drorzel | June 21, 2012In which we look at the failure of elites, and the international language of bad dancing.
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Why Elites Fail | The Nation
A pure functioning meritocracy would produce a society with growing inequality, but that inequality would come along with a correlated increase in social mobility. As the educational system and business world got better and better at finding inherent merit wherever it lay, you would see the bright kids of the poor boosted to the upper echelons of society, with the untalented progeny of the best and brightest relegated to the bottom of the social pyramid where…
drorzel | June 20, 2012In which we look at how the Brave New Publishing World makes it really hard to find something good to read.
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In a recent links dump, I included a link to this post about the current state of publishing, which is a follow-up to an earlier post about the current state of publishing. Elsewhere in my social media universe, this has come in for a lot of derision from anti-publishing friends, particularly the bit where the author complains that there are too many books published. "How can there be such a thing?" is the basic thrust of the thing. "The more books, the better!"…
drorzel | June 20, 2012In which the great blog recap rolls on to probably the most important event of the last ten years: the arrival of SteelyKid. And a bunch of other bloggy stuff.
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There's really no question what should be the featured image for this recap post: Clearly, it needs to be an early photo of SteelyKid, who arrived not quite four years ago, and soon made friends with Appa the stuffed sky-bison. Sadly, we haven't been very good about doing regular pictures of The Pip, mostly because it's so exhausting to keep up with the two of them.
Of course, regular blogging continued as well. This seems…
drorzel | June 20, 2012In which we look at failures of academic collegiality, the allocation of resources in the liberal arts, teaching as a big grey area, advice for new teachers, common misconceptions about education, an ambitious plan to reform jury duty, and a former member of Fred Phelps's hateful Westboro Baptist Church.
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Confessions of a Community College Dean: Collegiality
In traditional higher ed, there is neither a meaningful bottom line for most individuals, nor a credible threat of exit. There’s an institutional bottom line, in the sense of a budget that has to be met, but the consequences…
drorzel | June 19, 2012In which we look back at a very political, perhaps excessively political year on the blog.
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I'm picking up the pace of my recap because I'd like to get through as much as possible before the actual tenth anniversary of the blog this Friday. I won't get through every year, but I'm going to try to do as many as I can.
2007-2008 was a somewhat problematic year for me. On the one hand, there was some pretty good stuff in there, but there were also a number of ugly political squabbles. This was around the time I stopped even trying to read all of ScienceBlogs, and trimmed my RSS…
drorzel | June 19, 2012In which we look at a slightly crazy-sounding proposal from my former boss, the experimental realization of which is getting close to completion.
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I spent more or less the entire first day of DAMOP a couple of weeks ago going to precision measurement talks. Most of these were relatively sedate (at least by the standards of a sub-field that routinely involves people proposing incredibly difficult experiments), but my boss when I was at Yale, Mark Kasevich, provided the bold proposals I usually expect, in this case suggesting an experiment using an atom interferometer to measure…
drorzel | June 19, 2012In which we look at an impassioned plea from a gay seminarian, a satirical video about the Singularity, and two more dispatches from the imminent death of traditional publishing.
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Letter from a gay Christian classmate « Mercy not Sacrifice
I am asking you to set aside your quiet whispers for a potent disquietude; I’m asking you to turn over a few tables in the temple; I’m asking you to upbraid the violent language of your church; I’m asking you to openly speak truth to power, as one you said you would; I’m asking you to do risk crucifixion within your order; I’m asking for your…
drorzel | June 18, 2012In which we look back at a particularly eventful year for the blog.
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The ScienceBlogs archives aren't really set up very well for reading straight through, so as we reach this part of our historical recap, I've changed methodology. Since I have better analytics for the ScienceBlogs years than the Steelypips ones, I've got a list of the most-read posts in the history of the blog on ScienceBlogs, which I'm using as a starting point for the recap. This is a highly imperfect method, I realize, and the recent "upgrade" of Google Analytics made it inordinately difficult to get this…
drorzel | June 18, 2012So, anyway, as of today, I'm apparently the same age as the Reverend D. Wayne Love in 1998 or thereabouts.
And the sound makes its way outta the window
Minglin' with the traffic noises outside, you know and
All of a sudden I'm overcome by a feelin' of brief mortality
'Cause I'm gettin' on in the world
Comin' up on forty-one years
Forty-one stony gray steps towards the grave
You know the box, awaits its grisly load
Now, I'm gonna be food for worms
(I'm not really that depressed about this birthday, but it's such a random age to be mentioned in a song, and it sticks in my head. And it's a…
drorzel | June 18, 2012In which we look at basketball analytics, complaints about ancient Rome, the latest dispatch from the imminent death of publishing, and the optics of spy satellites.
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Where the Heat and the Thunder Hit Their Shots - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com
The shooting patterns for the players on the Miami Heat and the Oklahoma City Thunder reveal where they are most dangerous on the court. Below, compare each player’s strengths using court maps and analysis by Kirk Goldsberry, a geography professor at Michigan State.
The Seven Plagues of the Ancient Roman City Dweller | The Getty Iris…
drorzel | June 15, 2012In which we look at the job situation for different specializations, yet another dumb modest proposal to fix education, and a smackdown of NBA players who are ignorant of fashion history.
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Physics and Physicists: Job Advertisements For Theorists and Experimentalists In Physics Today Apr/May 2012
Anyone reading my blog on the Problem in Pursuing To Be A Theorist would have read comments that disputed my claim that there are less job positions for theorists to practice what they want to do versus that of experimentalists. To make a check on how far off (or on) I was, I did a quick…
drorzel | June 14, 2012Last night, as I was flying in to San Francisco, Matt Cain pitched the first perfect game in Giants history. Now, a casual observer might think these events were unrelated, but to ancient alien theorists, the connection between them could not be more obvious. Thus, you should come to Kepler's Books in Menlo Park this evening at 7pm, to see what amazing events will happen next.
Well, OK, the most that will probably happen is that I might read a bit from the How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog in a silly voice. But you don't know that I won't use my awesome ancient alien magic to transmute lead…
drorzel | June 14, 2012In which physics tackles a burning question from the world of computing, a famous biologist says something idiotic, and the world's smallest violin plays for frequent fliers.
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Does Your Download Progress Bar Lie to You? | Wired Science | Wired.com
Different browsers do this differently. Some show a little bar to indicate how much of the file you have downloaded as well as an estimate of how much longer you can expect to wait. Well, now the time has come. I am going to check these download progress bars. Why? I have no idea.
"Was Einstein Right About Imagination?" - THE DAILY RIFF…
drorzel | June 13, 2012I just realized that I forgot to do the annual congratulatory post for our graduates this year. I plead jet lag-- my flight back from DAMOP didn't get in until after midnight, and graduation was first thing Sunday morning. I didn't march in the procession for only the third time-- instead, I snuck around back to stand with the faculty and congratulate the graduates as they went by.
This has been a long and incredibly stressful year for reasons that I can't really go into, so I'm not that sorry to see it end. This is no reflection on this year's graduating physics majors and minor, though, to…
drorzel | June 13, 2012In which we look at the end of the Steelypips era and the launch of ScienceBlogs.
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Before the Great Upgrade derailed things completely for a month, I was working on a recap of this blog's history, and had gotten up through the end of 2005, which marked the end of my time as an independent blogger.
I was first approached about the idea of ScienceBlogs in late 2005 by Christopher Mims, then at Seed magazine, who later tweeted a secret history of ScienceBlogs. I was initially a little apprehensive about the idea, as I was still pre-tenure at that time, and hadn't attempted to explain…
drorzel | June 12, 2012In which we look again at the question of why, despite the image of physicists as arrogant bastards, biologists turn out to be much less collegial than physicists.
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While I was away from the blog, there was a spate of discussion of science outreach and demands on faculty time, my feelings about which are a little too complicated to boil down to a blog post in the time I have available. I did notice one thing in Jeanne Garb's guest blog post at Nature Networks:
Yet, given the current system, most scientists are choosing to keep a closed-notebook policy because they fear getting…
drorzel | June 12, 2012In which we look at a great commencement speech, the oversupply of mediocrity, the nominees for a science blogging award, and Facebook games distilled to their essence.
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Wellesley High grads told: “You’re not special” | The Swellesley Report
Yes, you’ve been pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped. Yes, capable adults with other things to do have held you, kissed you, fed you, wiped your mouth, wiped your bottom, trained you, taught you, tutored you, coached you, listened to you, counseled you, encouraged you, consoled you and encouraged you again. You’ve been…
drorzel | June 11, 2012Two How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog items:
First and foremost, I'll be appearing at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, CA, this Thursday, June 14 at 7:00pm. I'll probably read a bit of the book, so if you've ever wanted to hear me do the silly dog voice live, here's your chance. Provided, of course, that you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, or will be this Thursday night.
This will be my second trip to California in as many weeks, because all last week I was at DAMOP in Anaheim (the Chain-Restaurant-est Place on Earth). I spent a fair bit of time there explaining the whole talking-to-the-dog…
drorzel | June 4, 2012In which we do a little ResearchBlogging, taking a look at a slightly confusing paper putting a new twist on the double-slit experiment.
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I'm off to California this afternoon, spending the rest of the week at DAMOP in Pasadena (not presenting this year, just hanging out to see the coolest new stuff in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics). I don't want to leave the blog with just a cute-kid video for the whole week, though, so here's some had-core physics: a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (freely available online), looking at a new sort of…
drorzel | June 4, 2012In which we look at a prize for science blogging, a new book club, and the unhappy situation of associate professors.
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3quarksdaily: Sean Carroll to Judge 4th Annual 3QD Science Prize
As usual, this is the way it will work: the nominating period is now open, and will end at 11:59 pm EST on June 9, 2012. There will then be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza…