drorzel | February 1, 2011
Wait, Who Has Sinister Connections to Insiders That Influence Their Reporting? « Easily Distracted
"[...]Al-Jazeera! Al-Jazeera, with its mysterious (sinister!) agenda, its undisclosed connections, its desire to influence events!
As opposed to what? The New York Times, the Washington Post, the major US TV network news operations, with their still-largely cozy relationship to undisclosed inside sources, their unabashed mouthpiecing for American policy elites, their protected stable of hack editorialists and pet experts? Why is anyone still talking about Martin Peretz, for example, let alone…
drorzel | January 31, 2011This is a difficult book to review, which is probably fitting, because it's a very personal book. My reaction to it is largely personal as well, and may or may not be of any use to anyone else. Given the surprising number of people who had Opinions regarding my recollections of telecommunications, I almost think I might be better off not saying anything, but it's going to nag at me unless I write something about it, so what the hell...
So. Among Others is the story of Morwenna "Mori" Markova (previously Phelps), a girl from Wales who sees fairies and whose mother is an evil witch. Literally.…
drorzel | January 31, 2011
Rutherford's alchemy solved Atom's mystery
"He was the first to achieve the alchemists' dream of changing one element into another, yet he wasn't an alchemist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry, but he wasn't a chemist. The work for which he received the Prize was carried out in Canada, but he wasn't a Canadian. He achieved the first man-made nuclear reaction, but he doubted nuclear energy could be controlled by man. He was Ernest Rutherford, pride of New Zealand, England, Canada and McGill University."
(tags: science physics history nuclear atoms biography)
The Urbanophile »…
drorzel | January 30, 2011
slacktivist: People power in Egypt
"We've been "promoting democracy" as though the first and most important step involved conducting elections. But the health and success of a democracy isn't determined as much by the things the public is able to decide by majority vote as by those things that cannot be voted away.
Democracy doesn't start with elections. It starts with a bill of rights. Unless and until the rights of minorities are guaranteed and protected by law, elections can be a threat to the safety, property and freedom of the losers. This is the dynamic that makes the Afghan and…
drorzel | January 29, 2011
The 'scandal' of the kilogram (Blog) - physicsworld.com
"That's the name of the game in metrology these days - finding a way of defining mass without just resorting embarrassingly, as we do now, to a lump of metal in the basement of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) outside Paris and saying "that's a kilogram". After all, periodic inspections of the lump have shown it's been changing its mass slowly over time. As laser physicist Bill Phillips from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) told delegates during one question-and-answer session on Monday…
drorzel | January 28, 2011A somewhat surprising number of people asked for a return of the guess-the-lyrics posts in the who are you? thread, and it seems like a good Friday activity. So, as with the previous rounds, each of the following gives a pair of rhyming (or at least intended-to-rhyme) phrases from a pop music song in my collection. Some of these are very recent, some go back a ways; some are pretty obvious, others kind of obscure. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to guess the song from which I took the rhyming phrase.
1) mountain of rocks/ Cracker Jack box
2) by the wrist/ amethyst
3) CD…
drorzel | January 28, 2011
Promoting Science: MythBusters vs. Sport Science | Wired Science | Wired.com
"So, is Sport Science good for science? Is it even science? What about MythBusters? You know it and I know it - I am biased. However, let me pretend that I am not and compare Sport Science and MythBusters in terms of scienceyness."
(tags: science education television culture blogs physics dot-physics)
How to Make Trillions of Dollars | Raptitude.com
"I do encourage you to become a millionaire, if that's something that interests you. If it's billions you're after, I'm a bit suspicious but I'll give you the benefit…
drorzel | January 27, 2011Since we had a Mommy-for-scale picture last week, I thought it was high time we had another Daddy-for-scale picture. So, here's SteelyKid before going off to day care this morning:
(Photo credit: Kate)
She's been more than 0.5 Kate in height for a good long while, but now she's coming up on half a me. She's a great big growing toddler, all right.
drorzel | January 27, 2011I probably ought to get a start on the big pile of grading I have waiting for me, but I just finished a draft of the problematic Chapter 7, on E=mc2, so I'm going to celebrate a little by blogging about that.
One thing that caught my eye in the not-entirely-successful chapter on momentum and energy in An Illustrated Guide to Relativity was a slightly rant-y paragraph on how it's misleading to talk about the energy released in nuclear reactions as being the conversion of mass into energy, because what's really involved is just the release of energy due to the strong force. It struck me as…
drorzel | January 27, 2011Subtitled "Understanding Einstein's Relativity," David Mermin's It's About Time is another book (like An Illustrated Guide to Relativity) that grew out of a non-majors course on physics that Mermin offers at Cornell. It's also an almost-forty-years-later update of an earlier book he wrote on the same subject. And it's been a really good resource for writing the book-in-progress, which I ought to repay by reviewing it here.
Like the Illustrated Guide, this is a book that aims to teach students something about how relativistic kinematics actually works. Unlike the Illustrated Guide though, this…
drorzel | January 27, 2011
The Myth of Charter Schools by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books
"If we are serious about improving our schools, we will take steps to improve our teacher force, as Finland and other nations have done. That would mean better screening to select the best candidates, higher salaries, better support and mentoring systems, and better working conditions. Guggenheim complains that only one in 2,500 teachers loses his or her teaching certificate, but fails to mention that 50 percent of those who enter teaching leave within five years, mostly because of poor working conditions, lack of…
drorzel | January 26, 2011I'm about halfway through Jo Walton's Among Others, a fantasy novel set in Britain in 1979, featuring an unhappy teenage girl who finds relief in reading science fiction and fantasy, and becoming involved with SF fandom. It's getting rave reviews from a lot of the usual sources, and the concept sounded interesting, so I grabbed it right after it came out.
It's an easy read in a lot of ways, but also an odd one. In particular, I keep having trouble remembering when it's set. Despite the frequent reminders that it's set in an era I lived through (it's written as a diary, and every entry…
drorzel | January 26, 2011I have a Lenovo thinkPad X61 tablet that I use for a bunch of things, but mainly for working on the book in places that aren't my home or office on campus, and lecturing. I do use the tablet features, primarily for marking up my lecture slides (I have PowerPoint slides that I use for class, and I leave blank spaces on them for examples, which I hand-write. This helps slow down the pace of the lecture a little, which is the chief student complaint about PowerPoint lectures.
The X61 is a few years old, now-- three and a bit years-- so it's been getting kind of creaky. It crashes hard every…
drorzel | January 26, 2011
slacktivist: Anti-Missourian best-sellers
"When some polarizing figure publishes a book, the sales of that book do provide one useful way of gauging the popularity of that figure or that point of view.[...]
But say some less polarizing figure also publishes a book taking the opposite view and it doesn't sell anywhere near as well. Is that an indication that the opposite view has relatively less support?
That's one possibility. Generally, though, it's difficult to compare the two books head-to-head. One might have received a great deal more publicity than the other, might have more money or…
drorzel | January 25, 2011Over in locked LiveJournal land, I read a post talking about computer science education, and how it's biased against people who aren't already tech geeks coming into college:
Taking an intro CS course if you don't already know how to program is like taking intro Spanish without ever having taken it in high school - 90% of the people in that class are ahead of you, possibly way ahead of you, on day one, and you're working from the back.
That is a brutal situation to be in, honestly, and it does nobody any favours. The people who don't already know how to program are dealt a crushing blow to…
drorzel | January 25, 2011
Swans on Tea » Blogging: You're Doing it Wrong! (Part III)
"Completely unrelated to this was a session called "How Can We Maintain High Journalism Standards on the Web," and it was attended mostly by the professionals. Most of the session focused on ethics standards and disclosure and avoiding the appearance of bias, which means Pepsigate came up (surprise!) and other related subjects as well. I get that most responsible journalists don't want their work tainted by the appearance that they are endorsing a product or service, which can be questioned by links or undisclosed sponsorships or…
drorzel | January 24, 2011They say that, in writing, you should steal from the best. Or, failing that, whoever's convenient. Like, say, John Scalzi.
I made a little headway on the book-in-progress over the weekend, which is nice. The problem is, the words I wrote on Saturday were the first new text generated since Tuesday the previous week. Not the one four days earlier, the one the week before that.
This is obviously unsustainable if I'm going to finish the book-in-progress in finite time, so I am, effective immediately, copying John's writing quota system: No Internet for me on any given day(*) until I write…
drorzel | January 24, 2011We've had three pretty decent snow storms here recently, which is nice. Unfortunately, the middle one included a good deal of ice, so we now have a thick layer of snow, covered by a half-inch of ice, with another several inches of snow on top of that. Which makes getting around quite the chore.
However, if you break out big pieces of the ice layer, you can stick them back into the ice so they stand upright, like the bony plates on the back of a stegosaurus. which is pretty neat:
Of course, the real highlight of going out to play in the snow is coming back inside where it's warm, then running…
drorzel | January 24, 2011
Scientists discover snowflake identical to one which fell in 1963 | NewsBiscuit
"'It's one of the last remaining challenges known to science and we've cracked it at last,' said lead researcher, Professor Kenneth Libbrecht. 'The team will soon disband to pursue other major scientific challenges, such as the unresolved toast-butter conundrum, and whether or not my baldness makes me a better lover.'"
(tags: science physics silly)
Coding Horror: The Bad Apple: Group Poison
"Groups of four college students were organized into teams and given a task to complete some basic management decisions…
drorzel | January 23, 2011offers a suggestion that I heartily endorse. He quotes James Joyner on the problem of feeling obliged to comment:
I frequently see a headline or story somewhere, decide it's not worth my time, and then get drawn into it hours later when I see conversations about it on Twitter or my blog feed reader. Sometimes, it's just a function of "well, this must be important so let me say something."
and counters with the obvious solution:
I have a solution: don't do it! If it's not something that you personally care much about, just skip it. I, for one, would actually enjoy the blogosphere more if…