drorzel | June 14, 2006Via Dave Sez, Chris Chase has all the J.J. Redick DUI jokes you could possibly want:
* Redick's arrest could actually help his draft status, as the Portland Trail Blazers are currently sitting at #4.
* To keep up with his pal, Adam Morrison plans on knocking off a Seattle-area liquor store this evening.
Special extra bonus: poetry!
(Well, OK, maybe you don't really want to hear J.J. Redick jokes, but I needed to test something, and it's a cheap excuse for a post...)
drorzel | June 14, 2006Tara wrote a post about pressure to be perfect a few days back. This collided somewhat weirdly with this month's Rolling Stone piece on Duke (cashing in on the lacrosse scandal), which includes a few serious issues among a bunch of credulous stuff about sex:
In 2003, Duke launched a yearlong study, known as the ''Duke Women's Initiative,'' to look at the social attitudes and concerns of women on campus. What they found was alarming, says Donna Lisker, director of Duke University's women's center. The kind of hyperactivity Allison describes is typical among female undergraduates, whom, Lisker…
drorzel | June 14, 2006The esteemed Dr. Free-Ride has a post about politics responding to Sean Carroll's recap of Yearly Kos. Both of them say things about the practice of politics that nicely encapsulate why I'm not a political activist-- I'm too much of an academic:
Sean:
Deep down, though, I learned once again that an environment of political activism is not for me. I've volunteered and been active politically in very minor ways in the past, and I am always reminded that I should go back to academia where I belong. Of necessity, political action feeds on fervent commitment to the cause and a deep-seated…
drorzel | June 14, 2006Rob Knop talks about a great teaching moment: A student who refused to just smile and nod:
I was very grateful for that student. You see, when professors ask, "do you understand that?", it's not a test. It's not the professor trying to catch the students up in admitting to being confused, it's not the professor trying to sepearate the good students (Hermiones) from the bad students, the latter being the ones who will admit to struggling with the material. When we ask the question "do you understand that?" we ask it because we want to, yes, find out if the students understood what we just did…
drorzel | June 13, 2006Weirdly, this week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question may be the hardest one to answer yet:
Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?
Most of the responses have taken this as an "If you had it to do over, what sort of scientist would you be?", and that's the source of the problem. It's not that the question itself is all that difficult-- I actually have a stock answer for that. The problem is that I don't really like the premise of the question (he says cryptically, promising to explain…
drorzel | June 13, 2006Inside Higher Ed has a story this morning about Smith College moving toward requiring math. Smith, a women's college in Massacusetts, has had an "open curriculum" (i.e., no requirements at all) for many years, which has allowed lots of students to graduate without ever taking a course requiring math or mathematical reasoning.
They haven't introduced a requirement yet, but they're apparently leaning in that direction. As you might expect, I'm all in favor of this-- I think we need to demand a greater level of mathematical knowledge from all our college graduates.
As a confirmed liberal arts…
drorzel | June 13, 2006There's a piece in the New York Times this morning about a German project to send a balloon-borne rover to Mars that's got a little something for everyone. It's a Mars mission, which never gets old, but it's also a privately financed project, and thus a nice demonstration of the power of private enterprise, for those who favor private space exploration. It's not quite clear to me that what they're proposing will work (one or two of the elements sound a little goofy), but they're certainly fired up about it.
And really, why shouldn't they be? Balloons on Mars are just cool.
drorzel | June 12, 2006One of my least favorite end-of-term rituals for faculty is the dreaded student course evaluations. These have two components: the numerical bubble-sheet evaluations, which provide the pseudo-quantitatvie evaluation used to compare courses, and written responses to a half-dozen very general questions. The latter are at least potentially more useful, particularly when the standard questions are supplemented with some class-specific questions, and end up providing some of the most useful feedback on my teaching (though this sometimes includes things I can't do much about, such as the student…
drorzel | June 12, 2006Miscellaneous thoughts prompted by yesterday's Commencement:
- Like most of the graduations I've been to, Union's academic procession is led by a pipe and drum band. Why is that? What is it about academia and bagpipes?
- Also like most of the graduatiions I've been to, Union's graduation is held early on Sunday morning, with the students required to vacate campus housing by 5:00 that afternoon. This means that all the really big student parties are the night before, which in turn means that a large fraction of the graduating class is nursing a bad hangover during the procession and speeches.…
drorzel | June 12, 2006Between graduation yesterday and a trip to Williamstown Saturday (to see the Clark brothers exhibit, which was very cool), I didn't actually get to watch much soccer over the weekend. I caught most of the second half of the ancestral homeland's humiliating loss to Ecuador, and most of England's one-nil victory over Paraguay (though not the actual goal).
Scattered thoughts below the fold:
Boy, do American soccer announcers suck. The guys doing the England game for ESPN were just dull. In contrast, the YooKaydain team they had for Poland-Ecuador (One English, one Irish) was a hoot. At one point…
drorzel | June 11, 2006Today was Commencement at Union, and a cold and miserable morning for it. Normally, the faculty are grateful for our spots on the Library collonnade, where we're out of the sun, and able to enjoy a slight breeze, but today, it was about twenty degrees colder than normal, and the breeze was more of a gale. Global warming, my ass.
It was also a memorable commencement for me personally, as it marked the graduation of my first group of advisees. Last year was the first class I'd seen all the way through their four years of college, and this year's bunch was the first class in which I was assigned…
drorzel | June 10, 2006By the numbers:
Exams graded: 16
Mean exam grade: 64%
Mean final grade for Physics 121: B-
Papers assigned: 17
Papers received and graded: 16
Mean final grade for Physics 311: B+
Students receiving grades of Incomplete: 1
Large bottles of Scottish ale drunk while watching "Dr. Who": 1
And another academic year is in the books, but for a few odds and ends (one seriously ill student who needs to get me a final paper, receiving my course comment sheets for the term). This is the last term that will count toward my tenure review on the teaching side, so I'm vaguely apprehensive about the course…
drorzel | June 10, 2006Large meteorite hits northern Norway:
A large meteorite struck in northern Norway this week, landing with an impact an astronomer compared to the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima.
The meteorite appeared as a ball of fire just after 2 a.m. Wednesday, visible across several hundred miles in the sunlit summer sky above the Arctic Circle, Aftenposten reported.
My favorite bit of the (very short) story is this living-in-the-future moment, though:
Peter Bruvold, a farmer, said he happened to be out in the fields with a camera because he was tending a foaling mare and he photographed the fireball.…
drorzel | June 9, 2006A big event took place at noon Eastern time today. That's right, the soccer World Cup has started, and as I type this, Germany leads Costa Rica 2-1.
Oh, yeah, and because the science nerds need something to do while the sports fans are all obsessing over soccer, the new, improved ScienceBlogs front page launched, along with a whole host of new blogs joining the ScienceBlogs family. They're still a little light on physicists, with Dynamics of Cats being the only other physics type, but the drive to absorb all halfway decent science-themed blogs out there continues.
Should be plenty of stuff…
drorzel | June 9, 2006It's been a while since I did a True Lab Story, and it seems like an appropriate sort of topic for a rainy Friday when I have grades to finish. I'm running out of really good personal anecdotes, but there are still a few left before I have to move entirely to hearsay. And who knows, maybe I'll break something in spectacular fashion between now and then...
Anyway, lab safety offices are a rich source of True Lab Stories. Not just because they have to clean up from the really spectacular disasters, but also because their desire to prevent disasters sometimes leads to inflexible applications of…
drorzel | June 9, 2006Kate mentioned this story to me yesterday, and today, it's made the New York Times:
Fed up with the inability of two lawyers to agree on a trivial issue in an insurance lawsuit, a federal judge in Florida this week ordered them to "convene at a neutral site" and "engage in one (1) game of 'rock, paper, scissors' " to settle the matter.[...]
The proximate cause of Judge Presnell's ruling, issued Tuesday, was a motion saying the two lawyers in the case could not agree about where to conduct the deposition of a witness. The choices were the building where they both work, four floors apart, or a…
drorzel | June 8, 2006Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll (SF reviewer and walking True Lab Story) is discussing the best novels of the 1990's. He doesn't have the "SF" in there, but it's sort of implicit, because that's what James does.
Keeping up the literary/ pop culture bent of the last couple of weeks (there'll be science stuff soon, but it's the end of the term, and I don't even want to think about physics right at the moment-- it reminds me of the grading I should be doing), I'll post some suggestions after the cut. The list will mostly be SF, because that's the bulk of my reading, but I'll mix in a few…
drorzel | June 8, 2006Because it's not science without graphs:
(Click for larger image.)
Basically the same deal as the last time I posted one of these. It pretty much breaks into three parts: 1) The initial "eat less and exercise" weight-loss plan, with a linear slope through January and February, 2) The "heartburn diet" plan, when the gastroenterologists made me really paranoid about food triggers, and I really restricted what I ate, leading to the steeper downward slope, and 3) The "screw the doctors" plan, where I gave up on trying to find foods that would eliminate the problem, and started eating a bit more…
drorzel | June 8, 2006Look-- miniature dinosaurs! OK, fine, they're not that small:
These "dwarf" dinosaurs were slightly longer and heavier than a car, Sander said. "They stopped growing when they reached 6 metres [20 feet] in length and a ton in body mass," he estimated. Their brachiosaur cousins, by contrast, were up to 45 metres (148 feet) long and weighed 80 tons, as much as a small town of over 1,000 inhabitants.
Still, miniature dinosaurs are cool...