drorzel | March 15, 2007Is this video a deplorable example of cruelty to animals, or an entertaining way of dealing with bushy-tailed vermin?
(It's unquestionably the work of somebody with way too much free time. It's much simpler to just let the dog out back, and let her chase the squirrels out of the yard. Though she might enjoy catapulting them...)
Video via Timothy Burke.
drorzel | March 14, 2007
Announcing the first round games of the Orbit Region of the 2007 Science Showdown: These games match central physics concepts against one another, in a bid to determine the greatest physics idea, which will eventually face and humiliate ideas from other fields of science.
I'll be announcing the winners on Friday, but ehre's your chance to contribute: The eight first-round match-ups are shown in the graphic above: Which do you think should win? Leave your votes in the comments, and help determine the outcomes.
The games:
1) Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation vs. 16) Newton's Second Law of…
drorzel | March 14, 2007The BBC has done a poll about unread books, and found some results that at first might appear surprising:
Some 35% of those who bought or borrowed Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre's story of a US high school massacre, admitted not finishing it.
The figure was 32% for the fourth instalment in the Harry Potter series, while 28% said the same for James Joyce's Ulysses, third on the list.
In reality, though, I think this isn't terribly surprising, because it's a variant of what I think of as the Labrador Retriever Problem. It's got that name because when I went to buy homeowner's insurance before…
drorzel | March 14, 2007Posting has been basketball-heavy of late because, well, there isn't much else going on that I find all that interesting at the moment. More importantly, though, it's the Season of the Bracket...
I'm not the only one affected, of course, though many people who don't care about hoops have to find other outlets for the impulse to construct match-ups between various concepts, and arrange them in a single elimination tournament:
Locally, there's the Science Spring Showdown. I'll be announcing the first-round winners in the "Orbit" bracket on Friday, and while my decisions are final, they are…
drorzel | March 14, 2007John Scalzi is announcing the launch of a new "collaborative short fiction" site, Ficlets:
What does "collaborative short fiction" mean in this case? Simple: You, as a writer, post a very short (not more than 1,024 characters) piece of fiction or a fiction fragment on the Ficlets site. People come to Ficlets to read what you've written, and to comment on your piece. If they want to, they can also write a "sequel" to your story or story fragment, carrying the story forward from where you left it. Or, alternately, they can write a "prequel," explaining how you got to where you are in the story…
drorzel | March 14, 2007The winners of the 2007 Intel Science Talent Search have been announced. First prize goes to physics, as is right and proper:
Mary Masterman, 17, of Oklahoma City, submitted a physics project to the Intel Science Talent Search describing the spectrograph system she built for $300 at home (commercial units can cost $20,000 to $100,000). Mary found that machining the parts and aligning the optics (lenses from a microscope and a camera) were particularly challenging. Her Littrow spectrograph splits light, like a prism, and uses a camera to record the resulting Raman spectra - a specific…
drorzel | March 13, 2007... is blogging about basketball.
Of course, this was inevitable, because college basketball is inherently a liberal sport. There's no sports analogue for welfare and affirmative action better than the "atuomatic bid" system that allows small conference champions into the NCAA tournament, giving them the same chance at the title as teams from the power conferences.
College football on the other hand, is the quintessentially conservative sport, at least in the modern Republican sense of "conservative." Two teams are hand-picked from the power conferences to play for the "championship," while…
drorzel | March 13, 2007As threatened in passing earlier, I went through the NCAA Tournament field, picking the games based on the ranking of Ph.D. programs in Physics (I set the "Scholarly quality of program faculty is high" weight to 5, and left everything else off). I entered it on Yahoo, which provides a spiffy PDF version for those who want to see the full bracket.
The Final Four ends up being Maryland, Texas, Illinois, and Stanford, which would've made some sense about five years ago, but isn't really all that likely this year...
drorzel | March 13, 2007The New York Times offers an article profiling Terence Tao, mostly focussing on his child prodigy background:
Dr. Tao has drawn attention and curiosity throughout his life for his prodigious abilities. By age 2, he had learned to read. At 9, he attended college math classes. At 20, he finished his Ph.D.
Now 31, he has grown from prodigy to one of the world's top mathematicians, tackling an unusually broad range of problems, including ones involving prime numbers and the compression of images. Last summer, he won a Fields Medal, often considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics, and a MacArthur…
drorzel | March 13, 2007With the annual Office Pool Season now open, lots of people are queueing up to offer advice on how to fill out the bracket sheets for our national foray into illegal gambling:
Inside Higher Ed offers a bracket based on graduation rates, with a Final Four of Florida, Virginia, Michigan State, and, um, Holy Cross. Perhaps this isn't the way to bet...
If you'd like statistical backing for your bad picks, Ken Pomeror is breaking down the regions, predicting the West and Midwest today.
The New York Times offers two strategies for winning contests: 1) foolishly pick the wrong team, for example,…
drorzel | March 12, 2007As part of one of my intermittent attempts to be a better person, I've given up atheist-baiting for Lent. And let me tell you, it isn't easy.
I would be remiss in my blogging duties, though, if I didn't point out Rob Knop's recent posts about religion and science. The first is about being a Christian, and the second is about the role of spirituality.
The posts make for interesting reading. The comments in response, not so much.
drorzel | March 12, 2007We've got unjustified judicial firings, secret prison networks, and unauthorized wiretaps-- all good, solid scandals based on important ethical principles. Meanwhile, in Israel...
Israel has recalled its ambassador to El Salvador after he was found drunk and naked apart from bondage gear.
Reports say he was able to identify himself to police only after a rubber ball had been removed from his mouth.
Mark Foley, eat your heart out.
drorzel | March 12, 2007If you can't figure out basketball, but are looking to get in on the excitement of filling out bracket sheets and arguing about seeds, well, the boys at the World's Fair have got just the thing for you...
The Science Spring Showdown 2007
That's right, they've got brackets set up for the ultimate showdon of the sciences. Bosons vs. Fermions! Popper vs. Kuhn! Caffeine vs. Ethanol!
The only thing missing is numerical seeds, so we can argue about how on earth "Experiment" got stuck with a 12 seed vs. 5-seed "Theory"...
drorzel | March 12, 2007There's been a lot of commentary already about how the NCAA selection committee short-changed the smaller conferences. Only six small conference teams got at-large bids this year, half the number from a few years back.
This actually understates the problem, though. Not only dis the committee take too few small teams, in a few cases, they also seeded them to play each other, rather than putting small schools against big schools. Take, for example, the 5-12 game in Maryland's region, which pits Butler against Old Dominion-- two small-conference programs who received at-large bids. Two of the…
drorzel | March 12, 2007So, the NCAA brackets are out. Syracuse got left out of the field, which is what Jim Boeheim gets for sneering at the selection committee in public. And also for not playing a game outside the state of New York until late January...
Maryland, at least, is in, seeded #4 in the St. Louis region, where they'll play Dave Munger's Davidson team in Buffalo on Thursday. They're doomed.
Why are they doomed, you ask? Well, for one thing, Davidson has a pretty good team, and is just the sort of program that Maryland might easily overlook.
More importantly, though, they're cited in the New York Times as…
drorzel | March 11, 2007Everybody and their brother is doing the "which Significant SF books have you read?" thing today, so I might as well play along. The list is below, and just because I'm lazy, I've opted to strike out the ones I haven't read, rather than bolding the ones I have. It's less typing that way.
There are two things about this that are sort of striking: First, that while I may be the only ScienceBlogs person who regularly attends SF conventions, and yet, I've read fewer of these books than most of the other people who have responded. Second, that there really aren't any books on the unread list that…
drorzel | March 11, 2007A good weekend for science in the Sunday New York Times, with a nice magazine article about dark matter and dark energy, and also a piece about the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), inexplicably located in the Book Review section (the article, that is, not the aliens).
It's probably possible to draw some sort of parallel between the two-- after all, the notion of dark matter was viewed as bordeline kookery for decades before gaining wide acceptance, and SETI is still widely viewed as a little bit off. I'm a little discombobulated from yesterday's long trip, though, so I'll…
drorzel | March 11, 2007The site was silent yesterday because Kate and I drove down to The City to surprise my grandmother and father (her birthday was yesterday, his is Tuesday), and see a Broadway show (about which more later, maybe). That means a slight delay in the accolades for some little guys, but fortunately only one automatic bid was handed out Friday:
Holy Cross: The Crusdaders of the College of the Holy Cross (a name that sounds like it ought to describe something other than a basketball team) beat Bucknell Friday to win John Feinstein's favorite conference. It's the first time in three years that they've…
drorzel | March 9, 2007Stealing a topic from sports radio: Dick Vitale is a finalist for the Basketball Hall of Fame. Should he get in?
Much as I hate the guy, I think I have to say yes. He's an absolutely terrible game announcer at this point-- more often than not, he's so busy babbling about other teams, other sports, and Jim Boeheim's hot wife that he forgets to actually comment on the game he's being paid to watch. But he is widely liked by casual fans of the sport, and has been instrumental in raising the profile of college basketball, so he probably does deserve recognition.
Of course, some people think…