drorzel | August 24, 2011
To my ultra-rich readers (in the unlikely event I have any) | slacktivist
"Those seem to be the options. You can either risk losing a big pile of money for the slim chance of a decent return or you can give up on the idea of a decent return just to avoid losing a big pile of money.
But what if I told you there was another option? What if I told you that right now you have a chance to make your money go farther and do more than it ever could have done just four years ago before the world's economy ground to a halt?
And what if I told you that this option was even safer than bonds -- that if…
drorzel | August 23, 2011As long as I'm picking on education research papers in Science, I might as well call out the one immediately after the paper I wrote up in the previous post. This one, titled Graduate Students' Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills, is another paper whose basic premise I generally agree with-- they found that graduate students who had teaching responsibilities as well as research responsibilities did a better job of writing research proposals than graduate students who only did research. From all appearances, it's a good study, and makes a valuable point.
And yet,…
drorzel | August 23, 2011A while back, I Links Dumped Josh Rosenau's Post Firing Bad Teachers Doesn't Create good Teachers, arguing that rather than just firing teachers who need some improvement, schools should look at, well, helping them improve. This produced a bunch of scoffing in a place I can't link to, basically taking the view that people are either good at what they do, or they're not, and if they're not, you just fire them and hire somebody else. I was too busy to respond at the time, but marked that doen as something to come back to. So I was psyched when I saw this paper in Science about a scientific…
drorzel | August 23, 2011
'Infinite Jest' Imbues Decemberists Video by Michael Schur - NYTimes.com
"It is a project that so fully combines Mr. Schur's favorite book -- the first he ever read that he felt was written the way he thought and spoke -- and favorite band, he says he would have been crushed if anyone else had gotten the assignment.
"If Scorsese had directed it," he said, "I would have been like, why does he get that gig?"
The video, which makes its online debut on Monday, depicts the playing of Eschaton, a game invented by Wallace that he describes about 325 pages into "Infinite Jest.""
drorzel | August 22, 2011The whole issue of pseudonymity has come up again, both on Google+ and on ScienceBlogs. While I've been on the Internet for nigh on 20 years, my initial point of entry was through a Usenet group that strongly preferred real names (or something real-name-ish). As a result, I've never tried to maintain a separate Internet name-- all of my Usenet posting and all of my blogging has been under my real name. So I don't have a great deal invested in the question, on a personal level.
There are a couple of points, though, that I think are worth making about the recent discussion:
1) There's a much-…
drorzel | August 22, 2011A few people last week were linking to this press release from Fermilab, which probably says more about the state of American particle physics than anything else: it's about an experiment that they expect to be approved in 2012, to break ground in 2013, and start running in 2016. I guess with the Tevatron shutting down and nothing noteworthy from the LHC yet, this is what you have to talk about.
The experiment in question is an update of an experiment from Brookhaven in 2001, which measured the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. The value they get differs from the best theoretical value…
drorzel | August 22, 2011
hwrnmnbsol: Michele Bachmann: EXPLAINED
"[I]t seems that a great many statements made by Michele Bachmann have the effect of generating bewilderment among a certain class of the population, a class that for brevity's sake I shall label 'people who know things'.
I have a new theory to help explain some of Michele Bachmann's statements in a context that will clear up the confusion. This theory is sure to be controversial to that segment of America that is suspicious of all things theoretical, such as the theory of human-generated global warming, or equally spurious and unprovable theorems…
drorzel | August 21, 2011A physics story makes the front page of the New York Times today. Sadly, it's with the headline Laser Advances in Nuclear Fuel Stir Terror Fear. Sigh.
The key technological development, here, is that General Electric has been playing around with a laser-based isotope separation technique. This is an idea that's been around for a long time, with lots of different people working on it. GE's technology is based on an idea from some Australians back in the 1990's, and they appear to think they can scale it up to industrial scale. Predictably enough, there's a stark difference of opinion about the…
drorzel | August 21, 2011As noted a while back, the Hugo Award nominations for this year were pretty uninspiring. The actual awards were handed out last night and, well, yeah. I wasn't all that wild about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, but it at least would've been an interesting choice. But giving it to Blackout/ All Clear, a pair of books that almost nobody had anything good to say about? The only possible outcome that would've been less inspiring would've been a tie with Cryoburn.
Lower down the ballot, things are a little better. I don't read much short fiction, but lots of people who do said before the voting…
drorzel | August 21, 2011
Law, economics, and politics § Unqualified Offerings
"This is a musing on large bureaucratic organizations. I have noticed that some people get frustrated because they do not understand that law, economics, and politics are distinct things and they are not equally persuasive as arguments."
drorzel | August 20, 2011I've heard a bunch of good things about Dan Wells's John Cleaver series (a trilogy at the moment, consisting of I Am Not a Serial Killer, Mr. Monster, and I Don't Want to Kill You, but the ending of the last leaves an opening for more, should he want to write more), but I somehow didn't expect them to be quite as strongly in the Young Adult category as they are. It's a bold call, but it actually works pretty well.
The set-up here is that the first-person narrator of the series, John Wayne Cleaver, is a sociopath with all the usual traits of a serial killer in the making: pyromania, frequent…
drorzel | August 20, 2011
Things I can only teach you in research § Unqualified Offerings
"When I'm teaching a regular class, I know the answer. Or I don't know the answer, but I think I do. Or I know I don't know the answer for sure, but I'm "pretty sure" what the answer is and I'm winging it because it's just that sort of day. But I can't say the things that I said to one of my research students today. (Note that this is a condensed summary, there was a lot of discussion between us, and a lot of pauses to examine data.)"
Brian Phillips on Conan the Barbarian - Grantland
"As with Sherlock Holmes, Batman, and…
drorzel | August 19, 2011Back in June, when I was headed to DAMOP, I got email telling me that they had an official Android app. I installed it, and in with the meeting program and maps and things was a "Social Media" section, that included an official hashtag: #apsdamop.
I posted a few things using it, but it rapidly became clear that there was only one other person at the meeting using it. I happen to know him, so when I ran into him later at the poster session, I commented on how we were the only people at the meeting using the official Twitter hashtag. Someone else nearby looked baffled, and we had to explain.…
drorzel | August 19, 2011As a follow up to Wednesday's sad balloon post, the repair that lofted it back to the ceiling was a temporary reprieve, unsurprisingly. After 24 hours, more or less, it had sunk back down to the point where the ribbon was just barely touching the floor.
On the one hand, it looks kind of pathetic again. On the other hand, though, this is a chance to do some more physics. See, I know how much ribbon I clipped off the end to get it to lift off again, and if it's fallen back to where it's just touching the floor, that means that the buoyant force due to the displaced air has decreased by an…
drorzel | August 19, 2011
Jason Gay: Recreational Sports: It's Not Mortal Combat - WSJ.com
"Everybody who plays a sport for fun has encountered a Serious Guy (or a Serious Girl). A Serious Guy turns 3-on-3 into a curse-filled nightmare. A Serious Guy makes backyard badminton feel like tax preparation, and elevates meaningless Wiffle ball into Game 7. A Serious Guy groans when you swing and miss. A Serious Guy can't believe you sliced that Titleist into the woods. A Serious Guy just smashed a volley into your face.
You don't even have to be playing with a Serious Guy to upset one. A Serious Guy will howl if you hit a…
drorzel | August 18, 2011For this week's Toddler Blogging, here's a dad's eye view of one of today's playground activities: walking the 4x4 border on the sand playground as if it was a balance beam.
She doesn't actually need to hold my hand to walk this, but it makes her happier.
I snapped that with my phone, expecting her to still be in "No Pictures" mode at home. Surprisingly, though, she agreed to have her picture taking reading books with Mommy:
That's the sea turtle book that Grandma and Grandpa gave her (after a trip to the Virgin Islands where they saw turtles while snorkeling, I believe). She spread a huge…
drorzel | August 18, 2011I've moved on to the second of three academic writing projects I wanted to work on this summer (yes, I know I'm rapidly running out of summer...), which is a sort of review article on which I will be the only author. This creates an awkward situation in the introductory material, because it just feels wrong to use the first-person singular pronoun in an academic context. This is not a new problem for me-- my advisor pointed out that the only place I used "I" in my Ph.D. thesis was in the acknowledgements-- and other people have the same issue, so this seems like a perfect topic for a poll:…
drorzel | August 18, 2011I'm not much of a baseball fan, but we're edging our way toward football season, so I flipped to ESPN radio a couple of days ago, in time to hear Mike and Mike discussing Jim Thome's 600th home run. They were questioning how much meaning we should attach to home run records any more, given how many players were using steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. In support of the record being a big deal, they played a clip of ESPN analyst Bobby Valentine pointing out that even with the steroid-inflated batting numbers, not that many guys are making a serious run at this particular milestone…
drorzel | August 18, 2011
What is journalism worth?
"What is journalism worth? That's the question journalism managers and entrepreneurs have been trying to figure out ever since it became clear, years ago, that the Internet was disrupting local publishing monopolies. And so we've endured years of conference panels, email exchanges, and blog posts about paywalls and paid content strategies, as publishers try to figure out exactly how much people are now willing to pay for news content.
Lost in this is the realization that people have been telling us - for generations - how much they're willing to pay for news."…
drorzel | August 17, 2011My birthday was two months ago, and SteelyKid's was the weekend before last, so we've had balloons running around the house for a good while now. Meaning that when I came into the library yesterday, I saw the sad little image on the right: a half-deflated Mylar balloon floating at about chest height.
Now, the first thought of a normal person on seeing this would be "Why didn't we throw this away a while ago?" My thought, since I've been on a bit of an everyday physics kick for a little while now, was "Hey, physics!"
"What do you mean?," you ask. "What physics is there in the sad balloon? It…