drorzel | January 31, 2007Mark Kleiman explains the problem of abortion in American politics (Bill Hicks: "Yeah, I'm gonna win you all back with this one") in two paragraphs of this post:
Jane Galt is right that the country would be better off if the abortion debate sparked less hatred on both sides. Moreover, she's right that one key to reducing the ferocity of the debate would be for the pro-choice folks to admit that ending a pregnancy does pose what can plausibly be considered a moral problem, and that therefore it's possible to support limits on abortion for reasons other than hateful or dim-witted anti-feminism…
drorzel | January 31, 2007Discover magazine has announced a contest:
Your goal is to create a video that quickly and clearly explains perhaps the most baffling idea in the history of the world: string theory.
And the best part is that you have just two minutes.
You'll be happy to know that Peter Woit has already bowed out (suggested concept: standing in front of a whiteboard, hopping up and down, and yelling, "It's crap! Crap crap crap crap crap!" for two minutes).
This is a sure path to fame and fort-- well, actually, they don't appear to be offering money, so just fame. Well, actually, they just promise to feature…
drorzel | January 30, 2007Various and sundry items that don't quite rate a post of their own.
I was astonished to learn on Pardon the Interruption that today is Gene Hackman's birthday. Not so much that it's his birthday, as that it's his 77th birthday. He doesn't seem like he should be that old.
Then again, he's looked about sixty for the last twenty years, so I guess that's about right...
Elsewhere, the Little Professor dabbles in Live-Action Role-Playing. I need to get me one of those grimoires....
And, via Eurekalert a book I'm sure we'll hear more about:
In God: The Failed Hypothesis, physicist Victor Stenger…
drorzel | January 30, 2007Having talked about force and fields, it seems fairly natural to move on to talking about energy, next. Of course, it also would've made sense to talk about energy first, and then fields and forces. These are interlocking concepts.
A concise one-sentence definition of energy might go something like:
the energy content of an object is a measure of its ability to change its own motion, or the motion of another object.
That's a little longer than the previous one-sentence descriptions, but I'm trying to avoid the recursion effect of the usual one-sentence definition, "Energy is ability to do…
drorzel | January 30, 2007I meant to post a comment on the new SciFi Channel series of The Dresden Files yesterday, but really, it's hard to work up much enthusiasm. It's not that the show was bad-- if it was bad, I'd have no problem writing something saying that. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't all that good, either.
The series, for those not aware of it, is based on a popular set of fantasy novels by Jim Butcher, following the adventures of Harry Dresedn, the only wizard listed in the Chicago phone book. Dresden ekes out a living as a sort of mystical private investigator, doing jobs for members of Chicago's…
drorzel | January 30, 2007Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings points out an honest-to-God terrorist conviction that didn't make a big splash in the news. Guess why:
GREENBELT, Maryland - Robert F. Weiler, Jr., age 25, of Forestville, Maryland pleaded guilty today to possessing a pipe bomb (an unregistered destructive device), being a felon in possession of a firearm and attempting to destroy or damage an abortion clinic located on Greenbelt Road in Greenbelt, Maryland, announced United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein.
As Thoreau notes, had he been a Muslim rather than a right-wing…
drorzel | January 29, 2007Something my sister pointed out, based on driving from San Francisco to southern California, and subsequently confirmed by local observations (for example, in the parking lot on my way back from basketball today):
When you see magnetic ribbons attached to cars, they invariably have right-leaning political slogans on them: "Support the Troops" and the like.
When you see left-leaning political slogans on cars ("Support the Troops: Impeach Bush"), they're invariably on bumper stickers.
Why is that? Are leftists just a bunch of cheap Luddites afraid of using new technologies? Are conservatives…
drorzel | January 29, 2007Apparently, it's "economics of higher education" day here at Uncertain Principles. This time out, we have Steve Hsu on Larry Summers.
(Update: I should also link to this post by Brad DeLong discussing the same article, with good stuff in the comments. And while I'm bashing free-market advocates, here's Jonah on the worst assumption in economics, and Dave on funding research with prizes.)
Steve quotes Summers saying:
In today's economy an outstanding graduate of a leading business school earns a substantially higher salary than a potential Nobel prize winner graduating with a PhD in biology.…
drorzel | January 29, 2007Inside Higher Ed also features an opinion piece about Princteon's tuition freeze, following my alma mater's lead from 2000.
While Princeton is larger and may carry more punch in the world of higher education than Williams, I will be very surprised if this decision triggers an onslaught of emulation. Only a tiny number of extraordinarily wealthy institutions could even consider following, and it is unclear why they would do so. The distributional consequences of the Princeton decision could be viewed as analogous to the early Bush tax cuts, in that the benefits will accrue to the very wealthy…
drorzel | January 29, 2007This is kind of sticking with the "Journal of Unsurprising Results" theme, but Inside Higher Ed today reports on a new study of student evaluations finding, well, more or less what you would expect:
One explanation could be that good students are earning good grades, and crediting their good professors for their learning. The Ohio State study, however, provides evidence for the more cynical/realistic interpretation -- namely that professors who are easy (and aren't necessarily the best teachers) earn good ratings. The way the Ohio State team did this was to look at grades in subsequent…
drorzel | January 28, 2007Travis at Arcane Gazebo suggests a game: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
Go to Wikipedia.
Click the random article link in the sidebar.
Open a second random article in another tab.
Try to find a chain of links (as short as possible) starting from the first article that leads to the second.
Lacking other bloggy inspiration, I tried it out. My two pages to connect were Kings Contrivance, Columbia, Maryland and Home Alone (video game), because God hates me. I did find a chain between them, though:
Kings Contrivance, Columbia, Maryland
Planned Community
United States
Cinema of the United States
List…
drorzel | January 28, 2007Christopher Moore's Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story is probably my favorite of his books. It is a silly book, about the romance between Tommy Flood, a naive would-be writer from Nebraska, and Jody Stroud, a young woman in San Francisco who finds herself turned into a vampire. It's an extremely funny book, with adventures involving homicide cops, the Emperor of San Francisco, and a manic team of late-night stockboys from the local Safeway, and everything just clicks.
I was a little nervous when I heard that he had written a sequel. Plenty of authors have gone back to follow up a beloved…
drorzel | January 27, 2007The dog is standing at the window, wagging her tail excitedly. I look outside, and the back yard is empty. "What are you looking at?" I ask.
"Bunnies made of cheese!," she says. I look again, and the yard is still empty.
"There are no bunnies out there," I say, "and there are certainly not any bunnies made of cheese. The back yard is empty."
"But particles are created out of empty space all the time, right?"
"Have you been reading my quantum physics books again?"
"It's boring here when you're not home. Anyway, answer the question."
"Well, yes, in a sense. They're called 'virtual particles,'…
drorzel | January 26, 2007As noted a little while back, I recently bought Tom Waits's Orphans collection, which includes a number of covers that are given his "lounge singer from another planet" treatment. Most notable among these is probably "Sea of Love," which I first heard through the Robert Plant side project the Honeydrippers, but has been covered by approximately a billion people. Waits's take is weird and creepy, but actually kind of interesting.
A little more recently, I bought the Alabama 3 album La Peste, which includes a cover of "Hotel California." A pretty bad cover, actually-- I junked it almost…
drorzel | January 26, 2007Cosmic Variance finally got themselves an experimentalist, John Conway of CDF, and he hits the ground running with a nice post about the search for the Higgs boson:
I've been looking for the Higgs boson for almost 20 years.
So there I was, on a Saturday morning in December, at CERN as it so happened, when I saw the graph we'd been working towards all year. At first I thought it was some mistake - the hair literally rose up on the back of my neck, and I said: "Holy crap! What's that?"
This is only part one of the description, and like a good author, he leaves the reader in suspense. It's a…
drorzel | January 26, 2007Matt Leifer doesn't blog all that often, but what he posts is very good. It tends to be extremely high-level stuff about foundational problems in quantum theory, mind, so it's not for the faint of heart, but if you get into that sort of thing, it's fascinating. Wednesday's post on dechoerence is no exception:
[L]et me start by defining two problems that I take to be at the heart of understanding quantum theory:
1) The Emergence of Classicality: Our most fundamental theories of the world are quantum mechanical, but the world appears classical to us at the everyday level. Explain why we do not…
drorzel | January 26, 2007Via Eurekalert, a Florida State press release touting a paper in Science studying techniques used to teach reading. The conclusion won't surprise anyone who has worked in education:
The researchers found that "the efficacy of any particular instructional practice may depend on the skill level of the student. Instructional strategies that help one student may be ineffective when applied to another student with different skills." The trick, then, is to more precisely determine the reading skill level of each child and then find a way to cater the curriculum to each student's individual needs.…
drorzel | January 25, 2007I've been collecting a bunch of little news squibs from the IoP and the APS over the last week or so, and I keep saying that I'm going to do a nice long post explaining each of the experiments. And my actual job keeps eating my life, what with candidate interviews, committee meetings, class prep, and lab set-up. And, of course, those news items are becoming less current with every passing day...
In lieu of a lengthy and detailed explanation of each, then, here's a short list of physics stories that have caught my eye. If there's a great clamor for a more detailed explanation of any of these,…
drorzel | January 25, 2007Inside Higher Ed reports today on a new study of junior faculty job satisfaction showing that faculty satisfaction doesn't correlate with institutional prestige:
The collaborative, known as COACHE, last year released aggregate findings from its survey of thousands of faculty members at dozens of participating institutions. That analysis found that junior professors placed increasing importance on issues such as the clarity of tenure policies or the availability of support for balancing work and family life when evaluating their job satisfaction. This week, the project is identifying the…
drorzel | January 25, 2007I picked this out of the to-be-read pile because it's specifically name-checked in the "SF and the History of Science" panel description on my Boskone schedule. I figure it's pretty likely to get brought up, and since we had a copy lying around, I might as well actually read it so as to be able to say something intelligent about it.
Lest Darkness Fall is the story of archeology student Martin Padway, who gets struck by lightning, and wakes up to find himself in sixth-century Rome. Armed with a slightly improbable level of knowledge regarding ancient history, society, and culture, he sets out…