leisure pursuit that prefers to envision the cosmos as it might have once been or might someday be, would not begin until later that afternoon.
But everywhere you looked, there were signs that the fantastic was already encroaching in a "Twilight Zone"-like manner upon this ordinary 400-room, airport-adjacent hotel…
drorzel | May 6, 2007Having gotten a fair number of visits via the search string "Jim Boeheim's Wife" (and once or twice "Jim Boeheim's Hot Wife," presumably by people who are looking for something more salacious than me griping about how inappropriate it is for Dick Vitale to talk about her attractiveness all the goddamn time), I would be remiss in my duties if I were to pass up commenting on the New York Times article headlined "Boeheim and Wife Lead Crusade Against Cancer". As you might guess, it's about their fundraising efforts for Coaches vs. Cancer, which have a personal basis:
For Boeheim, 62, the fight…
drorzel | May 5, 2007
At lunch Friday, I was talking to a few colleagues about how smart our pets can be. I haven't done gratuitous dog-blogging in a while, and it's been a long week, so here are some of the more impressive of our Emmy's intellectual achievements:
She's managed to learn two or three English phrases entirely on her own. There are a few phrases like "Are you hungry?" and "Do you want to go for a walk?" that we deliberately used with her from the beginning, but a few months after we got her, I said to Kate, "What do you think, is it time for bed?" and the dog jumped up from her pillow and ran into…
drorzel | May 5, 2007Having disagreed (somewhat) with Tobias Buckell in the previous post, let me follow that up with something positive: He's got a new book, Ragamuffin coming out soon, and he's putting excerpts up on the official Ragamuffin page. You can get RTF files of the first two chapters, and he's promised a chapter a week leading up to the release.
So, if you like steampunk space opera with Aztecs, or open-source literary distribution, go check it out.
drorzel | May 5, 2007Earlier this week, while I was buried in work, Tobias Buckell pointed to a post at the Guardian blog in which China Mieville calls for more kid-lit agitprop. It's a nice example of why I have a hard time with Mieville. Or, quoting Toby because he puts it more concisely:
I'm left of two minds. One, I'd hate to see it become a war zone.
On the other hand, how cool was Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials?
The answer is: "For the first two books, very. The third book, not so much."
The Golden Compass is a wonderful piece of work-- richly detailed, deeply imaginative, full of lovely images (I…
drorzel | May 4, 2007I came home Wednesday night to find a message on the answering machine. This is somewhat unusual, as most of the people who call us are trying to get us to donate money to some cause or another, and they don't leave messages. I hit play:
Hi, this is [Name] from [Gastroenterology Practice]. This message is for Chad, I'm calling to confirm your appointment for a procedure at [Hospital] on May 7th.
This was somewhat alarming, because I had no recollection of scheduling any sort of procedure at [Hospital], let alone one for Monday...
I called them yesterday afternoon, and left a message. A…
drorzel | May 4, 2007We were talking about student recruitment the other day, as faculty are wont to do, and our chair suggested that we really ought to have a "Why You Should Major In Physics" page as part of the department web page. As I'm currently the web page coordinator, it will fall to me to write whatever goes on that page.
Now, there's a fair bit of material out there about potential careers and stuff like that from the American Institutes of Physics and other sources, but that tends to be pretty dry. So I thought I'd throw this out to the physics blogosphere:
Why should students major in physics?…
drorzel | May 4, 2007As mentioned previously, there was a talk on campus last night by a couple of activists, Michael Berg and Joan Mandle. Berg is an anti-war activist, best known as the father of Nick Berg who was infamously beheaded on video in Iraq. He's also a former Green Party candidate for Congress in Delaware. Mandle is the Executive Director of Democracy Matters, a student activist group dedicated to election reform.
Berg's story was mostly personal, and very interesting, but I don't have a great deal to say about it. Mandle's talk was more a straigthforward pitch for public financing of elections…
drorzel | May 3, 2007Two links to things promoting science on the web:
1) What's the Greatest Innovation? Spiked online asked a bunch of famous people to describe the greatest innovation in their field, and compiled the responses. As with most of these things, there's some interesting stuff in the responses, and a lot of predictable answers of the form "The greatest innovation is the one that led to my personal research."
2) String Theory in Two Minutes or Less. Some time back, Discover ran a contest for videos describing string theory in two minutes or less, and they've put the top entries up on the web for a…
drorzel | May 3, 2007Believe it or not, yesterday's post started as an honest question. I phrased it provocatively because this is, after all, the Internet, but I wasn't just poking atheists with sticks.
This actually started quite a while ago, during one of the previous rounds of squabbling over Dawkins and his ilk, when I started a sentence something like: "What I'd like to see is less 'Religion is Stupid' and more..." and couldn't finish it. I couldn't come up with a good example of something positive to put in place of the "..."
Which was really annoying. After all, I've got a pretty solid idea of what I'd…