drorzel | November 15, 2006I wasn't going to say anything about Bob Knight's latest little incident, in which he smacked a player on the chin to get him to look up. If it were anyone else, this would be a non-issue, and even though it's Knight, I don't think this is worth the energy that sports media are expending on it.
I can't resist linking to the New York Times story this morning, though, for this analogy near the bottom of the second page:
"He's kind of like the war in Iraq: all you hear about are the bad things," said [Texas Tech fan Steve] Winters, 39.
Ah, Texas.
drorzel | November 15, 2006Fred Clark at Slacktivist is probably the best writer in blogdom, when it comes to matters of religion and the intersection between religion and politics. This might sound like damning with faint praise, given how screechingly awful most blogospheric writing about religion is, but it's not intended that way. He's a terrific writer by any standard, and he's at his very best when it comes to religion. Supporters of liberal engagement with Christianity could do a lot worse than just pointing everyone they meet to his blog.
So, when blogdom's best writer on religion writes a post about the best…
drorzel | November 14, 2006The Female Science Professor (whose pseudonym I find unwieldy, but I'm not going to make a TLA out of it...) raises an interesting question in describing a language class experience:
By far the strangest experience was when we had to show and talk about photographs of our family and friends. Many of the other students got out their laptops and opened their Facebook pages. It was just like what I've read about -- endless flash photos of drunken parties with people hanging off each other whilst holding alcoholic beverages. This might have presented opportunities for learning some words and…
drorzel | November 14, 2006Today is the official last day of classes, though my final class meetings were yesterday. I'm also halfway through grading a big pile of lab reports, which I do electronically, so I'm trying to keep my extra-curricular typing to a minimum, lest I suffer another flare-up of muscle spasms in my neck and shoulder.
I shouldn't let this weekend's NFL games pass entirely without comment, though. The karmic blowback for slagging college football in general was the collapse of my Giants against the Bears on Sunday night. The loss was not unexpected-- the Bears are a very good team, and the Giants are…
drorzel | November 14, 2006Scott Aaronson renders a judgement on the Borat movie (scroll down into the comments), but I think my opinion is best summed up by Kevin Drum:
[T]he lesson of the movie wasn't some razor-sharp subversive point about how we're all racists and xenophobes an inch under the surface, the lesson was that if you act like a complete whack job you can get ordinary people flustered and flummoxed. This doesn't really strike me as any kind of surprise.
This can be sort of amusing in five-minute chunks, but I don't think it would hold up for a full-length movie. As a result, I have no intention of paying…
drorzel | November 13, 2006Christopher Priest's Victorian-magician novel The Prestige would appear to be unfilmable. The book is written as two entirely different texts, one a memoir and the other a diary, plus a framing narrative about descendants of the rival magicians Alfred Borden and Robert Angier trying to figure out the secrets behind their rivalry. It's a very twisty and literary book, relying heavily on unreliable-narrator games, and doesn't seem at all like the sort of thing that would play well on the screen.
I was surprised to hear that it had been adapted as a movie, then, and even more surprised to find…
drorzel | November 12, 2006While all right-thinking people know that the important games are played on Sundays, as God intended, there are some people who insist on watching football on Saturday. Yesterday was a particularly good day for it, with a bunch of highly rated teams losing .
While there was, of course, only one actually important result yesterday, namely Williams beating amherst as is right and proper, I like seeing the chaos in the upper echelons of Division I. Personally, I'm rooting for everybody to lose except for Boise State and the University of Exit 9. Not because I particularly like either of those…
drorzel | November 12, 2006(I bet this will get me all sorts of incredibly useful search engine traffic...)
Some time back, I asked for car-buying advice, and got a wealth of it in comments. Yesterday, Kate and I did a little car shopping, and visited a handful of local dealers to look at various cars. As with the last time I did this (circa 1997), just sitting in cars was enough to narrow the choice dramatically.
We tried pretty much everything in the big car/ small SUV line at the Honda dealership, and there wasn't a vehicle there where I didn't bang my knee into the steering column while switching from the gas to…
drorzel | November 12, 2006Some of the discussion in my recent post giving example slides made me realize a problem with the way I posted them-- converting the slides to PDF loses the transition effects, which are a significant part of the lecture.
In an attempt to address this, here's a crude simulation of the effect, done by making incremental copies of two slides, to show how the text is revealed. The slides in question are from the Camp College lecture, if you want to see them in context.
(Somebody else in comments suggested using SlideShare, which I would've tried, if the page had successfully loaded in, say, the…
drorzel | November 11, 2006Matt McIrvin reminds me to look at the nifty Saturn pictures on the Cassini-Huygens Mission page. The hot image of the moment is the big storm at the south pole, but there's lots of good stuff, like this:
(Explanation of the ring shot here.)
drorzel | November 11, 2006Via The Little Professor, a poem sure to touch most academics, Tom Wayman's "Did I Miss Anything?":
Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose
Where it will touch them, I'm not sure... (That's a short excerpt-- read the whole thing.)
drorzel | November 11, 2006I spent a while idly channel-surfing after we watched the final couple of episodes of Martian Successor Nadesico last night, and ran across the new Battlestar Galactica on the Sci-Fi Channel. Lots of smart people like the show, but I didn't get into the premiere, and the occasional attempt to watch it in sub-optimal circumstances hasn't really convinced me of its brilliance. The few clips I saw last night didn't really help, either, though they might be considered spoilers, so I'll put them after the cut:
On the first pass, I saw them explaining that there's some virus infecting the Cylons,…
drorzel | November 10, 2006This isn't actually another political post, though Allen conceding to Webb is certainly happy news, and something to be thankful for.
No, this post is about the holiday of Thanksgiving. Specifically, the fact that Kate and I will be hosting Thanksgiving at our house for both sets of parents, plus my sister, my grandmother, and one of my great-aunts. We're looking at nine for dinner, with turkey and all the trimmings, as they say.
Of course, while we have actually hosted more than nine people on several occasions, most of those involved students or other faculty, who are less demanding about…
drorzel | November 10, 2006No, this isn't a post about a big Bernie Sanders/ Babara Mikulski throwdown. the University of Maryland played the University of Vermont Wednesday night in basketball, and I'm just getting around to writing about it.
Much to my surprise, the game was on tv. Of course, that was the day I had my tenure interview, plus two classes and office hours, so I dozed off for a good chunk of the second half. Happily, the game was well in hand by that point, with Maryland coating to an 81-63 win. Commentary both detached and deranged is available on the Internet.
My thoughts are after the jump:
There was…
drorzel | November 10, 2006I would post some sort of wrap-up about the Lisa Randall chat yesterday, but Discover is broken. They don't have a link to a transcript on the site-- in fact, they haven't updated the front page to reflect the fact that the chat was yesterday, and is now over. There was a link that would sort of give you access to a transcript, but it's broken now, or at least doesn't work in either Opera or Firefox on my home computer.
It's pretty much of a piece with the chat itself, actually-- I thought it was pretty sharp of them to email physics bloggers with invitations to the chat, but the chat itself…
drorzel | November 10, 2006John Holbo comes a little unglued, but it's entertaining reading. Or, possibly, I need to get out more.
Also, what does Fictional Jimbo Wales think of this?
drorzel | November 9, 2006Having talked at length about my theories of how to do an effective PowerPoint talk, I probably ought to provide some examples. These are converted to PDF because it's more generally readable than PPT, and because the files are slightly smaller. The conversion is done using CutePDF writer, which does something to the files that occasionally causes Acrobat to choke, but you should be using FoxIt instead, anyway.
Camp College slides. This is a "simulated lecture" that I did for a summer program here. It's a 50-minute talk about laser cooling, and runs to 23 slides, though I usually wind up…
drorzel | November 9, 2006Well, it's not really much of a round-up, as that has a connotation of completeness, and this is pretty scattered. But, really, if I'm your only source for political links on the Web, you need to get out more. This is just a collection of links to a few things that I thought were particularly worth reading in the aftermath of Tuesday's election.
Brad DeLong on the size of the Democratic mandate. Thirty-two million Americans voted for Democratic candidates, compared to twenty-four million Americans who voted for Republicans. I think those numbers should get wider circulation.
Matt Yglesias on…
drorzel | November 9, 2006Discover magazine is hosting a live web chat with Lisa Randall this afternoon at 2 pm. Randall is famous for developing some ideas relating to the physics of extra dimensions, and has recently published a popular book (Warped Passages) on the subject.
This is supposed to be a one-hour live chat, with questions taken from the general public. I don't know if I'll have time to drop in (as noted earlier, this is a hectic week for me), but if you're interested in the arcana of modern theoretical physics, check it out.
If they archive it in some useful fashion after the chat, I'll post a link to it…
drorzel | November 8, 2006The Female Science Professor reviews an article from <Physics Today on getting a liberal arts college job. Unfortunately, the article itself seems to be subscriber-only. I have a subscription, but I haven't read the article yet, and can't tell you what it says, or whether the advice is good. The stuff that FSP says is all very sensible, though.
In a similar vein, Doug Natelson describes the search process from the faculty side. A few of the things he mentions are specific to large departments-- smaller schools don't generally have enough faculty to form sub-committees of the search…