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Sunday Chess Problem

Folks, I entertained tonight. Had actual people over at my house and served them dinner. And quite a dinner it was, if I do say so myself! I prepared filet mignon, with a homemade pan sauce made from balsamic vinegar, Dijon mustard, and chopped onion. For side dishes I roasted some red potatoes and steamed some broccoli. With the potatoes I went old school and prepared them just with salt, pepper, and olive oil, garnished with a bit of chopped parsley. For the broccoli I used chicken stock instead of water as the steaming liquid, and used lots of fresh herbs (rosemary, sage, and thyme,…

The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor - Chapter 44

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 43 Table of Contents Chapter 45 Chapter 44 An Unsettling Meeting, July 19, 2056 With the summer trimester, my schedule changed. Peter cut the UNGETF meetings down to once a month. I no longer had classes on Wednesday, the regular UNGETF meeting day. Usually I went in to work in the lab, but occasionally I stayed at home. As I walked downtown to the meeting that day, the sun was burning hot. I was sweating within a block. It was uncomfortable and I was thirsty, but mainly I was troubled by my membrane design. My artificial biology project was…

Strange Comments by Chomsky on the Election

From Noam Chomsky's blog: The outcome was a disappointment, but there have been disappointments before. Take 1984, when essentially the same gang of thugs--a little less tilted to the extreme reactionary statist side--won by a 2-1 margin, with about the same percentage of the electoral vote as today. About the same percentage of the electoral vote as today? In 1984, the electoral count was 525-13, for crying out loud, with Mondale managing only to win his own state of Minnesota. 2004 was one of the closest elections in history, 1984 was one of the largest (I believe the largest) victories…

Gay Penguins!

This story really cracks me up. It seems that the world is suddenly overflowing with gay penguins. At Central Park Zoo in New York, there are two male penguins, Roy and Silo, who appear to be in a gay relationship. They nuzzle each other and behave just like other sets of mates. They have sex with each other. When the zoo put female penguins in to entice them to mate with them, they had no interest at all. But they apparently make great parents: At one time, the two seemed so desperate to incubate an egg together that they put a rock in their nest and sat on it, keeping it warm in the folds…

Censorship from the Left

As I've written many times, censorship certainly does not always come from the right. The left has more than its fair share of Torquemade wanna bes, they just tend to couch their arguments in terms of diversity rather than morality. Case in point: a group of folks from the University of Arkansas is attempting to prevent the Promise Keepers from being able to rent Razorback Stadium for a rally June 10-11. The arguments are predictable: "I don't think this singleminded group should have their meeting here. It's not an all-encompassing group and we are promoting diversity at the university,"…

Real National Leadership

Deb Price has a great column about the clear trend of other nations allowing gay couples to get married, a trend that will surely put the lie once and for all to the absurd claim that banning gay marriage somehow "protects the sanctity of marriage." One can only sigh when reviewing the leadership on this issue that has been shown by the Prime Ministers of Canada and Spain, who have spoken out so boldly for the equal dignity of all people: Here's Zapatero, as quoted this month by Reuters: "We cannot deny a right to our compatriots when the exercise of that right does not harm anyone else."…

Bush Plans a Quick Troop Withdrawal After Election?

I sure hope that Robert Novak is wrong about this: Whether Bush or Kerry is elected, the president or president-elect will have to sit down immediately with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military will tell the election winner there are insufficient U.S. forces in Iraq to wage effective war. That leaves three realistic options: Increase overall U.S. military strength to reinforce Iraq, stay with the present strength to continue the war, or get out. Well-placed sources in the administration are confident Bush's decision will be to get out. They believe that is the recommendation of his…

Are the Bush Documents Forged or not?

After reading all the blogs and watching the chat room screaming and yelling today, I'm just laughing about the absolute certainty on both sides that the Killian memos are either forgeries or not forgeries. The fact is that everyone is speculating at this time. If they are forged documents, that should be quite easy to tell for those who actually determine such things. CBS says they had them exhaustively authenticated, and at some point I'm sure the types of authentication that they did will be revealed. It's not too hard to surmise. If the arguments about IBM selectrics not being able to…

Voting Libertarian? Maybe Not

Timothy Sandefur writes of the Libertarian Party nominating Michael Badnarik as their presidential candidate: I think the Libertarian Party is far more often an embarrassment than an aid to defenders of freedom. I wish I could dispute that, but I can't. I'm a longtime libertarian voter, but I don't know that I can vote for Badnarik, who strikes me as a first class loony and a fraud. He is called a "constitutional scholar" on the LP website, but his educational background is in chemistry and his entire work history is in computer software. His views on constitutional law are, from what little…

A Good Commencement Speech!

Okay, I spent enough time ripping on the typical commencement speech, how about a good one? William and Mary brought in alumnus Jon Stewart, host of the Daily Show on Comedy Central and one of the funniest stand up comics working today, to give their address and bestowed an honorary doctorate on him as well. Now this is what commencement speeches should sound like. A few choice excerpts: Thank you Mr. President, I had forgotten how crushingly dull these ceremonies are. Thank you... I congratulate the students for being able to walk even a half a mile in this non-breathable fabric in the…

Republicans to Purge Gay Staffers?

Max Blumenthal has a post at Talk2Action about the possibility that Republicans in Congress will begin to purge their staffs of all gays and lesbians because religious right leaders are now viewing them as a "homosexual clique" put in place to undermine the party: Immediately after the scandal broke about former Representative Mark Foley, Republican of Florida, some anti-Republican gay rights activists composed a memo containing the names of closeted gay Republican congressional staffers and sent it to leading Christian right advocacy groups. The founder and CEO of one of those groups, the…

Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See [Library of Babel]

The passing of Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin in a freak accident while diving with stingrays (and not while sticking his thumb of the butt of some exotic and venomous creature) has made a big splash in blogdom. I was never a fan of his shows, so I don't have anything specific to say about him, but he seems to have been very good at getting people interested in rare and interesting wildlife, and it's always sad to lose someone like that. As a tribute of sorts, I'll bump Douglas Adams's wildlife book Last Chance to See up in the booklog queue. The concept here was vaguely similar, though not…

What's So Interesting About Condensed Matter Physics?

If you go by physics-related stories in the mass media, you'd probably get the impression that about 90% of physicists work at the Large Hadron Collider or some other big accelerator lab. The other 10% would be dominated by people working on foundational questions in quantum mechanics-- Bell tests, teleportation, quantum information processing-- with a smattering of people doing something with superconductors. The distribution in the physics blogosphere is pretty similar. And yet, if you went by the mass media impression, you'd be way wrong. The largest division of the American Physical…

1491 by Charles C. Mann

We picked up a used copy of Charles Mann's pop-archeology book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus a while back. I didn't read it at the time, because I was a little afraid that it would be rather polemical in what I think of as the Neil Young mode-- wildly overstating the awesomeness of pre-Columbian cultures, and exaggerating the evil of the European invaders (Neil's recorded some great stuff, but the lyrics to "Cortez the Killer" are pretty dopey). It came up several times recently in discussions elsewhere, though, and seemed like it would make a nice break from the…

All the Myriad Inceptions

In comments to yesterday's post about my favorite Many-Worlds story, a couple of people mention "All the Myriad Ways," a Larry Niven short story. I don't think I've ever actually read the story, but it gets brought up all the time, so I'm familiar with the concept. It's an angle on Many-Worlds that I don't like, and has something in common with the central conceit of Inception, which is also not high on my list of literary tropes, though my reaction isn't anywhere near as negative as Scott's. If you're not familiar with it, here's the summary from Wikipedia: A police detective, pondering a…

Links for 2010-08-03

Scientopia A new non-profit science blog collective, including several people who left ScienceBlogs in Sodamageddon. (tags: science blogs internet academia) Experimental Error: Don't Try This at Home - Science Careers - Biotech, Pharmaceutical, Faculty, Postdoc jobs on Science Careers "So if you're Doktor Kaboom!, Professor Ker-Splat, or Nobel Laureate "I Didn't Think It Would Blow Up But Then It Totally Went Pfweeeeeeeeeeeee!," maybe it's time to vary the act a bit. Forget about the eyedropper in the 2-liter soda bottle and put together a show based on what scientists actually do. Good…

Links for 2010-06-11

Will New York Rebel Against Fracking? - Green Blog - NYTimes.com "A well blowout that shot gas and water polluted with drilling fluids as high as 75 feet into the air in Pennsylvania is a vivid reminder how a new generation of gas drilling is becoming more of a presence in the Northeast. Discussion of whether the main result will be jobs and royalty payments or environmental degradation still remains surprisingly below the radar screen in New York State, aside from the upstate communities that will probably be affected. But the issues are already a huge fact of life just across the Delaware…

Death and Body Mass Index

In the comments to the recent post on BMI, commenter Colst pointed to another study of mortality and BMI that found significantly higher risks for overweight people. Today, I see that Kevin Beck at Dr. Bushwell's Chimpanzee refuge has a post describing what I think is the same study, with the title Risk of death much higher in overweight and obese. Which is true, if you look at the data in the right way. Kevin posted a bunch of graphs from the study, and I'll excerpt two of them to keep things readable. The first is the relative risk of death for all the men in the study, as a function of BMI…

What I Do for a Living

I'm in the process of putting together my tenure documents (I know I've been saying this for weeks. It's a long process, OK?). Most of these are really not appropriate for reproduction here, but I'll post a few of the things I'm writing, when it's reasonable to do so. A major part of the tenure process is finding external reviewers for the research material. As most institutions don't really have enough people in a given sub-field to assess research in-house (especially at a small college), and as trusting such an assessment would be a little dodgy, the research review is traditionally…

Uv got mayel!

So, I do attract the occasional nutter email, and they meet the trash can pretty quickly, but this fellow put so much verbal affort at this one sent to my Facebook account I thought I should share the laugh. Check it out below: Sat with numerous scientists in earth and climate science and laughed our collective asses off that someone actually believes the bullshit regarding AGW. the astronomers in the group quickly point out the idiots like yourself are far more likely to run headlong into the ice berg of global cooling before you realize the Titanic sized ship of stupidity lead by Captain…

Why Climate Journalism is a Rotting Carcass

Love the title of that post! Keith Kloor tries to defend journalism's role in fiascos like "Swifthack" (aka Climategate) and climate science in general but really ends up simply providing a perfect example of the problem. I urge any and all to read the comment thread, it is an excellent and fascinating one, though I am only about a third of the way through. Great contributions from Things Break and Michael Tobis, appearnces by Andrew Revkin and Judith Curry. It is still going on though I would wager it's utility has diminished to near zero (I could be wrong). I would like very much to…

The Greening

Spring is an ecological phenomenon of weather and biota linked to orbital geometry. More importantly, spring is here, as of this very moment, in Anoka County, Minnesota. The parts of Anoka County, Minnesota that are not built on consist of scrubland, prairie, and marsh. So there is a lot of grass. For the last several weeks it has been unseasonably cold. So the soil beneath the grass is frozen solid. This frozen-state is facilitated by the fact that we have not had much snow, which otherwise might have insulated the ground and kept it warmer. And, this lack of snow means that when we…

Gustav Update

This may be premature by an hour or two, and if so, I'll update again, but there is enough new information on Gustav to provide an update. Gustav is now a Category Four Hurricane and is bearing down on Cuba. The hurricane will strike the northern Gulf coast as a serious, possibly major storm. I have heard from contacts in industry in the region that the presumption of a major hurricane is in effect and the shipping industry and other industries are in the process of shutting down. There are also news reports that I have not checked that LA Parishes in the vicinity are under mandatory…

Good News From Ireland

A large majority of voters have approved gay marriage: Ireland's citizens have voted in a landslide to legalize gay marriage, electoral officials announced Saturday--a stunningly lopsided result that illustrates what Catholic leaders and rights activists alike called a “social revolution.” Friday's referendum saw 62.1 percent of Irish voters say “yes” to changing the nation's constitution to define marriage as a union between two people regardless of their sex. Outside Dublin Castle, watching the results announcement in its cobblestoned courtyard, thousands of gay rights activists cheered,…

Sunday Chess Problem

Regular blogging will resume next week, once I have finished digging out from the pile of work that didn't get done during my recent travels. But since Sunday Chess Problem waits for nobody, I've picked out a tasty little morsel for you. One of my favorite motifs in chess is that of a fortress draw. This refers to a position that is drawn simply because the attacker has no possible way of making progress against the defender's set-up. Typically the term is applied to a situation in which the defender is down a substantial amount of material, so that it is surprising that the attacker…

An Interesting Logic Textbook

Jeffrey Shallit has an interesting post up about The Southern Confederacy Arithmetic, a mathematics textbook published in 1864. Some of its idiosyncratic examples make for amusing reading. Reading Jeffrey's post reminded me of a textbook I picked up at home-schoolers convention a while back. The book is called Intermediate Logic For Christian and Home Schools, by James Nance. Now, I am happy to report that the logic presented in the book is the same logic you would find in any other textbook. It covers all the standard banalities of basic propositional logic, and does so in an entirely…

Sunday Chess Problem

Last week we introduced selfmates with a straightforward example that I composed in the late 1980s. This week we feature another representative of this genre. It was created by an American composer named Mark Kirtley, in 1986. In the position below, white is to play and force selfmate in eight moves. (Recall that this means that white will force black to deliver checkmate, while black will do everything in his power to avoid giving mate.) Recall that the vertical files are labeled a--h from left to right. The horizontal ranks are labeled 1--8 from bottom to top. So, the white king is…

Horror Writers on God

I've been a Stephen King fan for a long time, so you can imagine my excitement at the fact that he has two books in the queue over the next few months. His novel Joyland will be available next week, while his Shining sequel, Doctor Sleep comes out in September. I'll be reading both of them, of course, but for now I want to call attention to this interview with NPR's Terry Gross. You see, he said the following about belief in God: I choose to believe it. ... I mean, there's no downside to that. If you say, 'Well, OK, I don't believe in God. There's no evidence of God,' then you're missing…

The Changing Zeitgeist on Homosexuality

As part of their ongoing campaign to botch as many personnel decisions as possible, the Obama administration recently announced that the Reverend Louie Giglio, of Atlanta, would deliver the benediction at the forthcoming inaugural. They rescinded the invitation, however, when an anti-gay sermon preached by Giglio many years ago came to light. The administration should have thought to look for such things before inviting him, but at least they belatedly did the right thing. Some of the mopier denizens of the religious right are less pleased, however. This article, over at HuffPo, rounds up…

Love letter from the Whittemore Peterson Institute

Today I spent the day driving home-- one of my best friends since the seventh grade is getting married this weekend. Look forward to pics of me in a 'beautiful' hot-pink bridesmades dress soon... Anyway, since I was on the road all day, I of course wasnt connected to the internet. So I just got a minute to check my email and found: yo pig. post my shit. or are you scared? Posted by: ron lassof | June 22, 2011 1:11 PM So I wandered over to the trashbin, expecting to find a signature XMRV nut 'comment': an OCD collection of links and copypastes from those links, thus trapped in the spam trap…

Let's just go back to arranged marriages

This is probably a serious site. Probably. It could be satire, but the line between satire and Christianity is razor thin. Read Christian dating tips, and judge for yourself. First rule of Christian dating: it's pretty much like going to church. Boring, chaste, and offering nothing but faint hopes. No intimacy is allowed, not even a kiss. Choose to not kiss - At least until you are engaged to be married. Okay, this can be extremely difficult, but if you can follow this one dating tip then most of the others will happen naturally. Even kissing once you are engaged can be very dangerous. It's…

Beta Globin and Junk

Human beta globin has held a special place in my heart due to its rather prominent role in the Evolution-Creation 'debate'. It just got a neat evolutionary upgrade :) Humans have one kind of hemoglobin when they are infants which has a higher affinity for O2 (alpha globin + gamma globin), because it makes it easier to steal O2 from their mom. Once the babies are out in the real world for a few months, they slowly but steadily shift from making the gamma globin to beta globin, the adult hemoglobin (alpha globin + beta globin). This transition is a problem for kids with sickle-cell. Their…

XMRV and chronic fatigue syndrome: Insanity

This is insanity, people. Scientific insanity. Moved right from 'this does not make sense' and 'youre acting like a bitch' to 'this is insane'. #1-- Lead author of the Reno XMRV-->CFS study is holding a live-streamed press conference at Hotel Mar Monte on Friday. *blink* This is insanity. They have no evidence connecting XMRV to CFS in anything but a casual manner, and yet she is giving a presentation/Q&A to CFS patients. Insanity. Furthermore, the people 'hosting' this talk, ProHealth? What is this? What is this crap? Pages and pages and pages of powders and potions and crap.…

Have you ever wondered why your chickens gonads are lopsided?

Weird science fact of the day: Girl birds only have a left ovary. The right one kinda develops, and then regresses. Left ovary is the only one that works. All birds. Wait... what? What the hell? What kind of evolutionary weirdness led to this absurdity? I bet you guessed an ERV is involved :D OVEX1, a novel chicken endogenous retrovirus with sex-specific and left-right asymmetrical expression in gonads. For real, you all should download and read over this one. Its in obnoxious 'pre-print' format (ie almost unreadable format. figures, figure legends, and text about figure all on…

Time Machine: GMOs, HIV, and fear mongering in 1994

I love the intrawebz! I was bopping around on Google last night, looking for neat info about Cauliflower Mosaic Virus (post on that later!), and I stumbled upon a really awesome article from 1994: The use of Cauliflower Mosaic Virus (CaMV) in genetic engineering: 35S Promoter (CaMV) in Calgene's Flavr Savr Tomato Creates Hazard Now I have no idea who "Joseph E. Cummins" is. He might be as embarrassed by that article today as I am amused by it. But the website that is hosting that article is concerned about two things: FRANKENSTEIN GMOs, and cell phones mutating your DNA. hehe. Anyway,…

Atheism and Civil Rights, Again

Rereading my post from Friday, I notice that I never actually answered the question I posed in the title. Is atheism a civil rights issue? Happily, other bloggers have stepped into the breach. Mike Dunford gets us started: Atheists, unfortunately, do face a great deal of discrimination. Actually, I should rephrase that. The discrimination is not faced by all atheists. It's faced by those people who, for whatever reason, choose to publicly identify themselves as nonbelievers. For one set of examples, you need look no further than child custody cases. Volokh has a laundry list of appeals…

Blogging Used to Be Punk Rock, Man

There's a sense in which the saddest true statement I've read about the unpleasant events of the past week is this: Blog editor at Scientific American is a position of great power, with the ability to make or break careers. I'm not disputing the truth of this. It's absolutely true that the position has enormous influence, and it's why Bora's actions were wrong. That is not in question. But it's sad because it's an indicator of where we've ended up, and not in a good way. I mean, there's a limited sense, if you're a glass-half-full sort of person, in which this could be seen as a good thing.…

Goldberg on Hamas; Friedman on Israel's Goals

Today's New York TImes features two op-eds essential to clear thinking about the situation in Gaza. The first comes from journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. He paints a grim picture of the enemy Israel faces. It is a useful corrective to those who think Hamas is a leigitmate negotiating partner interested, with the right incentives, in peaceful coexistence with Israel. You really must go read the whole thing, since it is impossible to capture all that is right with it in a few quotes. But here goes: What a phantasmagorically strange conflict the Arab-Israeli war had become! Here was a Saudi-…

Kramnik Not Dead Yet!

Vladimir Kramnik has announced his intention to fight to the end of the big chess match, and games nine and ten have certainly been his best efforts yet. When last we checked in (pun intended), Kramnik was down three points with four games to go in the big chess match. Playing black in Sunday's Game Nine, Kramnik played the Semi-Slav with black. And why not? It's been working for Anand. The first critical moment came a mere five moves in: Position After 5. ... h7-h6 Black's last move introduced the solid Moscow Variation. Even needing a win with black it was probably asking too much…

Palin Watch

In an interview this past Sunday with Fox News' Chris Wallace, John McCain said the following. Wallace had asked him whether Governor Palin had turned out to be a drag on the ticket. (The phrase “cold political calculation” cam from Wallace, but I didn't notice McCain being reticent to use it.) As a cold political calculation, I could not be more pleased. She has excited and energized our base. She is a direct counterpoint to the liberal feminist agenda for America. She has a wonderful family. She's a reformer. She's a conservative. She's the best thing that could have happened to my…

PNAS: Jon Moulton, Small Company Biologist

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Jon Moulton, a biologist working at a small biotech company.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I work for Gene Tools, LLC, manufacturers of Morpholino antisense oligos, as a molecular biologist and general-…

Links for2009-07-29

The Republic of T. » Sotomayor & The Vulcan Standard, Pt. 2 "It hit me like a slap in the face. It sounded familiar, but different. To me, this fictional family was white. But in the time and place they occupied on the page they weren't "white enough." "Oh my God!" I exclaimed. My husband, who was reading the same book, looked at me. I looked up from the page, looked at him, and said with a note of wonder in my voice, "There are different shades of white."" (tags: race society culture history literature blogs republic-of-t) OMG QIP=PSPACE! : The Quantum Pontiff "This solves a long…

PNAS: Australian Equipment Maker

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of an Australian who prefers to remain nameless.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I'm the manager of a small company that makes high-tech measuring equipment. Most of this is used for monitoring and control in…

links for 2009-06-13

slacktivist: TF: Skip verse 10 "Be sure to use the King James Version when you bring up Luke 17:34 -- "In that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left" -- and then argue that a literal interpretation suggests that precisely 50 percent of homosexuals will be raptured." (tags: books stupid religion blogs slacktivist) Colonial Africa: A List of Questions « Easily Distracted "I think Iâve hit on a catchy structure for a modest reshuffling of my Honors seminar in Colonial Africa. Much of my reading list will remain the same, but this…

Matter and Interactions: Post-Mortem

OK, it's not really a full post-mortem, because I haven't graded the final exams yet, but I wouldn't tell you about those, anyway. Still, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past term, which was my first teaching introductory mechanics on the Matter & Interactions curriculum. On the whole, I continue to like the approach. I like the way that the book focuses on the major physical principles-- the Momentum Principle, the Energy Principle, the Angular Momentum Principle-- because those are the real take-away message from introductory physics. I also thing it's good that the class…

How Many Incompetent Teachers Are There, Really?

As mentioned in the previous post, there has been a lot of interesting stuff written about education in the last week or so, much of it in response to the manifesto published in the Washington Post, which is the usual union-busting line about how it's too difficult to fire the incompetent teachers who are ruining our public schools. Harry at Crooked Timber has a good response, and links to some more good responses to this. I'm curious about a slightly different question, though, which is in the post title. There's a lot of talk about how incompetent teachers are dragging the system down, but…

Links for 2010-02-11

Cocktail Party Physics: a few choice words from the red pen brigade "The hardest thing about teaching anybody anything is finding the right level of communication, and the right way to express the concepts. It would seem logical that you don't go all jargony on a rank beginner, anymore than you have to spend time explaining the basics to an expert. But you'd be surprised how hard it is to put that into practice. [...] But that's not all that you have to worry about, either. The next problem is expressing that knowledge clearly in a way that will allow the listener or reader to follow your…

Links for 2010-01-23

Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Neglected Books: the list "So, I asked for recommendations for neglected books and authors and had an overwhelming response. I'm going to make the results into a useful reading list, in alphabetical order, with links, and usefully divided. The world is a very big place with a lot of stuff in it, and a lot of books are published and pretty much vanish. They say word-of-mouth is the best way to find books, and these are all books with someone to advocate for them. " (tags: books sf literature blogs tor) slacktivist: Bullies "This is what…

Links for 2009-11-12

Das Kriegstagebuch von Dieter Finzen im 1. Weltkrieg - Wardiary of Dieter Finzen in WW1 Diary entries from a German soldier in WWI, posted 93 years after they were written. (tags: history war world blogs) WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier "This blog is made up of transcripts of Harry Lamin's letters from the first World War. The letters will be posted exactly 90 years after they were written. To find out Harry's fate, follow the blog!" (tags: history war blogs world) Cocktail Party Physics: The Mayans Warned Us: Don't Trespass In Yellowstone "Last night I settled down into a cushy…

Lectures Are a Small Part of Learning

FriendFeed and Twitter are a terrific source of articles about how New Media technologies are Changing Everything. The latest example is Sebastian Paquet's The Fate of the Incompetent Teacher in the YouTube Era, in which he declares that the recorded lectures of Salman Khan are the beginning of the end for bad teachers: Even assuming, conservatively, that Khan's calculus videos are only slightly above average, roughly half the students taking calculus this semester would save time and pain by watching his lessons instead of paying attention to the mediocre teaching happening in front of them…