drorzel | December 18, 2006I don't usually read blog carnivals much, and it's probably a good thing. Scott's cryptic version of the History Carnival led me to spend a really ridiculous amount of time reading blog posts about cavalry tactics in the English Civil War (that's the first of several). And, really, I have no need to know this...
Still, it was a much more interesting read than what I was supposed to be doing. I also liked the ancient Egypt in ten minutes link, and...
Dammit, I have my own job to do. Stop posting things that are more interesting than the application folders I have to read!
drorzel | December 17, 2006What with Time naming everybody the "Person of the Year," Emmy is angling to snag Top Dog honors by uploading video of herself shredding a chew toy to YouTube:
It's hard to blog when you don't have opposable thumbs.
drorzel | December 17, 2006A couple of quick updates on things posted earlier this week:
1) A New York Times story on the Stardust findings.
2) A somewhat better press release on the single top quark production experiment (from the Fermilab press office, rather than the press office of one of the member institutions.
drorzel | December 16, 2006Along with tacky an inescapable Christmas music, December brings lists, as every publication that deals with music at all puts out their own compilation of songs or albums of the year. The definitive Uncertain Principles Songs of 2006 list will be coming up, but if you're just dying to see ordered lists of pop music, here are some year-end lists to tide you over:
Arcane Gazebo's top songs of 2006
The Onion AV Club's albums of the year
Top albums according to KEXP DJs
And not a year-in-review list, but a list nonetheless: libertarians steal my idea (see the original perfect album list,…
drorzel | December 16, 2006Colleges and universities working on a semester calaendar are just finishing up classes now, which means that most academics (unlike those of us in Trimester Land, who have been out of session for a few weeks) are currently buried in grading. This leads to some fun blog posts:
Grading as a text adventure (via Making Light)
A step-by-step guide to exam grading (via The Litle Professor).
The best exam doodle ever.
Good luck to those still fighting their way through paper grading. If you need me, I'll be reading application folders for the job search...
drorzel | December 16, 2006The forthcoming issue of Seed will include a big spread on ScienceBlogs, and the online version is already up. They got pictures of all the bloggers (with stand-ins for the pseudonymous), and turned a caricature artist loose on us, leading to the motley mob scene at the top of that page.
The cartoon will be in the magazine, along with excerpts from some particularly interesting blog posts, which are listed at the lower right of that page. I haven't seen the print magazine yet, so I don't know exactly what form it will take, but I'm happy to see that one of my posts made the list. Given that…
drorzel | December 15, 2006We might as well close out the week on a high note, so here's tonight's ornament. Actually, there are two of them:
Obviously, this is another reference to astronomy-- it's little guys looking through telescopes, after all. The larger of the two is even gazing upon a glassy celestial sphere, perhaps on the verge of discovering heliocentrism.
Their piratical outfits are, of course, something for the Pastafarians among us. We try to be inclusive, here in Chateau Steelypips.
drorzel | December 15, 2006So, what are the results of the Christmas Tunes Experiment? I've had a playlist of the songs on the Jefitoblog Holidy Mix Tape (plus a few other things) locked into the iTunes Party Shuffle while I work on the computer at home. At work, I stuck with the usual four-and-five-star playlist in the lab, because, well, the lab is not the place to debut new music.
The results were pretty mixed, but not as bad as I feared it might get. The list, with commentary on each song, is reproduced below the fold.
Les Brown And His Band Of Renown - I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm (Psapp's Lady Remix). I have…
drorzel | December 15, 2006One of the requirements of the Nobel Prize is that the laureates give a public lecture at some point, and as a result, there is generally a seminar scheduled a little bit before the actual prize ceremony, at which the laureats give lectures about the work for which they're being honored. These frequently involve props and demonstrations, but George Smoot takes it to a new level, using the Cal marching band to demonstrate the Big Bang:
"Professor Smoot came up to the band and asked if later that week, when we practiced at Memorial Stadium, we could do a formation like the universe forming. He…
drorzel | December 15, 2006A flurry of press releases hit EurekAlert yesterday (one, two, three), indicating the release of a bunch of data from NASA's Stardust mission. This is the probe that was sent out to fly through the tail of a comet, and catch tiny dust particles in an aerogel matrix, and return them to Earth for analysis.
The mission appears to have been a pretty impressive success, scientifically speaking, with a bunch of interesting findings relating to the age and composition of cometary material and interstellar dust. The full scientific results are released today in Science Express, and if you've got the…
drorzel | December 14, 2006Tonight's Science on the Tree ornament is a little more obscure:
Given the conical sort of shape, I suspect it's meant to be a Christmas tree, but it's abstract enough that it could really be some sort of Calabi-Yau thingy, so we'll let this stand as a symbol for string theory and other abstract mathematical areas of science: It's intricately patterned, follows elegant mathematical symmetry, and nobody's entirely sure what it's really supposed to be.
Also, it's made of straw. That may have some symbolic meaning, but I'm not sure what.
drorzel | December 14, 2006We've been having intermittent DSL problems here at Chateau Steelypips, which has led to much cursing of Verizon. The fact that their tech support department screwed up the first two service appointments, and repeatedly dropped calls after half an hour spent navigating their miserable phone tree and hold system didn't help any.
The repair guy finally showed up this morning, though, and found the source of the problem: Mice had built a nest in the terminal box on the pole, and squirrels had chewed on the wire going into the house.
And now, Her Majesty is being all smug. "You said I was…
drorzel | December 14, 2006Here's the latest of the intermittent updates (I actually skipped one, but I'll come back to it on a slow day one of these days) from my friend Paul, who's working as a journalist in Baghdad (and, thankfully, just about done with his tour there). This is one of the most opinionated of the occasional dispatches he's sent, and also probably the sharpest. It doesn't really have a moral, but true war stories never do.
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The word of the air strike came around mid-morning. I was actually the one to take the call from our stringer in Samarra. He said 32 people had been killed in an…
drorzel | December 14, 2006The physics story of the moment is probably the detection of single top quarks at Fermilab. Top quarks, like most other exotic particles, are usually produced in particle-antiparticle pairs, with some fraction of the kinetic energy of two colliding particles being converted into the mass of the quark-antiquark pair (see this old post). There's a very rare process, though, mediated by the weak nuclear force, that allows the production of a single top quark, without an anti-top (it's paired with a bottom quark and a W boson).
The D0 (or DZero) collaboration at Fermilab recently announced the…
drorzel | December 14, 2006The Times had an article the other day about the warped economics of higher education:
So early in 2000 the board [of Trustees of Ursinus College] voted to raise tuition and fees 17.6 percent, to $23,460 (and to include a laptop for every incoming student to help soften the blow). Then it waited to see what would happen.
Ursinus received nearly 200 more applications than the year before. Within four years the size of the freshman class had risen 35 percent, to 454 students. Applicants had apparently concluded that if the college cost more, it must be better.
"It's bizarre and it's…
drorzel | December 13, 2006A long day today, so we'll go with an obvious one:
Obviously, this stands in for biology. This brightly colored ceramic fish evolved over millions of years, descended from a long line of increasingly more evolved ceramic fish. Or, possibly, it was bought at an aquarium somewhere. I don't remember which.
drorzel | December 13, 2006The Democrats have decided to punt on the budget, which the outgoing Republican Congress left unfinished in a childish fit of pique. Instead of completing the usual budget process, the incoming Congress plans to pass a "continuing resolution," to fund 2007 operations of Federal agencies at the same level as 2006.
See, people, this is what happens when you put the grown-ups back in charge-- the first thing they do is cancel Christmas.
Inside Higher Ed gives a run-down of the implications for academia, which I know is what you were all dying to hear about. The bottom line isn't particularly…
drorzel | December 13, 2006Here's the day's final repost of an old blog post about space policy. This is yet another post from 2004, with the usual caveats about linkrot and dated numbers and the like.
This one is more or less a direct response to comments made in response to the previous post attempting to argue that using the Moon as a step toward Mars isn't a priori idiotic. Again, I'm not sure how successful this is, but you can judge for yourself:
In the comments to the previous post about the Moon/ Mars proposal, Jake McGuire raises a number of interesting points, which deserve a full response. Having sat on that…
drorzel | December 13, 2006Yet another in today's series of reposts of articles about space policy. This is another old blog post from 2004, back when the Moon-and-Mars plan was first announced. As with the previous posts, any numbers or links in the post may be badly out of date, and there are some good comments at the original post that are worth reading.
This installment contains my attempt at finding reasons why it wouldn't be completely idiotic to try to put a permanent base on the Moon. I'm not sure this was entirely successful, but it's worth a shot:
It's a little foolish to attempt to comment on the merits of…
drorzel | December 13, 2006This is the second in a series of old posts about space exploration in general, and the Bush Moon-and-Mars plan specifically. This is a repost of an old blog post from 2004, so any numbers or links in the post may be out of date. There were also a few comments to the original article, that you may or may not want to read.
In this installment, we have my half-assed explanation of the conceptual problems behind the Space Shuttle program:
There are essentially two arguments for why we ought to support manned space flight, and if you dip into the comments at any of the other fine blogs linked in…