drorzel | January 23, 2011
Food for Thinkers: The Rise of White People Food - Food - GOOD
"White People Food has nothing to do with the relative melanin level of the person eating it. There are plenty of black and Hispanic foodies happily gorging themselves. They, too, in this case, are White People. And it has nothing to do with cuisine or the chef. In fact, Momofuku, the very quintessence of a White People restaurant, serves Asian-themed food and is run by David Chang, who is Korean. White People Food does, however, have a lot to do with money. Are you wealthy enough to afford cuts of [insert farm name] [insert…
drorzel | January 22, 2011Last year, Kate was one of the people who helped organize a fundraising auction to send a few people to Wiscon. It's that time again, and she's seeking donations for the auction:
Last year, Con or Bust raised $6,183.89 and helped thirteen people of color attend WisCon. We weren't able to meet all the requests for assistance, however, so I'm tentatively setting this year's auction goal at $7,000. Bidding on the auction will start Monday, February 21, 2011, at 12:01 a.m. EST (GMT -5) and end Sunday, March 6, 2011, at 11:59 p.m. EST. You may post auction offers and make donations now.
If you're…
drorzel | January 22, 2011
$1,000 to do something Awesome. « The Awesome Foundation - Toronto
"Further details below, but the basic idea is that 10 Torontonians have committed to showing up each month, stuffing $100 each into a paper bag, and giving that bag to the person we think has the best chance at achieving something awesome.
No reporting, no strings, no oversight. Just $1,000 to do whatever it is you think is worth doing.
Deadline for submission is February 15th."
(tags: awards culture society internet world)
Oliver Twist's Workhouse Discovered - Telegraph
"[A] buzz surrounds the new claim by Ruth…
drorzel | January 21, 2011There's been a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing in academic circles this week over the release of a book claiming college students are "Academically Adrift" (see also the follow-up story here). The headline findings, as summarized by Inside Higher Ed are:
* 45 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" during the first two years of college.
* 36 percent of students "did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning" over four years of college.
* Those students who do show improvements tend to show only modest improvements.…
drorzel | January 21, 2011Ephblog has mentioned Connecticut Congressman Chris Murphy, Williams class of '96 several times, but until yesterday's announcement and an email from somebody else pointing it out, I never connected the name with the Chris Murphy who was a freshman playing rugby when I was a senior. Having looked at his video announcing his campaign for Joe Lieberman's Senate seat, though:
I do kind of remember a guy on the team who looked more or less like that. Only, you know, younger. (In my defense, he played on the line, and those guys were all kind of indistinct and overly well-groomed (no rugby player…
drorzel | January 21, 2011
Surviving the World - Lesson 862 - Middle Aged
"I like the idea that you are greeted by a yeti either as you leave this world or when you first arrive in the afterlife. If you're creating a new religion or lifestyle, may I suggest you implement this concept into your theology?"
(tags: comics internet silly surviving-world)
Community gun ownership and Tulsa at Tobias Buckell Online
"I understand the momentum of gun ownership in the US, and find most people I know who own weapons do actually either hunt (and eat their hunt) or keep it for home protection (there are the nuts who fetishize…
drorzel | January 20, 2011There have been a bunch of times in the last couple of weeks where it was brought home how big SteelyKid has gotten compared to Kate, so this week, we have a Mommy-for-scale photo:
The stylish headband SteelyKid is sporting is from today's Tu B'Shevat celebration at the Jewish Community Center, where she goes to day care. (Learning a whole new set of holidays is an unexpected bonus of sending her there; happily, this one isn't major enough to close the JCC, which happens a lot...) The kids made these this week, and she's been talking about her band for a few days now, so she was very happy…
drorzel | January 20, 2011I gave a talk today on blogs as a tool for science communication (basically the same as this one, with a few minor updates), and got asked "Aren't the people who read science blogs mostly scientists already?" Which reminded me that it's been a while since I did a "Who are you people?" post.
So, if you've got a minute, leave a comment to this post, telling me something about who you are and how you got here. And if you want to throw in something about what you particularly like to read, or would like to see more of here, that sort of feedback is always helpful.
Thanks in advance.
drorzel | January 20, 2011A pretty straightforward question: Which prime number do you like the best?
What's your favorite prime number?online surveys
This is a purely classical poll, so you only get to choose one favorite, not a superposition of multiple numbers. Your selection is legally binding, so choose wisely!
(There's actually a point to putting this up today, beyond providing some cheap and easy blog traffic... I'll explain later.)
drorzel | January 20, 2011
Andrew Lownie Literary Agency | What Editors Want
A big list of editors talking about what they're looking for at their publishing houses, including this, from Oneworld i the UK: "We also love quirky non-fiction for our Autumn list, when shoppers are looking for something a bit different. We had great success last year with How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel and Mary Roach's hilarious Packing for Mars (popular science) as well as Peter Cave's Do Llamas Fall in Love (philosophy). Books like these that offer intelligent but highly readable introductions to interesting…
drorzel | January 19, 2011I'm giving a talk at the AAAS meeting next month on international physics tests, and they have asked me to provide information that they will duplicate and distribute to the media. Items requested include:
-- A one-paragraph biographical sketch (not a C.V.)
-- A lay-language summary of your talk, beyond the abstract.
-- The full text of your talk or a related (ideally recent) technical
paper, either as a Word file or a PDF. PowerPoint presentations are
acceptable, but a full text will better serve reporters' needs.
The first two are no big deal, but the third is kind of weird. I don't…
drorzel | January 19, 2011We did a lab yesterday that asked students to measure the speed of a ball leaving a spring-loaded launcher in a few different ways. this is a great way to talk about the difference between systematic and random errors and how those are dealt with. As a way of starting that discussion, I asked the students to calculate the speeds last night, and then enter their values in an Excel sheet when they came to class this morning. Since generating a sensible plot in Excel 2007 is such a gigantic pain in the ass, I used an older data set to set up a template, and made a graph of the quantities we were…
drorzel | January 19, 2011
The slow-photography movement asks what is the point of taking pictures? - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine
"[T]he real victim of fast photography is not the quality of the photos themselves. The victim is us. We lose something else: the experiential side, the joy of photography as an activity. And trying to fight this loss, to treat photography as an experience, not a means to an end, is the very definition of slow photography.
Defined more carefully, slow photography is the effort to flip the usual relationship between process and results. Usually, you use a camera because you want the results…
drorzel | January 18, 2011The latest snowstorm is wreaking some havoc on my plans for the day, which means I'm going to lift another question and answer from the Physics Stack Exchange, with some modification. This one is a question about thermal radiation:
What are the quantum mechanisms behind the emission and absorption of thermal radiation at and below room temperature? If the relevant quantum state transitions are molecular (stretching, flexing and spin changes) how come the thermal spectrum is continuous? What about substances (such as noble gases) which don't form molecules, how do they emit or absorb thermal…
drorzel | January 18, 2011
xkcd: 3D
"You should've gone to the screening at CERN."
(tags: comics xkcd silly physics particles science theory)
Smarter Than the Average Bear? « Easily Distracted
"If I have seen a pattern, among my students and my parental peers alike, it's that parents who try to be someone that they're not, pursuing a parenting style that doesn't come from their own life experience, are the ones who will create the most psychic havoc for their children and for themselves. That's the really pernicious thing about figures like Chua, or indeed most folks who try to sell a complete parenting philosophy…
drorzel | January 17, 2011Part of this past weekend's meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public was to evaluate 100+ proposals for "mini-grants" of up to $10,000 for new outreach activities. It wouldn't be appropriate to go into detail about any of the proposals or what we decided (the PI's of the proposals we decided to fund will be notified soon), but there was one issue that came up again and again that I think is appropriate for the blog, which is what should be considered as a successful effort, particularly in the online world.
A large number of the proposals we were considering had "new media" components…
drorzel | January 17, 2011
Drug experiment - The Boston Globe
"[N]early a decade later, there's evidence that Portugal's great drug experiment not only didn't blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon's troubled neighborhood, has improved. And new research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, documents just how much things have changed in Portugal. Coauthors Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens report a 63 percent increase in the number of Portuguese drug users in treatment and,…
drorzel | January 16, 2011I was at a meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public of the American Physical Society at the tail end of last week, so it seems appropriate to post a couple of APS-related announcements here on my return:
1) The APS has just created a Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public. You may have read about this in the monthly APS News, but in case you missed it, there is a new organization with APS to bring people interested in outreach together:
"The forum provides a venue for people to congregate, provide best practice manuals...and disseminate things that work so people don't have to…
drorzel | January 15, 2011For one obvious example, I'm typing this on a plane-- Southwest has started doing wi-fi on some flights, and it is totally worth $5 to be able to web-surf in flight.It would be even better if the flight wren't packed, so I could type more comfortably, but I'm ok with just reading (once I post this).
Another example is the way that net access enabled me to have a far better time in Miami last night than I ordinarily would have. Everybody from the meeting I went there for took off, so I was on my own for the evening, and South Beach isn't my kind of scene, being neither rich nor famous nor fond…
drorzel | January 15, 2011
YouTube - Fox in Socks-Like NEVER before
Just a tiny bit faster than I can manage...
(tags: youtube books kid-stuff video)
Veiled Criticism - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - 01/13/11 - Video Clip | Comedy Central
"It's not a show!!!"
(tags: politics us television comedy video)