drorzel | July 23, 2006Today's New York Times has an article on the loss of the middle class in major cities:
The Brookings study, which defined moderate-income families as those with incomes between 80 and 120 percent of the median for each area, found that the percentage of middle-income neighborhoods in the 100 largest metropolitan areas had dropped to 41 percent from 58 percent between 1970 and 2000. Only 23 percent of central city neighborhoods in 12 large metropolitan areas were middle income, down from 45 percent in 1970.
Of course, my immediate reaction was that this is old news, coming as it does several…
drorzel | July 21, 2006This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question breaks a three-week string of topics I have no real opinion on:
If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?
I have two answers to this question: the true answer, and the answer they're looking for (below the fold).
The true answer to this question is "Right now." There's never been a better time to be a scientist, and I'm not just talking about things like the availability of antibiotics to keep one from dying a miserable death from some sort of plague or another, which would be a real…
drorzel | July 21, 2006Via a mailing list, Reason magazine has an article claiming that SUV's are better for the environment than hybrid cars:
Spinella spent two years on the most comprehensive study to date - dubbed "Dust to Dust" -- collecting data on the energy necessary to plan, build, sell, drive and dispose of a car from the initial conception to scrappage. He even included in the study such minutia as plant-to-dealer fuel costs of each vehicle, employee driving distances, and electricity usage per pound of material. All this data was then boiled down to an "energy cost per mile" figure for each car (see here…
drorzel | July 21, 2006We haven't done the guess-the-lyrics thing since I moved over to ScienceBlogs, and that seems like a good thing for a lazy Friday (I played soccer after work on Tuesday and Thursday, and basketball at lunch on Wednesday, so I'm pretty wiped. What a drag it is getting old.).
A little variant on the "Random Ten" thing: the list below the fold is the Top 25 Most Played playlist from iTunes on my home computer. It's a little quirky, thanks to my habit of putting recent acquisitions on shuffle play for a few weeks to get a feel for new songs, but it's not a bad representation of my general tastes…
drorzel | July 21, 2006I'm pretty sure the folks at Inside Higher Ed don't know that it's International Blog Against Racism Week, but they've provided some good material all the same. Today, Alan Contreras offers some provocative thoughts on diversity in academic hiring:
Anyone interested in actual improvement of the presence of good nonwhite faculty in our universities needs to take certain steps at their schools. Do not allow the hiring of more bureaucrats to gasp in predictable horror at the way things are. No more Assistant Vice-hand-holders in the bower of ethnic unhappiness. Forget all the false storefronts…
drorzel | July 21, 2006So, you've finally achieved (through a combination of hard work and inheritance) a livable monthly income, and are looking for a way to cut loose and splurge a little?
Well, for just $35 million, you can both visit the Space Station and walk in space ($20 million to get there, $15 million for the spacewalk). Start saving now!
drorzel | July 20, 2006In the previous post, I said that the fine structure constant alpha provides us with a way to measure whether the fundamental constants making it up (the electron charge, Planck's constant, and the speed of light) have changed in the last few billion years. How, exactly, does that work?
The easiest way to see how the fine structure constant leaves a signature that can be detected millions or billions of years later is to think about its effect on atomic states. In the picture where you think of it as describing the ratio of the speed of an orbiting electron to the speed of light, it's easy to…
drorzel | July 20, 2006As noted yesterday, someone going by "who" (who may or may not be a doctor) took me to task in the comments to the dorky poll for talking about fundamental constants that have units, preferring dimensionless ratios instead:
I would be really interested to hear what your readers come up with if the popularity constest was about DIMENSIONLESS physical constants----which are significant RATIOS built into the universe. Like the ratio of mass of proton to mass of electron, or the ratio of Planck mass to proton mass.
these are things you can't simply make become = 1 and in effect "go away" merely…
drorzel | July 20, 2006In the wake of academic scandals involving the Auburn football program, Inside Higher Ed reports on a study looking at the majors of athletes. The results will be shocking to, well basically no-one who has ever set foot on a college campus:
While accusations of widespread abuse like that alleged at Auburn are unusual, "clustering" of athletes -- in which large numbers of athletes at an institution major in a particular program or department, out of proportion to other students at the college -- is common. A 2002-3 analysis by USA Today found that a large percentage of football players at…
drorzel | July 20, 2006Kate and I both hate doing housework, so a year or so ago, we broke down and hired a cleaning service. Every other week, they send a crew in to vacuum and dust and clean the bathroom and kitchen, so we don't have to. IT's not a terribly expensive service, and we're happier as a result.
I occasionally have pangs of liberal guilt about this, because it's such a bourgeois thing to do. I had this mental image (aided by the brochure they sent when we signed up) of the cleaners as middle-aged Hispanic women, probably getting paid about six bucks an hour. Which would put me in the position of aiding…
drorzel | July 20, 2006Via James Nicoll, there's a new press release from the Cassini mission talking about new radar maps of a region on the surface of Titan that's been dubbed "Xanadu." The topography looks very Earth-like, with rivers and lakes and oceans of methane, providing Dr. Jonathan Lunine an opportunity to show off the benefits of a classical education:
"Although Titan gets far less sunlight and is much smaller and colder than Earth, Xanadu is no longer just a mere bright spot, but a land where rivers flow down to a sunless sea," Lunine said.
(Based on the other comments quoted, this is another case…
drorzel | July 19, 2006Scientific Curmudgeon John Horgan reads calls for more nuclear power and offers a slightly different objection to nuclear power than most people:
Five years ago, I might have considered climbing aboard this bandwagon, even though Indian Point has an imperfect safety record, but not any more. In fact, I want to whack the neo-nukers and the Times Magazine for irresponsibly downplaying the immense security risks posed by nuclear power.
On September 11, 2001, one of the hijacked jets flew down the Hudson River right past Garrison. A woman I know was gardening that morning outside her house on…
drorzel | July 19, 2006I was planning to write a big, long post tying together Nathan's mention of an ICAP talk on the time-variation of fundamental constants with Rob Knop's post on same and this comment regarding the dorky poll (still time to vote!) and a conversation I had with Kate about the meaning of the fine structure constant. It was going to be genius, I tell you.
But, my monitor died this morning, and while I replaced it with the old CRT we had lying around, the delay cut into my blogging time enough that the post didn't get written. So, it'll wait for tomorrow.
While you're waiting, you can read the…
drorzel | July 19, 2006I'd be remiss in my academic-blogging duties if I failed to point out this Inside Higher Ed piece on teaching core courses. Like many articles published in academic magazines, it's aimed directly at English composition, but the main points can be extended to intro classes in other disciplines. In particular:
10. Don't compare students' attitudes to your own. A colleague of mine who taught business at a private university constantly made scathing comments about his students' seeming lack of effort. "I can't believe you guys don't know this stuff!" he would shout at them. Time and time again,…
drorzel | July 19, 2006Speaking of fictional science, was there a sci-fi cliche that Eureka (new show on the Sci-Fi Channel) missed last night? Shows like this really make me question whether Battlestar Galactica can be as good as people insist it is (the one episode I watched didn't sell me on it).
(I'm also kind of apprehensive about the Dresden Files show that's in the works. The one commercial they showed was such a mess of jump-cuts that I couldn't really make sense of it, but I rather like the books, and hope they don't screw it up too badly...)
drorzel | July 18, 2006The article about physicists in movies cited previously had one other thing worth commenting on: the fictional portrayal of the practice of science:
All these films illustrate a fundamental pattern for movie science. Rarely is the central scientific concept utterly incorrect, but filmmakers are obviously more interested in creating entertaining stories that sell tickets than in presenting a lesson in elementary physics. They also know that scenes of scientists at a lab bench do not generally make for gripping movie moments. Indeed, the need for drama often pushes the basic scientific idea to…
drorzel | July 18, 2006Benjamin Cohen at The World's Fair posts a link to an article about physicists in movies. The author provides a surprisingly detailed breakdown of what must be every character described as a physicist in the history of motion pictures. He also says really nasty things about What the Bleep Do We Know?, which warms my heart.
In the "elsewhere on the web" list at the bottom of the article, they mention the Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics site, which was the subject of the fourth post ever on Uncertain Principles. Which is all the excuse I need for some Classic Edition blogging-- the original…
drorzel | July 18, 2006On Saturday, Kate and I went to see Johnny Depp swish his way through a second movie as Captain Jack Sparrow, with assistance from Kiera Knightly, Orlando Bloom, and a lot of other wooden props. She's posted a review with spoilers, and I'll post some spoilers below the fold, but my one-word, spoiler-free review is here:
Excessive.
To expand, the movie was not just too long, it was too much. Individual pieces of it were a good deal of fun, but there were too many pieces, and the whole was less than the sum of the parts. More details (with massive movie-destroying SPOILERS) below the fold.
To…
drorzel | July 18, 2006This week has been dubbed "International Blog Against Racism Week" by some folks over on LiveJournal, with the goal being to have lots of people, well, blog about issues related to race. It's not likely to save the world, but it's a noble enough cause, and deserves a mention. There's some good stuff over there-- a discussion of race in casting, and a post on suppressing discussion, complete with its own live-action demo.
As one of the whitest white guys you're ever likely to meet, I'm sort of hesitant to contribute anything to this (see also Sherwood Smith's demurral). I mean, I completely…
drorzel | July 17, 2006This past weekend, Union played host to the New York State Association for College Admissions Counseling's Camp College program. This is a three-day summer program where students from disadvantaged backgrounds (the vast majority of this year's students were from New York City, with a handful of local students, and one group from Philly) spend a weekend on a college campus, sleeping in the dorms, eating in the dining halls, and attending simulated classes. The classes are taught by faculty memebers recruited from the host institutions-- I did a lecture for them a few years back, in the early…