"Literally Unbelievable" Stories from The Onion as interpreted by Facebook (tags: silly onion internet blogs facebook stupid)

Kij Johnson's "Ponies" is the second on Locus's Short Story Club list of award-nominated stories. More than that, though, it's an actuall award winner, having claimed a share of the Nebula for Best Short Story. I enjoyed Johnson's two novels, The Fox Woman and Fudoki quite a bit, so I'm happy to see her doing well, with award-nominated short stories the last two years. The problem is, like last's year's "Spar," which was up for the Hugo, my primary reaction to this story is "Oh, ick." The set-up is simple and heavy-handed: like all young girls, Barbara has a Pony, some sort of artificial…

Bob Dylan is turning 70: Let's take a look at some of the weird shit he's done | Music | The A.V. Club Twin Cities "Dylan's musical brilliance is already a solidified fact, his onstage antics have already been covered, and plenty more ink has been spilled about his standing as a prickly interview subject, so why not, instead, honor the man with a list of some of his most randomly wacky moments?" (tags: music culture history avclub blogs silly) The story behind the world's oldest museum, built by a Babylonian princess 2,500 years ago - io9 " In 1925, archaeologist Leonard Woolley…

Union operates on a trimester calendar, with three ten-week terms (September-November, January-March, April-June), rather than the two 14-15 week semesters used by most other colleges and universities. This has some advantages in terms of flexibility-- even science and engineering students get to take terms abroad, which is harder to swing in a semester system-- and some disadvantages in terms of scheduling-- we run much later than most other schools (the last day of classes is next Friday), which closes our students out of a lot of summer programs that begin in early June. As you can imagine…

The big physics story of the week is undoubtedly the new limit on the electric dipole moment (EDM) of the electron from Ed Hinds's group at Imperial College in the UK. As this is something I wrote a long article on for Physics World, I'm pretty psyched to see this getting lots of media attention, and not just from physics outlets. My extremely hectic end-of-term schedule and general laziness almost make me want to just point to my earlier article and have done with it. But really, it's a big story, and one I've been following for a while, so how can I pass up the chance for a ResearchBlogging…

(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Richard Lobinske, a Hazardous Waste Manager (meaning he handles chemicals, such as these decades-old pesticides, not particularly noxious low-level employees). The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.) 1) What is your non-academic job? Hazardous Waste Manager. I oversee a county household hazardous waste collection program that also handles…

The Power of Hunger and Stairs: House of Stairs | tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Blog posts "House of Stairs may be one of the most disturbing and memorable young adult science fiction books ever. I first encountered it in junior high, and it left a chill that has never completely left. Written in the 1970s, in a period of deep distrust of government, it is a chilling tale of brainwashing, governmental power, distrust, and stairs, terrifying for its bleak visions of humanity and our future." (tags: sf books blogs tor review)

Kate is off at Wiscon (or at least en route-- her flights are all screwed up), and SteelyKid is off at Grandma and Grandpa's for the weekend. Which means I don't have an Appa picture this week, but in honor of the pagan origins of the name of the day, here's a picture of SteelyKid enacting a scene from the movie Thor: Well, OK, she's just gesturing dramatically with a fruit twist on the steps of the Nott Memorial. But it sort of looks like she might be declaiming some of the ludicrous dialogue of the Asgard sequences... Maybe? I dunno. That's all I've got, really: she's out of town, I went…

As I've mentioned before, I'm schedule to teach a class on "A Brief History of Timekeeping" next winter term as part of the Scholars Research Seminar program. Even though I have a hundred other things to do, I continue to think about this a lot. One of the goals of the course is to introduce students to the idea of doing research. This was primarily conceived as a humanities/ social sciences sort of thing, so most of the discussion I've seen about these has been in terms of library research. Of course, as a physicist, I very rarely need to look things up in the library. when I think about…

(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Darren Anderson, the Chief Technology Officer for Vive Nano. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their future careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I was the founding president of a start-up / spin-off company out of the University of Toronto. The company was originally called Northern Nanotechnologies, and is now called Vive Nano. My current job is…

Career Advice: 10 Tips for Junior Faculty - Inside Higher Ed The usual mix of sound general advice and "Thank God I don't work at a big university/ in the humanities." (tags: academia jobs tenure inside-higher-ed) 6 Civil War Myths Everyone Believes (That Are Total B.S.) | Cracked.com "Now, we know what you're thinking: What the hell is that "Confederate flag" everyone keeps fighting over today? It's a dark blue variant of the Second Confederate Navy Jack. Although occasionally used on the battlefield as just one of countless regimental colors, this particular version enjoyed renewed…

I learned today that the National Georgraphic Channel video I mentioned last week has actually already aired on the network. It was last week's episode of the series "Naked Science," titled Living in a Parallel Universe. I haven't seen it, obviously, but it's running again, tomorrow (the 26th), at 4pm (Eastern (US) time). Set your DVR accordingly. (I'm also very pleased to have learned of the air date via email from Alan Guth...)

If I ever decided to abandon any pretense of integrity or credibility, and just shoot for making a bazillion dollars peddling quantum hokum, the particular brand of quantum philosophy I would peddle has already been laid out, in Robert Charles Wilson's Divided by Infinity. In the story, the narrator is given a copy of a "crank book" by Carl G. Soziere, titled You will Never Die, which makes an argument that is essentially a variant of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics: And the argument was seductive. Shorn of the babble about Planck radii and Prigogine complexity and the…

(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Will Hendrick, who worked as a lab tech before returning to school. (This may seem like an odd inclusion, but there are people who do this sort of thing forever, so I think it's valid.) The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their future careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.) 1) What is your non-academic job? My official job title was 'Biological Materials Technician', and I worked for…

News: Major Decisions - Inside Higher Ed "For 15 broad categories of majors, such as engineering, physical science, and business, the report explores the median and quartile pay, the percentage of the major comprising women and minorities, and the percentage of individuals from that major who went on to get graduate degrees. The report also breaks down those groups and explores similar data for 171 individual majors. Some of the results are to be expected. Science, engineering, and business majors tend to be better-off financially than majors in liberal arts and humanities, education, and…

I'm teaching our upper-level lab course this term, where I do a two-part experiment on laser spectroscopy. The first part is to calibrate the free spectral range of a homemade Fabry-Perot interferometer, and the second part is to use that Fabry-Perot as a frequency marker to calibrate a diode laser scan across the rubidium hyperfine spectrum, allowing a measurement of the Rb ground-state hyperfine splitting. That's a bunch of jargon, the details of which don't really matter. What matters is that this is a lab that involves scanning the frequency of a particular laser through some range of…

(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Amy Young, who runs her own soap-making business. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.) 1) What is your non-academic job? The relevant part of my work is as partner and chief developer/producer at Foam on the Range, which makes and sells soaps, lotions, and other bath/cosmetic-type products. My business cards say "Saponifier in Chief". It'…

Is the Launch Speed in Angry Birds Constant? | Wired Science | Wired.com "Does the Bird's Launch Speed Depend on the Angle? If the bird is indeed shot from an elastic cord, then technically the bird should go faster when shot horizontally than when it is shot straight up. Why? Physics." (tags: science physics education blogs dot-physics games computing) The Clean Fossil Fuel? Natural Gas Under Fire | Txchnologist "The good news is that it seems the effects of methane gas can be limited through action by industry. But the economics of drilling, mediated by the actions of regulators, will…

As I have admitted previously, I have a fondness for tv shows about UFO's, the loonier the better. So, when I learned that there was a show called When Aliens Attack airing last night on the National Geographic channel, I was all over that. I'm happy to report that it did not disappoint-- it brought the crazy, in exactly the manner I was hoping for. The premise of the show is a look at what would happen if aliens turned up on Earth, and turned out to be hostile. It claims to be a look at military contingency plans for dealing with an alien invasion, though the "plans" in question seem to be…

Matt McIrvin's Steam-Operated World of Yesteryear - Children's/science museums north of Boston "Boston has lots of great places to take kids to see/interact with cool stuff; there's the New England Aquarium, the Museum of Science, and the Boston Children's Museum, all of which are justly famous. But they're a long enough trip for us that we have to plan ahead a little to go there; closer alternatives are welcome for spur-of-the-moment visits. Here are some we like:" (tags: kid-stuff science education outreach blogs)