Twinkle, twinkle Have you any wool? H I J K L-M-N-O-P Up above the world so high One for the little boy who lives down the lane Now I know my A-B-C's Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full Baa, baa black sheep E F G How I wonder what you are Q R S One for the dame Like a diamond in the sky Twinkle, twinkle, little star Next time won't you sing with me? A B C D Little star Yes sir, yes sir,three bags full One for the master T U V W X Y and Z Baa, baa black sheep, Have you any wool? How I wonder what you are.

Atlas Mugged: The Ayn Rand Six Step | Common Dreams "Imagine your landlord coming to you one day and saying, "It's everyone for himself. We're not going to supply heat or water or electricity any longer, and we're not going to conduct repairs." Of course, you and the rest of the tenants wouldn't stand for such a thing . You'd kick him out if you could and move out if you couldn't. But suppose, over the years, he cuts the part of the portion of your rent that goes to utilities and repair work. Year after year, he'd stop by and announce his cuts with great fanfare, telling you how much money…

Smartypants: What it means to be the first African American President...getting your buttons pushed "We have probably all grappled with the experience that has been labelled "getting our buttons pushed." What we tend to mean by that is that there are people who know our sore spots...those places where we tend to react (in anger) because we have been hurt there before. When people know our sore spots and want to get us off our game, they can manipulate us into the reaction they're after. And so, for most of us, we have to eventually learn to deal with those issues to heal the hurt that caused…

As mentioned earlier in the week, I recently read Charles C. Mann's 1493 (see also this interview at Razib's place), which includes a long section about the colony at Jamestown. Like most such operations, the earliest colonists were almost comically incompetent, managing to nearly starve to death several times, despite being in an absurdly fertile region, and nearly running out of money on multiple occasions before they stumbled on the idea of tobacco as a cash crop (at which point they nearly starved again because all agricultural activity shifted to tobacco, and they needed to force people…

How where you live affects the life you prefer. Or not. | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network "How do people value a better life? The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently released the Better Life Index, an interactive graphic that lets you rank 11 different dimensions (income, environment, life satisfaction, etc.) to see how different countries perform, and then "share" your ranking. Since it launched a few months ago, the OECD has been collecting data about what different people who visit the website rank as the most important values to a better…

Our next-door neighbors are awesomely nice, and helped Kate move all the breakable stuff in the back yard out of harm's way before the big storm this past weekend (since I left town before it was clear that Albany would get hit). as a thank-you, Kate and SteelyKid baked cookies for them. But you don't have to just watch-- you can help, too: (Seriously, that's what she's saying, here: "You can help, too, Daddy.") A couple more pictures showing the mixing process are below the fold. Kate measured everything out, and controlled the mixer, but SteelyKid was in charge of carefully adding…

While I was out in Denver, Joss Ives had a nice post asking what courses are essential in a physics degree?. This is an eternal topic of discussion in undergraduate education circles, and I don't really have a definitive answer. It's an excellent topic for a poll, though, so here you go: Which of the following courses are essential for an undergraduate degree in physics? "Essential" here means "it would be kind of ridiculous to award a physics degree to a student who hadn't had this class." A class that is nice to have, but could be picked up in graduate school if necessary does not count as…

As previously noted, I'm planning to do more active-learning stuff in my intro mechanics courses this fall (starting next Tuesday), and as a result have been reading/ watching a lot of material on this (which, by the way, includes far too many slickly produced sales videos and not nearly enough "here's an example video of a full class using this technique"). This is doing little to make me less apprehensive-- most of these assume both a leisurely semester calendar and TA-led recitation sections for teaching problem-solving-- but I still like the idea, and want to give it a go. One of the…

How to read academic research (beginner's guide) Some basic tips on finding useful information, and the rudimentary statistical knowledge you need to make sense of it. Most applicable in the social and life sciences, but worth knowing for anybody. A Quick Look at How Our Kids Are Doing | Mother Jones "I'm pretty sure I've posted this before in one form or another, and I'm not sure what prompted me to do it again, but every once in a while I feel the urge to present some raw data about how our kids are doing in school. The charts below are taken directly from the most recent NAEP report card…

A currently popular explanation for the increasing price of higher education is that all those tuition dollars are being soaked up by bloated bureaucracy-- that is, that there are too many administrators for the number of faculty and students involved. While I like this better than the "tenured faculty are greedy and lazy" explanation you sometimes hear, I'm not sure it's any more valid. In part because proponents make it difficult to see if it's any more valid. One of the major proponents of the administrative bloat idea is Benjamin Ginsberg, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, who is…

Back when I reviewed Mann's pop-archaeology classic 1491, I mentioned that I'd held off reading it for a while for fear that it would be excessively polemical in a "Cortez the Killer" kind of way. Happily, it was not, so when I saw he had a sequel coming out, I didn't hesitate to pick it up (in electronic form, this time). As you can probably guess from the title and subtitle, 1493 is about what happened after Europeans made contact with the Americas. This covers a wide range of material, from straight history, to biology, to economics, but the central theme of the whole thing is basically…

I get a lot of publicist-generated email these days, asking me to promote something or another on the blog. Most of these I ignore-- far too many of them are for right-wing political candidates-- but I got one a little while back promoting a program airing tonight, called Project Shiphunt, which included a link to watch a preview of the show. And since I needed stuff to watch on my laptop while SteelyKid falls asleep, I checked it out, and it's pretty good. As the title suggests, it's a show about finding a sunken ship. Specifically, finding a sunken ship in Lake Huron, that went down a…

Sometimes I Take a Great Notion to Jump in the River and Drown | Alas, a Blog "Now, it's true, the storm did not particularly batter New York City. And I think anyone with an ounce of compassion and decency would view that as an overwhelmingly good thing. A major hurricane battering the largest city in America would be a bad thing. But declaring immediately as Irene passed that it had done no damage, that it had been of no consequence, seemed rather haughty. After all, Irene had not merely struck New York City. It affected states as far south as North Carolina, and as far north as the…

My father's a huge fan of the Weather Channel, something I've never really gotten into. I did watch a bunch of its hurricane coverage on Sunday, though, trying to figure out how my travel was going to be affected. Thus, I got to see a really fabulous exchange as the studio anchor tossed to a field reporter on a boardwalk in New York City after learning that the storm had been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm. Paraphrasing from memory: ANCHOR: [Reporter], we've just learned that Irene has been downgraded to a tropical storm. Has that changed anything where you are? REPORTER: […

As previously noted, I was in Denver for a long weekend with friends from college. I spent a fair bit of time checking the projected storm track and airport closings, but they kept saying Albany was going to stay open until late Saturday, when there wasn't time to do anything about it. Yesterday morning, every flight listed on the Albany International Airport web site was canceled (except for a few Delta flights that showed as arriving early, which knowing Delta, I attribute to incompetent data entry), except mine and a few later Southwest flights. I fully expected to be spending last night…

The week before last, I finished writing up a pedagogical paper I've been meaning to write for some time, and sent it off to The Physics Teacher. A couple of days ago, it occurred to me that I could probably post that to the arxiv. So I did, just before I left town for an extended weekend reliving my college days: Investigating Systematic Uncertainty and Experimental Design with Projectile Launchers The proper choice of a measurement technique that minimizes systematic and random uncertainty is an essential part of experimental physics. These issues are difficult to teach in the introductory…

SteelyKid has recently discovered the game hide-and-seek. Shhh! She's hiding right now. Can you guess where she is? You can't tell from the picture, of course, but just in case it wasn't obvious where she's hiding, she usually calls out when you get kind of close. Or even jumps out of her hiding place yelling "Ta-da!" She's got a ways to go before she's ready for the Olympics. the important thing is to have fun, though: This is from an extended period of "hiding" with Kate under the green blanket, then pulling the blanket down and laughing uproariously. It was the funniest thing in the…

A Higgs Setback: Did Stephen Hawking Just Win the Most Outrageous Bet in Physics History? | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network Overblown anti-Higgs hype, just for balance. News: Breaking Bread - Inside Higher Ed "For the project, students were asked about their views on the state of race relations on campus. Not surprisingly (as this is the case at many places), the views of white students about the state of race relations were generally much more positive than those of minority students. Then the sociologists looked at what factors were linked to whether students had a more…

I don't think my point quite got across the other day, so let me try phrasing this another way. I think a lot of what's being written about pseudonymity on blogs is missing the real point. The really important question here is not so much whether blog networks should allow pseudonymous blogs as whether employers should allow their employees to blog about what they do in their day jobs. Things like the much-cited Epi-Ren case are not really evidence of the risk of blogging under your own name, they're evidence of the risk of blogging when your employer doesn't want you to. Pseudonymity is a…

The new school year is upon us, so there's been a lot of talk about academia and how it works recently. This has included a lot of talk about the cost of higher education, as has been the case more or less since I've been aware of the cost of higher education. A lot of people have been referring to a "Student Loan Bubble," such as Dean Dad, who points to this graph from Daniel Indiviglio as an illustration: That post is a week old, which is a hundred years in blog time, and I wish I'd gotten to it sooner, because it's a terrible graph. Indiviglio says: This chart looks like a mistake, but it…