drorzel | January 1, 2007Well, that was a cranky post. Not a good start for New Year's Day, is it?
To make up for that, how about a good recipe:
Cheesy Poof (From Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food)
Ingredients:
270 g all-purpose flour
10 g baking powder
9 g dry mustard (1.5 teaspoons)
100 g eggs (2 large eggs)
43 g vegetable oil (3 Tbs)
227 g milk (1 cup)
15 g granulated sugar
4 g kosher salt
227 g shredded cheddar cheese
Directions:
Pre-heat the oven to 375 F (do your own Celsius conversion).
Mix together the flour, baking powder and mustard. Toss with the cheese.
Mix together the eggs, oil, milk, sugar, and…
drorzel | January 1, 2007Over at The Island of Doubt, James Hrynyshyn (pronounced, no doubt, just like it's spelled) points to an article by Daniel Dennett in which he refuses to let a bad idea die:
In July, 2003, I wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times entitled "The Bright Stuff", where I drew attention to a budding movement among atheists intent on copying an idea from the homosexuals' excellent campaign: the hijacking of a perfectly good word with an established meaning, gay, and putting it to use with a new meaning, as a consciousness-raiser.
Articles like this make me question whether Dennett ever talks…
drorzel | January 1, 2007I lost a lot of weight, read a lot of books, taught a lot of classes, did a bit of research, and oh, yeah, I got tenure. I think that last outweighs the miserable stomach problems by, oh, quite a bit.
And now, that's officially last year, at least for those using the Western calendar system. Happy New Year, unless you're on some lunar calendar thing, in which case, um, have a good Monday.
It's traditional to wish that the New Year be better than the last, but 2006 is going to be a hard one to top, for me at least. Still, it's not just about me, so may your 2007 be better than 2006, or at the…
drorzel | December 31, 2006Having booklogged two heavy and confusing books already today, let's throw in something light. A. Lee Martinez's debut novel Gil's All Fright Diner is a comic fantasy featuring a couple of redneck-y guys named Duke and Earl, who stop by a diner in rural Texas for a quick bite to eat. Of course, Duke is a werewolf and Earl is a vampire, and when the diner gets attacked by a horde of zombies, they find themselves caught up in some odd and supernatural events.
There's really not a lot to say about the book other than that. If the idea of white-trash undead battling zombies to prevent…
drorzel | December 31, 2006Having finally posted about Gaudeamus, I might as well get the other great "WTF" book in the stack out of the way. Hal Duncan's Vellum has been described as "cubist fantasy," and while I'm not quite sure what that means, it's probably as good a description as any.
Vellum takes place in 2017, and also during World War I, and also in the distant past, and also a few worlds outside of time. It follows Thomas Messenger, who is sometimes a modern teenager, sometimes a young aristocrat in the trenches of the Somme, sometimes an angel, and sometimes the Sumerian icon Tammuz. Thomas has gone missing…
drorzel | December 31, 2006In some ways, John Barnes's metafictional novel Gaudeamus is the proximate cause of the huge backlog in my book logging. I was more-or-less caught up at one point, but then stalled on this book, unable to think of what to say about it. I'm still not entirely clear on it, but I'm just going to bang some stuff out so that I can finally get the damn thing off my desk.
I should start off by noting that Gaudeamus is definitely the work of the Good John Barnes, responsible for One for the Morning Glory, and not the Evil John Barnes who wrote Mother of Storms. That's a critically important…
drorzel | December 30, 2006Matt Yglesias nails it when talking about faux-outrage over people complaining about the execution of Saddam Hussein:
Do these guys not understand the concept of principles? The point of the belief that all people are entitled to fair trials before receiving criminal sentences is that all people are entitled to fair trials. The point of the belief that capital punishment is immoral (not a belief I share, incidentally) is that it's always immoral. It's not as if Amnesty International is confused and doesn't understand that Saddam isn't a very sympathetic case. Rather, the point is that…
drorzel | December 30, 2006I've got to be close to the last person on the Internet to link to this, but in the unlikely event that you haven't already seen it, Phil Plait presents the best astronomy pictures of 2006. My personal favorite of his images is probably this one:
We haven't sent all that many probes to Mars, and it's not often that they snap pictures of each other. And the Mars rovers are really a fabulous story-- it's rare to see the kind of Murphy's Law violation that turns a 90-day mission into more than 1000 days of continuous operation.
I just wish she'd update her LiveJournal.
drorzel | December 30, 2006I'm very angry with David G. Hartwell.
Hartwell, for those who don't know his name, is a very distinguished editor of science fiction, with a long list of anthologies and scholarly essays to his credit, not to mention fabulous taste in clothes. He's also an editor for Tor Books, where he appears to be the king of splitting long books in two. He's responsible for splitting Scott Westerfeld's The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds and Charlie Stross's The Family Trade and The Hidden Family, and also these two books, The Last Guardian of Everness and Mists of Everness. These are all long…
drorzel | December 30, 2006I actually read this months ago, but I'm only just getting around to booklogging it. Which is a problem, because I no longer remember it all that clearly...
Elizabeth Bear's previous books were a trilogy of competent neo-Heinlein adventure stories, so it's perfectly logical that her next book, Blood and Iron, should be a fantasy novel about the Sidhe in New York. Um, right?
Blood and Iron mostly follows three characters: Matthew Szczegielniak, a mage of the Promethus Club, an organization dedicated to fighting Faerie by any means necessary; and Seeker, a young woman taken as a changeling and…
drorzel | December 29, 2006Speaking of James Nicoll and space news, he also notes the launch of the COROT satellite, which is designed to look for extrasolar planets. The detection limit for COROT is supposed to be something like twice the mass of the Earth, so there's some reasonable expectation that it should shed light on planetary systems more like our own than the oddballs that have been detected so far. I also agree with James's prediction in comments:
[T]he first detection by this system of a roughly Earth-massed planet around a sunlike star will involve a "who ordered that?" moment as the new world turns out…
drorzel | December 29, 2006James Nicoll, one of my go-to sources for odd information about space related issues, is attempting to determine whether it's true that space enthusiasm is for older people. Unsurprisingly, given who he is and what he writes about, his comments have turned up lots of examples of people born after 1980 who are wild for space travel. I think the term is "selection bias."
My readership is probably somewhat less space-crazed than his, but I doubt you all would be a representative sample, either. If you've got opinions on the subject, though, go leave him a comment. Or leave one here.
(Update:…
drorzel | December 29, 2006Not long ago, I booklogged Odyssey, the latest of Jack McDevitt's Archeologists in Spaaaace books. When I picked that up, I also grabbed a paperback copy of Seeker, the latest in his other series of novels, these ones about, well, antiquities dealers in spaaaace. I don't believe I've booklogged the previous volumes, A Talent for War and Polaris, so we'll lump them all together here.
A Talent for War introduces the setting and main characters: Alex Benedict is a dealer in antiquities a few millennia in the future, when humans have discovered FTL travel and spread out among the stars. There…
drorzel | December 29, 2006Yesterday's Inside Higher Ed had a story about the latest group to report on science education. Like any good blue-ribbon commission, they have changes to suggest:
The panel's members seemed agreed on several major goals. One is to align all components of education in science technology, engineering and math (STEM). The current system in the United States, they agreed, lacks any attempt at coordination either horizontally across school districts, or vertically from one level of education to another. Lack of a coherent system for STEM education means that students who move between states may…
drorzel | December 29, 2006A few weeks ago, the Modern Language Association released a report calling for changes in the tenure process for language and literature faculty. The report was a stirring call to action, and the members of the MLA quickly sprang into action, doing what faculty do best: arguing about stuff.
[A]lthough no one is challenging the main approach of the MLA panel, there are serious quibbles. At a session Thursday, for example, a dean questioned a proposal to give tenure candidates more of a say in which outside experts will analyze their work. And there was grumbling from some rhetoric and…
drorzel | December 28, 2006Word and Excel are both part of the Office "suite" of programs. Like all Windows programs, they open in windows with a big red "X" button in the upper right-hand corner, and a smaller grey "x" below that. In either program, if you click the small grey "x" button, it closes just the file that you're looking at in that window.
In Word, when you have multiple files open, and click the big red "X," it closes just the file you're looking at, leaving the other files open.
In Excel, when you have multiple files open, and click the big red "X," it closes the entire program, and all the open files.
I…
drorzel | December 28, 2006It's that time of year, when people who write about music attempt to sum the year up in list form. And who am I to buck that trend?
The advent of iTunes makes it much easier than it used to be for me to compile a "best of 2006" list, as it keeps records of when I added various songs to the collection, and also what I rated them. This isn't a foolproof method-- I bought some old albums and greatest hits packages, so the really basic algorithm would claim that "I Can't Hardly Wait" was among the best songs of 2006-- but it's better than relying solely on my memory.
I tend to rate songs on…
drorzel | December 28, 2006The Times today has a good article on Bob Knight and his place in coaching history:
In coaching circles, Knight's legacy appears to be intact.
His former players make up a who's who list in coaching, including Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, Iowa's Steve Alford and the Knicks' Isiah Thomas. Even longtime rivals concede Knight's name is synonymous with the "part-whole" method of teaching, man-to-man defense and the motion offense. All ascribe a virtue to Knight that is perhaps at odds with his public image: patience.
Still, some worry that Knight's coaching accomplishments have been eclipsed by his…
drorzel | December 28, 2006Having spent a couple of posts on the infamous Duke lacrosse case back in the early part of the year, I should make a note of the fact that the case against the lacrosse players has pretty much disintegrated. There's a piece in Inside Higher Ed today giving an overview of the situation, albeit with an annoyingly self-congratulatory tone.
I haven't been following this closely in the past several months, but since I was fairly quick to post about the allegations, I feel some obligation to make a public acknowledgement that many of the allegations now appear to be badly exaggerated.
drorzel | December 27, 2006While I was out of town for the holidays, Bora announced that he's putting together an anthology of high-quality science blogging to go with the Science Blogging Conference that's happening in January. He's looking for something like fifty posts to be compiled and published using Lulu.
He's collecting nominations over at A Blog Around the Clock, so if you have strong opinions about the best science-related blog posts of the year, you might want to head over and leave some suggestions (they could use more physics to go with all the philatelics). Or, you could just look at it as a great source…