drorzel | November 8, 2006The college basketball season started off well last night, with Maryland defeating Hampton in the first game of the "Coaches v. Cancer Classic" pre-season tournament. Or possibly the "2K Sports College Hoops Classic"-- I've heard both, and don't really care.
"Big deal," you say, "it's another meaningless game where a big school beats up hapless competition."
The thing is, they had previously barely squeaked past Easterbrook favorite California of Pennsylvania, in an effort to make Jeremy Gold's head explode. So, it's actually nice to see them soundly beat a team that they ought to soundly…
drorzel | November 7, 2006Rhymes With Orange explains the state of the art in dog surgery, and the Queen of Niskayuna demonstrates the technique:
(The patient is an Awful Mad Kitty from Fat Cat Toys, who make great dog toys.)
drorzel | November 7, 2006Two links from the always interesting Tim Burke, on "Free Speech Kabuki", and a humorous student response to it.
The former will sound familiar to most academics, the latter is the sort of thing that makes this job rewarding.
drorzel | November 7, 2006Two links to speed you on your way to the polls:
1) Jim Macdonald writing to Democrats.
2) John Scalzi writing to Republicans.
Now step away from the keyboard, and go vote. The Internet will be here when you get back.
(This assumes you're a US citizen, or coincidentally holding an election in your home country today. If you're not eligible to vote in the US, but have the balloting bug, um, well, go vote for your favorite academics, or something...)
drorzel | November 6, 2006I'm going to be too busy to blog much for the next few days. This is partly a matter of it being the end of the term, with lab reports due (drafts tomorrow, the final reports Thursday), and exams (next Thursday), and grading, and an end-of-term push in the lab with one of my research students. But mostly, I'm going to be thinking about seven questions.
The way the tenure process works here is that candidates have two interviews with the ad hoc committee. The first is to meet the committee, and establish a sort of initial context for their fact-finding, while the second interview is to give…
drorzel | November 6, 2006Having strongly stated my opinion that PowerPoint is not actively evil, but can be used to give good scientific presentations as well as soul-crushingly dull bullet-point talks, I feel like I ought to say something to back it up. Here, then, are some of the rules of thumb I use when putting together a good PowerPoint talk.
1) Know Your Audience. This is probably the most important rule in giving a talk, no matter what medium you plan to use. A talk aimed at an audience of undergraduate science majors is a very different thing than a research talk given at an international conference, or a…
drorzel | November 6, 2006I'm officially about three "Ask a ScienceBlogger" questions behind, but I didn't want to pass this one up completely:
What's the most important local political race to you this year (as a citizen, as a scientist)?
It's tough to say, because the answer is either "all of them" or "none of them." I thought about writing a voter guide a la Scalzi, but the truth is, my voting this year is entirely determined by a simple algorithm:
I will not vote for the Republican candidate for any office, so long as the current leadership of the national party holds power.
It's as simple as that. I don't care…
drorzel | November 6, 2006So, the Cowboys-Redskins game yesterday apparently had a wild finish. There were three field goal attempts in the final 31 seconds, one of them blocked and partially returned, with a penalty setting up the game-winning attempt with no time on the clock. Wild stuff, sure to be good highlight fodder, right?
So, I made a point to stay around for halftime in the Pats-Colts game, when the "Football Night in America" crowd on NBC talks about interesting games from earlier in the day. And sure enough, we get highlights from this game: we got to see Terrell Owens catching a touchdown pass, and…
drorzel | November 5, 2006My Giants fianlly got the chance to play a bad team today, and true to form almost honked a game to the Texans. They trailed in the fourth quarter, but rallied to win 17-14.
Their bad play was a combination of being generally banged up (the defense was without Osi Umenyiora, Brandon Short, Sam Madison, and LaVar Arrington, and Michael Strahan left early in the game with a foot injury), and the classic sports sin of "looking ahead." Next week, the Giants face the Chicago Bears, who came into this week 7-0, and have been steamrolling their opponents. The Giants-Bears game was shaping up to be…
drorzel | November 4, 2006Over at Effect Measure, Revere (or one of the Reveres, anyway, I'm not certain if they're plural or not) has posted another broadside against PowerPoint, calling it "the scourge of modern lecturing." This is something of a sensitive point for me, as I use PowerPoint for my lectures in the introductory classes. I've been using it this way for more than five years, and I like to think I've gotten to be pretty good at it. I fully expect this to be brought up in my tenure review, though, and to have to justify my use of PowerPoint in class.
Here's the thing: PowerPoint is a tool, nothing more. It…
drorzel | November 4, 2006For I'm not sure what reason, Scott Eric Kaufman is blogging a close reading of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn". I suspect this may be a new frontier in procrastination, but I'm not up on the latest developments in that field.
In the course of his reading, he helpfully updates one stanza into modern idiom:
What's the title of this thing anyway?
Is it about them? Them? Both?
It takes place where?
Which one of them are these? Who are they?
Where are they going and why are they in such a rush?
What is that? Guitar? Xylophone? Why so loud?
There's a lot of thought-provoking…
drorzel | November 4, 2006I'm in charge of the senior major seminar, in which we have the senior physics and astronomy majors meet once a week to talk about topics of interest to them. I've also been making them give short "progress reports" on their thesis research projects. Last week, one of my students was tapped for a progress report, and started out by saying:
As I'm sure you know, in the Orzel lab, we're in the business of creating dreams. Sort of like Disneyland.
I wonder if I could get that on business cards?
drorzel | November 3, 2006In the previous installments, I talked about identical particles and symmetry, and what that means for fermions. Given that there's only one other type of particle in the world, that sort of means that I need to explain what symmetry means in the case of bosons.
When I explain this to the first-year seminar, I generally do this by anthropomorphizing the particles somewhat, to describe fermions as "antisocial," and bosons as "gregarious." Not only does this give me the chance to use "anthropomorphize" and "gregarious" in class, thus confusing the hell out of a bunch of frosh, it's actually…
drorzel | November 3, 2006Via Inside Higher Ed's Quick Takes, some good news about the medical profession:
The proportion of medical residents who said they had worked more than 80 hours a week in the previous four weeks at any point during the 2005-6 academic year fell to 2.4 percent, spread among 18.7 percent of all residency programs, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education announced Thursday. That is down from 3.0 percent among 21 percent of programs in 2004-5 and 3.4 percent of residents among 24.8 percent of programs, the council said. The issue of excessive hours worked by doctors in training…
drorzel | November 3, 2006
This might not look it, but this is actually a happy dog picture. On windy days, she'll sit like this at the edge of the patio, just letting the wind blow interesting smells past her. You can't see it from a still photo, but she's constantly sniffing, and her ears are twitching, and she's generally having a good time. It's really cute.
It's hard to get a picture of, though, because the minute we open the door, she'll explode into motion to chase... something. Birds, squirrels, invisible aliens that only dogs can detect, I'm really not sure. This picture was actually shot through the kitchen…
drorzel | November 3, 2006The Onion AV Club has a review of the Aardman Animation CGI flick Flushed Away that contains a sentence starting with:
Once the film introduces a pack of French frog ninjas led by Jean Reno,...
Really, it doesn't much matter what comes after that. I don't really intend to see the movie, but it pleases me to know that there is a movie that introduces a pack of French frog ninjas led by Jean Reno.
Really, more movies should feature packs of French frog ninjas led by Jean Reno. Or, possibly, I should get more sleep.
drorzel | November 3, 2006Like most pieces in McSweeney's, the lette denying Indiana Jones tenure goes on a bit too long, but it has its moments:
The lone student representative on the committee wished to convey that, besides being an exceptional instructor, a compassionate mentor, and an unparalleled gentleman, Dr. Jones was extraordinarily receptive to the female student body during and after the transition to a coeducational system at the college. However, his timeliness in grading and returning assignments was a concern.
(Via The Little Professor)
drorzel | November 2, 2006November has been dubbed "National Novel Writing Month" or "NaNoWriMo" for those with too short an attention span to handle full words, in which people will commit to trying to write an entire novel in just thirty days. If you look around a bit, you'll see lots of blogs and LiveJournals tracking the progress made by various writers for the next month. The artificial deadline probably helps at least some inveterate procrastinators to actually sit down and write, though I wonder whether it's really possible to produce a commercially viable first novel this way.
At this time, I would like to…
drorzel | November 2, 2006While I know that there's no great love for basketball in these parts, I can't let Jonah Lehrer's post on the "Hot Hand" go without comment. It's about a paper analyzing the statistics of jump shooting, which finds that contrary to popular belief among basketball players, they don't really get "hot" in a statistically significant way. In fact, in some cases, they found the opposite:
The 76ers were shocked by the evidence. Andrew Toney, the shooting guard, was particularly hard to convince: he was sure that he was a streaky shooter, and went through distinct "hot" and "cold" periods. But the…
drorzel | November 2, 2006Scott Aaronson speaks for the computer scientists, partly in response to the same Times piece that I blogged about recently.