drorzel | June 7, 2006My Quantum Optics class this term is a junior/ senior level elective, one of a set of four or five such classes that we rotate through, offering one or two a year. We require physics majors to take one of these classes in order to graduate, and encourage grad-school-bound students to take as many as they can fit in their schedule.
Students in all majors are also required to take five "Writing Across the Curriculum" classes, which are intended to be courses with a strong writing component that should build their writing skills both in their discipline and out. As you might imagine, the bulk of…
drorzel | June 7, 2006Over at Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse recommends mystery writers, and touches on something that's always puzzled me about the genre:
Like Symons [Robert Barnard] has largely eschewed the detective series, which is probably has kept his profile lower than it could have been, but there is one recurring character--the english way of death.
I've really never understood why it is that mystery novels always seem to come in series. In fact, it's not unusual to see a debut novel hailed for introducing a series, which always seems sort of premature to me.
Why is that, anyway? That is, why is the…
drorzel | June 7, 2006A little while back, Eugene Wallingford wrote about the dumbing-down of cookbooks as a metaphor for computer science education. As we get a fair number of student in introductory calculus-based physics who can barely take a derivative of a polynomial, I have some sympathy with what he describes.
The cookbook thing, though, is interesting from a different angle. The article Eugene linked has some interesting quotes from people in the cooking business, including this one:
"We're now two generations into a lack of culinary knowledge being passed down from our parents," said Richard Ruben, a New…
drorzel | June 7, 2006Over at Gene Expression, Razib responds to my brain drain comments in a way that provokes some twinges of Liberal Guilt:
Second, Chad like many others points to the issue of foreign scientists allowing us (Americans) to be complacent about nourishing home grown talent. I don't totally dismiss this, there are probably many doctors and lawyers out there who could be scientists if the incentives were right (Ph.D. scientists are one of the least compensated groups in relation to how much education they have). But, I would frankly rather focus on tightening labor supply on the low end of the…
drorzel | June 6, 2006Another week, another "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question. This week, the topic is the putative "brain drain" caused by recent US policies:
Do you think there is a brain drain going on (i.e. foreign scientists not coming to work and study in the U.S. like they used to, because of new immigration rules and the general unpopularity of the U.S.) If so, what are its implications? Is there anything we can do about it?
This is really three questions, with a fourth sort of assumed on the way to the third. Answers below the fold.
The first question is "Is there a 'brain drain' going on?" That one, I can…
drorzel | June 6, 2006I've been watching Netflix DVD's of the late, lamented Homicide: Life of the Street lately, and a little while back, I went through the DVED's of the first season of The Wire, which shares some of the same creative team. In particular, both series were based in part on work by David Simon, whose Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets tracked the Homicide unit of the Baltimore Police for a full year.
I've been curious about the book for a while, and finally checked it out of the library a couple of weeks ago. It's a fascinating story in its own right-- Simon had unprecedented access to the…
drorzel | June 6, 2006I'm sort of on a roll of unpleasantly political posts lately, which I try to avoid. I can't really not link Scalzi on the framing of gay marriage, though:
There's a manifest difference in a debate which has as its founding proposition that same-sex marriage is a theoretical construct in the US -- which is the proposition marriage bigots want to promote -- and the debate which has as its founding proposition that same-sex marriages are already here, and there thousands of them. The latter forces the marriage bigots to come out and admit that their proposed amendment and their goals destroy…
drorzel | June 5, 2006Kate's come up with a semi-ambitious plan for the summer: She's going to re-read The Lord of the Rings (for the first time since the movies came out), and post chapter-by-chapter thoughts on her LiveJournal. At the moment, she's only gotten through the introductory material and one critical essay, but there's already some interesting discussion in comments.
I've got a little too much on my plate to read along with her (also, she reads a whole lot faster than I do), but if you think this might be interesting, there's a handy index page where updates will be posted as they appear.
drorzel | June 5, 2006Via bookslut, an interview at AlterNet with Tamara Draut, author of Strapped, a book about how hard young people have it today. The basic thesis of the book and the interview is that twenty- and thirty-somethings these days are in a uniquely bad position, because of the rising cost of college and relatively stagnant wages.
My reaction to this is sort of equal parts "There but for the grace of God go I" and "You people are doing it all wrong." The picture Draut paints does, indeed, sound pretty bleak, but it doesn't really fit my experience very well. This is really a fundamental problem with…
drorzel | June 5, 2006Locus is the semi-official magazine of SF-- its reviews are quoted almost as prominently as those of better-known mass media outlets in cover blurbs and the like-- but it remains a small operation, a "semi-prozine" in Hugo ballot terms. That means most issues aren't edited quite as carefully as they might be, and there are usually some typos or grammar errors in the reviews.
This month, there's a real gem, in Tim Pratt's review of Joe Lansdale's Retro-Pulp Tales:
Alex Irvine's "New Game in Town" is an exquisite story of small-time crooks and poo hustlers that takes a sharp turn into uncanny…
drorzel | June 4, 2006Despite generating a surprising number of comments with last week's burning question (thanks to Kate for the suggestion), we didn't actually go see X-Men III until yesterday afternoon. Short verdict: Not quite as bad as I was led to believe.
The longer version is either on Kate's LiveJournal, or below the fold.
As lots of people have said, the fundamental problem with this movie is that it really wanted to be two different movies. The Phoenix plot deserved a movie all its own (at least based on the number of comic books and Saturday morning cartoons it took up previously), and the mutant cure…
drorzel | June 4, 2006As you know, Bob, the Hugo Awards are one of the top literary honors in the field of science fiction and fantasy. They're voted on by the attendees of each year's Woldcon, held in August or September, and include awards for Best Novel, Novella, Novelette, and Short Story. I posted about the Best Novel nominees back in March when they were announced (I don't read much short fiction, so I have nothing to say about the other categories).
If you're thinking to yourself, "Yes, we know what you think, but what about everybody else?", well, have I got a URL for you. Nicholas Whyte has posted a giant…
drorzel | June 3, 2006PZ notes and article about a controversial physics demonstration:
Every year, physics teacher David Lapp brings his Korean War era M-1 carbine to school, fires a shot into a block of wood and instructs his students to calculate the velocity of the bullet.
It is a popular experiment at Mill Valley's Tamalpais High School, where students are exposed to several unique stunts that Lapp performs in his five classes every year to illustrate inertia, velocity and other complex formulae.
Turns out, it also may be illegal.
The legal problem is due to laws that were passed as an over-reaction to the…
drorzel | June 2, 2006Having been depressing and/or political for the last few posts, I feel like I ought to do something to lighten the mood. So here are some pop songs (extended beyond the canonical ten because it's the last day of classes. Woo-hoo!):
"The Devil Went Down to Georgia"Charlie Danliels Band
"Since You're Gone"The Cars
"Star Bodies"The New Pornographers
"The Band Played Waltzing Matilda"The Pogues
"Barrier Reef"Old 97's
"Oceanographer's Choice"The Mountain Goats
"How Could I Know"My Morning Jacket
"I Can't Remember"The Thorns
"Ache for You"Ben Lee
"Start Choppin'"Dinosaur Jr
"Some Girls"The Rolling…
drorzel | June 2, 2006Scalzi has the proper response to the Bush Administration's latest insult to the collective intelligence.
New York has no national monuments or icons, according to the Department of Homeland Security form obtained by ABC News. That was a key factor used to determine that New York City should have its anti-terror funds slashed by 40 percent--from $207.5 million in 2005 to $124.4 million in 2006.
But it's the Democrats who aren't serious about national security.
Honestly, every time I think these people have hit rock bottom, they find a way to tunnel a little deeper.
drorzel | June 2, 2006Matt Welch has a nice post-mortem for the 2001 blogging boom, in which he recalls the days when the whole post-September-11th-attacks thing seemed like it would really shake up American politics, and that weblogs were at the forefront of a grand realignment. That failed pretty spectacularly, didn't it?
It's a good piece, both recalling what things were like then (I didn't have a general-purpose blog yet, but I was booklogging, and regularly reading most of the top blogs of the day), and lamenting how far we've fallen. Sadly, I discovered this via Ted Barlow's farewell post. Another one, as…
drorzel | June 2, 2006The post title pretty much says it. Raymond Davis Jr., who shared the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work on detecting neutrinos, died Wednesday. The Times obituatary showed up in my RSS feeds today.
Davis got his dynamite money for the neutrino detection experiment that he ran for years in the Homestake mine, where a giant tank of industrial cleaning fluid was placed so that an occasional neutrino would react with a chlorine atom and change it into an argon atom. Every few months, Davis would sift through the thousands of gallons of liquid to pull out tens or hundreds of argon atoms, and detect…
drorzel | June 1, 2006A List of Things Thrown Five Mintues Ago is live-blogging the National Spelling Bee.
The Internet is large, and contains multitudes.
(Via a comment at Making Light.)
drorzel | June 1, 2006Back in the fall of 2000, I was a post-doc working at Yale, working on a fairly major paper (at least from the my persepctive), and starting to apply for academic jobs at small liberal arts colleges. Kate and I also got engaged that September, so we started doing a bit of wedding planning.
We decided that the most sensible thing to do would be to set the date a year and a half in the future, for just after her graduation from law school. At the time, I didn't have any job offers yet (when I interviewed for my current job, I left Schenectady the next day, and drove to Boston for our engagement…
drorzel | June 1, 2006Mark Trodden has a post endorsing the BEC videogames at the University of Colordao's Physics 2000 project. These are a bunch of Java applets demonstrating different aspects of the laser cooling and trapping process. I used to link them from my blog on Steelypips, but in the move to ScienceBlogs, I dropped the "Geek Stuff" category of sidebar links. Still, I heartily agree with the recommendation to go try these out.
They first put that site up back when I was in grad school, and somebody or another found the link and brought it up on the computer in the lab. If you read through the text, you'…