drorzel | August 17, 2011A little more tab clearance: these are stories about the transformation of publishing that I've been meaning to say something about but haven't got around to.
First, some actual news: rumors of the imminent death of publishing may be somewhat exaggerated, as more books were sold for more money in 2010 than in a while.
Of course, that doesn't make Borders any less dead, so here are a couple of eulogies: from Dean Dad and Jeff Mariotte (the latter hosted by Borders so, you know, read it soon before it disappears).
If you remain convinced that traditional publishing is going the way of the…
drorzel | August 17, 2011
Is Rick Perry a 'sucker,' or was he just lying? | slacktivist
"Maybe he really believed that. Maybe the single example of "stifling regulations" that he chose for his stump speech was some wild rumor that, despite being a state governor, he never bothered to check into or to have an aide check into. Maybe he is as naive and gullible and prone to misplaced knee-jerk indignation as the Facebook fools denouncing stories from The Onion thinking they're true.
But for that to be true, Rick Perry would have to be really lazy and really gullible.
It seems far likelier that Rick Perry was just…
drorzel | August 16, 2011Two "small world" items, involving people I know turning up unexpectedly, doing well for themselves:
1) As mentioned previously, I've been thinking a lot about physics education stuff (even though I have other things I ought to be doing), and reading a lot more education-oriented blogs. I was surprised, though, to find a physics-related post from Dan Meyer, featuring an example from Greg Schwanbeck. Unless there's a truly amazing name coincidence at work, here, Greg's a former student, Union Class of 2003, I believe. I knew he was teaching high school in Massachusetts, but it's nice to see…
drorzel | August 16, 2011Over at io9, they have a post on the finances of running a research lab at a major university. It's reasonably good as such things go, but very specific to the top level of research universities. As I am not at such an institution, I thought it might be worthwhile to post something about the finances of the sort of place I am at: a private small liberal arts college.
I'll follow the io9 article's format, but first, one important clarification:
Do you really do research at a small college? Yes, absolutely. At the upper level private liberal arts colleges, faculty are expected to be active…
drorzel | August 16, 2011
Welcome to the Fall Semester | Wired Science | Wired.com
"Sharpen your pencils and charge your laptops. It is time for the next semester to start.
How about some tips to those that will be involved. Yes, I am talking to you. All of you."
The Only Time the Conservative Politicians Ignore Warren Buffett « Whatever
"The worries for the tender sensibilities of the rich has been a hallmark of conservative American politics since time immemorial, but the current gag-inducingly lickspittle levels of it are a bit much. Among other culpable parties, I lay some blame for this at the altar of Ayn…
drorzel | August 15, 2011Over in Twitter-land, Josh Rosenau re-tweeted a comment from Seattle_JC:
It is a bad sign when the promotion of science and science education has been reduced to a grassroots movement in this society.
It's a nice line, but it doesn't entirely make sense. When I hear the term "grass-roots movement," I think of something that has widespread popularity among the public at a low level, with that public support forcing political elites to take notice. Things like organized labor back in the day, or antiwar activism in the Vietnam era.
That's almost the opposite of how the term is used here. If we…
drorzel | August 15, 2011
Bill Kirchen and Friends: Folsom Pinball Blues - YouTube
"Bill Kirchen and whole collection of talent at SoHo in Santa Barbara, CA doing a delicate combination of Folsom Prison Blues and Pinball Wizard."
Takraw: Thai Soccer - Thailand - YouTube
This would be so much cooler to have on tv than baseball or preseason NFL games, it isn't even funny.
Backreaction: Was there really a man on the moon? Are you sure?
"There is arguably information about the real world that is not (yet?) to be found in any published sources. Think of something trivial like good places in your neighborhood to find…
drorzel | August 14, 2011Lev Grossman's The Magicians never got a full entry to itself, but as I said when I mentioned it in this round-up post, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's a magical school novel about recognizable American teenagers attending Brakebills, a sort of liberal arts college for the wizarding set, somewhere in the lower Hudson valley (presumably near the Lake of the Coheeries). It's not to all tastes, but it resembles my actual college experience a lot more than most other magical college novels, so I enjoyed it quite a bit.
It's essentially impossible to say anything about the new sequel The Magician…
drorzel | August 14, 2011
THE "Don't Miss" Volume? | Tor.com
"In the 1995 Hugos thread, Womzilla asked what was THE don't-miss novel of Bujold's Vorkosigan series. There has been much interesting discussion in the thread of the idea of a series novel winning the Hugo and specifically of which Bujold to read first, but I think the whole question of "the one don't-miss volume" is interesting to examine. It's quite a different question from "Where do I start?" It's full of assumptions and worth unpacking."
I am the Very Model of a Singularitarian - Charlie's Diary
"If the Singularity is our new Maginot Line, what's the…
drorzel | August 13, 2011
"Black And Blue" | Homicide: Life On The Street | TV Club | TV | The A.V. Club
"Andre Braugher's Pembleton is fiery and mercurial and theatrical, and he works so fast that it's as if he thought that extracting false police confessions was a category recognized by the Guinness Book Of World Records. First, he pretends to be angry with the "suspect," played by Isaiah Washington, complaining that he isn't showing him the same respect he extends towards the white Bayliss. Then, having thrown Washington off balance, he guilt trips him, telling him that he's responsible for the dead man's murder…
drorzel | August 12, 2011I am an inveterate driver of "back ways" to places. My preferred route to campus involves driving through a whole bunch of residential streets, rather than taking the "main" road leading from our neighborhood to campus. I do this because there are four traffic lights on the main-road route, and they're not well timed, so it's a rare day when I don't get stuck at one or more of them. My preferred route has a lot of stop signs, but very little traffic, so they're quick stops, and I spend more time in motion, which makes me feel like I'm getting there faster.
That's the psychological reason, but…
drorzel | August 12, 2011I'm sending a little pedagogical paper off to a journal today, and spent a while yesterday re-formatting it to meet their standards. This was particularly annoying for the references, as I had to go find a bunch of information that I don't usually write down. Which seems like a good topic for a poll:
A citation in a list of references should include:
Please note that the writing of papers is a classical phenomenon, and thus you may choose only one of these options.
My default answer, for the record, is the first choice. This is because my grad school training involved writing exclusively for…
drorzel | August 12, 2011Shockingly, it does not seem to involve right-wing politics in any way. It's this explanation of why swirling wine in your glass clockwise produces different effects than swirling it counter-clockwise. a sample:
Like all living things wine cells have a magnetic polarity, just like humans and the Earth. The positive pole is more highly charged, just like the North Pole of the Earth, which is why there are Northern Lights in the Arctic Circle, but not Southern Lights in the Antarctic. This polarity tends to keep wine cells generally upright, spinning on their axis when they are being swirled.…
drorzel | August 12, 2011
Your Picks: Top 100 Science Fiction, Fantasy Books : NPR
The usual mix of "pretty good" and "utterly preposterous" selections.
Exposing a Fake Video Trick | Wired Science | Wired.com
"You know I love videos that may or may not be fake. It gets me pumped up. Ok, here is a video. It is almost certainly fake.
Oh, how do I know? Well, first the guy is hitting a ball and bouncing it off of 4 nets? What would a small deviation in the initial velocity of the ball do for later collisions with nets? It would cause a huge problem. Actually, I am sure I will do this calculation at some point in the…
drorzel | August 11, 2011It was another "no pictures" day today, so this shot is from earlier in the week, when SteelyKid got some birthday presents from my Aunt Norma and Uncle Dan:
This shows her playing with the I Spy Preschool Game, which involves matching cards containing pictures of complicated collections of objects with other cards containing objects to be found in those pictures.
I like this because she's sporting the "Future Physicist" shirt I bought her at DAMOP, which is kind of appropriate, really. After all, physics is all about finding and matching patterns in the universe around us.
You can see Emmy…
drorzel | August 11, 2011I continue to be distracted from the paper-writing that I really ought to be doing by thinking about my classes this fall, and Joss Ives isn't helping. By being very helpful-- he posted a nice list of resources for active teaching. His blog has a bunch of other interesting stuff, too.
For the specific Matter and Interactions curriculum that we're using, it's probably also worth noting that they have a complete set of video lectures linked from their resources page. Unfortunately, these are complete with the "going over the syllabus" stuff in the early lectures, so the early going is a little…
drorzel | August 11, 2011Fred Clark has an idea for you:
Start with the housekeeping staff at a Manhattan hotel. They've just learned that their next contract includes no raise, but doubles the employee share of the cost of health benefits. The Norma Rae of this bunch -- let's say Jennifer Lopez* -- convinces them to strike, but they have little leverage and she's struggling to hold the line. These women can't afford the new contract, but they can't afford a lengthy strike either.
As it happens, this very same Manhattan hotel is the site of negotiations between the NFL Players Union and the owners. Mixed up in all…
drorzel | August 11, 2011Yesterday was apparently Gender in Science day here, while the theme for today is Tab Clearance-- a couple of shortish posts about things that deserve more than just a Links Dump mention, but don't really cohere into any kind of grand synthesis of deep thoughts, or whatever.
This particular link was prompted by an item in the SF Signal links dump for today, with the title Writing Science Fiction as a Non-Scientist, by Jamie Todd Rubin. that made me blink a little, because it's never really seemed like a science degree was a necessary condition for writing SF. Even within so-called "hard SF,"…
drorzel | August 11, 2011A well-known joke is "Rule 34" saying that anything that exists will have porn about it on the Internet. The introduction to this Inside Higher Ed piece about anti-law-school blogs reminds me that we probably need a higher-numbered rule stating that every field of human endeavor will also produce a bunch of blogs about how much it sucks.
It's an important principle to keep in mind when trying to learn about anything on the Internet.
drorzel | August 11, 2011
I watched every Coen brothers movie. - By David Haglund - Slate Magazine
"My opinion changed later--not of each of those films (not entirely), but of the Coens' work as a whole. Before coming to that reversal, though, I think it's worth sitting for a moment with that earlier reaction. A lot of moviegoers, and a good number of critics, are, in some sense, skeptical of the Coens, dubious of their intentions. No one says that they are bad at what they do, or that their best work is behind them--given their obvious skill and their recent run of movies (almost universally acknowledged to be as…