drorzel | May 22, 2011
con_or_bust: Con or Bust NOW taking requests for July-September cons!
"Con or Bust is pleased to announce that as of this very moment, and through May 31, fans of color/non-white fans may request assistance to attend SFF cons in July, August, and September 2011.
Because there was no advance notice that we'd be taking requests, please repost and link to this post far and wide so that people know that assistance is possible. I will announce the precise amount after WisCon, once the T-shirt sales are counted up and I hear from some cons I've contacted, but a minimum of $600 will be available…
drorzel | May 21, 2011As mentioned a little while ago, Locus is running a Short Story Club to discuss the award-nominated stories that are available online. First up is Aliette de Bodard's "The Jaguar House, in Shadow". Like her novels and other notable short fiction, this has a Central American theme, though it's alternate-history SF rather than fantasy.
This is a sort of caper story, set in a high-tech Mexica empire, where the elite order of Jaguar Knights are the only survivors of a bloody purge instigated by the new emperor, which has wiped out all the other orders. Xochitl, a young-ish female knight started a…
drorzel | May 21, 2011
SLR Camera Simulator | Simulates a digital SLR camera
"Practice using an SLR camera...
Experiment with the lighting, ISO, aperture, shutter, and distance settings while observing the readings in the camera viewfinder
Click the "Snap photo!" button
Review your photo!"
(tags: technology pictures internet computing)
Astrogator's Logs » Blog Archive » Area 51: Teen Commies from Outer Space!
"Jacobsen's addition (asserted with a completely straight face and demanding to be taken seriously) is that this craft contained "genetically/surgically altered" teenagers engineered by Josef Mengele at…
drorzel | May 20, 2011This was a hellishly busy week, and today was especially bad. I barely had time to read non-work-related email, let alone write anything for the blog. And now that I have time, I'm too fried to write anything.
So here's a bonus cute-toddler photo, with an ego-blogging element:
That's SteelyKid sitting in my desk chair, watching the National Geographic video clip from the other day. She's pointing at the screen to say "That's you walking Emmy!" Which she does every time we play it, and it doesn't get old.
I don't think she really gets the physics yet, but there's plenty of time for that...
drorzel | May 20, 2011
A career as editor « the Node
"In 1993-4, I went on the job market, looking at standard faculty positions. I received some offers, including one from Vanderbilt University, where I am now. But I was resisting accepting a position, and some friends - who were also on the job market at the time - sent me to a career counselor. The counselor's husband was a bench scientist, so she had some sense of my career until that point, and asked me a very simple question, one that I had never asked myself: "If you didn't have to worry about how much money you made, or what anyone else thought of you,…
drorzel | May 19, 2011Earlier tonight, I was sitting at my computer, and SteelyKid came running over. "Let's go to Israel. Pretend Israel." she said in a conspiratorial whisper.
"Why are you whispering?" I asked. "Do we have to whisper in pretend Israel?"
"Yes," she replied immediately. "Because there are bears."
The origin of this odd conversation was today's "trip" to "Israel" at the JCC day care. The pre-schoolers all got out in the hall, sat down, and pretended to ride an airplane to Israel. Once there, SteelyKid's class made like good American tourists, and went shopping. She excels at shopping.
This was a…
drorzel | May 19, 2011In keeping with this week's unofficial theme of wibbling about academia, there's an article at The Nation about the evils of graduate school that's prompted some discussion. Sean says more or less what I would, though maybe a little more nicely than I would.
I wouldn't bother to comment further, except this spurred Sean to solicit career advice for scientists looking to leave the academic track. Which reminded me that a couple of years ago, I did a bloggy Project for Non-Academic Science (name chosen to have the same acronym as a prestigious journal, because it amused me to do so), where I…
drorzel | May 19, 2011Via Twitter, Daniel Lemire has a mini-manifesto advocating "social media" alternatives for academic publishing, citing "disastrous consequences" of the "filter-then-publish" model in use by traditional journals. The problem is, as with most such things, I'm not convinced that social media style publication really fixes all these problems. For example, one of his points is:
The conventional system is legible: you can count and measure a scientist's production. The incentive is to produce more of what the elite wants. In a publish-then-filter system nobody cares about quantity: only the impact…
drorzel | May 19, 2011
News: What They Are Really Typing - Inside Higher Ed
"The authors of two recent studies of laptops and classroom learning decided that relying on student and professor testimony would not do. They decided instead to spy on students.
In one study, a St. John's University law professor hired research assistants to peek over students' shoulders from the back of the lecture hall. In the other, a pair of University of Vermont business professors used computer spyware to monitor their students' browsing activities during lectures.
The authors of both papers acknowledged that their respective…
drorzel | May 18, 2011Today's lecture topic was position-space and momentum-space representations of state vectors in quantum mechanics, which once again brought up one of the eternal questions in physics:
Why do we use the symbol p to represent momentum?
I did Google this, but none of the answers looked all that authoritative. And, anyway, I'm sure that the readers of this blog can come up with fanciful speculations that would be far more interesting than the real answer. So, have at it.
(I'm too overextended and exhausted to post anything more substantive right now; maybe later this afternoon.)
drorzel | May 18, 2011
Book View Cafe - Exordium 01, by Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge
"Smith and Trowbridge describe the flavor of their five-book space opera Exordium as a cross between Star Wars and Dangerous Liaisons with a touch of the Three Stooges. With its fast-moving blend of humor and horror, of high-tech skiffy and the deep places of the human heart, The Phoenix in Flight launches the reader into a complex, multi-layered universe as Brandon nyr-Arkad, dissolute youngest son of the ruler of the Thousand Suns, abandons the life of Service planned for him and flees into the lawless Rift. Only slowly…
drorzel | May 17, 2011Well, on video over the web, anyway... If you look at the Featured Videos on the National Geographic Channel web page, or, hopefully, in the embedded video below:
You'll see a short video clip of a program about quantum physics, that includes me and Emmy among the experts on camera. I'm pretty psyched, though I'm not sure what Alan Guth and Lawrence Krauss will think about sharing the bill with my dog...
This is from a show, tentatively titled "Parallel Universes," which is why I went to Buffalo back in October. Most of the scenes in that clip were shot in the abandoned railway station in…
drorzel | May 17, 2011As I noted the other day, we're entering graduation season, one of the two month-long periods (the other being "back to school" time in August/September) when everybody pretends to care deeply about education. Accordingly, the people at the Pew Research Center have released a new report on the opinions of the general public and college presidents about various topics related to higher education. The totally neutral post title is copied from their report.
So, what do they find about general public attitudes? The usual confused muddle:
Cost and Value. A majority of Americans (57%) say the…
drorzel | May 17, 2011For both of the readers who enjoyed last fall's Short Story Club, there's another round starting up soon, this time run by Locus, featuring award-nominated works. I'm busier now than I was in the fall, so I'm not sure I'll be able to participate in all of these, but then, I've already read two of the five stories, so that makes it a little easier...
Also in short fiction news, I have to do a guest lecture on Robert Charles Wilson's "Divided by Infinity" for an English class on science fiction this Friday. Which means I probably ought to find some time to figure out what I'm going to say about…
drorzel | May 17, 2011
Generalist's Work, Day 5 « Easily Distracted
"In humanistic writing, I'm struck by the sometimes uncomfortable mixing of a romanticist vision of authorship with the value of scholarship as a collaborative, collective and accumulative enterprise. In peer review, tenure review, grant applications and other venues where we set the benchmark for what counts as excellence, we often expect scholarly work to exhibit the author's "quality of mind", and that in turn is often best established by the degree to which the analysis and interpretation in scholarly writing appear to be original and highly…
drorzel | May 16, 2011Several years ago, now, a group at Penn State announced a weird finding in helium at extremely low temperatures and high pressures (which is what you need to make helium solidify): when they made a pendulum out of a cylindrical container with a thin shell of solid He toward the outside edge, twisting about its axis, they saw a small but dramatic change in the oscillation frequency as they cooled the system below a particular temperature. They interpreted this as a "supersolid" phase of helium, with a quantum phase transition taking place that caused the "supersolid" to stop rotating with the…
drorzel | May 16, 2011Physics is a notoriously difficult and unpopular subject, which is probably why there is a large and active Physics Education Research community within physics departments in the US. This normally generates a lot of material in the Physical Review Special Topics journal, but last week, a PER paper appeared in Science, which is unusual enough to deserve the ResearchBlogging treatment.
OK, what's this paper about? Well, with the exceptional originality that physicists bring to all things, the title pretty much says it all. They demonstrated that a different style of teaching applied to a large…
drorzel | May 16, 2011
Beta Readers: Best Practices » Inkpunks
"The author-beta relationship is a strange one. The author exposes a vulnerable, still-in-the-works thing to the beta, a fleshy little newborn fiction coated in soft bits. The author is pleased. The author thinks this is an Excellent Thing which they are giving to the beta. The beta takes this dream and proceeds to point out every flaw, fracture, and missing piece. The beta takes this whole beautiful entity and returns a broken thing which the author must go fix.
Then they, like, go see a movie, or something. Get some froyo. Whatevs."
(tags: writing…
drorzel | May 15, 2011College graduation season is upon us, at least for institutions running on a semester calendar (sadly, Union's trimester system means we have another month to go). This means the start of the annual surge of Very Serious op-eds about what education means, giving advice to graduates, etc. The New York Times gets things rolling with an op-ed from the people who brought us the Academically Adrift kerfuffle a few months back. As I wrote at the time, I am underwhelmed by their argument. In fact, I would let it go entirely, were it not for a new bit that kind of creeps me out. In this new op-ed,…
drorzel | May 14, 2011SteelyKid is, as I have noted previously, half Korean, a quarter Polish, and an eighth each Irish and German. Her parents are irreligious, the extended family is Catholic (more so on my side than Kate's), and she goes to day care at the Jewish Community Center. In other words, a thoroughly American sort of upbringing. I can't wait to see what she finds to rebel against when she hits the teenage years.
For no obvious reason, three of the four kids she's most likely to play with on the playground when I pick her up in the evening (we play at the JCC for a while before going home, to give Kate…