drorzel | December 13, 2006As threatened in passing yesterday, I dug up some old posts on space policy, and will re-post them here. This first one dates from January of 2004, around the time that Bush first floated the idea of the new Moon-and-Mars plan that's re-shaping NASA.
The original post has a ton of links in it, and given that this is lazy-blogging, I haven't checked that they still work. There are also a handful of comments over at the original site, if you'd like to see what people said back then.
Anyway, here's the first installment, on the relative worth of manned and unmanned space missions:
The Mars…
drorzel | December 13, 2006There's a very nice article in the new Physics World in praise of James Clerk Maxwell of "Maxwell's Equations." Incredibly, Maxwell is probably somewhat underappreciated, what with wrapping up all of classical electromagnetism in one neat and Lorentz-invariant package, making pioneering contributions to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, and taking the first color photograph, using basically the same process NASA uses for all those specatcular Hubble images. Sharp guy, that Maxwell.
He also gets credit for one of the best off-hand announcements of a titanic physics discovery I've ever…
drorzel | December 13, 2006If you can, consider throwing it to help with the maintenance of Mixed States and the other science-themed feed aggregators at Something Similar. Mixed States is back after a long absence (long enough that I had stopped checking), and it's reminded me what an excellent resource this is.
The proprietor is looking for $135 to move to a better web host for the next year. If you like reading physics blogs, and like having that made easier for you, throw him some change.
drorzel | December 12, 2006That damn airplane-on-a-treadmill problem has come up again, thanks to the New York Times, aided and abetted by Boing Boing. For some reason, this problem inevitably produces very heated responses, such as this one. It doesn't help that the problem is frequently mis-stated to explicitly have the airplane stading still relative to the ground.
The key question here is whether the plane moves relative to the ground (not the treadmill) or not-- if it does, then the plane will eventually take off, and if it doesn't, it won't. The main source of confusion then seems to be what, exactly, the wheels…
drorzel | December 12, 2006Here's the second of a series of holiday photo-blog posts showing some of the ornaments we have, and providing explanations for how they're really all about the science. It starts to get a little harder here:
"Dude," you say, "that's a teapot. What does that have to do with science?"
Thermodynamics, of course. The making of tea is all about boiling water, and what is that, but applied thermodynamics? Heat transfer, the latent heat of vaporization, phase transitions-- it's all there, symbolized by this little teapot. There's a tea cup, too, which isn't in this picture because it doesn't…
drorzel | December 12, 2006It's job-hunting season in academia, so we're not the only ones sifting through huge piles of applications looking for the One True Job Candidate. Clifford Johnson has his own pile of mail, and some suggestions for how to fix the process:
Of the order of a decade ago I suggested (to nobody in particular, just during random lunchtime conversations and the like) that we could fix this with a similar setup to the arXiv, in fact. We have a central database where a person in the field can upload their cover letter, curriculum vitae, research statement, and so forth. The system assigns it a unique…
drorzel | December 12, 2006A few weeks ago, Ethan Zuckerman got wistful about collaboration:
Dave Winer's got a poignant thought over at Scripting News today: "Where is the Bronx Science for adults?" He explains that, as a kid, the best thing about attending the famous high school "was being in daily contact with really smart and creative people my own age." It's harder to find this in adulthood, he observes, even as a fellow at the Berkman Center, where Dave and I met four years ago.
I empathize with Dave - the experience of being surrounded by smart people working on the same kinds of problems is one of the most…
drorzel | December 12, 2006Surprising approximately no-one outside the medical profession, Eurekalert today features a press release about a paper showing that doctors on long shifts make more mistakes:
The study, published in PLoS Medicine, which was led by Charles Czeisler and Laura Barger from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, included 2737 medical residents, who completed 17,003 monthly reports. In months in which residents worked even one long shift-of 24 hours or more -they were three times more likely to report a fatigue-related significant medical error compared with months in which they…
drorzel | December 12, 2006Monte Davis, of "Thinking Clearly About Space" has another snarky look at overblown space enthusiasm, providing a helpful taxonomy of X-Treme Spacers:
Alt.Tech
Chemical rockets have let you down: after decades of gritty engineering they remain expensive and trouble-prone. It's time to start over with a space elevator, deployed by laser launch and magnetic catapult. From the top, nuclear salt-water hotrods will set out to roam the solar system. This team will take the field as soon as a few remaining kinks are worked out.
On a vaguely related note, Dennis Overbye questions the need for a Moon…
drorzel | December 12, 2006As you may or may not recall, some time back we did a fundraising challenge to raise money for the educational charity Donors Choose. Uncertain Principles readers donated a little over $1,200, and ScienceBlogs in general raised about $34,000.
When I kicked in my money, I forgot to un-check the option to have thank-you notes sent from the classes that were funded by the contribution, mostly because I didn't understand what it was. A week or so ago, a big envelope arrived from DonorsChoose, containing a bunch of hand-written notes from one of the classes who got funding through the Challenge,…
drorzel | December 11, 2006I remarked to Kate the other night that it's a shame we don't have any science-themed ornaments for the Christmas tree. She responded that I just wasn't thinking hard enough about what we do have, and she's right-- with a bit of effort, it's not hard to come up with scientific symbolism for the ornaments we've got.
So, this is the first of a series of holiday photo-blog posts (how many there end up being will depend on how long it takes me to become bored with this), showing some of the ornaments we have, and providing explanations for how they're really all about the science. We'll start…
drorzel | December 11, 2006Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean is pondering comment policies:
So the question is: how can the comment sections be better? To decode this for our more innocent readers: how can we increase the signal-to-noise ratio? Increasing the signal is one obvious way, but that's hard. The real question that I've been wondering about (haven't consulted my co-bloggers on this) is: should we take more dramatic steps to decrease the noise? In particular, should we have a much heavier hand in discouraging, deleting, or even banning people who are rude, disruptive, off-topic, or just plain crackpotty? And in…
drorzel | December 11, 2006Inside Higher Ed had a story on Friday about a Modern Language Association study on tenure and promotion. The study group just released its final report (available for download here. Given that I'm waiting to hear the results of my own tenure case (a decision could come at any time, starting this week), there's no way I can let this pass without comment.
The report makes a number of specific recommendations, helpfully summarized by Inside Higher Ed:
The panel -- the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion -- urged departments to:
Create "transparency" in hiring and…
drorzel | December 11, 2006Over at Bora's House of Round-the-Clock Blogging, we find the sensational headline Beaten by Biologists, Creationists Turn Their Sights On Physics. On seeing that, I headed over to the editorial in The American Prospect that it points to, expecting to be scandalized. When I got there, I found this:
U.S. creationists have changed tactics. Though none have explicitly abandoned ID in public, the focus of their scientific cover arguments has shifted from organic change to the creation of the universe. They have picked up on the controversial claim that human life could only have evolved because…
drorzel | December 11, 2006There were several sporting events worth commenting on this weekend, none of which I saw in their entirety. Hence, the combo recap post.
Maryland-BC The Terps got beat by Boston College in a game that I didn't realize was on TV until Kate told me about it about midway through the second half. I'm still used to thinking of Sundays as football days.
Maryland was down ten when I started watching, and made a game of it for a little while, before dropping behind by double digits again in the final two minutes. The game was pretty much consistent with what I've seen previously this season-- the…
drorzel | December 10, 2006At least, that's the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the fact that not one string theory result has been nominated for either the Physics Result of 2006 or the Astronomy Result of 2006...
Well, OK, there are other conclusions to draw, such as "Nobody has nominated any string theory results because nobody has nominated much of anything," or "Nobody has nominated any string theory results because nobody reads your stupid blog anyway, you nihilistic Bush-hating anti-America liberal commie type." These might even be in better agreement with the experimental data...
I really was hoping for…
drorzel | December 9, 2006
One of the problems with the logarithmic response of our eyes is that it's always kind of hard to use a camera to really capture the effect of things that light up. If there's enough light to see the background, the lights don't jump out as much as they do in person, but if you make the background darker, the lights end up oversaturated.
I kind of like the effect here, though (this is using the "Night Snapshot" setting on our Canon digital camera, with the flash turned off, followed by a bit of GIMPing to bring the levels up a bit). This does also loudly proclaim our Neville Chamberlain…
drorzel | December 9, 2006Seen here and there around the Interwebs, the Brutally Honest Personality Test. It's pretty much a standard Meyers-Briggs four-component personality test, except without all the happy touchy-feely crap talking up your positive qualities:
Commander - ESTP
73% Extraversion, 46% Intuition, 66% Thinking, 33% Judging
It's all about action with you, isn't it? You're outgoing and right to the point. Fast moving, fast talking and often fast spending. Your motto is "Just DO it."
Wow. You move faster than the Flash on a treadmill. (Yes. I could have thought up something cleverer than that. But…
drorzel | December 8, 2006As previously established, I don't much care for Christmas music. Last year, I compiled the few holiday songs I owned, and came up with a whopping ten, and that required stretching things a bit. Based on comment thread recommendations, I expanded that to 22 songs (mostly by adding Sufjan Stevens tracks), but it's still not good, and I don't really like all the songs on the list.
With the AV Club debating Christmas music, though, and every PA in the country blaring dire holiday songs, it seems like a good time to revist the crucial question from last year's post:
Are there Christmas songs that…
drorzel | December 8, 2006The AV Club (I promise I'm not actually turning this blog into theonionavclubwatch.com, but I do like their stuff) had a discussion of Christmas music a little while ago, which collides with last night's campus holiday party in interesting ways. Let's just say that there are few things in this world as horrible as a not-all-that-good cover band doing "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree"... It does, however, suggest a blog topic for the day.
This is going to take two parts-- ao "Classic Edition" post of something I wrote on the old blog, and one new post about an experiment I'm going to try…