TODAYMoms - Want another bedtime story, sweetie? Here's one: 'Go the F@#k to Sleep' "The cats nestle close to their kittens. The lambs have laid down with the sheep. You're cozy and warm in your bed, my dear Please go the f@#k to sleep." (tags: kid-stuff books silly sleep)

Union's edition of the chase-each-other-with-Nerf-guns game Humans vs. Zombies kicks off next week, and has prompted some discussion of whether this is just a harmless way of blowing off steam, or an existential threat to the core mission of academia. While some of this has been vaguely entertaining, it ignores the really important question: Who would win:online surveys We're talking classical movie-type zombies, here, not Schrödinger cats that are alive and dead at the same time, so you can only choose one answer at a time.

The nominees for the 2011 Hugo Awards were released on Sunday, which is the sort of thing I usually blog about here, so you might think it's just our flaky DSL that's kept me from saying anything about it. that's only part of the story, though. I haven't said anything about them in large part because it's a really uninspiring bunch of works. I've only read two of the Best Novel nominees at this point, Cryoburn and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and I'm not enthusiastic about either. I have fairly low expectations for a Miles Vorkosigan novel relative to a lot of fans, but Cryoburn failed to…

It's been in the works for a while, but a couple of days ago the news got out via the usual combination of rumor-mongering and confidentiality-breaking that makes blogdom such a joy to work with (seriously, you want to know why it's hard to get mainstream media types to take bloggers seriously, or keep bloggers in the loop about major decisions? Take a look at the drama surrounding any changes at ScienceBlogs...): ScienceBlogs and National Geographic are "partnering" in a way that looks an awful lot like NatGeo taking over SB. What does this mean for this blog? I haven't the foggiest. NatGeo…

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science As someone who blogs about science and occasionally about politics, I am contractually obligated to link to this article. Fortunately, it's also good and interesting. (tags: psychology science politics neuroscience climate vaccine culture society cog-sci medicine magazines) The Non-Science That Explains What's Wrong with Science Explaining Non-Belief in Science « Easily Distracted "I have a lot of complicated misgivings about the implications of this overall approach in its reconsideration of the public sphere, deliberative processes, the act…

Amazon's $23,698,655.93 book about flies "A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence's The Making of a Fly - a classic work in developmental biology that we - and most other Drosophila developmental biologists - consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping)." (tags: amazon books economics business technology computing silly science) The Intern: Guest Post: The Tricky Territory of Publishing Blogs "On my…

This paper made a big splash back in November, with lots of news stories talking about it; it even made the #6 spot on Physics World's list of breakthroughs of the year. I didn't write it up then because I was hellishly busy, and couldn't take time away from working on the book-in-progress to figure out exactly what they did and why it mattered. I've got a little space now between handing the manuscript in last week and starting to revise it (probably next week), so while it's a bit late, here's an attempt at an explanation of what all the excitement was about. So, what's this about, anyway?…

I try not to do any shilling for political groups on the blog, but I'll make an exception for the National Center for Science Education. Why? Three reasons: 1) They do good and important, if not always glamorous work, supporting the teaching of evolution in public schools, both in the classroom and in the courts. 2) Josh Rosenau has a really good blog, one of the best on science-and-politics issues, and his day job is with NCSE. 3) Jerry Coyne is a jackass, whose latest bit of jackassery involves sending an open letter to NCSE complaining that Josh (among others) was mean to him on the…

Our home Internet has been out since Friday, which is, as you might imagine, somewhat vexing. The most likely cause is that our DSL modem is dying (it's nine years old), which raises a technical problem. A few years ago, when we last had a problem requiring a service call, the tech who came out told us that the only reason our service has worked as well as it has is that we had an older modem. The nominal speed for the service is 1.5 Mbps (I believe), and we're actually getting something like 1.1 Mbps. This was attributed to our distance from the central office. He said that the older modem…

The Management Myth - Magazine - The Atlantic "The recognition that management theory is a sadly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy began with an experience of déjà vu. As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that…

nanoscale views: Public funding of science, and access to information "While this is an interesting topic, I'd rather discuss a related issue:  How much public funding triggers the need to make something publicly available?  For example, suppose I used NSF funding to buy a coaxial cable for $5 as part of project A.  Then, later on, I use that coax in project B, which is funded at the $100K level by a non-public source.  I don't think any reasonable person would then argue that all of project B's results should become public domain because of 0.005% public support.  When does the obligation…

A few months ago-- just before the paperback release of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog-- Amazon started providing not only their Sales Rank data, but also sales data from Nielsen BookScan. Of course, the BookScan data is very limited, giving you only four weeks, and the Sales Rank data, while available over the full published life of any given book, are presented as a graph only with no way to extract them as a data table. You'd have to be some sort of obsessive nerd to make a quantitative comparison between them. So, anyway, here's the data I got for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: This…

I intended to do a big book-sales post today, but our DSL modem may be dead, so there was no Internet in Chateau Steelypips this morning, and I forgot to copy the relevant files onto a thumb drive, so it will have to wait. Maybe this afternoon. In lieu of that, here's some other stuff on shale gas drilling in the Northeast, following on Tuesday's post: -- It's always nice to have my half-assed writing about economic issues supported, even indirectly, by people who know something about the subject writing similar things. Thus, Felix Salmon on cost-benefit analyses of oil drilling: Under…

Top Facts - Gauss Facts "Gauss has an Erdos number of -1." (tags: math silly internet) Making Light: Yog's Law "Self-publishing is the part of the map where the author is the publisher and hires the editor, hires the cover artist, the typesetter, the proofreader, contracts the printer, buys the ISBN, arranges distribution, promotion, marketing, and carries out every other aspect of publishing. What you need to recall is that while the author is the publisher, "publisher" and "author" are separate roles. One of the classic mistakes I see with self-published authors is that they don't put "…

I'm sitting on the couch reading when Emmy trots in looking excited. "Hey, dude, I've got a great idea!" she says cheerily. "You know how your puppy is away for the week?" "Yeah." "Well, I think this is the perfect opportunity to class up your blog a little. I mean, you always post pictures of her on Thursdays, but she's not here to take a picture of, so..." "So... What?" "Well, you should post some pictures of me, silly!" "Yeah," she says. "Just like that. I'm an excellent dog!" "Yes, you're the best. The Queen of Niskayuna." She flops over, and I rub her belly. She's quiet for a minute,…

Several people blogged about a new measurement of gravitational states of neutrons done by physicists using ultracold neutrons from the Institut Laue-Langevin in France. I had to resort to Twitter to get access to the paper (we don't get Nature Physics here, and it's way faster than Inter-Library Loan), but this is a nice topic for a ResearchBlogging post, in the now-standard Q&A form: OK, why was this worth begging people on Twitter to send you a copy? The paper is a demonstration of a sort of spectroscopy of neutrons bouncing in a gravitational field. They showed they could drive…

After chasing a bunch of kids with cell phones off of his lawn, Kevin Drum has kicked off a discussion of "multitasking", specifically about whether it's merely a threat, or a positive menace. He points to an interview with Clifford Nass, a researcher who says his experiments show that nobody is any good at doing two things at once. John Holbo at Crooked Timber picks up the discussion and adds a few good points, and there are some others in the comments (CT's comment section being one of the most civilized and erudite in blogdom). In particular, I think John's comment on satisficing is an…

How to be South Asian on American TV « North Philly Notes "Recently, a student presented on Outsourced, providing an overview of the TV show, clips, and some background information, including that Outsourced is the longest running show to date that has multiple South Asians as major characters.  With over two million South Asians (from India, Pakistani, and other countries abutting the subcontinent) in America, I wonder why the first popular show about South Asians on American TV is set in India.  Also, although the actors are North American or British, they must adopt Indian accents for…

(Alternate Title: "Epic Fantasy Is What We Point to When We Look Down on Epic Fantasy.") I've been on a bit of an epic fantasy kick lately, evidently due to the thousand-ish pages of The Crippled God not being enough. This means that I was in a weirdly appropriate mental space to catch the recent furor over a fairly dumb NYTimes review of A Game of Thrones on HBO that said some snide things about the genre, particularly that women don't read it. Which has led to a lot of discussion of what epic fantasy is, and whether women read or write it. A lot of what's been said is dumb in various ways…

Bill III's Blog » Have you ever printed a boarding pass? "Well this little feat has been a long time coming.  For those of you who have worked with me in Unalakleet you probably have heard about my aspiration of using the poster printer to print my boarding pass.  Well two days ago my dream became a reality.  I logged onto nwa.com and checked in for my flight.  Selected my seats and chose the option to print my boarding pass.  Well as you know Mac computers make it super easy to print things as a PDF file instead of to a printer.  So thats what I did.  I was on two different flights and…