drorzel | August 26, 2006A day late for the usual pet-blogging, you say? I prefer to think of it as being six days early.
Caption: "Hey! Who said you could stop petting me?"
(The Queen of Niskayuna is shown in her usual spot, on a pillow next to the couch, which is my usual spot when I'm downstairs watching tv or reading. She tends to flop down on the pillow, and demand to be petted. If you stop petting her-- say, to change channels, or turn a page in a book-- she gets annoyed.)
drorzel | August 26, 2006Kate's out of town for the weekend, leaving me here by myself (well, not counting the Queen of Niskayuna), needing to find something to do to entertain myself. My first thought was "big long bike ride," but it's raining, and I'm just not that committed to bicycling.
Second thought was "Maybe I'll go see a movie. So I punched up the local movie listings for the giant multiplex in the big shopping mall. I'll put them below the fold, to shield people from the soul-sucking horror:
Accepted
Barnyard The Original Party Animals
Beerfest
How to Eat Fried Worms
Idlewild
Invincible
Little Miss…
drorzel | August 25, 2006The start of the new term brings not just new students and qualifying exams, but another round of introspection and soul-searching among the academic set. Which is a good thing for lazy bloggers, because it provokes lots of interesting articles to link to...
First up is the always interesting Timothy Burke, who is concerned about last year's students:
Right around September, a lot of last year's graduates from liberal arts colleges are discovering that they appear to be qualified for approximately none of the jobs that they might actually want to have. There are exceptions: students who have…
drorzel | August 25, 2006One of the things required for the tenure review is a full and up-to-date curriculum vitae. Having spent an inordinate amount of time updating and re-formatting my CV, it seems a shame not to make more use of it than that, so I might as well recycle it into a blog post (after stripping out my home address and a few other items).
Of course, I'm too lazy to do it in proper HTML, so what's below the fold is an automated conversion from the RTF file into really, really bad HTML. But, having spent an inordinate amount of time updating and re-formatting the Word file to get it to look right, I'll…
drorzel | August 25, 2006I've talked before about the tension between the desire to encourage students to major in physics and the tight job market in academia. Every time I talk about ways to draw more students into physics, it seems that somebody pops up to call me irresponsible for trying to lure them into a dead-end career track, saying that we don't really need more physics majors.
Eugene Wallingford quotes the best concise response to this argument that I've heard:
Another colleague spoke eloquently of why we need to work hard to convince young people to enter the sciences at the university level. He said…
drorzel | August 25, 2006
(This is a screen cap of my desktop at work. The shortcuts are frequently-used folders, and I added one for my tenure materials only a couple of days ago.)
drorzel | August 24, 2006There's been a lot of hand-wringing in the science blogosphere about the low numbers of women in science, and I've contributed my share of comments. On the theory that you shouldn't curse the darkness when you could be fumbling for a book of matches, I'll pass along this call for proposals from the Feminist Press:
The Feminist Press, as part of our National Science Foundation Women Working: Thinking, Creating, Making Science project, is exploring new ways to get girls and young women interested in science. While there are many library resources featuring biographies of women scientists that…
drorzel | August 24, 2006Over at Retrospectacle, Shelley has decided to ask us all a nice, simple, uncontroversial question:
"Are you for or against the death penalty, or (if its conditional), in what cases? Furthermore, do you believe that societies that sanction war are hypocritical for opposing the death penalty?"
Yeesh.
Actually, though, this is relatively easy to answer. I'm going to put my comments after the cut, though, to build suspense....
Ooooh-- suspense...
I'm going to do a slight spin on the time-honored tactic of denouncing the question as completely uninteresting. This might be an interesting question…
drorzel | August 24, 2006In the comments to the recent post on BMI, commenter Colst pointed to another study of mortality and BMI that found significantly higher risks for overweight people. Today, I see that Kevin Beck at Dr. Bushwell's Chimpanzee refuge has a post describing what I think is the same study, with the title Risk of death much higher in overweight and obese. Which is true, if you look at the data in the right way.
Kevin posted a bunch of graphs from the study, and I'll excerpt two of them to keep things readable. The first is the relative risk of death for all the men in the study, as a function of BMI…
drorzel | August 24, 2006Gordon Watts reminds me that the start of a new academic year means more than just the arrivial of a new crop of freshmen. For grad students, it's qualifying exam season.
For those not in the know, "qualifying exams" are a common feature of most Ph.D. programs. These are big, comprehensive tests that all students have to take at the end of the required course work. They usually come at either the end of the first year, or the start of the second year, and you have to pass the test in order to continue in the program.
And, of course, the tests aren't exactly easy. As Gordon puts it:
The common…
drorzel | August 23, 2006Over at A Blog Around the Clock, Bora has reposted an old article written in response to a list of "must-read" SF books, in which he sets out to generate his own list. Never one to shy away from excess, he ends up with a nearly complete list of genre novels since about 1890. Steinn points out a few that he missed.
This would be a great point for me to respond with my own list, and rail against the tendency to draw up lists full of books that are historically Important, without considering readability for modern audiences, and all that sort of thing. I'm still being bothered by the "too much…
drorzel | August 23, 2006New students will be showing up on college campuses all across the country in the next few weeks, which means it's time for the annual "kids these days" reflections on the character of the new freshmen. Apparently, they don't know all kinds of important stuff, but they don't drink as much as they used to:
(Figure from The American Freshman - National Norms for 2005, sent to me in an all-faculty email. It's not clear to me whether "in the past year" refers to their first year in college, or their last year in high school, but I don't care enough to pay $25 to read the report...)
Make of those…
drorzel | August 23, 2006Via Arcane Gazebo (who adds a category), an entertainingly snarky taxonomy of lab scientists:
Weird and Whacky
Consider the "mad scientist" of popular fiction, someone so obsessed with their subject that they forget to dress and show up to the lab in their pyjamas. Without wishing to indulge in stereotypes there are scientists who are highly creative and imaginative, it's just that you do wonder when the Mother Ship is going to come and collect them. On a good day they are self sufficient, enjoy thinking laterally and are great at finding ingenious ways of tackling a difficult piece of…
drorzel | August 23, 2006This morning's Times bring a story saying that astronomers are still dithering about Pluto. The latest plan would create a new category of "dwarf planets," and presumably get the International Astronomical Union eaten by Cthullu.
My immediate response is: "Jesus, people, make up your frickin' minds!"
Look, the joke is over, ok? The Pluto story has officially worn out its welcome. Pick a definition, any definition, and go home. Make room for some real science news.
Honestly, this is why physicists sneer at astronomers. Not only do they use dumb units, and have the axes backwards on most of…
drorzel | August 22, 2006The classroom across the hall from my office is currently being remodeled into interview rooms for the Psychology department (we traded it for some laboratory space in the basement). As a result, my usual office soundtrack of KEXP streaming over the web has been supplemented by, well, whatever the guys doing the remodeling happen to be listening to.
Thus, I can report that carpernters and electricians listen to classic rock radio, while painters appear to favor Rush Limbaugh. I'm sure this information is the key to some deep insight into American mass culture, but I have no idea what it means…
drorzel | August 22, 2006Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake has a nice post about a study showing that the ever-popular Body Mass Index measure is not a good predictor of the risk of heart disease. He's got a lot of details about the study, including this graph of risk vs. BMI:
Now, here's the thing. This is the second study I recall hearing about that has a similar result-- there was a flurry of articles a while back about a large study (or maybe one of those meta-studies) showing that people who were slightly overweight according to BMI had lower mortality than those of "normal" weight. And now, this study shows that…
drorzel | August 22, 2006Opinions differ about Vernor Vinge's latest book, Rainbows End (the apostrophe was intentionally left blank), and mostly seem to be correlated with how people approached the book. For example, Mike Kozlowski approached it from the standpoint that it's a new Vinge book, and thus expected to be as good as A Deepness in the Sky, and found it "disappointingly okay".
I, on the other handed, looked at the jacket copy and said "It's a Singularity book, it'll probably suck," and was quite pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed this quite a bit, actually, and it might be the best Singularity book I've read…
drorzel | August 22, 2006I want to take a quick moment to echo what Dave Sez about the World Basketball Championships:
Now, I know what you're thinking. You've seen the US play in past years and have been underwhelmed and maybe a bit disgusted. I'm with you. I felt the same way. Ever since the Dream Team in 1992, we've been putting out worse and worse teams filled with disinterested players. There was nothing worse than watching a team full of NBA All-Stars get drubbed by Puerto Rico by 20 points in the last Olympics. It was disgraceful.
But that's the past. This team is awesome. They way they play is awesome. The…
drorzel | August 22, 2006there's a fascinating article in the TimeS this morning about Chinese physicist Xu Liangying, a man who has led an interesting life, to say the least:
The first time he was purged, Xu Liangying was 27, an up-and-coming physicist, philosopher and historian and a veteran of the Communist underground. He had to divorce his wife, leave his sons and go live on his mother's farm in the country.
Three decades later, only a heart attack saved him from imprisonment or worse during the massacre that ended the democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989.
During the Cultural…
drorzel | August 21, 2006As hinted last week, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory has some new results conclusively showing that dark matter is a real, physical thing. This is big news, because the previous evidence for dark matter was all indirect, and based on inferring the mass distribution of galaxies and clusters of galaxies from looking at their motion. These results could indicate the presence of dark matter, or they could point to a flaw in our understanding of gravity at extremely long ranges.
The new observation shows fairly conclusively that dark matter and ordinary matter are different things, by combining two…