drorzel | July 26, 2011Michelle Sagara's rant about convention panelist behavior reminded me that I never did get around to writing up the other panel from this year's Readercon that I wanted to say something about, namely "Why We Love Bad Writing"
James D. Macdonald, Anil Menon, Resa Nelson, Eric M. Van, Harold Torger Vedeler (leader).
In the Guardian, writer Edward Docx bemoaned the popularity of such writers as Stieg Larsson and insisted on a qualitative difference between "literary" and "genre" fiction. Critic Laura Miller, writing in Salon, disagreed with most of Docx's assumptions, but wondered what it is…
drorzel | July 26, 2011One of the benefits of having joined AAAS in order to get a reduced registration fee at their meeting is that I now have online access to Science at home. Including the Science Express advance online papers, which I don't usually get on campus. Which means that I get the chance to talk about the few cool physics things they post when they first become available, without having to beg for a PDF on Twitter. This week's advance online publication list includes a good example of the sort of cool ultra-cold atom physics that I talked about at and after DAMOP, so let's take a look at this paper in…
drorzel | July 26, 2011The Dean Dad asks a question on the minds of lots of faculty: how do you handle early-morning classes?
Wise and worldly readers, have you had good experiences with 8 a.m. classes? Does anybody know of any useful empirical studies done at the college level of the effects of 8 a.m. classes? Is this basically solvable with caffeine and nagging, or are we shooting ourselves in the collective foot here?
As I am emphatically not a morning person myself, I'm no fan of 8am classes either, but as Dean Dad notes, they're a necessary evil given the constraints of limited classroom space. I don't know…
drorzel | July 26, 2011
A Bedtime Story | Easily Distracted
"Now this is a new thing in my lifetime, I grant you: a Congressman who is going to run on the argument that it's time for America to take its place among the poor and struggling nations of the world. I don't have to study go to Zimbabwe any more to study Zimbabwe: my Congressman is doing his best to bring it to me. Thanks, Congressman!"
(tags: politics us society culture history economics stupid blogs easily-distracted)
drorzel | July 25, 2011Here is a very significant picture:
"What's significant about that?" you ask. "It's slightly out of focus and oddly framed. Why should I care?"
You should care because of the photographer:
That's right, SteelyKid has a camera now-- we gave her my old Canon A95. She was playing with Kate's smaller point-and-shoot camera (I forget the model) yesterday, and having a little trouble because it's so small her fingers kept getting in the way. The A95 is a little bigger, and while it's on the heavy side, it fits her hand reasonably well. And she took right to using it.
And, because the laws of the…
drorzel | July 25, 2011Via Bee, we have the BlaBlaMeter, a website that purports to "unmask without mercy how much bullshit hides in any text." Like Bee, I couldn't resist throwing it some scientific text, but rather than pulling stuff off the arxiv, I went with the abstracts of the papers I published as a grad student, which I wrote up on the blog as part of the Metastable Xenone Project a few years ago. The abstracts, their scores, and some comments below:
Paper 1: Optical Control of Ultracold Collisions:
Near-resonant light is used to modify the collision dynamics of magneto-optically trapped metastable xenon…
drorzel | July 25, 2011I've got a ton of stuff to do this morning that will keep me from more substantive blogging, so here's a cute toddler picture:
This is SteelyKid playing with the giant magnet in the MRI exhibit at the Schenectady Museum, trying to see how big a tower she could make out of steel washers and hex nuts (answer: 11 hex nuts before it fell over). She also greatly enjoyed tossing washers at the magnet and seeing them snap to it (I was more interested in tossing them so they got deflected but missed the magnet body, and shot off into the wider room. I doubt the other patrons would've guessed…
drorzel | July 25, 2011
nanoscale views: Einstein, thermodynamics, and elegance
"Recently, in the course of other writing I've been doing, I again came to the topic of what are called Einstein A and B coefficients, and it struck me again that this has to be one of the most elegant, clever physics arguments ever made. It's also conceptually simple enough that I think it can be explained to nonexperts, so I'm going to give it a shot."
(tags: science physics blogs natelson atoms optics quantum)
Water Fountain Shows Cool Physics | Wired Science | Wired.com
"Here is a clever water fountain in Japan.
What did I…
drorzel | July 24, 2011
Katie Baker on the New York Times wedding section - Grantland
"This renewed series will attempt, through a rigorous quantitative method detailed below, to determine the following:
Which couple best exemplifies both the unique spirit and impossible standards of everything the New York Times "Weddings/Celebration" section stands for?
Back in the day I used a scoring-system metric originally devised by Alexis Swerdloff but I felt it needed a more modern update. This new and improved NUPTIALS (Names, Universities, Parents, Tropes, Identifiers, Avocations, Locales, and Special Situations)…
drorzel | July 23, 2011Contrary to Jo Walton's prediction, I didn't love this book. In fact, I didn't even like it very much.
Much has been made over the long wait for this latest installment in the Song of Ice and Fire series, building it up to the point where actually reading and reviewing it feels a little like being asked to review a unicorn, to lift a phrase from Chuck Klosterman. Much of the discussion leading up to this had to do with whether fans were unreasonable for complaining about the wait, and talked about whether readers had any right to make demands of authors.
Sort of lost in that was the real…
drorzel | July 23, 2011
Quantum Diaries
At the moment anyone who has even a passing interest in particle physics is thinking about the results being presented that European Physical Society High Energy Physics 2011 conference (referred to as simply "EPS".) It is at EPS that we hear news about the search the Higgs boson, and the news is tantalizing! The talks are all publicly available, and to understand them fully you need to know a little bit about how limits work.
(tags: science physics particles experiment blogs)
Bill Simmons on WWE music - Grantland
"In more than 30 years of following wrestling, the first…
drorzel | July 22, 2011The final Space Shuttle landed the other day, leading to much lamentation over the end of the program, all over the Internet. It was absolutely choking my Twitter feeds for a while, which is mostly what I was thinking about when I re-tweeted this snide comment from Robert Lamb (though, to be fair, most of the people choking my Twitter feeds with Shuttle-related comments are space obsessives anyway, so it's not that new). I got a little grief for that over in locked LiveJournal land, so I thought I might as well say a bit more about it here.
While there is some part of me that feels a little…
drorzel | July 22, 2011
If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault - Anil Dash
"As it turns out, we have a way to prevent gangs of humans from acting like savage packs of animals. In fact, we've developed entire disciplines based around this goal over thousands of years. We just ignore most of the lessons that have been learned when we create our communities online. But, by simply learning from disciplines like urban planning, zoning regulations, crowd control, effective and humane policing, and the simple practices it takes to stage an effective public event, we can come up with a set of principles to…
drorzel | July 21, 2011SteelyKid's "no pictures" phase continues, meaning that I have to do things like snapping low-light pictures of her after she falls asleep:
I used a really wide aperture lens for this-- waking her up with the flash would be the end of the world-- and had to process the hell out of it to get the colors to look remotely right. I could probably do a little better with more work, but we'll leave it like this as a reminder of how difficult it was to get any pictures for Toddler Blogging
drorzel | July 21, 2011It's really frickin' hot in much of the US. Fortunately, we have central air at home, A/C in the car, and convenient local businesses with air conditioning and free wi-fi. The inadequate HVAC systems in the Science and Engineering building on campus aren't anywhere near being able to cope with this, so I'm working from home or a cafe until the weather breaks.
I will, however, use this as a shameless plug to re-link a post from last year, where we scientifically tested whether it's better to leave your car windows open or closed on a hot day. The answer: if it's a short stop, closing the…
drorzel | July 21, 2011A lot of pixels have been spilled lamenting the death of Borders books, a rather large fraction of them being used to say stupid things. Particularly in the "they killed off independent bookstores so good riddance to them" vein-- it's great that you lived in a place that had good indie bookstores and enough hipsters to support them, but for large swaths of the country, the big-box chains were the best thing ever to happen to readers. Going from a cramped little B. Waldencrown in the local mall to a full-size Borders or Barnes and Noble store was a world-changing experience for a lot of people…
drorzel | July 21, 2011
Towards an Opt-Out Button in Left-Liberal Debates | Easily Distracted
"Here's what I want and I think maybe a lot of people, both Americans and otherwise, want. I want what my colleagues Barry Schwartz and Ken Sharpe call "good enough". I don't want to grab for the brass ring, be the alpha male, see my name in lights, have the penthouse apartment on the East Side. I don't want to write out a lengthy policy manifesto on what American foreign policy towards 21st Century African states should be and then spend the next ten years taking meetings and writing op-eds to push my plan. I just want…
drorzel | July 20, 2011Keeping the week's unofficial education theme, Kevin Drum posts about the latest "kids these days" study, namely the just-released NAEP Geography results. Kevin makes a decent point about the 12th grade questions being fairly sophisticated, but includes one comment that struck me as off base:
I gotta tell you: I went through the five sample questions for 12th graders, and they were pretty damn hard. This was not "identify France on a map" stuff. I ended up getting them all right, but I was half guessing on some of them.
He says that as if it's a bad thing, but it seems to me that it's really…
drorzel | July 20, 2011One of the standard education reform proposals that gets suggested every time somebody brings up the condition of American public education is that teachers should be offered some form of performance incentive, whether in the form of "merit pay" programs on a continuing basis, or bonuses for reaching particular targets. This is one of those ideas that economists swear ought to work, but a new RAND Corporation study found that, well, they don't. This is based on a three-year pilot program run by the New York City school district, which offered selected districts bonuses of up to $3,000 per…
drorzel | July 20, 2011
The Strategic Plan: Neither Strategy Nor Plan, but a Waste of Time - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education
"This interchangeability of visions for the future underscores the fact that the precise content of most colleges' strategic plans is pretty much irrelevant. Plans are usually forgotten soon after they are promulgated. My university has presented two systemwide strategic plans and one arts-and-sciences strategic plan in the past 15 years. No one can remember much about any of those plans, but another one is in the works. The plan is not a blueprint for the future. It is,…