drorzel | April 8, 2007Bill Hicks on Easter.
"At least a goldfish with a Lincoln Log on its back crawling across your floor to your sock drawer has a miraculous connotation to it."
drorzel | April 8, 2007I haven't been following the discussion of the Mooney/ Nisbet "framing" article in Science all that closely, because most of the commentary has tended to be uninteresting in predictable ways. You can find a fairly comprehensive list of links from Bora (who else?), and Matt and Chris respond to most of it.
There was one response that struck me as worth highlighting, though, from James Hrynyshyn of the Island of Doubt:
Essentially, my response is that it is neither realistic nor fair to ask scientists to ditch their penchant for the facts and wander into territory more familiar to the…
drorzel | April 8, 2007For those few readers who are really fascinated by the workings of SF fandom, Kevin Standlee has posted a map of the Worldcon membership by country, and by state for the US and prefecture for Japan.
It's interesting not just for the distribution of the actual members, but for the gaps. Africa appears only in a couple of small insets, thanks to a few members in Nigeria, South Africa, and Israel, while only a tiny slice of Aouth America is shown, thanks to a handful of members in Chile. There are no members from anywhere in the former Soviet Union.
I don't know that you can read any Deep…
drorzel | April 7, 2007There's been a fair bit of discussion of this year's Hugo nominees around the Internets, most of it centering around the gender of the nominees (that link goes to a fairly civilized discussion, which includes links to a rather more heated argument). For those who haven't been following the controversy, only one of the twenty nominated works in fiction categories was by a woman.
What follows will be rambling and discursive and probably not terribly productive, but I've become accustomed to thinking by typing, so there you go. If you're not fascinated by squabbling over SF awards, scroll down…
drorzel | April 7, 2007I do it for the toys:
OK, it's not like they gave me a robot vacuum cleaner because of the blog, but I spent some of the money I got paid for blogging on this. It helped that there was a talk by Colin Angle of iRobot on campus a while back, talking about the history of the company, as part of the dedication of a new robotics lab in the CS department. He was an excellent speaker and a fairly charming guy, and more importantly, he handed out a bunch of 20% off coupons to people after the talk...
There are a bunch of justifications for buying this: Kate and I both hate doing housework, I have…
drorzel | April 6, 2007Yesterday, on my way in to work, I was listening to ESPN radio and Mike Greenberg made a bold assertion (paraphrased slightly):
Jackie Robinson is one of the ten most important Americans of the twentieth century. Not just sports figures, Americans.
Contrary sort that I am, my first thought was "I don't think I believe that."
Which is not to say that Robinson wasn't an important American of the twentieth century. I don't think there's any question that he's the most important twentieth century American from the world of sports (trailed by Muhammed Ali and Jesse Owens, and then a big step down…
drorzel | April 5, 2007Inside Higher Ed today offers a column by Daniel Chambliss of Hamilton College, taking issue with the Spellings commission report on higher education, and its analogies comparinf education to manufacturing:
By the conclusion of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings' recently-convened Test of Leadership Summit on Higher Education, I finally understood why her proposals are so ... well, so ill-conceived. They rest on a faulty metaphor: the belief that education is essentially like manufacturing. High school students are "your raw material," as Rhode Island Gov. Donald Carcieri told us. We…
drorzel | April 4, 2007
As you can see from the picture, my desk is a mess. Also, I've come into possession of a second free copy of Paul Davies's new book Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life (one is an advance reading copy in trade paper, the other a spiffy new hardback). You can read my lukewarm review, from which you can easily deduce that I don't actually need to own two copies of this book.
Thus, I am pleased to announce The Offical Uncertain Principles Cosmic Jackpot Giveaway Contest. I will give away one of these two copies to the person who successfully completes the following challenge…
drorzel | April 4, 2007Eugene Wallingford talks about a great idea for a conference session:
At SIGCSE a couple of weeks ago, I attended an interesting pair of complementary panel sessions. I wrote about one, Ten Things I Wish They Would Have Told Me..., in near-real time. Its complement was a panel called "It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time". Here, courageous instructors got up in front of a large room full of their peers to do what for many is unthinkable: tell everyone about an idea they had that failed in practice. When the currency of your profession is creating good ideas, telling everyone about one of…
drorzel | April 3, 2007Saturday's Georgetown- Ohio State game was hyped as featuring a clash of two seven-foot centers, but failed to live up to that billing, as Greg Oden picked up two quick fouls, and sat for most of the first half. Roy Hibbert of Georgetown didn't fare much better.
This has prompted a bunch of pinhead commentators, most notably Dick Vitale and Billy Packer to start agitating for changes in the rules so that star players won't have to worry about foul trouble. Vitale wants to move to six fouls before disqualification, but he doesn't stop there. He thinks that you should be able to continue…
drorzel | April 3, 2007It's summed up nicely by the discussion at Cosmic Variance, and spelled out explicitly in comment #125 by Marty Tysanner:
Sean coaxingly requested,
Come on, string theorists! Make some effort to explain to everyone why this set of lofty speculations is as promising as you know it to be. It won't hurt too much, really.
It seems remarkable to me, 120+ comments later, how few people have responded in this vein. Over at Clifford's blog there have been some angry discussions (e.g., this and this) about the merits of Lee's and Peter's books, and some string theorists and partisans were quite vocal…
drorzel | April 2, 2007As mentioned in passing in the previous post, we've been having some DSL issues that prevent me from posting anything from home at the moment. Hopefully, Verizon will get this fixed (Kate spent a long time on the phone with them Sunday morning, and they think it's a software problem on their end).
More importantly, I've got a wretched cold, and an 8am class. I can more or less handle lecturing at that hour, but that combined with the cold leaves me glassy-eyed and drooling for most of the rest of the morning, which isn't exactly conducive to interesting blogging.
As a result, traffic here…
drorzel | April 2, 2007We've been having some problems with our DSL service at Chateau Steelypips again, which has gotten me thinking about the design of devices that are annoying to use. It occurs to me that you might use a sort of control to indicator ratio as a measure of how irritating a device is to use.
This is prompted by the fact that our home network contains two devices, a DSL modem and a wireless router, each of which has four indicator LED's on the front. These LED's have a couple of different states each-- when either devices is functioning properly, they're steady green, but they can also blink, and…
drorzel | April 1, 2007I stopped by to support my local independent bookseller yesterday, and was immediately confronted with a dilemma: A big display of signed copies of White Night by Jim Butcher, the new Dresden Files novel. The signed part has nothing to do with the dilemma-- I'm a reader, not a collector-- the dilemma was that I haven't been buying these in hardcover, and it's only out in hardcover. But I've really been in the mood for a Dresden Files book lately, especially since the Rob Thurman book mentioned previously turned out to be so unsatisfactory.
As you can tell, I ended up buying it, and tore…
drorzel | April 1, 2007Having watched UCLA set offensive basketball back about fifty years in the first half of last night's game (I didn't watch the second half, as the outcome wasn't in doubt, and really, I'd rather stab myself in the eye with a fork), it's worth taking a few minutes today to discuss one of the most important plays in basketball, the pick and roll. This was the Bruins' undoing on both offense and defense, so it's appropriate to explain how it's supposed to work.
The play itself is extremely simple, and involves two players on the offensive team. One of the two, usually a guard, starts the play…
drorzel | April 1, 2007As we look at science in general, and physics in particular, a clear pattern emerges: the scientific endeavours most worthy of praise and acclaim are the most abstract and mathematical sciences. Physics is of greater worth than biology, theoretical physics is more worthy than experimental physics, and high-energy particle theory is the most fundamental and important field in the history of human though. Rather than deriding string theory as an excessively mathematical dead end, as many anti-science America-hating Bush-bashing politically correct feminist shrub-hugging liberal communist dupes…
drorzel | March 31, 2007There's a nice article about former Princeton coach Pete Carril and the motion offense popularly associated with his teams:
Carril has not been a college coach for 11 years. But he is wearing a Georgetown cap, and people keep calling to talk about the precise pass-and-cut offense that he supposedly invented but never called the Princeton offense.
"I didn't call it anything," he said.
To him, it is only basketball, and it is not complicated. Carril does not understand why no one talks about other offenses the way they do about Princeton's. But people are calling him, and they are suddenly…
drorzel | March 31, 2007As you undoubtedly already know, the Large Hadron Collider suffered a setback this week:
The start-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN could be delayed after three of the magnets used to focus and manipulate the accelerator's proton beams failed preliminary tests at CERN earlier this week. The magnets were built at Fermilab in the US, which announced the failure on its Web site. Although CERN has not yet issued a formal statement on the set-back, it looks increasingly unlikely that the LHC will come on-line this year as planned.
(See also the official Fermilab release on the…
drorzel | March 31, 2007Just a quick note that everybody's favorite physics-oriented blog carnival is now up: Philosophia Naturalis #8.
Once again, I forgot to submit anything, but Sujit was kind enough to include one of the things I wrote anyway. There's a lot of good stuff there, so go check it out.
drorzel | March 30, 2007It's Friday, and the new academic term starts on Monday (I'll be teaching at 8am-- shoot me now), so it seems like a good time to try to forget about our troubles with pop music:
The Onion's AV Club has a list of great story songs, topped by "A Boy Named Sue." I was amazed to discover a year or two ago that this was actually written by Shel "Where the Sidewalk Ends" Silverstein, who also wrote a sequel. the world is a very strange place.
Also on the list is Dylan's "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts" off Blood on the Tracks. "Tangled up in Blue," from the same record, doesn't make the…