Bora/ coturnix over at Science and Politics has generated a lot of conversation via his taxonomy of science blog posts, mostly relating to the call for people to start publishing data and hypotheses on blogs. Much of the discussion that I've seen centers on the question of "scooping" (see, for example, here and here), but there's a wide range of reaction linked from the end of the original post. Bora seems to regard it as a Bad Thing that people don't post data (though I should note that I did post some data during the Week in the Lab-- calibration data only, granted, but it's data...). I don…

I'd just like to note that I'm inordinately amused to find a blog called Mormon Philosophy and Theology linking me. I also seem to have picked up a sidebar link at Cocktail Party Physics, which reminds me that I really need to update the blogroll... These minor revelations brought to you by ego-surfing on Technorati...

The people (well, person) who brought you the physics blog aggregator Mixed States have now rolled out a new biology-themed blog aggregator: Recombinants. At the moment, it only has about six feeds going into it, and the content is about 70% PZ Myers, so head over there and suggest some biology feeds to be added to the mix.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden, writing about the phenomenon of fan fiction: Personally, I'm convinced that the legends of the Holy Grail are fanfic about the Eucharist. One of the most peevesome things about the hectic period I'm in at my day job is that I no longer have time to follow Making Light comment threads-- I saw that post go up yesterday, but by the time I got around to looking at the comments this morning, there were already 245 comments. I can either read those, or prep for my morning classes, but not both... My personal feelings on the fraught subject of fan fiction, below the fold: I'm…

Via BioCurious, a list of science questions every high school graduate should be able to answer: What percentage of the earth is covered by water? What sorts of signals does the brain use to communicate sensations, thoughts and actions? Did dinosaurs and humans ever exist at the same time? What is Darwin’s theory of the origin of species? Why does a year consist of 365 days, and a day of 24 hours? Why is the sky blue? What causes a rainbow? What is it that makes diseases caused by viruses and bacteria hard to treat? How old are the oldest fossils on earth? Why do we put salt on sidewalks…

Monday is the decision deadline for accepted students to decide whether they're coming here next year, and we've had a slow parade of people getting tours of the department and suchlike over the last few weeks. We've also had a couple "Open House" events, where accepted students and their families are invited to campus to see the school, sit in on classes, and have lunch with members of the faculty. In talking with the students at these events, I'm always struck by how apparently random the college decision process is. We spend hours and hours and thousands of dollars trying to draw the best…

The NFL Draft is this weekend, and ESPN is entering their 57th day of intense, round-the-clock coverage of the draft. I have one simple thing to say to them: Stop. You're hurting America. This isn't even a real sports story-- this is a fantasy sports story. This is like college basketball recruiting, only even less interesting-- half of the guys who go in the first round won't pan out, and half of the superstars of tomorrow will be little-regarded sixth-round picks who go on to win multiple Super Bowl MVP awards. The draft is meaningful only in the spherical, frictionless, eleven-dimensional…

I've found myself in the weird position of giving career advice twice in the last week and a half. Once was to a former student, which I sort of understand, while the second time was a grad student in my former research group, who I've never met. I still don't really feel qualified to offer useful advice-- I haven't even come up for tenure yet, after all. I might have something useful to say next year at this time-- that, or you'll know not to listen to anything I have to say. Anyway, since I'm thinking about this, and since I'm otherwise afflicted with motivation-sapping medical crud, I'm…

In a previous post, I dissed the NBA as being a haven for ugly pseudo-basketball. It does serve a purpose, though, as a sort of methadone program to ease the way down from the hoops-jukie high of March to the Great Sports Desert between the end of the NBA and the start of the NFL. As I was feeling generally cruddy yesterday (side effects of some medication, I think, and we're going to be getting that dosage tweaked just as soon as the doctor's office opens), I wound up watching a little of the NBA playoffs, specifically, the Indiana Pacers playing the New Jersey Nets. Now, granted, these are…

Why is this dog sulking, you ask? (Answer below the fold) Because this: and this: show what the back yard looks like right now. We've needed rain for the last couple of weeks, and as you can tell, this has been good for the lawn. Those parts of it that are still above water, that is...

Kate and I went to see Thank You for Smoking yesterday (Short review: About as good an adaptation of the original book as you could hope for, and much more my thing than Kate's). The set of trailers we got was generally excruciating-- lots of film-festival material about quirky families being awful to one another. Granted, it's not really the audience you want to pitch X-Men III to, but I don't know if I've seen a more dispiriting block of trailers ever. The most excruciating, of course, was the trailer for United 93, a lovingly detailed September 11th movie. And, apparently, based on poster…

As someone who reads a lot, I have a certain amount of interest in the way publishing works. It's sort of fascinating to get to hear about the day to day operations, and how a manuscript becomes a book. In that vein, alg on LiveJournal (I'm hazy about whose names are public and whose aren't, so I'll stick with the username) has a discussion of book finances, complete with made-up numbers, part of her ongoing series of posts about the publishing business. It's an interesting look at what goes into a failed mass-market book. In a vaguely similar vein, there's some interesting stuff about the…

Over at the Seed editors blog, Maggie Wittlin asks who's the most overlooked scientist: Which scientist (in your field or beyond) has been most seriously shafted? This could be taken two ways: Who deserves to be more recognized, revered and renowned today than he or she is? Who got passed over, ridiculed, etc. the most while he or she was alive? It's a little ironic that I can point to a nice magazine profle of my nominee, but I would have to say Ralph Alpher. As a grad student, Alpher realized that the Big Bang should've left an echo in the form of an all-pervading radiation field, and even…

I'm still feeling pretty lethargic, but I hope that will improve when I get to lecture about the EPR paradox in Quantum Optics today (it's going to be kind of a short lecture, unless I can ad-lib an introduction to Bell's Theorem at the end of the class, but then I've been holding them late for three weeks already...). In an effort to perk myself up through blogging, here are some amusing tales about mishaps involving electricity. (First, a disclaimer: Though these stories are presented in a manner that (hopefully) makes them sound amusing, most of what I describe here is, in fact, incredibly…

When I teach introductory classes, I use a somewhat more complicated homework policy than most of my colleagues. As a result, my syllabus tends to run longer than theirs, by at least a page or two. I sometimes worry that this is excessive, but happily, Inside Higher Ed is here to prove me wrong: By my second semester, I was getting more specific on paper. My attendance policy seemed clear to me -- as did my requirements for rewrites. I had even made up an in-depth course outline, which listed due dates for papers, late due dates for papers which included a 10 percent grade penalty, quiz dates…

Everybody should read today's Medium Large. In fact, you should read Medium Large every day. Why aren't you?

The official letter from the department requesting the formation of an ad hoc committee for my tenure review was sent in yesterday. This is the official start of the process-- I'm still a little fuzzy on the timeline from here out, but by September, I'll have to provide the committee with a huge amount of teaching and research material, and then there's a long process of interviews with students and faculty, external review of my research, and a visit by someone who will be evaluating the lab that I've built. This isn't the main reason why I haven't been blogging as much this week-- that's…

I'm not feeling especially inspired, blog-wise, this morning, and I've got another couple of busy days on tap, so you get the fall-back post of the uninspired blogger: Ten random tracks from my iTunes library (the four-and-five-star playlist), with commentary. I'm tempted to just steal Kate's musical range idea, but she thought of it first, so go comment at her place if you're interested. Today's random tracks: "Meadowlake Street," Ryan Adams & The Cardinals. The "Song Lotto" pick at the show I saw, part of the fantastic second set. "Loving Cup," The Rolling Stones. Off Exile on Main St…

I retain just enough of my childhood fascination with dinosaurs to be interested in a headline like "A Meat Eater Bigger Than T. Rex Is Unearthed". Of course, most of the information you would really want is right there in the headline: New dinosaur species, really big, carnivorous, next story please. Subsequent years of scientific training have given me a second reaction to this sort of story, after "Whoa, cool." Namely, "Boy, the graphics with this story are useless." I mean, the little shadow-dinosaur jpeg at left is a standard thing, but the almost completely featureless map of Argentina…

Reading this article reminds me that I forgot to talk about the poetry reading from a few weeks ago. In lieu of a regular colloquium talk one week this term, we co-hosted a poetry reading by George Drew, a local poet with a book of physics-themed poems. There are some sample poems on that site, which give you an idea of the flavor of the thing (I don't think he read any of those specific poems, but they're fairly representative). They aren't so much poems about physics principles as they are poems about the history of physics-- lots of imaginary letters from one famous 20th Century physicist…