drorzel | March 20, 2007... is astronomy, as the New York Times notes in explaining the equinox:
Archaeological evidence abounds that astronomy is among the oldest of professions, and that people attended with particular zeal to the equinoxes and the solstices. The Great Sphinx of Egypt, for example, built some 4,500 years ago, is positioned to face toward the rising sun on the vernal equinox.
In the 1,500-year-old Mayan city of Chichén Itzá, in Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, the magnificent Kukulcán Pyramid practically slithers to life each spring equinox evening, as the waning sun casts a shadow along its steps…
drorzel | March 19, 2007Well, ok, he hasn't posted anything yet, but Michael Bérubé will be joining Crooked Timber. This is good news indeed for the academic blogging community. I didn't read his blog as regularly as it deserved the first time around, but he was one of the sharper writers out there, and it's good to see him returning to blogging.
drorzel | March 19, 2007You may notice that there are some new ads on the site. They're short videos done by DuPont, with an excessively perky anchor talking about science topics and the wonders of chemistry, and that sort of thing.
We were promised that the ads would not auto-play or break people's browsers, and as far as I can tell, that seems to be the case. If you encounter any problems with them, though, please leave a comment here, and your concerns will be relayed to the Powers That Be.
And while we're at it, we may as well make this a Site Design Open Thread-- if you have comments or complaints about…
drorzel | March 19, 2007I'm giving an exam this morning, and I needed to get to work early to make copies, so I didn't have time for lengthy, insightful blogging. So here's a dorky poll.
This one needs a little background. A post-doc in my old group at NIST used to say that he always wished he had a prehensile tail, because there are lots of situations where you need a third hand. It doesn't have to be a very good hand, but when you're doing experimental work, you frequently wind up holding a flashlight in your mouth, while attempting to connect two wires in an awkward position, and it would be good to have a tail…
drorzel | March 19, 2007The first weekend of the NCAA tournament wound down pretty much the way it started. There were a few good games, but almost all the higher seeds won. Only one of the top eight seeds failed to advance, and that was Wisconsin, who have looked shaky since the loss of Brian Butch. Purdue gave Florida a surprisingly good game, and Nevada hung with Memphis for a good while, but the only other upsets by seed were in the 4-5 games, with trendy pick Texas and VA Tech both losing.
This is the chalk-iest tournament in recent memory, and my personal theory is that this is closely related to the other big…
drorzel | March 19, 2007Over at Kurt's Krap, there's extensive discussion of the relative merits of Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth as the front man for Van Halen. You can also find them discussing a bunch of other songs, but the Hagar/Roth question is the important one.
By a weird coincidence, I read Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City over the weekend (booklog post forthcoming), which also contains an extensive discussion of this critical pop-culture question.
It's kind of a tough call: Roth had more style, but Hagar was a little more consistent. I'd probably go with Roth, but I have a soft spot for Hagar, as the…
drorzel | March 18, 2007There's been a copy of Snake Agent at the local Borders for a while now, but it kept narrowly losing out to other books. On a recent shopping trip, though, I was buying enough stuff that throwing another trade paperback on the pile was just a small perturbation, so I picked up a copy.
The set-up here sounds like a cross between Jim Butcher and Barry Hughart: Detective Inspector Chen Wei is a policeman in Singapore, assigned to dealing with supernatural crimes. He occasionally descends into Hell to interview murder victims, he deals with demonic incursions into the regular world, and he tracks…
drorzel | March 18, 2007I'm always sort of fascinated by articles in which people talk about why they believe what they do, particularly in a religious context. I basically never find them persuasive (my own inclinations are Apathetic Agnostic-- I don't care if there's a God or not), but when they're done well, they're really interesting reading, in sort of the same way as some science fiction-- it's a look inside a very different worldview.
Two good examples have crossed my path recently. One is Rob Knop's post about why he is a Christian (the third and concluding post in a series), which I'm sure has already been…
drorzel | March 18, 2007Back at Boskone, I went to a panel consisting of a number of revieweres recommending books that we might not have heard of. Toward the end, one of the panelists rattled off a list of authors writing urban fantasy (what he described as "Laurel Hamilton without all the porn"), and Rob Thurman was on the list. A couple of weeks ago, I was in Borders buying books, inclusing Jim Butcher's Proven Guilty (which I read out of the library when it came out in hardcover). Since I was buying that, I decided to look for something else in the Dresden Files vein, and picked up Nightlife, thinking that it…
drorzel | March 18, 2007Saturday finally saw some good action in the NCAA tournamnet. Three of the eight games went to overtime, and four of the remaining five were decided by seven points or less. VCU and Xavier came up short against Pitt and Ohio State, but made fantastic runs to get the games into OT, and #6 seed Vanderbilt knocked off #3 Washington State in double overtime. We finally got a slate of close, exciting games.
Unfortunately, one of those games saw Maryland losing to Butler. Thanks to the Ohio State overtime, I actually got to see a fair bit of this one, but really, two lines in the box score tells…
drorzel | March 17, 2007I saw very little basketball on the second day of the tournament, because I had a meeting at 1:00 that ran until almost 3:00. I watched a bit of the second set of games between that and going to a faculty-student St. Patrick's Day event at 4:30, and then dozed off during the games after dinner.
Not much to say about the second day, though, They at least managed some dramatic games-- VA Tech rallied to squeak out a win, scoring the last twelve points of the game to win by two, and #2 seed Wisconsin trailed by almost twenty before rallying to win. Oregon squeaked out a win over Miami University…
drorzel | March 17, 2007A few days back, commenter igor eduardo kupfer compiled the log5 predictions for the first round, and tried to come up with a test of their validity. We didn't agree on anything, but for the sake of intellectual honesty, here's a breakdown of how those predictions fared, binned in 10% groups (so 0.5-0.6 collects those teams for which the winning probability was between 50-60%):
0.5-0.6: 2-2
0.6-0.7: 3-1
0.7-0.8: 4-1
0.8-0.9: 8-2
0.9-1.0: 9-0
(These records are approximate-- it's possible that I've misremembered a game here or there, but I've just come in from shovelling a foot of snow out of…
drorzel | March 17, 2007Via Inside Higher Ed, a story about a unique attempt to address student problems at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai:
One of India's top engineering schools has restricted Internet access in its hostels, saying addiction to surfing, gaming and blogging was affecting students' performance, making them reclusive and even suicidal.
Authorities at the elite Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai said students had stopped socializing and many were late for morning classes or slept through them.
Accordingly, the Internet access will be completely cut off from 11pm-12:30 am…
drorzel | March 16, 2007Muiscal intro, fancy CGI effects
Anchor 1 (voiceover): The Showdown begins! Four regions, eight games each, sixty-four top science concepts in a fight to the finish.
Anchor 2: In today's Orbit region action, two titans of Newtonian physics collide-- will Universal Gravitation maintain its orbit, or will the upstart Second Law change its momentum for the worse?
Anchor 1: Quaternions. Euler angles. Which is which, and what does their exciting clash mean for the future of physics? We'll find out what Dick Vitale thinks.
Anchor 2: And you won't believe the controversial finish of the match…
drorzel | March 16, 2007The Dean Dad posts lots of very interesting things that I end up not having time to link to-- you should be reading his blog every day, if you're interested in how academia operates. This one is too good to not link, though-- a discussion of Boards of Trustees and how they operate. I particualrly enjoyed this bit:
Boards are usually relatively small, and often dominated by a few strong personalities. Board members are typically not, um, experts in the innards of higher education, having earned their stripes in other fields of endeavor. Board service is usually only one of the obligations a…
drorzel | March 16, 2007The first day turned out to be a little disappointing, from a fan's perspective. There were only two upsets by seed, and one of those was an 8-9 game. Other than that, the higher seed won all the games, and most of them weren't all that close.
CBS demonstrated a real gift for switching to a close game right before it became a blowout. They did this three times in rapid succession in the afternoon session, leaving Georgetown's thrashing of Belmont to look in on Old Dominion just as Butler started to pull away, then changing to Oral Roberts just as Washington State caught fire, and finally…
drorzel | March 15, 2007Maryland held off a tough Davidson team to win, 82-70, in a game that I saw basically none of. By the time the BC-Texas Tech game wound down to its uninteresting conclusion, Maryland had built up a fairly secure lead, and there were only a couple of minutes of garbage time left. I gather that Davidson shot the lights out from three-point range early, but cooled off in the second half, and the Terps were able to use their superior size to good effect down the stretch. But, as I said, I saw none of it.
Boston College beat Texas Tech in a game that managed to be both close and dull. This was…
drorzel | March 15, 2007While I am taking the day off to watch basketball all afternoon, I will not be live-blogging the first round, the way I have the last couple of years. I realize this is a huge disappointment to about two people out there, but since typing on the laptop got me crippling muscle spasms in my neck and shoulder, it's just not worth it.
I do, however, want to get a few thoughts out there on record, before the MAryland game tips off shortly, starting with the fact that I wouldn't be all that surprised to see the Terps drop their game this afternoon to Davidson. When they play well, they have the…
drorzel | March 15, 2007After a short post-March Meeting lag, Physics World is back to announcing really cool physics results, this time highlighting a paper in Nature (subscription required) by a French group who have observed the birth and death of photons in a cavity. I'm not sure how it is that the French came to dominate quantum optics, but between Serge Haroche and Alain Aspect, most of the coolest experiments in the field seem to have been done in France.
In this particular case, they set up a superconducting resonant cavity for microwaves. Basically, this is like two mirrors facing one another, and a photon…
drorzel | March 15, 2007From the first invention of human language right up to the present moment, there has never been an instant when "He did it first" was a winning argument.
Counterexamples?