I've been kind of bad about responding to the "Ask a ScienceBlogger" questions lately, but they've had a lot of stuff up there that I just don't have a response for. The most recent question is something I probably ought to post about, though: What's a time in your career when you were criticized extremely harshly by someone you respect? Did it help you or set your career back? This is a question that grew out of back-channel discussions of the adversarial culture of science, which are a major part of the arguments about why there are so few women and minorities in science. Accordingly, most…

I've been thinking about doing some best-of-the-year posts this week, and trying to come up with a reasonable list of best books. Frank Portman's piss-take on Catcher in the Rye, the much-praised-by-Bookslut King Dork is one of the books that might well figure in a "best books of 206" post, which made me realize that I never did get around to booklogging it. So, King Dork. It's very up-front about being a response to The Catcher in the Rye, what with the big explanation of "The Catcher Cult" starting on page ten, and the fact that the plot is set in motion by the narrator's discovery of…

We're back in town, and I'll schedule some science stuff for later today, but first I want to take a moment to note the passing of the hardest working man in show business. Much as we'd like to see him shake the cape off and run back to the mike one more time, James Brown is dead. It's difficult to overstate Brown's importance for modern music, though every media outlet in the country is going to give it a shot this week. He's probably more important than Elvis, though it'd be a near thing. He more or less invented the sound that became the basis of modern soul, hip-hop, and rap, and whether…

I can't really come up with any scientific significance for this one, but it amuses Kate to no end to have an elephant angel on the tree. And why not? It's supposed to be a season of miracles, and what could be more miraculous than an elephant with butterfly wings shooting stars out of its trunk? Merry Christmas to everyone who won't be offended by being wished a Merry Christmas.

We're off to do our annual holiday trek all over New England. We will have sporadic Internet access, but don't expect any blogging before next Wednesday. Not that anybody's going to be reading blogs over the weekend, anyway... If you'd like some seasonal music, below the fold is a list of the 21 songs from the holiday playlist that earn a four or five star rating. Two of them aren't strictly Christmas songs, but "Jingle Bells" doesn't have anything to do with Jesus, either, and that doesn't stop people from playing it all the goddamn time. Have a good weekend. "Valley Winter Song," Fountains…

The problem with the holiday season is that it just flies by so fast-- it seems like you've barely finished clearing away the Thanksgiving dishes, and then you find that you've already missed Mellowmas. Haven't heard of that one? Well, it's a new holiday invented by jefitoblog and Jason Hare, explained by jefito thusly: For the next twelve days, Jason and I will be having the mellowest listening party you ever did hear, and we're going to do it yuletide style, bringing you the finest seasonal cuts from artists such as Air Supply, Glenn Medeiros, REO Speedwagon, and more. Just when you think…

Scott Aaronson is offering his services to the highest bidder in the String Wars. His prices may be a little steep-- a well organized review article will set you back $2 million, though a sloppy and poorly sourced one is probably cheaper-- but really, isn't it worth it to have the second funniest physics blogger on your side? Act now. Supplies are limited. Allow six to eight weeks for delivery.

The big NBA story of the week is, of course, the brawl that broke out between the Knicks and Nuggets a week ago, and the big suspensions that followed. In particular, Denver star (and former Syracuse player) Carmelo Anthony was suspended for fifteen games for slugging the goon from the Knicks whose flagrant foul touched the whole thing off. The event itself was extremely well documented, so you might think there wouldn't be any room left for conspiracy theorizing-- it's not like we're working from the Zapruder film, here-- but there's still one big mystery: Why did Anthony slug that guy when…

One of the fun things about following science news through the Eurekalert press release aggregator is that work done by big collaborations tends to show up multiple times, in slightly different forms. Take, for example, the gamma-ray-burst results being released in Nature this week, which show up no less than five times: one, two, three, four, five. It's entirely possible that I missed some others, too. Each of those releases is written by the press office at a different institution, and each tries to make it sound like the people at their university made the most important contribution to…

Charlie Stross is one of the current Hot Authors in SF, but he's been pretty uneven for me. I liked Iron Sunrise quite a bit, but thought the highly-regarded Accelerando was actually pretty bad, and I didn't care much for The Hidden Family, the second volume in the Amber-with-Usenet-economics series. The cover copy of Glasshouse was enough to get me to put it down and look for something else. So, he's had a bad run of late. Still, when I heard there was a sequel to The Atrocity Archives, I knew I needed to get a copy, and made a special trip to Borders just to pick up a copy of The Jennifer…

Slate's Explainer presents a list of questions that were submitted but not answered. They propose to answer one of these, chosen on the basis of a reader vote. (Details at the bottom of the article.) Some of my favorites: Lasers are now powerful and small (at least I think they are), so why don't our troops carry laser guns? Because Home Depot doesn't carry an extension cord long enough to reach Iraq. Is it possible to collect all the cookie dough in Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream and actually bake cookies from it? "Coming up next on Mythbusters..." Just suppose, one day someone wants…

A couple of the women behind Inkycircus have decided to launch a new online science magazine, called Inkling. As they put it, their mission is: [to] cover the science that pervades our life, makes us laugh, and helps us choose our breakfast foods. If you like the stuff you see in Seed, you'll find similar things in Inkling. Check it out.

There's a news squib from the Institutes of Physics this morning touting new results on a theory of modified gravity that the authors say can explain the structure of the universe without needing to invoke dark matter. This is a significant problem in cosmology, as the article explains: [O]ur theory of gravitation - Einstein's theory of general relativity - cannot account for the extent of clumping without invoking the right amount of a mysterious substance called "dark matter". Originally introduced in the 1930s to explain anomalous galaxy dynamics, dark matter (which cosmologists think…

A few weeks back, I was talking to my parents on the phone, and my mother asked "What do you want for Christmas?" "Tenure," I said. Because, well, that's what's been on my mind. This is going to be the Best Christmas Ever...

Via Doug Natelson, a very nice paper from the arxiv on Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiments with atoms. The Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment (that's two guys, one with a double unhyphenated last name) is a classic experiment from the field of quantum optics, which can be interpreted as showing the bosonic nature of photons. I posted some lecture notes about it during my Quantum Optics class. (The Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment can also be understood classically, but that's not as much fun...) The key idea here goes back to the symmetry business I talked about a little while back.…

That's Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald, authors of the Mageworlds series of space opera novels, and a host of other books-- they're shorted on their first names, because I don't really want to test the character limit for titles in Movable Type. Land of Mist and Snow has been in progress for some time-- I've heard them read from it at least twice at conventions-- but has finally hit the stores, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. Run out and buy copies for those hard-to-buy-for relatives... The book is a secret history of naval actions in the American Civil War, taking off…

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Edward Palm gets all Swiftian: The Department of Defense finds itself desperately short of troops with which to sustain what promises to be a long and increasingly unpopular, inconclusive war in Iraq. The Department of Education finds itself suddenly alarmed by the relatively low percentage of Americans pursuing postsecondary education compared to the rate of participation in other countries. American colleges and universities find themselves bucking the current demographic trend such that some of them are lowering standards as they compete for fewer and fewer…

We recently acquired some lab space that was previously occupied by a biologist, and will be offering part of it to whoever we hire for our job opening. The space will probably need some extensive remodeling, both because it hasn't been touched in years, but also because it was set up for biology work. Thinking about the space, and what would be needed to make it useful for a physicist, led me to the following rule of thumb for identifying the type of science done in a lab: If a room has more sinks than electrical outlets, it's a biology lab. I'm sure something similar could be done for most…

The latest step in John "BaconCat" Scalzi's project of world domination (or, at least, domination of the SF corner of the literary world), The Android's Dream is set in an entirely different world than his Old Man's War and sequels. It's still very much a Scalzi book, though, insofar as the third published book by an author can really be said to fall into an established pattern. It's got a fast-moving plot, inventive aliens, and snappy dialogue galore. After an opening chapter in which a disgruntled trade negotiator attempts to fart his way into a diplomatic incident, the book moves quickly…

Bill Hooker is a regular advocate of "open science," and is currently supporting a new subversive proposal: to make all raw data freely available on some sort of Creative Commons type license. It sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea on the face of it, but I have to say, I'm a little dubious about it when I read things like this: First, note that papers do not usually contain raw (useful, useable) data. They contain, say, graphs made from such data, or bitmapped images of it -- as Peter says, the paper offers hamburger when what we want is the original cow.  Chris Surridge of PLoS puts it…