drorzel | September 20, 2006If you've had trouble accessing the site in the last couple of days, sorry about that. Scienceblogs.com has been under a cross-site script attack for a while, and we only recently figured out what was going on. Efforts are underway to deal with the problem. We're re-targeting the orbital mind control lasers even as I type...
Unfortunately, an attempt at a quick-and-dirty fix for the problem last night rather comprehensively broke the server. It seems to be better now-- knock on wood-finish particle-board desk top.
The server difficulties destroyed a couple of posts that I was working on this…
drorzel | September 20, 2006Simon Owens of Bloggasm has conducted an unscientific survey of diversity in the blogosphere by emailing a bunch of bloggers to ask them demographic questions. He emailed 1,000 bloggers, and on that basis, has constructed a quick profile of the "blogosphere":
Male: 69%
Female: 31%
***
White/Caucasian/European: 73%
Black/African: 9%
Asian: 10%
Middle Eastern/Arab: 1%
Latino/Hispanic: 6%
Native American: 1%
Make of that what you will.
The flaws in this study are many and obvious, and Simon is up front about them. Flaws aside, he deserves credit for even attempting to do this sort of thing. So…
drorzel | September 19, 2006My pseudonymous colleague Orac makes it part of his mission to lampoon "alternative medicine" wherever he encounters it, so this may well piss him off: For the last several weeks, I've been taking a daily dose of pseudoscience. Why? I blame the medical establishment, but you're going to have to click below the fold to find out why.
As I've mentioned here several times, back in January, I started having very bad heartburn more or less constantly. After a couple of visits to my doctor, I was referred to a gastroenterologist, who scheduled an endoscopy, and then proclaimed that I have "gastro-…
drorzel | September 19, 2006I'm vaguely relieved that I didn't make the Top Five in the Nerd-Off. Just to prove that I'm still plenty nerdy, though, here are a few links:
First, a new(ish) physics grad student blog, Tales from the Learning Curve, by Jen Fallis. I noticed her blog a while abck when she ran into everyone's favorite troll, but I haven't gotten around to linking her because I'm lazy. Sorry.
Of course, every silver lining has a cloud: Dylan Stiles is shutting down his blog. As Derek Lowe notes, it's probably the right thing to do, but I'll miss his irrepressible chem-dork posts.
Finally, via RRResearch (via…
drorzel | September 19, 2006Two quick academic links:
First, Eugene Wallingford on fundraising, which these days extends down to the departmental level. He has good thoughts on the raising of money, and the issues he talks about sound awfully familiar.
I'd add one thing to his advice-- if you're pursuing big gifts, make sure the donor is as specific as possible about what they want done with the money. My alma mater got an unexpected bequest of a rather large sum of money to the physics department, but the will was vague on what that meant, leading to some frantic scrambling and high-stakes bargaining. It would've been…
drorzel | September 19, 2006The "Genius Grants" for 2006 have been announced, and as usual, your humble correspondent is not among the winners. Damn.
You know, if I were a MacArthur trustee, I'd be sorely tempted to throw one grant a year to somebody completely bizarre-- $500,000 to Giblets for excellence in Fafbloggery-- just for the hell of it. Or, better yet, just pick a name out of the phone book, and drop $500K on them. Why him? The MacArthur Foundation works in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform...
This is probably sufficient explanation of why I will never be selected to help administer a multi-million-…
drorzel | September 18, 2006You know the song. It's instantly recognizable, even without the slightly daft religious lyrics. The fuzzed-out guitar, the chugging riff, the weird little noises in the background. But who recorded "Spirit in the Sky" (now playing in a Nike commercial near you...)?
The guy's name is Norman Greenbaum, and this is one of those useless bits of trivia that I know that prevent me from remembering important deadlines and where I put my keys. I'd be willing to bet that eight out of ten people on the street could hum the riff and sing the chorus, but not tell you who recorded it.
"Spirit in the Sky…
drorzel | September 18, 2006Alternate title: Imminent Death of High-Tc Superconductivity Predicted. Film at 11.
PhysicsWeb has a story about a study of condensed matter papers that has been posted to the arxiv, predicting the imminent death of high-temperature superconductivity:
The new study was carried out by Andreas Barth from the FIZ Karlsruhe and Werner Marx from the Max Planck Institute for Solid-State Research in Stuttgart, who examined the number of papers listed in the INSPEC and Chemical Abstracts Service databases with words like "superconductivity" or "superconductor" used in the title or listed as "keywords…
drorzel | September 18, 2006As of this morning, the Blogger SAT Challenge has been looked at by 177 people. The number of completed essays is considerably smaller-- Dave estimates somewhere around 40-- and so far, everyone I've heard from has said that it was a lot harder than they thought it would be.
Even Kate thought it was tough, and she's way smarter than I am.
So, do you have what it takes to face the Challenge? It'll only take 21 minutes, and it'll give you a new perspective on education...
(Also, if you're an English composition type who would be willing to grade a few of these SAT style, email me at orzelc at…
drorzel | September 18, 2006I root for the Giants, and Kate roots for the Patriots, and at times in the last few years, it's seemed like they had a zero-sum relationship. When the Giants win, the Pats lose, and when the Pats are playing well, the Giants look awful.
Yesterday wasn't zero-sum, but the games were practically mirror images of one another. The Giants were dog-awful for three quarters, giving up sacks and stupid penalties, and appearing to have made their shaky secondary worse in the off-season. And then, they mounted a huge comeback, scoring seventeen points in the fourth quarter to force overtime, then…
drorzel | September 17, 2006So, the good news is, Gregg Easterbrook is writing about football for ESPN again. His "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" columns are some of the most entertaining football writing around. Here's hoping he can make it through the whole season without saying something stupid to get himself fired.
The bad news is, Gregg Easterbrook is writing about science for Slate. Actually, Gregg Easterbrook writing about anything other than football is bad news, but science is particularly bad. His knowledge of the subject always seems to operate at the Star Trek sort of level-- like he's read the glossary of a…
drorzel | September 17, 2006Does including his middle name make USC quarterback John David Booty sound more or less like a porn star?
(Yesterday was the inauguration for our new college president, so it was a long day, and I'm a little punchy watching SportsCenter...)
drorzel | September 16, 2006Scott Westerfeld's new YA novel The Last Days is a sequel to his earlier Peeps, so technically, it's a book about teenage vampires. Only really it's a book about a bunch of misfit kids forming a band and trying to make it big. While the Vampire Apocalypse happens around them.
In Peeps, we learn of the existence of a parasite that infects humans, and gives them vampire-like abilities (strength, speed, heightened senses) and some of the drawbacks of classic vampirism (things they used to love become anathema to them). The story there alternates with sections describing the actions of freaky…
drorzel | September 16, 2006The booklog post on Scott Westerfeld's The Last Days got to be long enough that I wanted to split it just to keep it from eating the front page. Which would sort of preclude using the extended entry field for spoiler protetction, so here's the stuff with the spoilers. Don't read the rest of this before you read the book.
As I said in the non-spoiler review, one of the strongest points of this book is the character voices. There are lots of nice little touches in there, like the way Zahler isn't as dim as the others think, or the fact that Moz is making the money to pay alana Ray by playing…
drorzel | September 15, 2006Via a mailing list, Peugeot offers a parallel-parking simulator. So, if you're a person who thinks that Grand Theft Auto doesn't contain enough three-point turns, there's a Flash game just for you...
drorzel | September 15, 2006It's raining, nobody's petting her, nobody's dropping any food, nobody's taping bacon to slow-moving domestic animals:
Some days it's hard to be the Queen of Niskayuna.
drorzel | September 15, 2006As discussed last week, the comments about the perfect-scoring SAT essays published in the New York Times made me wonder whether bloggers could do any better. On the plus side, bloggers write all the time, of their own free will. On the minus side, they don't have to work under test conditions, with a tight time limit and a specific question to answer.
Because we're all about a rigorous scientific approach here at ScienceBlogs, we'll settle this the modern way: with an Internet contest. Thus, we now present the Blogger SAT Challenge.
("We" in this case is me and Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily…
drorzel | September 15, 2006The New York Times has a story about yet another weird extrasolar planet, this one a gigantic fluffy ball of gas bigger than Jupiter, but less dense than water:
While gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are made primarily of hydrogen and helium, they also possess rocky cores and crushing pressures within that squeeze the hydrogen and helium to higher densities. Jupiter's average density is 133 percent greater that of water, while Saturn's is 70 percent that of water. The density of HAT-1-P is one-quarter that of water.
Astrophysicists now have two problems to solve: how a planet that has…
drorzel | September 14, 2006The truly remarkable thing about the BaconCat incident is not that John Scalzi taped bacon to his cat (as you can tell from his wife's reaction), or that he got a bazillion hits from Fark for it (which is what the Internet is for, after all), or that he made a motivational poster about it (because, really, it takes firearms to keep Scalzi away from PhotoShop).
No, the remarkable thing is that the fake blog someone set up for John's cat currently has a Technorati rank in the top 1.6% of all blogs (848,635 out of 54 million, at this writing).
Really, there's just no way you could make this shit…