drorzel | May 3, 2007No, this has nothing to do with duck genitalia. Instead, it's about a basic principle of music: You've got to put down the duckie if you want to play the saxophone.
Via Scott. It's also a nice reminder of why Sesame Street was such a brilliant show (and may still be, for all I know...)-- not only does it have a great tune and silly squeaky noises to keep kids interested, it's got all those bizarre cameos to give parents something to look at.
drorzel | May 2, 2007There's going to be a dinner/ discussion event tomorrow night featuring Michael Berg and Joan Mandle, who I gather are anti-war activists of some standing (I'll post some of the biographical information from the announcement below the fold). Anybody have any questions they're dying to ask either of them? If I get any good suggestions, I'll try to ask them and report back.
Biographical notes:
*****Michael Berg, a retired teacher and antiwar activist, ran for Congress in the state of Delaware on the Green Party ticket in the 2006 midterm elections. He is most well-known as the father of Nick…
drorzel | May 2, 2007Are there reasons for being religious that don't easily reduce to "God said so"?
What are they?
(I probably don't have the right audience for this to really work the way I'd like, but let's give it a try anyway...)
drorzel | May 2, 2007Via a pseudonymous LiveJournal, an online study that combines the fun of clicking radio buttons with the thrill of doing SCIENCE!
* The study URL is: http://www.homeport.org/~kcat/study3/
* It takes about 15 minutes. You listen to 8 short clips and answer questions about how the people sound. It is easily as fun as a quiz.
* For participating, instead of finding out what muppet tarot card you are, you can choose between being entered into a drawing with a 1 in 10 chance at a $30 iTunes gift certificate, or having $5 donated to Doctors without Borders.
Go help advance the sum of human…
drorzel | May 2, 2007Are there reasons for being an atheist that don't easily reduce to "Religion is stupid"?
Should there be?
drorzel | May 1, 2007So, looking at the SRI studies of undergraduate research and its effects, it seems like the solution to a lot of problems. Involvement in research has been shown to increase student interest in science careers and increase the likelihood of graduate school, regardless of the race and gender of the student or the race and gender of the faculty mentor.
While this is undeniably really good news, suggesting that we don't actually need to radically re-invent the way we deal with students in order to change the demographics of science, it's almost too good to be true. There's got to be a catch,…
drorzel | May 1, 2007I wrote yesterday's post about the undergraduate research study very quickly, basically just to note the existence of the survey. It's sparked some good discussion, though, and I'd like to take another post or two to expand on what I think it means.
Of course, the beneficial effect of undergraduate research seems almost obvious if you stop to think about it a bit. Undergraduate research works to attract students from all different backgrounds into science for a very simple reason: doing research is nothing at all like the typical science class.
OK, I can really only speak for physics, here,…
drorzel | April 30, 2007Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake notes an article in Science about a survey of undergraduate research. The actual article is behind a paywall, but you can get access to the survey reports from SRI directly, which is even better.
The study finds a large number of benefits from undergraduate research, from increased confidence to improved knowledge of graduate school. Students who have done research are about twice as likely to pursue a Ph.D. as those who haven't, and the more research they do, the more likely they are to pursue careers in science.
The conclusion is strikingly simple, and I'll copy…
drorzel | April 30, 2007Kate was scheduled to argue a case Friday morning in Federal court in Manhattan, so we decided to make a weekend of it. I drove down after class on Friday, and we went to dinner with Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden on Friday night, and spent Saturday at the Met, getting some culture.
Kate's a big fan of stained glass, so whenever we're there, we make it a point to check out the Tiffany windows they have on display. This trip, there was the added bonus of a special exhibition of items from Louis Comfort Tiffany's country estate, which showed the extravagent results you get when an artist is…
drorzel | April 30, 2007You might not have noticed, but John Scalzi has a new book out. The Last Colony is the third book in the Old Man's War series. It's narrated by John Perry from Old Man's War, now happily married to Jane Sagan from The Ghost Brigades, and working as a colonial administrator on a planet called Huckleberry. At least, that's what they're doing until an old acquaintance from the military turns up to ask them to take over running a new colony, the first to draw its colonists from already established human colonies, rather than third world countries on Earth. Predictably, this creates a somewhat…
drorzel | April 30, 2007The Skinner is another book in the same Polity universe as Gridlinked, though it appears to be more or less self-contained. It doesn't share any characters with the other book, though it does share bits of technology and a general attitude to the world.
The book is set on Spatterjay, a planet with a complex and improbable ecosystem that's designed to allow the author to construct ridiculously gory ways for the characters to suffer and/ or die. The dominant creature in the world is a "leech," that infects its prey with a parasite that confers a sort of immortality. People who are bitten by…
drorzel | April 29, 2007"The Fossil-Maker's Blues", by Steven Brust. Inspired by a comment in this post about paleoarcheology.
It's calcium and marrow and mix 'em fine
I'm on the job from nine to nine
Oh lord won't someone set me free
From the Devil's Fossil Factory.
drorzel | April 29, 2007
You bet your sweet ass I am.
Yeah, there are about six people on the Interweb who will get that joke...
This little guy lives in our back yard somewhere. He's damnably elusive, though, and never stays in one clearly visible place long enough for me to find the camera and get a picture. He was sitting out on one of the pine trees today, chirping away loudly, though, and I managed to get a few decent shots, despite not having the right sort of camera for this kind of thing.
This is probably the best for showing the red color (he was almost directly overhead the whole time, making it difficult…
drorzel | April 29, 2007 Over at Mixing Memory, Chris is annoyed with Larry Moran and PZ Myers for comparing themselves to suffragists:
It's difficult, at this point, to say anything other than, "Are you kidding me?" Watching white, middle-class, mostly ex-Protestant males (the dominant new atheist demographic) compare themselves to feminists, labor movements, gay and civil rights activists, or the members of any other persecuted group fighting for their social, political, and economic lives is just plain surreal. Or worse, as Trinifar notes, it's just plain manipulative.
The ensuing discussion and the follow-up…
drorzel | April 27, 2007Pretty much all of the songs that I thought anybody might possibly guess were guessed, so I might as well reveal the answers. If you'd still like to try your hand, don't click through to the rest of this post until after you've finished...
Those of you who have given up can find the full list of titles below the fold, with commentary on the songs that nobody recognized.
"I Don't Like Mondays," The Boomtown Rats
"I Wish I Was A Girl," Counting Crows
"The Destruction of Lurel Canyon," Youth Group. Off Casino Twilight Dogs. I couldn't find lyrics for this online (though I didn't try all that…
drorzel | April 27, 2007How can you tell that it's spring? Look at the Queen of Niskayuna:
When she's regally reclining under the swing in the back yard, then it's definitely spring.
drorzel | April 27, 2007Over at Cognitive Daily, Dave asks about splitting articles in RSS feeds. The ScienceBlogs feeds do not provide the full text of our posts, just the "above the fold" portion, and this practice rubs some people the wrong way.
The reason for this is that our Corporate Masters are trying to support the site by selling ads, and ad revenues are based on page views. The get those page views, we need people to click through to ScienceBlogs, so we try to use the "above the fold" content to draw people in, and get them to look at the ads.
My question to you is, how do youn feel about this?…
drorzel | April 26, 2007Inside Higher Ed notes in passing a new bill from the Senate supporting scientific research. There's a lot of bafflegab there, but if you scroll to the bottom, you can find the executive summary:
More specifically, the Commerce and Science Division of the America COMPETES Act would:
Increase Research Investment by:
Establishing the Innovation Acceleration Research Program to direct federal agencies funding research in science and technology to set as a goal dedicating approximately 8% of their Research and Development (R&D) budgets toward high-risk frontier research.
Authorizing the…
drorzel | April 26, 2007No, I'm not talking about the sort of thing where teams play cooperative, non-competetive games, and everybody gets a trophy at the end. I'm talking about academia, here, and specifically the recent flurry of colleges and universities offering child care support:
In the last week, both Stanford and Yale Universities have announced significant expansions of the help that they provide to new parents -- with Stanford unveiling a plan for junior faculty members and Yale one for graduate students.
Those moves follow this month’s announcement by Princeton University of substantially increased…
drorzel | April 26, 2007Every now and then, you run across things on the Internet that make you say "Wow, this is really cool!" For example, the fake trailer for Greg Bear's Eon (via Tobias Buckell). I haven't read the book in years, but that trailer looks amazing.
And, of course, every now and then, you encounter something that leaves you twitching and mumbling "The horror... the horror..." Such as, for example, Sad Kermit singing depressing songs (via bassfingers).