drorzel | March 9, 2007Light blogging today, because I'm having muscle spasms in my neck and shoulder again. Blogrolling and typing aggravate that, so there will be minimal posting for the rest of the weekend.
To fill a bit of space, though, here's a call for music recommendations: I bought a whole slew of Crowded House/ Finn Brothers stuff off iTunes last night thanks to Senor BaconCat, and I picked up the much-hyped new Arcade Fire album at the same time, but what else should I be looking at buying?
I'll throw out an oddball recommendation just to get things started: I bought the Holmes Brothers State of Grace on…
drorzel | March 9, 2007Karma is a bitch.
I left work a little early yesterday, because I saw that both Maryland and Syracuse were playing at 2:00, on ESPN networks, and I was finished with my meeting in time to catch most of the second half. Not only did I get home to find that the Maryland game was only on pay-per-view, but both of them lost. Syracuse lost by six in a game where they shot 16-28 from the free-throw line (at one point, they were 9-20), while Maryland played a horrible game and lost to Miami. They did have a shot to tie, but really, there's no excuse for falling behind a 12-19 team by fifteen points…
drorzel | March 8, 2007Hamish Johnston is live-blogging like a pro, and has entries on invisibility, buckets of BEC, biophysics, and the toy show.
Travis Hime knows more than you do about superconducting qubits.
And that's it for the moment.
drorzel | March 8, 2007I'll post a March Meeting update later, but if you like your conferences a little more wide-ranging, Ethan Zuckerman provides extensive reporting from the TED Conference. The speakers range from Steven Pinker and Murray Gell-Mann to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, so there's a little something for everyone.
drorzel | March 8, 2007This idea is stolen from Colin Cowherd, a pinhead on ESPN Radio, but even a blind pig finds the occasional acorn. I'm going to list a bunch of abbreviations below, and you tell me which are the initials of conferences in Division I basketball, which are agencies of the US Government, and which could be either.
For example, "MVC" would be the Missouri Valley Conference, which is a basketball conference, while "NACIC" would be the National Counter-Intelligence Center, a government agency. "ACC" could be either the Atlantic Coast Conference or the Air Combat Command.
The full list of twenty…
drorzel | March 8, 2007Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake Young has an anti-tenure post that repeats one of the classic mistaken arguments:
1) Tenure supports bad teachers as much as it supports unproductive researchers. I can't tell you the number of bad lecturers that I have had over the years. It has to be like 90%. Science in particular is filled with a lot of very smart people, very few of whom have the slightest idea how to convey that miraculous intelligence to another scientists, much less a lay-person.
As it exists now there is no incentive to teach well after you receive tenure. Teaching duties are often…
drorzel | March 8, 2007Lest it be said that I never say anything nice about anyone from Duke, let me second Dave's recommendation of Al Featherston's article about coaching consistency at the Duke Basketball Report. It being a Dukie publication, he goes on rather too long about the greatness of Mike Krzyzewski, but the opening point about how even the best coaches in the business can't avoid off years is excellent.
Lest it be said that I'm going soft on Duke, though, let me also link to Dave's most-hated Dukies post, with a bonus list of hated Tar Heels. Because nothing's as much fun as ragging on hateable players…
drorzel | March 8, 2007Two more automatic bids handed out last night:
Central Connecticut: The Blue Devils beat Sacred Heart in a battle of small Connecticut schools, winning the Northeast Conference title behind 25 points from Javier Mojica. The high-profile UConn Huskies lost to Syracuse yesterday in the Big East tournament, so Central Connecticut will be the sole representative for the state. Who woulda thunk?
Weber State: pronounced "Wee-burr" and best rememebred for upsetting North Carolina back in 1999, the Wildcats earned a bid to the NCAA's by winning the Big Sky tournament over Northern Arizona last night…
drorzel | March 7, 2007Dave and Jim Munger are doing their annual male-bonding fest this weekend:
Over the course of the next four days, Jim and I are going to watch, and review, every Rocky and Rambo movie.
[...]Here's our tentative viewing schedule:
Today: Rocky I and II
Tomorrow: Rocky III
Friday: Rocky IV and V
Saturday afternoon: First Blood, Rambo: First Blood Part II
Saturday night: Rocky Balboa (in an actual movie theater -- assuming we can find one. It's playing in Statesville tonight, but we want to watch the movies in order!)
Sunday afternoon: Rambo III
This isn't quite as ambitious as Vidsanity!, but…
drorzel | March 7, 2007I forgot to post this earlier, but there are a few posts out there about the second day of the APS March Meeting:
Cocktail Party Physics has interesting comments on a bunch of biophysics.
Doug Natelson gets roped into chairing a session, and talks about some STM talks.
Matt Leifer talks about research on foundational issues in QM, without mentioning any obvious kooks.
Hamish Johnston talks about graphene, medical physics, and High Tc superconductors.
drorzel | March 7, 2007Here's the scenario: You are the sole executive authority of Hypothetical College, which has a faculty of three. It's performance evaluation time, and you have $1,500 in bonus money to distribute, in increments of $500 (that is, you can award $0, $500, $1,000, or $1,500 to each faculty member, but the total amount of all the awards can be no more than $1,500). To make this easier, all three of your faculty taught the same number of students, received the same student evaluation scores, and served on the same campus committees, so all you need to do is evaluate their scholarship.
Professor A…
drorzel | March 7, 2007On Monday, I lectured about the strong nuclear force. It's called that because it's, well, a force, that acts within the nucleus of the atom, and is, um, strong.
On Wednesday, I'm lecturing about quarks, which are called that because, um, well, because Murray Gell-Mann is a pretentious git, and wanted to show off the fact that he'd read Joyce.
These pretty much span the full range of names in physics, which are either incredibly dull, or painfully dorky. Physicists have many talents, but coming up with good names for things isn't one of them.
The worst offenders, in terms of sheer numbers,…
drorzel | March 7, 2007Inside Higher Ed has an op-ed piece up urging faculty to abandon textbooks:
Here's a statement with which everyone can agree: College instructors cannot assume that students come to their classes in possession of basic knowledge. Now here's one sure to generate some controversy: In many cases textbooks deter the pursuit of knowledge more than they help it. The sciences may be different, but at least in the case of the humanities, most of us would be better off not assigning a textbook.
He goes on to make a strong case for abandoning history textbooks in favor of monographs, based on both the…
drorzel | March 7, 2007Three more automatic bids last night, earning three teams their coveted one-paragraph summary on Uncertain Principles:
Wright State: The shocker so far (for small values of "shocker"), the unranked Raiders beat #19 Butler to win the Horizon League title and a trip to the NCAA's. Though Butler is nationally ranked, they were co-champs with Wright State in the regular season, and Wright State won the tiebreaker and got to host the championship.
North Texas: The Mean Green assured that tehre will be at least one school witha color nickname in the field of 65, beating Arkansas State behind 24…
drorzel | March 6, 2007Over at the Freakonomics blog, Steven Levitt takes up the question of tenure in academia. As you might expect, it's bad from an economic perspective, and ought to be eliminated:
If there was ever a time when it made sense for economics professors to be given tenure, that time has surely passed. The same is likely true of other university disciplines, and probably even more true for high-school and elementary school teachers.
What does tenure do? It distorts people's effort so that they face strong incentives early in their career (and presumably work very hard early on as a consequence) and…
drorzel | March 6, 2007Arcane Gazebo provides a picture of a giant blue bear, a few notes on talks about quantum computing, and thoughts on the Kook Session.(*)
Cocktail Party Physics offers thoughts on Irish giants and large-scale pattern formation in geological systems.
Physics World offers three posts: on carbon-trapping windmills, the physics of icicles, and the 20th anniversary of Woodstock.
Know of any other reports from the meeting? Leave a link in the comments.
(* - Background for non-APS types: The American Physical Society meetings accept essentially all contributed abstracts, even the ones from crazy…
drorzel | March 6, 2007Physics World has a story today about a new addition to the now-you-see-it, now-you-don't maybe-it's-a-Higgs-boson signals seen at Fermilab. (See here and here for a flavor of the earlier discussions). This one is a beyond-the-Standard-Model particle that would require a supersymmetric theory to explain.
Of course, the evidence at this point consists of a whopping three events. Color me skeptical.
drorzel | March 6, 2007Four more automatic bids to the NCAA's were won over the last couple of days:
Creighton: The Blue Jays almost don't deserve to be thought of as a "little guy" any more, given that this is their seventh win in the last nine years. They did, however, have to beat a ranked Southern Illinois team to get the bid, so I think they still count.
Virginia Commonwealth University: If you want to be George Mason, you have to beat George Mason, which is what the Rams did. I saw the last two minutes or so of this one, which was one of the most impressive individual game-changing performances I've seen.…
drorzel | March 6, 2007Kate bought this a while back, and I picked it up a little bit before Boskone, because I wanted to read at least a little of it before the Mike Ford retrospective panel. I was a little disappointed that the panel didn't mention this or his other lesser-known works, but, hey, it got me to read the book...
The Scholars of Night is a Cold War spy novel. A consultant for an American intelligence agency stumbles across some old documents, which reveal a certain individual as a Soviet agent, and he is assassinated. His lover, code named WAGNER, is determined to carry through the last great…
drorzel | March 5, 2007James Nicoll is soliciting recommendations for a series of novels about the planets of the Solar System. His first pass:
Mercury:
Venus:
Earth: Imperial Earth, Arthur C. Clarke
Mars:
Jupiter: Jupiter Fred and Carol Pohl (ed)
Saturn:
Uranus:
Neptune: Triton, Samuel R. Delany
As you can see, there are some gaps...
Suggestions are welcome, bearing in mind of course that James's definition of SF pretty much demands MilSpec certification for the bolts holding the rockets together, so it's a little tough to come up with books that meet his standards. I'm a little more forgiving of dodgy science…