drorzel | September 26, 2006Since everybody else left of Limbaugh is linking it, I might as well throw in a pointer to the Fox interview with Bill Clinton, where he lights into Chris Wallace for asking him about Osama bin Laden:
CLINTON: What did I do? What did I do? I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still president, we'd have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him.
Now, I've never criticized President Bush, and I don't think this is useful. But you…
drorzel | September 25, 2006Kate's busy doing LiveJournal things downstairs in the living room, and I'm upstairs blogging in my office. What's a dog to do? Mope at the foot of the stairs, of course:
She's the most neglected dog in the entire world. Just ask her...
drorzel | September 25, 2006The Slush God offers all-too-typical news:
Today SCI FI Wire published a piece I wrote about Terry Brooks's latest novel, Armageddon's Children, which is the first in a series that will connect his Word and the Void trilogy with his Shannara series.
Is there any surer sign that an author has fallen to the Brain Eater than writing books to tie different fictional universes together? It got Heinlein, it got Asimov, and it's getting Terry Brooks, too.
drorzel | September 25, 2006I've updated the sidebar links to reflect the fact that John Horgan has moved his blog, and to add Tales from the Learning Curve. I'm sure I'm missing something, though, so tell me what it is.
What are the best blogs out there that I'm not linking to? (Bearing in mind that I'm not enthusiastic about political punditry at the moment...) If you think there's some blog I should be reading and linking to that you don't see represented here, leave a link in the comments, and I'll take a look.
(It would probably be a good idea to leave a link to a specific post that you found worthwhile, or a short…
drorzel | September 25, 2006We get the Sunday New York Times delivered every week (which accounts for the higher-than-usual number of stories from the Times that I link on Sundays...), and I read most of it, but I usually run out of steam before I get to the Magazine, unless the cover story really grabs me. This week was one of those times, with their profile of Michael Oher. I'm bothered by this particular story, in a way that's a little hard to explain, so I'm going to babble about it here a bit, and see where that leads.
On the surface, it's a really heartwarming story. Michael Oher is a poor black kid from the slums…
drorzel | September 25, 2006Bummer news from Making Light this morning: one of my favorite authors, John M. Ford, has died. That's a shitty way to start the week.
The post title is from his poem Troy: The Movie, which does not involve Brad Pitt. Also well worth reading is his September 11th memorial poem 110 Stories, which I had taped up outside my office for a long time. His NESFA collection, From the End of the Twentieth Century is full of good stuff, as is the more recent Heast of Fusion, and Growing Up Weightless may be my favorite coming-of-age SF story ever.
He was also an occasional poster to Making Light, and an…
drorzel | September 24, 2006Emmy, Queen of Niskayuna, is not what you'd call a well-socialized dog. We got her from a shelter, where she was an owner turn-in due to allergy problems, so the only time she's been around other digs was in the shelter. I think the technical term for her reaction when confronted with another dog is "total freak-out."
As a result, when we go out of town, we can't just leave her with family, because my parents and Kate's have dogs of their own. And when we put her in a normal kennel, it takes about a week for her to calm down after we get back. Which means that we end up paying a pet-sitter to…
drorzel | September 24, 2006Following on the heels of my post on getting into graduate school, Jorge Chan offers some advice on how to stay in graduate school.
drorzel | September 24, 2006When Brandon Sanderson's debut novel, Elantris first appeared on store shelves, I was tempted to buy it. It had a lot of things going for it: good review quotes, a striking cover, an interesting description, and it's published by Tor, who are usually pretty reliable. I couldn't quite figure out, though, whether it was the first book in a series or not, and I'd really rather not commit to another long fantasy series if it can be avoided.
The paperback edition helpfully addresses this in the back cover copy:
"Elantris delightfully proves that a great complete fantasy story can still be told in…
drorzel | September 23, 2006Over at The World's Fair, David Ng is sorting his records autobiographically, and encouraging others to do the same:
If you make a music mix that is a reflection of your informative years, what would those dozen or so songs be, and maybe more interesting, why? You don't have to be proud of the song choices - they're not necessarily a reflection of taste, more about your history.
This could get embarrassing, but it's a grey and rainy Saturday morning, I'm getting a bit of a cold, and I need to do some major updates on the departmental web page, so thinking about my musical history seems like…
drorzel | September 22, 2006I'm teaching our senior major seminar this term, which means that once a week, I'm giving hour-long talks on topics of interest to senior physics majors. This week's was "How to Pick and Apply to a Graduate School."
I've probably written this basic stuff up about three times already, but I'm too lazy to look for it, and this particular presentation was slightly different than anything I may have put on the web in the past. And I might as well wring another post out of the topic, while it's fresh in my mind...
There are several steps to the grad school application process, but the most…
drorzel | September 22, 2006Through some quirk of the publishing industry, I find myself with two free copies of Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics, one from my Corporate Masters at Seed, and the other direct from the publisher. This seems a little excessive, even for a confirmed bibliophile like myself. (I know, I know, this is a problem a lot of people would be happy to have...)
The obvious thing to do is to give it away as the prize for some sort of bloggy contest, but I don't have any ideas for a good contest (I'm generally terrible at this sort of thing). So here's a meta-contest: A free copy of Lee Smolin's The…
drorzel | September 22, 2006Via Jo Walton, Russ Allbery has a wonderful piece on the glory that was Usenet:
I've strongly disagreed with the idea that Usenet is dying. I still do, I think. I think things ebb and flow and shift around, but up until now I haven't really thought about how my interaction with Usenet has changed, whether Usenet has died a little for me. But I'm sitting here, trying to capture how I feel about newsgroups and the communities in them, how I feel when I post, what threads I participate in, and... there's That Hierarchy, there's a sense of attachment to the technology and to a bunch of technical…
drorzel | September 22, 2006It's that time of year when student groups try to get new members to sign up, leading to all manner of interesting signs around campus. One of my favorites:
drorzel | September 21, 2006Over at Inside Higher Ed, William Durden resorts to satire in response to the Spellings commission report:
In the nation's current zeal to account for all transfer of teaching and insight through quantitative, standardized testing, perhaps we should advance quantitative measurement into other areas of human meaning and definition. Why leave work undone?
I suggest, for example, that a federal commission propose an accountability initiative for those of faith (not such a wild notion as an increasing number of politicians are calling the traditional separation of church and state unhealthy for…
drorzel | September 21, 2006So, the Blogger SAT Challenge has officially run its course, and Dave has posted the question to Cognitive Daily. I'll reproduce it below the fold, and make some general comments.
What were the results like? We had 500 people at least look at the survey question, and Dave gives the breakdown:
The survey required participants to enter at least their name before moving on to answer the essay question. The most popular name was "asdf," but no one claiming the name asdf actually wrote an essay. Clearly plenty of participants only "participated" in order to see the question (you'll see it soon…
drorzel | September 21, 2006Senior Middle East Correspondant Paul Schemm checks in with another email update from Baghdad, this time describing a visit to a tank graveyard.
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It was a graveyard. That was the only way to describe it. The place where old war machines came to die. Row upon row of massive sand-colored metal tanks, their huge guns each raised to a different height, like a frozen image of a clumsy chorus line.
There weren't just tanks either, massive artillery pieces, trucks, strange amphibious vehicles that looked half boat - an automotive mating ritual gone horribly wrong, and all…
drorzel | September 21, 2006One of the bloggers quoted in Simon Owens's demographics post states flat-out that "I basically don't give a crap about the non-political blogosphere." I found this interesting, because I used to read almost exclusively political blogs, but my opinion has shifted to be almost exactly the opposite of this: I really find it hard to give a crap about most political blogging these days.
Some of this is just outrage fatigue, but I've been at least ambivalent about the whole blog punditry thing for years. This is a Classic Edition post originally from July 2002, barely a month after I started the…
drorzel | September 21, 2006Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor are currently facing execution in Libya, charged with deliberately infrecting some 400 children with AIDS. An independent scientific study of the matter found that most of the children were infected well before the "Tripoli Six" even entered the country, but the study was dismissed by the court.
The case has largely been ignored by the media (I only learned of it last night), but the consesnsus is that international pressure is the only way to clear the six. In particular, Declan Butler is calling for scientists and bloggers to spread word of…
drorzel | September 20, 2006Back in May, the DAMOP keynote address was delivered by a DoE program officer who basically chided scientists for being politically active, in a "you have only yourselves to blame if your funding gets cut" sort of way. Obviously, she hasn't read The Republican War on Science, or she'd understand why 48 Nobel laureates publically endorsed John Kerry in 2004.
(Full comments below the fold.)
I didn't read this book when it first came out because I'm a scientist and I follow the news, and I figured I already knew the story. Why buy a book to make myself depressed? I generally buy books to make…