drorzel | April 10, 2012Between unpleasant work stuff and the Dread Stomach Bug wiping out the better part of five days, I only got my student evaluation comments for my winter term class last week, and I'm only getting around to writing the post-mortem now. This was, for those who may not have been obsessively following my course reports, a "Scholars Research Seminar" class with the slightly cute title "A Brief History of Timekeeping," which is intended to introduce students to scholarly research and writing. The topic for my SRS was timekeeping, specifically the development of various timekeeping technologies and…
drorzel | April 10, 2012Gymkata proves that tiny gymnasts make tough heroes | Film | Films That Time Forgot | The A.V. Club
Plot: At the height of the Reagan era, someone had the bright idea to turn diminutive, soft-voiced, mulleted gymnast Kurt Thomas into an international action star. How? By positing him as a master of "gymkata," a discipline that combines gymnastics--a sport most commonly associated with anorexic 12-year-old girls from former Soviet-bloc countries--with karate.
The anti-Walmart | David Rohde
Cashiers are barred from interacting with customers until they have completed 40 hours of training.…
drorzel | April 9, 2012 I'm trying not to be Neurotic Author Guy and obsessively check online reviews of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog every fifteen minutes. I've actually been pretty successful at it, so successful that I didn't notice the first posted review at Amazon until my parents mentioned it to me. It's a really good one, though:
I'm at the point know where I could answer some of the most basic questions that his dog has, but I remember a time when I couldn't and when the questions the dog asks would've been exactly the questions that I would have had. Pretty much every time a statement by the author…
drorzel | April 9, 2012SteelyKid has recently become obsessed with the Disney Junior show Jake and the Never Land Pirates, demanding to watch it all the time. Thanks to her two recent bouts with this year's stomach bug, I've had to watch, or at least listen to her watching in the next room, every episode that Time Warner offers on demand. Being a scientist, and thus inclined to over-analyze things, this has, of course, raised some questions:
-- The show focuses on the title character, Jake, and his friends Cubby and Izzy, who live on Pirate Island off the coast of Never Land, and spend their time thwarting the…
drorzel | April 8, 2012Today is Easter Sunday, which we celebrated in the manner of my people, by chasing soap bubbles around the backyard:
OK, that's not an actual tradition, but it was a beautiful day today, and SteelyKid got a big bottle of bubble stuff from her great-grandmother, so it seemed like the right thing to do. So she and Bodie (my parents' yellow Lab, seen in the above photo) frolicked around the yard until she was so tired that she slept all the way home. Everybody wins with Easter bubbles.
Happy Easter if you're someone who celebrates it, or at least won't get into a snit about being wished well…
drorzel | April 7, 2012The murky water of chastising and celebrating NFL violence - Grantland
Of course, it's 2012 -- the Year of Internet Self-Righteousness -- which means we need to feign disgust, pile on the Saints, argue for Williams to receive the NFL's death penalty and basically freak out that a football coach would ever do that. So let's concede the following points. No, you shouldn't instruct your players to hurt people. Yes, you should be fined and suspended for that. Yes, Gregg Williams came off like an insensitive Neanderthal, and yes, it would be difficult (if not impossible) to take him seriously as a…
drorzel | April 6, 2012I'm killing time waiting for something I can't talk about yet, so here's a silly poll to pass the time, brought to you by a couple of songs served up on the radio this morning while I was running errands:
Which of these awkward song lyrics is the worst lyrical crime against English grammar?
I thought about including "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight," but since it's a deliberate spoof, I don't think it should count.
drorzel | April 6, 2012I want a story. The story about one little pig, and the wolf.
I'll need you to help me with it, OK?
Yeah.
OK, once upon a time, there was one little pig, and he... What did he do?
He built a house out of straw.
Right. He was a little bit silly, so he built himself a house out of straw. Which is a terrible material to build a house out of.
So, then, one day, a big wolf came along, and said [scary wolf voice] "Little pig, little pig, let me in!"
But he was a NICE wolf.
Right, so he said [scary wolf voice] "Little pig, little pig, let me in! I'm a nice wolf, but I sound like this because this…
drorzel | April 6, 2012Texts from Hillary
"So then I sent her a text saying I think I left my favorite sunglasses in the desk."
Swans on Tea » Do You Have My Back?
So this whole "get back to doing science" kind of hits me where I live. I've seen budgetary fallout from recent events, and I know I'm not alone in that regard. But I also know that a tweet is not a substitute for actual action or activism. I'm a scientist. So I want to know: Do you have my back? Are you going to fund me? That is, do you recognize the value of research so that you won't complain that some fraction of a penny from your tax dollar goes…
drorzel | April 5, 2012While none of the college basketball teams I root for made the Final Four in their respective tournaments, I probably really ought to note that there is a team that might loosely be termed "mine" that's playing in the national semifinal. Then again, since they've gotten this far without me saying anything about them at all, maybe they'd be just as happy if I continued my benevolent neglect...
We're all science types here, though, so to hell with superstition: Union College, where I work, plays hockey at the NCAA Division I level, and has made it to the "Frozen Four," the semifinals of the…
drorzel | April 5, 2012Over in Scientopia, SciCurious has a nice post about suffering from Impostor Syndrome, the feeling that everyone else is smarter than you are, and you will soon be exposed as a total fraud. Which is nonsense, of course, but something that almost every scientist suffers at some point. The post ends on a more upbeat note, though, when she thinks about fighting it:
The more I thought about ways to combat imposter syndrome, either by myself or in academia in general...the more I came up with nothing. Until today, when I was working out.
I'm doing circuit training, and as I worked my way through…
drorzel | April 5, 2012Two things I was forwarded or pointed toward this week, that interact a little oddly. First chronologically is from the New York Times, which has a story about how Harvey Mudd College has boosted the number of female computer science majors, by committing serious resources to reforming the intro course (which is required of all students there):
Known as CS 5, the course focused on hard-core programming, appealing to a particular kind of student -- young men, already seasoned programmers, who dominated the class. This only reinforced the women's sense that computer science was for geeky know-…
drorzel | April 5, 2012The Gravitational Force in Angry Birds Space | Wired Science | Wired.com
As anyone that has played the game can tell you, this air looking stuff surrounding an asteroid defines a region in which the angry birds will interact with the rock. If the bird is outside of this region, there will be no force on bird. No force means no change in velocity and the bird will move along at a constant speed in the same direction. Ok, I admit it - I missed this one. Why? Why would the game do this? I have no idea, but it is probably either because it makes the game more fun to play or because it makes it…
drorzel | April 4, 2012Over in Twitterland, we have a question from WillyB:
If you had to pick one topic to cover in Physics, which do you think is the most important for the gen. public?
This sounds like a job for the Internet! To the polling machine!
If you had to pick one topic to cover in Physics, which do you think is the most important for the general public?
While several of the options allow linear superpositions of solutions, this is a purely classical poll, so you may choose only one answer. Though you should, of course, feel free to bitch about the choices in the comments.
drorzel | April 4, 2012While reading bits of Neil deGrasse Tyson's Space Chronicles yesterday, I ran across this quote, attributed to "an Assyrian clay tablet from 2800 BC":
Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.
This made me scratch my head for a couple of reasons. I've seen this quote before, but always attributed to Cicero, which sorta-kinda makes sense. Seeing it moved back in time by a few…
drorzel | April 3, 2012While in the past, I've written a bunch about basketball here, I've been unusually silent on the subject this year, confining my commentary to the occasional Links Dump item from Grantland and other sites. This isn't because the past season was not noteworthy-- indeed, it was a rather eventful year for Syracuse basketball, with the best record in school history, but a good deal of turmoil off the court. It's just that I've been too busy to watch basketball, let alone blog about it. I did manage to catch all or part of several Syracuse games, though not as many as I would've liked, because…
drorzel | April 3, 2012June 22, 2012 will mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of this blog. While I would like to one day be famous enough to be able to staple together a collection of loosely related blog posts and call it a book, I'm not there yet. This particular arbitrary numerical signifier does, however, seem worth some commemoration. Also, while I have some idea of how the site has evolved over the last ten years, it's been a slow process, so I thought it would be interesting to troll back through the archives and see how things used to be.
Next Friday, appropriately enough the 13th, will be exactly…
drorzel | April 3, 2012Science teacher: Why kids love science anyway...
We grow beans and basil in class, edible stuff from the breath they exhale--at first they resist the idea, as any reasonable creature would, and I don't give them any particular reason to believe it, but some do anyway. Kids like this. Many of the hypotheses generated in class are as good as mine. A few are better. Now and again a child develops a spectacularly good idea, beyond anything I'd likely generate. Their ideas, crafted within the nature of science, count as much as mine. Kids like this. I am wrong a lot. Science teachers in general…
drorzel | April 2, 2012So, the infamous OPERA result for neutrino speeds seems to be conclusively disproven, traced to a problem with a timing signal. Matt Strassler has a very nice explanation of the test that shows that the whole thing can almost certainly be traced to a timing error that cropped up in 2008. This problem is generally described as resulting from a "loose fiber optic cable," and Matthew Francis's reaction is fairly typical
The main culprit was a fiber optic cable that was slightly out of alignment. This is not quite a "loose wire", as it sometimes has been described: it's far more subtle and harder…
drorzel | April 2, 2012MacRecipes | Fathom
Have you ever wondered in how many different episodes MacGyver has made an arc welder (answer: 3 times in episodes 6, 52, and 87)? Or perhaps you forgot about your favorite episode (season 1, episode 12) when Mac escapes via a casket that transforms into a jetski. And how many times has Mac made a diversion? In order to placate all of your MacGyver-related curiosities, we offer you MacRecipes.
Knight Science Journalism Tracker » Blog Archive » Should science journalists actually read the scientific paper before reporting? And other questions from UK science journalists…