drorzel | November 22, 2006I've been way behind in my blogreading the last few weeks, owing to a huge amount of, you know, actual work for my day job, so this may have been all over the Internets already. On the off chance that it hasn't, via Ethan Zuckerman, a link to Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala:
Leroy Brown's head was like Wikipedia. It was full of facts he had learned there. He was like the entire Wikipedia site walking around on sneakers. Simon Baron-Cohen had written a paper about him.
It's done as a set of image files, which is kind of annoying, but it's worth reading all the way to the…
drorzel | November 22, 2006I scan the titles reviewed by the Onion AV Club through their RSS feed every week, and only click over there for things that look particularly interesting. I don't regularly check their feature stories, which is why I'm a week late in noticing that they have an interview with Donald Westlake, one of my very favorite fiction writers, talking about his career, the writing process, and his best-known characters:
DW: This sounds like a joke, but in a way, I mean it straight: Dortmunder's the most realistic stuff I do. Stark is much more of a romantic. The example that I've given in the past is,…
drorzel | November 22, 2006Steve Cook suggests a holiday for computer nerds:
Far better than World Hello Day would be Hello World Day, celebrating 32 years of every programming manual's stock first example. Global diversity could be honored by recognizing our rainbow of programming languages, from Pascal to Brainfuck, and when we were done we could all sing a song, examine some art, and return to our homes without bothering anyone.
Hey, it makes more sense than "Talk Like a Pirate Day"...
Of course, as always with a Snarkout post, there are more offbeat links in the post than you would want to shake a stick at, and…
drorzel | November 21, 2006
Not much commentary required here. This is the ornamental maple in front of our house, taken a couple of weeks ago. It's also a reminder of why fall in New England is one of my favorite seasons, at least when it's not miserably cold and raining...
drorzel | November 21, 2006PZ links to a video of a couple of guys dressing like missionaries and knocking on doors for atheism in Salt Lake City. Like most ambush comedy, the concept is better than the execution-- in particular, there's an opening rant about Mormons that goes on way too long. There's some moderately clever stuff, but it's pretty typical of the genre.
I've never quite understood the level of antipathy that the door-knockers draw. It's not that I've never been visited by them, but rather that I've never had a problem with them. When I was in grad school, the Jehovah's Witnesses used to come around at…
drorzel | November 21, 2006There's a nice article in the Times today about Mythbusters as science television. As is typical of the Times, it sort of overreaches with some of the conclusions:
Their delight in discovery for its own sake is familiar to most scientists, who welcome any result because it either confirms or debunks a hypothesis. That sense of things can be corrupted when grants or licensing deals are on the line. But the Mythbusters get paid whether their experiments succeed or fail.
but it's generally a good piece.
The show is somewhere on the good side of "guilty pleasure." Scientifically, a lot of what…
drorzel | November 21, 2006New Scientist has decided to commemorate their 50th anniversary by asking a large number of scientists to predict what will happen in the next 50 years. As you might have predicted, the list of responses includes a large number of short essays of the form:
Exciting new developments in my own field of research will completely transform our understanding of the universe and our place in it.
Nevertheless, they make for some interesting reading. Of course, they're not sorted by topic, and it can get a little daunting trying to figure out who you should read, so it's good that Sean Carroll (who…
drorzel | November 21, 2006Following up on the weekend's reading suggestions, I should point to John Horgan's list of the Ten Worst Science Books. These aren't obscure self-published tracts on the Theory of Everything, either-- Stephen Jay Gould, Malcolm Gladwell and E. O. Wilson make the list, and there are more best-selling suggestions in the comments.
drorzel | November 20, 2006Inside Higher Ed has a short piece today on a lecture given to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching by Carl Wieman on how to teach science. Though, from the sound of it, it was mostly about how not to teach science.
During the talk on Friday, Wieman said that traditional science instruction involves lectures, textbooks, homework and exams. Wieman said that this process simply doesn't work. He cited a number of studies to make his point. At the University of Maryland, an instructor found that students interviewed immediately after a science lecture had only a vague…
drorzel | November 20, 2006Over in LiveJournal land, there's this "meme" going around about describing fandoms as relationships. It's not really my sort of thing, but it did lead Rachel Manija Brown to ask why so many people are so mad at The X-Files:
I had a different experience: I drifted away slowly, I think during the sixth season (around "Post-Modern Prometheus," the episode where Mulder repeats a bank robbery day, the baseball alien episode, etc.) The show and I just seemed to be going out of sync with what had made me love it in the first place. So I had stopped watching long before whatever led to everyone else…
drorzel | November 19, 2006We're out of town for the weekend visiting family, so if you usually depend on this blog for entertainment, you'll need to find something else to do. How about a good book or two?
You can't decide what to read? Well, the Internet is here to provide suggestions. You might, for example, think about the list of most significant SF books that was compiled by the SF Book Club. It's the usual mix of influential and popular and has been making the rounds in LiveJournaldom, where it has come in for some criticism.
Not in the mood for genre fiction? Well, Discover has put together a list of the…
drorzel | November 18, 2006Thursday night's shellacking of St. John's seemed to be mostly about the ineptitude of the Red Storm, rather than an indicator of greatness for the Terps. I fully expected them to come out and lose to Michigan State, who beat a ranked Texas team in their half of the semifinal bracket.
Much to my surprise, when we got back from dinner and flipped on ESPN, St. John's and Texas were locked in a tight game, that Texas eventually won by two, which either meant that St. John's was better than I thought, or that Texas was wiped out from their last-second loss to Michigan State the night before.…
drorzel | November 18, 2006Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance and Jennifer Ouellette of Cocktail Party Physics have gotten engaged. All together now: Awwwwww....You crazy kids with your falling in love over the Internet and all.
Actually, we here at Chateaue Steelypips heartily approve of both the institution of marriage and the idea of meeting spouses through the Internet. Sincere congratulations to both Jennifer and Sean, and best wishes for the future.
drorzel | November 17, 2006The dark energy press conference mentioned a couple of days ago happened yesterday, and is written up in the Times. You can also get information straight from NASA.
The basic result here is that astronomers have made a bunch of measurements of supernovae at extremely large distances, which amounts to looking at galaxies a very long time ago. From those measurements, they have made a rough measurement of the expansion of the universe at that time, and find that the mysterious "dark energy" that appears to be causing the modern universe to expand faster over time was also making the universe…
drorzel | November 17, 2006If you go into any big-box bookstore these days, you'll find a huge section of manga titles (that is, Japanese comic books), including dozens of different series, many of them running to a dozen or more volumes. This section is always impeccably organized, with all the series grouped neatly together, and the overall section alphabetical by series.
Right next to that, there will be a considerably smaller section of "graphic novels" (that is, Western comic books). The shelving for this section always appears to have been done by poorly trained chimpanzees. They rarely even mange to have books…
drorzel | November 17, 2006I am already sick of Ohio State-Michigan, and the they haven't even played yet. Can we at least get a final score before we declare this the Greatest Football Game of All Time?
I can't quite decide what I'm rooting for, here, but it's either a 0-0 tie, or a 54-0 blowout. Whichever would make the hype machine look worse.
Suggestions are welcome in the comments.
drorzel | November 16, 2006The college basketball season is officially underway, and as is typical of the early season, there are already some wacky results, the most shocking being Kansas losing to Oral Roberts Wednesday night. Nobody is happier to see that score than Boston College coach Al Saunders-- losing to Vermont is one thing (and makes Maryland's win over the Catamounts look better), but losing to a vanity university is a whole new level of embarrassing. Particularly at home.
Also in action Wednesday night were North Carolina, playing Winthrop in the preseason NIT, and Syracuse, playing Northeastern before a…
drorzel | November 16, 2006The last step in the tenure review process (from my end) is the approval of the Procedure section of the report. By rule, the ad hoc committee sends the candidate a copy of the section describing what they did in the course of the review (with the names removed), and the candidate gets a chance to respond.
I'm not quite sure what I would object to in this, as it's a really sketchy outline of what they did, most of which is directly determined by the official procedures spelled out in the faculty manual. It's a part of the process, though, so I read it over, and sent my official acceptance in…
drorzel | November 16, 2006The fad of the moment among the physics majors is a shareware game called Pocket Tanks, in which players on opposite sides of the screen fire various weapons at one another, adjusting the launch angle and overall power in order to hit the target. Every time I walk into a room with two or more students in it, they seem to be playing Pocket Tanks. They jokingly justify it as studying for the projectile motion problems on the Physics GRE, and to the extent that being able to predict the range of a particle based on sketchy information about angles and relative launch speed can help, they should…
drorzel | November 15, 2006A bunch of links about recent happenings at everybody's favorite space agency:/p>
Steinn has links to dark energy proposals.
Science and Reason on the "Beyond Einstein" program.
Those little scamps are having another mysterious press conference tomorrow, to announce something about dark energy. Steinn suggests it has something to do with this guy's research, but only Sean knows for sure, and he's just going to taunt us.
Four more lab reports to grade, two exams to write (one at 9:00 tomorrow, one at 8:30 Friday morning), plus grading. And then I get to start reading 200 pages worth of…