Search Content

Displaying results 74301 - 74350 of 87950

Links for 2012-10-05

In which Heinlein helps out a friend, new Trek turns 25, the future isn't what it used to be, skeptics see a chupacabra, Star Wars characters can't read, and Frank Turner is brutally honest about John Lennon's worst famous song. ------------ British folksinger Frank Turner on why he hates John Lennon’s “Imagine” | Music | HateSong | The A.V. Club AVC: You come from a punk background. That seems to fit in with the anti-nationalism, anti-corporate, and anti-religious messages of “Imagine,” no? FT: Yes, but that’s one of the things that’s so fucking annoying about it. Compared to, say, “The…

The Electric Life of Michael Faraday by Alan Hirshfeld

A passing mention in last week's post about impostors and underdogs got me thinking about Michael Faraday again, and I went looking for a good biography of him. The last time looked, I didn't find any in electronic form, probably because the Sony Reader store has a lousy selection. I got a Nook for Christmas, though, and this time, Alan Hirshfeld's 2006 biography, The Electric Life of Michael Faraday was right there, so I picked it up and read it over the weekend. It was a fast read, both because this is a short popular biography-- 250-odd pages-- and because Faraday's life story makes for…

My opinion on the Global Climate Model clique feedback loop

My opinion on the Global Climate Model clique feedback loop was requested by not one but two people, and how could I resist? The text starts well, by assuring readers of the most important point, which is you don’t know enough to intelligently comment on the code itself which is true, certainly for readers of WUWT, and quite likely for many of my readers too. But already at that point its gone wrong by assuring readers this is because they need to know about computational fluid dynamics and some other stuff. This is about the most common mistake people make about GCMs. Of course they do have…

Climate Change Policy: What Do the Models Tell Us?

Quite a lot really. Unless, of course, you're looking at the wrong models in the wrong way. As Robert S. Pindyck does. I do have some sympathy for the paper, but its badly written, somewhat confused, and the author has failed to emphasise some key distinctions. To begin with where I agree, I'm fairly happy with his assertion that "certain inputs (e.g. the discount rate) are arbitrary, but have huge effects on the [social cost of carbon] estimates". I'm only "fairly" happy, because to say that the discount rate is "arbitrary" is stupid (which is probably a hint that this thing hasn't been peer…

Farewell to EvolutionBlog!

Folks, I'm done. A recent story in the news involves the decision by FIDE, the world chess federation, to hold the Women's World Championship in Iran. That's a bit awkward, since Iran imposes certain religion-inspired dress requirements on women. This has led some players, most notably the current American women's champion Nazi Paikidze, to boycott. She is supported in this by the U. S. Chess Federation, among many others. Frankly, you have to go back to the 1970s to find a time when FIDE was something other than a corrupt embarrassment to chess players. So here we have a story about…

The Schindlers' Quack Doctor

Another aspect of the Terri Schiavo situation that hasn't gotten enough attention is the physician they've been using to claim that Terri can get better. And they've got themselves a real doozy, William Hammesfahr. The man's webpage virtually drips with disingenuous self-promotion. I especially love the blaring headline: Dr. Hammesfahr has been identified as "the first physician to treat patients successfully to restore deficits caused by stroke." Uh, yeah. Sorry doc, but physicians have been rehabilitating stroke victims to improve their deficits in speech, muscle control, walking, etc, for…

Learning Something New Every Day

Have you ever had an issue that you thought you understood perfectly well, only to find out that what you thought you knew about it was totally wrong? It happened to me today regarding a Supreme Court case called Lamb's Chapel v Center Moriches School District. For several years I've thought that this case involved the Equal Access Act, a federal law that requires schools to not discriminate in allowing student-run clubs and organizations to use school facilities. This act has been credited with protecting the rights of students to organize bible clubs and prayer groups, and use school…

The Martyr Pose Strikes Again

Of all the prominent religious right figures, you'd think the last one to scream persecution and claim victimhood would be Pat Buchanan. But here he is in - where else? - the Worldnutdaily proclaiming himself and his fellow Christians the victims of a silent and unnamed conspiracy deep within the bowels of Macy's: Now Macy's has stopped using the phrase "Merry Christmas" in all store advertising, replacing it with what Macy's calls the more inclusive "Season's Greetings" and "Happy Holidays." But how is it "inclusive" to exclude the Christians' greeting? Is that not anti-Christian? Why would…

More Wingnuts in Katrina's Aftermath

Disasters do bring the whackos out of the woodwork. I've already cited a few of them, but how about these guys? I can't get my head wrapped around this kind of reasoning. Here's the first one: Chuck Kelley is president of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, with facilities located near the southern banks of Lake Pontchartrain and in Chalmette, east of the city. Baptist Press reports that Kelley now finds himself homeless and with only a few personal belongings following Hurricane Katrina's devastating blow to the New Orleans area. But the seminary leader says he is able to discern God's…

Response to Patterico on "made-up rights"

Patterico left a comment below that harkens back to a prior exchange we had on the subject of the legitimate exercise of authority by the government. I thought I'd move it up here in the hope that we could continue that discussion and others could jump in as well. Patterico writes: Where liberals have gone wrong is in relying upon an expanding and mysterious group of "rights" the existence of which is subject to the whims of unelected judges. Conservatives would rather stake their claim to liberty on the premise that the authority granted to a centralized government is limited in scope. If…

Another nail driven into poor Behe

Another review of Behe's book, The Edge of Evolution, has been published, this time in Nature and by Ken Miller. This one focuses on Behe's central claim, that he has identified a probabilistic limit to what evolution can do that means no differences above roughly the genus level (and in many cases, the species level) can be generated by natural mechanisms. This is his CCC metric, or the probability of evolving something equivalent to the "chloroquine complexity cluster", which he claims is the odds of evolving two specific amino acid changes in a protein. It's a number he pegs at 1 in 1020,…

Real Idiot of the Month: Charles Colson

There's nothing more annoying than finding a really good Idiot of the Month nominee, putting it up, and then finding someone a day or two later who makes the first nominee sound like Mortimer Adler by comparison (okay, that's an exaggeration. There is something more annoying than that. Need I mention Celine Dion?). But yes, it has happened again, and I'm afraid David Morrell is going to have to surrender his recent award to none other than Watergate-crook-turned-evangelist-fraud Charles Colson for this unrelentingly idiotic screed in Christianity Today. Just look at this: We must be careful…

There is no Consensus

This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic. Objection: Climate is complicated and there are lots of competing theories and unsolved mysteries. Until this is all worked out one can't claim there is consensus on Global Warming Theory and until there is we should not take any actions. Answer: Sure there are plenty of unsolved problems and active debates in climate science. But if you look at the research papers coming out these days, the debates are about things like why model predictions of…

To Old Friends, part 2

I spent a great day yesterday visiting with old friends in two different shifts. First, I went down to MSU to spend a few hours with my old friends Will and Biza, who are brother and sister and in some ways like a little brother and sister to me. When I coached the debate team at Okemos High school from 87-90 while I was in college, they were the top debate team at East Lansing, so in some ways they were a rival team. But their coach was terminally clueless and they had far outgrown anything he could teach them, so they often traveled with my team and we all kind of worked together and became…

The Theory of Almost Everything by Robert Oerter

In case you can't pick up his direction from the subtitle of The Theory of Almost Everything ("The Standard Model, the Unsung Triumph of Modern Physics"), Robert Oerter lays it all out for you in the second paragraph of the Introduction: the Standard Model has a surprisingly low profile for such a fundamental and successful theory. It has deeper implications for the nature of teh universe than chaos theory, and unlike string theory, which is purely speculative in nature, it has a strong experimental basis-- but it is not as widely known as either. In physics news itesm, the Standard Model…

Atheist Charity Drive

Over at Framing Science, Matthew Nisbet notes a survey about poverty which finds, among other things, that atheists are less likely to take part in anti-poverty efforts. There are a number of good reasons to be skeptical of this survey, which I'll mention at the end of this post, but Nisbet seems to take it seriously, and speculates about why atheists might be less charitable than believers, giving three possible interpretations of the result. In the very first comment to the post, commenter "Roy" offers a fourth: bone-deep cynicism. Most of the religious 'charity' aimed at poverty actually…

Deism's Just Alright With Me

Over at Bora's House of Round-the-Clock Blogging, we find the sensational headline Beaten by Biologists, Creationists Turn Their Sights On Physics. On seeing that, I headed over to the editorial in The American Prospect that it points to, expecting to be scandalized. When I got there, I found this: U.S. creationists have changed tactics. Though none have explicitly abandoned ID in public, the focus of their scientific cover arguments has shifted from organic change to the creation of the universe. They have picked up on the controversial claim that human life could only have evolved because…

Jackie Robinson: Most Important American?

Yesterday, on my way in to work, I was listening to ESPN radio and Mike Greenberg made a bold assertion (paraphrased slightly): Jackie Robinson is one of the ten most important Americans of the twentieth century. Not just sports figures, Americans. Contrary sort that I am, my first thought was "I don't think I believe that." Which is not to say that Robinson wasn't an important American of the twentieth century. I don't think there's any question that he's the most important twentieth century American from the world of sports (trailed by Muhammed Ali and Jesse Owens, and then a big step down…

Athletes Aren't Different

It's a great time of year if you're a sports fan. The NFL is in full swing, and college football is coming to the inconclusive end of its season (save for the weird six-weeks-later coda of the bowl games). The NBA and NHL are just starting up, and most importantly, college basketball season has just started. The abundance of sports, particularly college sports, at this time of year makes it a great time to be a fan. Unfortunately, the fact that both college football and college basketball (the biggest of the big-money sports) are in season at the moment also means that this is the peak season…

Optimism and the Depression

This week's department colloquium was Roel Snieder of the Colorado School of Mines on The Global Energy Challenge. I have to admit, I was somewhat rude, and spent a lot of the talk futzing with my tablet, but really, while his presentation of the material was very good, the material itself wasn't new to me-- if you read ScienceBlogs, you've probably heard it all. It's a colossal ball of woe, too. You know the story-- demand for energy is increasing, supplies of oil are dwindling. The planet is warming, the ice caps are melting, the oceans are rising. Everything is on the verge of collapse.…

The Relevance of Relevance

Via Swans On Tea, a ranty blog post titled Sucky Schools - How To Repair Our Education System, which takes its structure and much of its tone from Paul Lockhart's "Mathematician's Lament" (which, unfortunately, is a PDF file). I'm fond of ranty posts about education reform, but both of these kind of lose me. Lockhart, in particular, strikes me as being an excellent example of the dangers of being too attached to a subject. He writes with great passion and at great length about the fun and creativity involved in math, which is all very nice. Unfortunately, it also leads to paragraphs like this…

Social Class Tourism

Over at the Whatever, Scalzi has some acid comments for Prof. Will Barrat's Social Class on Campus diagnostic tools, particularly the step forward exercise (I've linked the Web version-- John refers to the Word file): [F]or the purposes of this exercise -- showing indicators of privilege and class -- this list is not actually useful, and indeed counter-productive. In this exercise, it's entirely possible for someone of a lower social class to appear more "privileged" than someone who is of the "rich and snooty" class. This doesn't create awareness of privilege; it does, however, create…

Secrets of Committee Work

Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau has encountered the dark side of academic life: I was assigned to the curriculum committee, so I went to the meeting today. (I don't go to committee meetings for my health.) I learned that one of the tasks before us was demonstrating that we have assessments to show that introductory physics courses satisfy the University's "quantitative science" requirement. Now, I know what you're thinking: HOW THE HELL COULD PHYSICS NOT BE A QUANTITATIVE SCIENCE? Well, I got past that. I had told myself that I would just accept the bullshit and do whatever needs to be…

Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novik [Library of Babel]

Tongues of Serpents is the nth book in the Temeraire series started with His Majesty's Dragon (in the US, anyway), and another "Meh" review from me. In this case, this is probably less to do with the book itself than with the fact that I am not really in the target demographic for this book. The series, for those who aren't familiar with it is basically Patrick O'Brian crossed with Pern: our chief protagonist is William Laurence, a sailor in the Biritsh Navy in the Napoleonic Wars who captures a dragon's egg, and inadvertently becomes the human captain of Temeraire, a Chinese Celestial dragon…

Qualifying Exam Season

Gordon Watts reminds me that the start of a new academic year means more than just the arrivial of a new crop of freshmen. For grad students, it's qualifying exam season. For those not in the know, "qualifying exams" are a common feature of most Ph.D. programs. These are big, comprehensive tests that all students have to take at the end of the required course work. They usually come at either the end of the first year, or the start of the second year, and you have to pass the test in order to continue in the program. And, of course, the tests aren't exactly easy. As Gordon puts it: The common…

Religion must be placated. You will be assimilated.

The Kentucky Park Service has a problem. People are going to the Creation "Museum", getting their heads filled up with idiocy, and then they go to the state parks and pester the rangers with stupid assertions. The parks department had a great idea: let's send the rangers to the museum to find out what exactly they're facing. I approve! You should know the enemy well if you're going to out-argue him, and this is one of the few legitimate reasons for visiting that pile of dreck in Petersburg. Only…they're going to hobble themselves, tie one hand behind their back, and wear a blindfold in this…

The Falsehoods

Biology is harder to learn than quantum physics. Why? Because most people think they totally get biology, but everyone knows nobody gets quantum physics. Therefore, any effort to explore quantum physics will result in new learning, but people rarely learn new biology. The bottom line is that our brains are full of biology, which would be good if most of it did not consist of falsehoods. ~ ~ ~ The things that people know already often need to be removed from the brain prior to teaching new stuff. This may seem a little offensive to some, but really, it is easier to just admit it. I'm not…

Scientists to Texas Board of Education: Teach Evolution Right!

Over 50 scientific societies representing hundreds of thousands of American scientists today publicly urged the Texas Board of Education to support accurate science education.... From the National Center for Science Education Over 50 scientific societies representing hundreds of thousands of American scientists today publicly urged the Texas Board of Education to support accurate science education. The board--dominated by creationists--has been embroiled in a debate over changes to the Texas science standards that could compromise the teaching of evolution. "Evolution is the foundation of…

Back to School!

Classes started on Monday. I'm actually pretty happy about that. This summer was rather hectic and stressful in many ways. Also productive, but still. It was basically a good counterexample to the clueless types who insist that teachers only work nine months out of the year. For me, the summer tends to be harder work than the regular school year. Teaching isn't easy, and it's rather time consuming, but it's familiar and predictable and routine. Of course, if all you know about higher education comes from what you hear in the news, you could easily think that modern academic life is an…

Sunday Chess Problem

Okay, I'm back from Tennessee. The talk went pretty well, and the conference was a lot of fun. So let's celebrate with another installment of Sunday Chess Problem! Our last entry featured a series mover. It seemed to be well-received, and they happen to be fairly easy to blog. So let's try another one! The following problem was composed by Josif Krikheli in 1966. It calls for Series Helpmate in 25: Our last entry called for Series Selfmate, so this one is a bit different. We have seen normal helpmates, in which black moves first and both sides cooperate to create a position in which…

Sunday Chess Problem

My SIWOTI syndrome has not returned, the end of the semester notwithstanding. Watching the daily broadcasts from the recently completed U. S. Chess Championship, however, has certainly gotten my chess juices flowing. So here's another installment of Sunday Chess Problem! Another mate in two for you this week, but with a twist. The problem below was composed by Norman Macleod in 1984. In the position below, white is to play and mate in two. The twist is that this game is being played under Madrasi rules! Here's how it works: Everything proceeds as in regular chess, but with one…

Sunday Chess Problem

To this point in our Sunday Chess Problem series, we have considered one endgame study and two “direct mates.” While the diagram positions we have considered may have seemed a bit fanciful, we have not yet fiddled with the basic logic of the game itself. Which is to say that even if the position seems bizarre, we still imagine that white and black are simply playing a normal game of chess. This week we change that up a bit. This will be our first example of the “selfmate” genre. In selfmate problems, white tries to force black to give checkmate in the stipulated number of moves. Black,…

Underpromotion!

OMG! Did you see the game between U. S. first board Hikaru Nakamura and Russia's first board (and former World Champion) Vladimir Kramnik at the big Chess Olympiad last week? No? It saw one of the rarest and coolest moves in chess. In the following position, it is Nakamura, playing white, to move: Let me remind you that when a pawn makes it all the way to the other side of the board, it can become either a queen, rook, bishop or knight. This is called pawn promotion. In nearly all situations you are going to promote to a queen, since that is the most powerful piece. When a person…

HIV-1 and Vpu: Behe is still really, really wrong

Hey do you guys remember Michael Behe? Massive douche, wrote books about how EVILUTION IS IMPOSSI-BLEH! Gave school boards/teachers an excuse to teach Creationism in public school classrooms and pretend they were teaching science? He was like, the cock-of-the-walk when 'Darwins Black Box' came out, but then he made a total ass of himself testifying in Dover, and then he wrote that massive abortion, 'Edge of Evolution', and now dude has pretty much disappeared off Planet Earth? Well, while Michael 'Lilo' Behe might be gone, he has not been forgotten! Ancient adaptive evolution of Tetherin…

IDiots and HIV-1, now with gratuitous lazrs.

Helpful hint to Creationists: Never mention HIV-1. Just dont. It will make your lives much easier if you just see the word "HIV" and associate it with an ass whooping. You dont really understand what HIV-1 is or how it works, so just shut up, cause you look like a worthless IDiot. On the Discovery Institute Blog, EN&V, David Klinghoffer wrote a nice TARDalogue about how EXPELLED victim Ralph Seelke does research that proves evilution is a lie and Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior: Seelke's work tests evolution's power to produce two necessary mutations in a case where the mutations,…

Recombination: Retrovirus Sex

There was a lot wrong with Micheal 'Lilo' Behes description of HIV-1 in last years book, 'Edge of Evolution'. There is a lot of discussion in the Evilutionist community as to what constitutes a Creationist, but there are a few mistakes Creationists continually make when trying to argue against evilution, especially regarding 'mutations'. Despite Lilos acceptance of common descent and educational training as a biochemist, he made the same childish mistakes Creationists make when they are wrestling with 'mutation': Because of the difference in mutation rates HIV has actually experienced about…

Roughgarden on Behe

Over at The Christian Century, biologist Joan Roughgarden serves up this review of Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution. The good news is that Roughgarden is unambigously pro-evolution and anti-ID. She writes: Behe's position has been criticized scientifically and theologically. The structures thought to be irreducibly complex aren't; precursor structures can be identified whose modification can lead to a flagellum--or any other trait, for that matter. Furthermore, ID advocates don't offer any hypothesis about what happened in the evolutionary past--where, when and how did the designer…

Brownback on Evolution

Meanwhile, writing in The New York Times, Senator Sam Brownback clarifies his views on evolution. Recall that Brownback was one of three Republican candidates to admit to rejecting evolution in a recent debate. He writes: The premise behind the question seems to be that if one does not unhesitatingly assert belief in evolution, then one must necessarily believe that God created the world and everything in it in six 24-hour days. But limiting this question to a stark choice between evolution and creationism does a disservice to the complexity of the interaction between science, faith and…

More Nuggets From Town Hall

Two other items caught my eye while I was slumming over at Town Hall. First, here's William Rusher warning us all about the pernicious influence of junk science: As regular readers know, I seldom review books in these columns, preferring to leave that important job to professional reviewers. But every once in a while a book comes along that illuminates a major political problem so effectively that I cannot resist calling it to the attention of thoughtful readers. What book would that be, Mr. Rusher? That is the case with Tom Bethell's “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science,” recently…

Friday Tab Clearance

This has been a pretty brutal week-- classes are in full swing, and we had a candidate interview for our visiting faculty position which always eats up a bunch of time. And then Kate was out of town for work Wednesday night. So I haven't had time for substantive blogging, and don't really have the brains for anything deep. The kids are at Grandma and Grandpa's all next week, though, so maybe I'll finally get to do some of the little experiments for the blog that I've been kicking around in my head. Until then, though, here are some links to thing I've had open in tabs for a while, and won't…

Cosmos Reboot: On Light

Another Monday, another recap of a new episode of the Cosmos reboot. This one was all about optics, and much of it was excellent. This was in part due to the fact that its first couple of historical segments focused on non-Western figures, and I don't know as much about their background to be able to nitpick. First up was Mozi, a Chinese philosopher from circa 400BCE, who may have been the first to demonstrate the camera obscura technique of projecting images from a pinhole in the wall of a dark room. He was followed by ibn al-Haytham, circa 1000CE, who did the first fairly complete analysis…

Laser-Cooled Atoms: Strontium

Element: Strontium (Sr) Atomic Number: 38 Mass: Four stable isotopes, ranging from 84 to 88 amu Laser cooling wavelength: Two different transitions are used in the laser cooling of strontium: a blue line at 461 nm that's an ordinary sort of transition, and an exceptionally narrow "intercombination" line at 689 nm. Doppler cooling limit: 770 μK for the blue transition, below a microkelvin for the red. The Doppler limit for the red line turns out not to be all that relevant, as other factors significantly alter the cooling process. Chemical classification: Alkaline earth, column II of the…

Solving the Cubic, Part Two

A while back I I began a discussion about deriving formulas for solving polynomial equations. We saw that linear and quadratic polynomials did not pose much of a challenge. But cubic polynomials are considerably more complex. The set-up was that we had a polynomial equation of this form: \[ x^3+ax^2+bx+c=0 \] We can assume that the leading coefficient is one, so long as we're OK with the idea that the other coefficients might be fractions. If we have a cubic polynomial whose leading coefficient is not one, then we can simply divide through by whatever it is. We got as far as saying…

Fermat's Room

You can imagine my dismay upon discovering that I had forgotten to deposit my latest Netflix offerings in the mail. Bereft of quality home entertainment to take my mind off the looming return of the students, I hopped into the Jasonmobile and sallied forth to the local Blockbuster Video. Typically I rent back episodes of television shows. If I have the attention span for a movie, I simply go to a movie, you see. Nonetheless, I browsed the new releases and discovered an intriguing little film called Fermat's Room. That Fermat? So I picked up the box, noticed the first two words of the plot…

Carnage in Bonn!

Remember at the end of my last chess post when I wrote: But no need to despair! This is just the feeling out period. I suspect the real match will begin shortly. Oh baby! Was I more right than I knew! Vishy Anand drew first blood in the big chess match today, and did so in fine style. Once again Kramnik opened with his queen pawn, and Anand replied with the Slav. But whereas game one saw Kramnik employ the insomnia-curing Exchange Variation, this time we had the ultra-sharp Meran Variation. After fourteen moves of well-known theory, Anand, playing black, bashed out a novelty: V.…

Links for 2009-09-05

slacktivist: TF: No heroes "Here is the scene LaHaye and Jenkins are stumbling toward: Nicolae sits in his office, meditating on his evil scheme and the worldwide suffering it will cause. In walks the hero. If that hero is anyone other than Buck Williams, then we're in for some fireworks. Pick a hero, any hero. In walks Buffy Summers, armed with wisecracks and a nasty scythe-looking thing, matter-of-factly informing Nicolae that his scheme stops, now. In walks the Doctor, unarmed except for a sonic screwdriver and a boundless, inexplicable confidence, cheerfully explaining to Carpathia that…

Dispatches from the Class War: Educational Consultant Edition

The New York Times has a habit of publishing these loathsome little profile articles that either belie the paper's liberal reputation, or are a stealthy attempt to bring about the Red Revolution by stoking class hatred. These generally take the form of profile stories about wealthy suburbanites in Westchester County or Connecticut, who have more money than taste, and whose sense of entitlement can be detected from distant stars through its gravitational pull on the sun. These typically turn up in the Style section or the Magazine, but today's made the front page of the print edition: Before…

Quantum Mechanics vs. Relativity: It Depends on What "Understand" Means

Sean Carroll and Brad DeLong have each recently asserted that relativity is easier to understand than quantum mechanics. Both quote Feynman saying that nobody understands quantum mechanics, but Sean gives more detail: "Hardness" is not a property that inheres in a theory itself; it's a statement about the relationship between the theory and the human beings trying to understand it. Quantum mechanics and relativity both seem hard because they feature phenomena that are outside the everyday understanding we grow up with. But for relativity, it's really just a matter of re-arranging the concepts…

Massive by Ian Sample

The physics book generating the most bloggy buzz in the latter part of 2010 would have to be Ian Sample's Massive: The Missing Particle that Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science, about the as yet undetected particle known as the Higgs boson. Detecting the Hiigs is the most immediate goal of the Large Hadron Collider, so it's a topic that's in the air at the moment, so this book was inevitable-- in fact, the publisher sent me not one but two review copies. I gave one away, but that makes me feel even more guilty for taking months to get around to reviewing it. This is, basically, a concise…

Links for 2010-09-14

Geocentrism: Was Galileo Wrong? : Starts With A Bang No. An exhaustive explanation of how we know the Earth goes around the Sun. (tags: science astronomy physics planets blogs starts-with-bang stupid education) Testing, the Chinese Way - NYTimes.com "Professor Cizek, who started his career as a second-grade teacher, said the prevailing philosophy of offering young children unconditional praise and support was probably not the best prescription for successful education. "What's best for kids is frequent testing, where even if they do badly, they can get help and improve and have the…