drorzel | March 15, 2011It's NCAA tournament time, which is time for everybody to break out the moralizing stories about the pernicious aspects of college athletics that they've been sitting on since the football season ended. The Associated Press (via the New York Times) clocks in with a particularly discreditable entry, a story on a study of racial disparities in graduation rates in major college baskeball:
An annual report by the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport found a 2 percent overall graduation rate increase to 66 percent for Division I players, but showed the rates…
drorzel | March 15, 2011
Which Traits Predict Success? (The Importance of Grit) | Wired Science | Wired.com
"For a long time, talent seemed to be about inheritance, about the blessed set of genes that gave rise to some particular skill. Einstein had the physics gene, Beethoven had the symphony gene, and Tiger Woods (at least until his car crash) had the golf swing gene. The corollary, of course, is that you and I can't become chess grandmasters, or composers, or golf pros, simply because we don't have the necessary anatomy. Endless hours of hard work won't compensate for our biological limitations. When fate was…
drorzel | March 14, 2011Even though the really important Final Four has already been decided, the Division 1 NCAA basketball championship starts this week, which means it's time to fill out your championship brackets. And so, as usual, I present the guaranteed-can't-miss-sure-thing method of picking the winner based on the rankings of Ph.D. programs in physics (excerpt displayed; click for the full bracket):
OK, maybe there are a few bugs yet to be worked out with this method...
drorzel | March 14, 2011I've still got work to do today, but I did want to pop in quickly to note that I'll be giving my "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk tomorrow night at 8 p.m. in the Coykendall Science Building Auditorium, at SUNY New Paltz. It's part of the Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association meeting, and has also been plugged in the local paper.
If you're in the area, and looking for something interesting to do, stop by and say hi, and learn a bit about why quantum physics matters to the dog on the go.
drorzel | March 14, 2011
Why I am not worried about Japan's nuclear reactors. | Morgsatlarge - blogorific.
"Now, where does that leave us?
* The plant is safe now and will stay safe.
* Japan is looking at an INES Level 4 Accident: Nuclear accident with local consequences. That is bad for the company that owns the plant, but not for anyone else.
* Some radiation was released when the pressure vessel was vented. All radioactive isotopes from the activated steam have gone (decayed). A very small amount of Cesium was released, as well as Iodine. If you were sitting on top of the plants' chimney when they…
drorzel | March 13, 2011OK, having spoken vaguely about The Crippled God, here's a post for spoiler-y comments about the book and the series as a whole. If you haven't read it, but think you might, save this post for reading after you're done.
SPOILERS:
There's a bit early in the book (too far back for me to find now) where somebody says of Shadowthrone and Cotillion that they became gods because it seemed like the next logical step after conquering a vast empire. Once they were gods, though, and saw how the world worked, they decided they didn't like it, and set out to fix things.
That's kind of the core of the…
drorzel | March 13, 2011(This is a post about the concluding volume of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, so if you clicked through here because the title made you expect a rant about religion, you're at the wrong blog.)
It's hard to say anything coherent about this other than "Wow." I mean, this is the tenth thousand-page book in an epic fantasy series, and it actually ended! He took all the myriad storylines of the previous nine books, and brought most of them together in a way that made them fit! Most of all, it didn't suck!.
It's also sort of hard to write a blog review of the book, because it's the tenth in a…
drorzel | March 13, 2011
Bowing to the Future: Just for the record...
"It takes a bit of work to make a decent ebook. I've been overseeing the conversion of the Pyr backlist for two months now, so I know. I've also bought about 15 ebooks in the last two weeks on iBooks, and I'm sorry to say that I wish a few of the publishers whose books I've bought had taken a little more time with the conversion process. In one sad case, every single first letter of the first word on every line of the contents page is omitted. In another, every instance of the word "pilot" has been rendered as "pi lot," where about a quarter of…
drorzel | March 12, 2011I stayed up way too late last night, watching televised basketball and reading Steven Erikson (about which more later). It wasn't a good night for my teams, with both Syracuse and Maryland losing, but this is the most hoops I've watched all season, and I have a few miscellaneous comments:
-- How about that Big East? Two hard-fought games in the semifinals, both going to overtime, with a spectacular individual performance by Kemba Walker. Sadly, both Syracuse and Notre Dame lost in large part due to grievous lapses in judgement, with players who ought to know better rushing three-pointers when…
drorzel | March 12, 2011
What if editors got royalties? - Hey, There's A Dead Guy in the Living Room
So okay, publishing is risky no matter the paradigm. But what if, rather than a traditional publishing house glomming most of the risk into one big beach ball, each participant in the publishing process took ownership of his/her own little ping pong ball of risk?
Which brings me to: What if editors got royalties ... instead of salaries?
As a freelance editor, I can choose to help mitigate an author's risk by eliminating any up-front cost to hire me. What do you think, does that sound like an intriguing idea?
(tags:…
drorzel | March 11, 2011I've got three months to decide. I'll be giving an invited talk at the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (DAMOP) with this title, with a goal of introducing the field to students and physicists from other fields:
In recent years, DAMOP has expanded to the point where the meeting can be quite daunting for a first-time attendee. This talk will provide an introduction to some of the most exciting current areas of research in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical physics, intended to help undergraduates, beginning graduate students, or physicists from other fields attending their first…
drorzel | March 11, 2011One thing that I thought of while writing yesterday's mammoth post about scientific thinking and stereotypes was the notion of stereotype threat, the psychological phenomenon where students who are reminded of negative stereotypes right before a test tend to score worse than they do when taking the test without the negative reminder. This is a hot topic in education research at the moment, and it seems like EurekAlert throws me about one press release a week relating to the topic (or, at least, it seemed that way before I got too bust to keep up with EurekAlert).
I ended up not throwing it in…
drorzel | March 11, 2011
Among the Assisterati: Bottoms Up with the Highbrow Bottom Feeders | The New York Observer
"For six weeks, at a cost of $7,000, Columbia University offers recent college graduates forgettable workshops, fleeting encounters with important editors and access to the best unlisted job openings in book publishing and magazines. After swift job placement, these hyper-literate 20-somethings occupy a peculiar professional class: the Assisterati. Their institutional affiliations lend them a sense that they are the caretakers, soon to be inheritors, of a sublime patrimony. Their proximity to literary…
drorzel | March 10, 2011"I do not, for one, believe that the problem was that the band was down. I believe the problem may have been that there was a sky bison on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a toddler.
"Alright? That tended to understate the hugeness of the animal."
(A tiny bit of context. And no, we're not going to play "Stonehenge" tomorrow.)
drorzel | March 10, 2011A few more comments on the scientific thinking thing, because it's generated a bunch of comments. As usual, some of them are good points, and some of them have completely misunderstood what I was trying to say. so let's take another crack at it.
While the post was worded somewhat strongly, I'm not really trying to stake out a position diametrically opposed to what Neil DeGrasse Tyson said. In fact, I suspect we agree more than we disagee. We certainly share the same broad goal, namely to see more people thinking more scientifically more often. The difference is really a question of emphasis.…
drorzel | March 10, 2011
When Lew Alcindor defeated Scott Ostler at Pauley
"The UCLA freshman team featured Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Lucius Allen and three other prep All-Americans. In a game to open the new Pauley Pavilion, UCLA's frosh beat the varsity by 15. The varsity was coming off back-to-back national championships and was ranked No. 1 in the nation.
Our foes trotted out not only the future NBA career scoring leader, and a future NBA star guard in Allen, but also another guy who played briefly in the NBA and a fourth player who started for UCLA's subsequent three NCAA championship teams.
So…
drorzel | March 9, 2011As a sort of follow-on from yesterday's post, thinking about the issues involved reminded me of a couple of browser tabs that I've had open for a while, namely this story about an education session at the AAAS meeting, and this Inside Higher Ed article on "Teaching Ambiguity". From the IHE piece:
Tidy may be comforting, but it is also banal, boring, conventional and unrealistic. That's why I have been asking faculty to infuse their classes with the element of surprise. By surprise I do not mean mysteriously taking a rabbit out of a hat, but rather incorporating experimental, untidy open-ended…
drorzel | March 9, 2011
How Much Could the Real Floating House Lift? | Wired Science | Wired.com
"The internet is all pumped up over this real floating house recreating the scene from Up! (the movie). Here is a video:
Or perhaps you prefer some pictures. Here is a website full of pictures. here is the deal. National Geographic has some upcoming show and they built this for one of the episodes.
Where do I come in? Well, at first I was like "that is cool - but there isn't much for me to say." But then someone said that they weren't giving out many details of how they did this - you know, saving it for the real show…
drorzel | March 8, 2011Everybody's favorite science blogger did a podcast with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and has been posting highlights of it. One of these, on scientific thinking, has a bit that I don't quite agree with. Tyson says:
I think the, if it were natural to think scientifically, science as we currently practice it would have been going on for thousands of years. But it hasn't. It's relatively late in the activities of a culture. Science as we now practice it...this is a relatively modern, that's been going on for no more than 400 years. And you look at how long civilizations have been around, and you say,…
drorzel | March 8, 2011It's the last week of the winter term here, so here is a totally serious and important music-related poll question:
Which do you prefer?survey software
(OK, maybe the end-of-term craziness is making me just a tiny bit punchy...)