drorzel | June 28, 2006I haven't posted much about life in the lab lately, because even though I'm getting to spend a bit of time in the lab, I've been so fried from this past term that I haven't had much energy for blogging. Things are finally settling into the summer routine, though, and I've gotten a little rest since handing in my grades, so I'll try to post occasional updates on what's going on in the lab.
Of course, life in the lab has its own frustrations, chief among them being equipment failures for stupid reasons. We've had another such event in my lab, so I'll be spending a bit of time wrestling with my…
drorzel | June 28, 2006Two links containing important advice for the academic set. First, Derek Lowe reminisces about summer in graduate school:
When I was in graduate school, I had a law student as a neighbor for a while. We were both pretty quiet, and got along fine in our respective dinky efficiency apartments, but we couldn't help but notice some differences between our studies. The biggest one became clear around this time of the year: he left, and I stayed. I still remember the look of surprise on his face when I told him that we didn't have any time off.
Well, I know that law students don't generally go off…
drorzel | June 28, 2006Miscellaneous sports-related items (mostly soccer talk, because other than the World Cup, there are no sports going on now worth watching):
Before getting to soccer, some really important sports news: Williams College won its tenth Sears Cup in the last eleven years, as the best athletic program in Division III. They also topped the US News rankings for liberal arts schools. Eat our dust, Amherst.
On to soccer: I didn't get to watch any of Tuesday's games, because I have a day job, but Monday's games were pretty ugly. Australia lost to the Italian national diving team on a late penalty kick,…
drorzel | June 27, 2006There was an interesting article in the Times today about the possibility of "geoengineering":
In the past few decades, a handful of scientists have come up with big, futuristic ways to fight global warming: Build sunshades in orbit to cool the planet. Tinker with clouds to make them reflect more sunlight back into space. Trick oceans into soaking up more heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
Their proposals were relegated to the fringes of climate science. Few journals would publish them. Few government agencies would pay for feasibility studies. Environmentalists and mainstream scientists said…
drorzel | June 27, 2006My traffic has been down a little in the past couple of weeks, which of course can't possibly be because I haven't posted anything really interesting in that time. No, clearly, it must be that I'm not playing the game right.
Thus, I have performed an extensive study or high-traffic blogs, to determine what it is that they post that I don't, and the answer is clear: Internet personality quizzes. Thus, here are some quiz-type things for your amusement and edification:
A timed online IQ test. You get 13 minutes to answer 38 true/false questions, and then it tells you how smart you are. (Via…
drorzel | June 27, 2006An open thread comment over at Making Light triggered a discussion of what words and phrases could serve as reliable markers of SF fandom. (It continues for a good while, but at times is nearly buried in discussion of Japanese knotweed.).
This got me to wondering about what phrases would serve as similar markers for scientists-- that is, what are the words or phrases that would reliably mark someone as a scientist (other than a tendency to start sentences with "So, ...")?
My best guess for a general science phrase would be some variant of "[really hard thing] is left as an exercise for the…
drorzel | June 27, 2006Last week's attempt to shame people into donating to the DonorsChoose fundraiser produced a flurry of donations that brought us up to a respectable $896.02 and third place on the leader board. Which is pretty cool-- thanks to all who have donated.
The official challenge runs through July 1 (that is, Saturday), and it'd be cool to take that total over $1000, if possible. I'm not really going to ramp up the annoying pledge-drive stuff as we approach the deadline, but if you haven't given anything yet, please do consider contributing. There are a large number of proposals left open, seeking…
drorzel | June 27, 2006Via Cosmic Variance, news of the Shaw Prize in Astronomy for 2006:
Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt are awarded the Shaw Prize in Astronomy 2006 in recognition of their leadership roles on the two teams that made the remarkable discovery of an acceleration in the rate of the expansion of the universe. Such an effect had been known theoretically since shortly after Einstein applied his theory of general relativity to cosmology, but the general belief, including Einstein¡¦s own assessment, was that the cosmological constant had no basis in reality. Thus, the 1998 announcement of…
drorzel | June 26, 2006I'm a very, very lazy blogger, and I'm particularly bad about updating my sidebar links. I finally got around to putting a few months' worth of new science-y blogs into the sidebar, though, so you might want to check them out, if you don't already read them:
Angry Physics "Presenting the "other" side of academic physics, where people backstab and give lousy talks. Where people are sometimes lazy or incompetent, and the best don't get the credit or the job. From the perspective of someone lucky enough to have landed a tenure-track professorship."
Backreaction A blog by a recently married high-…
drorzel | June 26, 2006This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question is a total meatball:
What makes a good science teacher?
Teaching science is a big part of what I do, so of course I have an answer for this. Which is basically the same answer as everybody else has already given, so let me try to put a slightly different spin on this, and object to the implicit premise of the question.
Let's be clear on one thing: Science is not special. The qualities that make a good science teacher are exactly the same qualities that make a good English teacher, or a good history teacher, or a good shop teacher, for that matter.…
drorzel | June 26, 2006It was a lazy Sunday in Chateau Steelypips, what with the party Saturday afternoon, so I watched a fair amount of soccer. I saw nearly all of the England-Ecuador game, and the second half of the Portugal-Netherlands game. This has made something clear to me:
The most difficult thing to find in international soccer is not a good goalie, or a great midfielder, or a skilled striker. The most difficult thing to find in international soccer is a good referee. Because otherwise, I can't explain why the idiot working the Portugal-Netherlands game was drawing a paycheck.
Miscellaneous other…
drorzel | June 26, 2006I've got a grant proposal to review, and a progress report to write for one of my own grants, so you're getting short, link-y physics blogging:
- The Strings 2006 conference has ended, with the participants apparently deciding to keep up with this "string theory" thing (maybe you've heard of it?) for a little while longer. Talk slides from many of the speakers are available here. Of course, if you can understand them, you probably already knew that, and if you didn't know that, you probably won't get much from the slides, but there you go.
- The Wall Street Journal piece talking about Peter…
drorzel | June 25, 2006Some sort of network problem at Verizon cut Chateau Steelypips off from the Intenets yesterday, but that was all right, as we were hosting a party for some friends from work, and had other things to do. The weather, which had been predicted to be lousy, turned out to be fine, and a good time was had by all.
The party was a particular hit with the children of a professor from the Math department, who were absolutely enthralled with the Nerf dart gun we usually keep on the mantle, next to the samurai sword:
They spent hours shooting little Nerf darts around the yard (on one occasion getting…
drorzel | June 23, 2006It's almost finished now, so this is a little late in being posted, but the Washington Post has been running a week-long series of on-line chats with noted "futurists," under the title Beyond the Future. I'm a little dubious about most "futurism," but reading about people's predictions for future trends and gadgets can be a good way to waste a little time on a Friday afternoon, if you're so inclined...
(Sadly, I can't really afford the time-- I've got to get back to my windowless basement lab, and align some optics...)
drorzel | June 23, 2006So, the US lost to Ghana yesterday, ending the World Cup for the Americans. I watched most of the second half, and it was pretty frustrating. Amazingly, Ghana was actually more theatrical than Italy, with the flopping and the flailing and the writhing on the ground as if in agony-- there should've been about fifteen minutes of injury time added.
In the end, the US was done in by an apparent lack of fundamental skills. I couldn't begin to estimate the number of lead passes that went five yards too far for their intended target, or crosses that sailed four feet over everyone's head, or just…
drorzel | June 22, 2006There's been some behind-the-scenes talk of the resurfacing of the annoying comment bug, which we had thought was fixed. I haven't noticed any problems myself, but I have noticed that the comment traffic is down a bit. I just attributed that to the fact that I haven't written much lately that was comment-worthy, but if there's a technical issue, I'd like to know.
If you've tried to post a comment recently (say, in the last two weeks), and been denied by the system, or had it vanish into the aether, please send me an email (orzelc at steelypips, which is an org not a com) and let me know when…
drorzel | June 22, 2006OK, it's not an official Ask a ScienceBlogger question (that answer will show up next week), but over at the World's Fair, they've raised an important scholarly question via a scene from The Simpsons:
Marge: Homer?
Homer: Yelloh?
Marge: There's a man here who thinks he can help you.
Homer: Batman?
Marge: No, he's a scientist.
Homer: Batman's a scientist.
Obviously, this leads to the question : "What sort of scientist is Batman, anyway?" Some of my colleagues are trying to claim him for psychology or genetics, but the real answer is after the cut:
It's a trick question. Batman isn't a…
drorzel | June 22, 2006I'm not about to stay up all night to post to every channel on the front page, but I will make a brief appearance in the "Culture Wars" channel, not my usual space, to note two science and religion items:
1) Rob Knop offers lecture slides on the scientific method, and the difference between scientific and religious approaches.
2) A new blog, See You at Enceladus offers a slightly different take on Why Creationism Is Stupid (below the fold):
This is what scientists been doing for the last 300 years or so. They been that "listen" to what the universe has to say about history. In fact, ideally…
drorzel | June 22, 2006Two music-related follow-up items:
Over on her LiveJournal, Kate has a more complete concert report from the Springsteen show, including a full set list, and some links to Springsteen resources.
Elsewhere in blogdom, the Blog on Bach is unhappy with my Old Tunes Experiment. The author seems to take the whole thing a little too personally, but I'd probably react similarly to somebody showing up in comments to start dogging Bob Dylan or the Afghan Whigs. Anyway, a couple of clarifications behind the cut:
First of all, I didn't say that I disliked Copland and Reich-- the only thing I said I…
drorzel | June 21, 2006Over at bento-box, there's a nice response to my recent post about simulations. He makes the very good point that the Sandia press release in question could sensibly be read as referring to the fact that recent computer technology requires fewer simplifying approximations:
Well, it isn't really until quite recently that computers have gotten fast enough that many of these approximations can be toned-down. Simulations are starting to match up on a more than qualitative level with experiment on more than simple and uninteresting systems. But computers have been around for a long time and there…