drorzel | June 1, 2006Via sennoma (I'm not sure that link will work, as the server appeared to be down this morning), Hunter S. Thompson's obituary for Nixon:
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
You know, in…
drorzel | May 31, 2006This week's question from our Corporate Masters has to do with the ever-popular issue of funding:
Since they're funded by taxpayer dollars (through the NIH, NSF, and so on), should scientists have to justify their research agendas to the public, rather than just grant-making bodies?
"Justify" is an awfully strong word, here...
The answer to this question is "yes and no," because there are a couple of ways to take this. If you mean "should individual scientists be required to justify their specific research activities to the general public?" then the answer is a clear "no." But if you take it…
drorzel | May 31, 2006We had an interesting colloquium yesterday from Mark Walker, a colleague in the History department, on the subject of Peter Debye, a Dutch chemist and Nobel laureate. It seems that a book published last year on Einstein in the Netherlands included some material accusing Debye of being a Nazi collaborator, which touched off a major controversy. The University of Utrecht renamed their Debye Institute, and Maastrichty University removed Debye's name from a scientific research prize.
The main point of the talk is pretty well summarized in the piece Mark co-wrote for the German Physical Society (…
drorzel | May 30, 2006Two news stories today relating to students' intake of various substances, and the people who want to control them:
First, an essay in the New York Times about misguided anti-obesity measures in the public schools. It's got the requisite list of dodgy medical statistics, and some shots at the BMI as a measure of "obesity."
At a higher educational level, there's an Inside Higher Ed piece about debates over the definition of "binge drinking." Some people think that the current definition of 4-5 drinks in a two-hour period is too restrictive, and that efforts ought to be focussed on people who…
drorzel | May 30, 2006There's an interesting story in the Times this morning about efforts to make robotic space probes more autonomous. The idea is that it would be nice to be able to explore the Solar System without the big delays introduced by light-speed communications lags. In the absence of an ansible, autonomous robots are the best way to accomplish this.
I don't really have anything to add, I just wanted to note the article. I'm going to start posting more short link-y things, for a variety of reasons, and this is one such post.
drorzel | May 30, 2006While channel-surfing the other night, I caught a few minutes of a program claiming to present the "100 Funniest Movies of All Time," and was a little baffled at the choices I saw represented. As with most list shows, it was way too heavy on recent stuff (The 40-Year-Old Virgin might be really funny, but it's too recent to be on an all-time list), but they seemed to be particularly misguided, even by the standards of pop-culture list shows.
I didn't watch much of it, but today Ed Brayton has the full list, and it's clear that the producers are using "funny" in a different sense than I do. Ed…
drorzel | May 29, 2006I gained about fifty pounds my freshman year in college (from ~190 lbs in high school to ~240 labs by the end of the year), owing to taking up rugby and a beer-heavy diet. Since then, people who meet me generally assume that I played football in high school-- in fact, that was probably the biggest indicator of the weight gain (other than, you know, clothes fitting differently)-- people stopped asking me whether I played basketball, and started asking what position I played in football.
In fact, I never played organized football-- basically because the coach when I was in Jr. High was a jerk,…
drorzel | May 29, 2006One of my two classes this term (Quantum Optics) is a junior/senior level elective, and when I teach those sorts of classes, I like to invite the students over to the house for dinner (they're paying $40K/year for the Liberal Arts College Experience, after all...). The problem this year is that it's also a very large class-- 17 studnets, almost unheard-of for a class at that level. Our house doesn't have room to hold 17 students. We barely even have 17 chairs.
This isn't a problem, as long as they can be outside, which is what I prefer, anyway-- I usually make spiedies on the grill, and the…
drorzel | May 27, 2006A couple of link-worthy posts dealing with the true nature of academia:
Over at the Little Professor, Miriam Burstein addresses the movie cliches of academia (spinning off a post at Michael Berube's blog).
Meanwhile, Dr. Free-Ride discusses the finer points of tailoring academic regalia, which is useful information as graduation season approaches. (My own cheap robes came with a zipper in the front, and I use a safety pin to hold the hood in place...)
And the Dean Dad has a nice discussion of the permanence of temporary solutions in the academic world.
As for my own glamorous academic life, I…
drorzel | May 26, 2006Gandalf or Magneto?
(Look, it's the ninth week of our ten-week Spring term, and including the Winter term, we've been in session since January with only a one-week break. I'm getting a little punchy, all right?)
drorzel | May 26, 2006Over in the right-hand sidebar, Seed is pushing a short piece on Laurie Pycroft, a 16-year-old Briton who founded Pro-Test, an organization supporting animal testing. This was all over the UK papers a couple of months ago, and a little Googling turns up a piece by Pycroft himself telling the story of the group's origins.
(Note to Seed overlords: I shouldn't need to Google this stuff. Why not put a link to Pycroft's web site in the web version of the article?)
I have to say, I'm terribly disappointed with what this says about the state of modern youth, particularly in Europe. Doesn't he know…
drorzel | May 26, 2006Today finds Kieran Healy counting words, and Hedwig the Grrlscientist tallying visits, so that must count as a blog statistics meme. Or something.
Out of curiosity, I checked the Google Analytics stats for this site, and was bemused to discover that as of sometime this morning, there have been 141,183 unique visits to this site since the site went live in January. That's a pittance compared to PZ's two million plus, but I find it slightly boggling.
Back when we were working on the transition, Kate and I spent a little time trying to determine the traffic on the old Steelypips site (…
drorzel | May 26, 2006It's not really all that flame-tastic, but Janet has a nice post on the women in science thing, taking off from yesterday's post, and my comment that I don't really have the energy to wage a "women in science" flamewar at the moment. If you do have the energy, head over to Janet's blog. But read her post before getting too fired up, because she makes some interesting points about nerd culture and gender issues.
drorzel | May 25, 2006The science story of the day is probably the Department of Education Report on science test scores, cited in this morning's New York Times. They administered a test to fourth, eight, and twelfth-graders nationwide, aking basic science questions, and compared the scores to similar tests given in 1996 and 2000. (Update: John Lynch has some thoughts, and includes a couple of the questions.)
The headline-grabbing result is that the twelfth-grade scroes are down over the last ten years, while the fourth-grade scores rose. The educational system of the nation is clearly in free-fall, and we'll all…
drorzel | May 25, 2006Scott Aaronson takes up the eternal question of why there are so few women in science. His contribution to the nature/ nurture side of the debate is particularly noteworthy:
To put the point differently: suppose (hypothetically) that what repelled women from computer science were all the vending-machine-fueled all-nighters, empty pizza boxes stacked to the ceiling, napping coders drooling on the office futon, etc.; and indeed that men would be repelled by such things as well, were it not for a particular gene on the Y chromosome called PGSTY-8. In that case, would the "cause" of the gender…
drorzel | May 24, 2006Dave Bacon asks, I answer. Well, OK, Dave was asking how one would go about teaching quantum computing to CS undergrads, while what I provide here is a set of lectures on presenting quantum computing ideas to undergrad physics majors in my Quantum Optics class. But, really, isn't that almost the same thing (don't answer that).
The notes:
Lecture 17: Computing theory, logic gates, quantum gates, entangling operations.
Lecture 18: Quantum algorithms, the Deutsch-Josza algorithm.
Lecture 19: Physical implementations of quantum computing, the DiVincenzo Criteria.
This more or less concludes the…
drorzel | May 24, 2006This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question from On High arrived while I was out of town (see also last week's results), and I've held off answering because I had a huge stack of papers to grade. Of course, time for responding has almost run out, so I guess I ought to say something...
The question of the week is:
"If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be?"
Most of the other answers have come in already (and I'm too lazy to link them all), but they divide into two basic categories: answers dealing with the process of science, and answers…
drorzel | May 23, 2006So, in our last installment, I had purchased a bunch of classical music off iTunes, and pledged to listen to it while away at DAMOP last week. I was pretty good about it, too-- I kept the classical playlist going on the iPod all the way through the flights down there, and for listening during the week. I did abandon it for the trip back up, but only because I found myself seated in the Squalling Infant Section of the plane, and needed the more even volume distribution provided by pop music to cover the noise.
So, what were the results of the experiment? Look below the fold for details...
The…
drorzel | May 22, 2006A scientific conference like DAMOP almost always includes a conference banquet (to which people may or may not bring dates), usually the last night of the meeting, where everybody gets together to eat massive quantities of catered food and drink massive amounts of wine supplied by the conference. The quality of these ranges from your standard rubber chicken sort of fare to the multi-course gourmet meal (with a different bottle of wine for each course) provided at a conference I attended in Bordeaux.
DAMOP does all right in the food department, though you're not going to get real gourmet fare…
drorzel | May 22, 2006The problem with scheduling something like last week's Ask a ScienceBlogger for a time when I'm out of town is that any interesting discussions that turn up in comments are sort of artificially shortened because I can't hold up my end of the conversation from a remote site. I do want to respond (below the fold) to a couple of points that were raised in the comments, though, mostly having to do with my skepticism about the Singularity.
(Side note on literary matters: When I wrote dismissively that the Singularity is a silly idea, I didn't realize that I was going to spend the flight down to…