Search Content

Displaying results 63351 - 63400 of 87947

What are the odds? Part 1: that the LHC will find SUSY

"The subject of gambling is all encompassing. It combines man's natural play instinct with his desire to know about his fate and his future." -Franz Rosenthal Last month, Sean Carroll asked the blogosphere to give their personal odds on whether various theories will turn out to be true or not. And so I thought it would be a lot of fun to take a look at some of the best theories or most renowned theories and ideas out there today, and to tell you, if I were a Las Vegas bookmaker, what are the odds I would give you on various ideas. (If you know of an idea you want my odds on, leave it in the…

What's in the Universe?

"There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self." -Aldous Huxley Earlier this week, I told you the story of how we went from a Universe that was -- at one time -- almost perfectly smooth, full of tiny, random fluctuations in density, to the Universe we have today, full of stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies all clumped together in a beautiful cosmic web of structure. But there was one picture I showed that generated a lot of questions. I put up an image showing what the Universe was made out of today (when we have this great cosmic…

Dear Asteroid Hunters: Stop telling us we're all gonna die!

"Don't blame yourself. The apocalypse wasn't your fault. Actually, it was just as much your fault as it was anyone else's. Come to think of it, if you're an American, it was probably about 80-90 percent more your fault than the average human. But don't let that get you down. It wasn't exclusively your fault. Unless you're the president. Then it might be your fault. But you'll have plenty of interns to tell you that it wasn't, so you'll be fine." -Meghann Marco Nothing gets a scientist in the press quite like telling everyone that we're all gonna die. Remember when there was talk of creating…

The Greatest Problems with the Greatest Story Ever Told

"Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt." -Lev Landau I've been telling you about the Big Bang, the greatest story ever told, and the entire natural history of the Universe. Let's remind you -- historically -- of how our conception of the Universe changed as we learned more about our surroundings. Maybe the first astronomical observation ever made was that the Sun rises in the East, passes overhead, and sets in the West. And it does this day after day, every day. It's no wonder that our first "cosmological model" of the Universe was that the Earth is stationary, and the Sun…

The Greatest Story Ever Told -- 07 -- Save the neutrons!

Welcome back to The Greatest Story Ever Told, where we're bringing you the story of the Universe. We're going to go from the very beginning -- before the big bang -- up through the present day, and tell you how we got here. This is part seven, and you can always go back for parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Last time, we got rid of all the antimatter in the Universe by letting it cool enough that every particle-antiparticle pair in the Universe annihilated with one another, producing a huge excess of radiation. But there was also a little bit of normal matter -- protons, neutrons, and electrons…

The Lazy Astronomer

Every once in awhile, I'll get an email from someone curious about getting into amateur astronomy, but with no idea where to begin. More often than not, it's from someone with a crappy telescope who's trying to salvage some utility out of a bad purchase/gift. The truth of the matter is that most telescopes either cost a lot for automated, easy-to-use features, or require a lot of time and effort to learn to use them properly. But lets say you'd like to start exploring the skies, and need some help with where to begin. If you're like most people, and not sure how seriously you're going to be…

What Terrell Owens Can Teach Us

I'm not sure why I'm compelled to write about this, but I am. I think it's because past experiences in my life have showed some exact parallels with the kind of fake apology that he offered on TV the other day. And far too many people, at least far too many people I've known, can't distinguish between a real apology and a fake one. Owens' apology is obviously a fake one, and not just because of his past track record of behavior. Here's how you know it's fake: his words and his actions don't match up. While he says that he's sorry and he understands that he was out of line, he's still trying…

Zombie Tits ...

... Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals... "Look, for the last time, we're not angry lesbians! We just considered all of the options and it makes more sense for us to reproduce on our own!" ... "Ha! I told you she'd yell. Yo owe me fifty bucks." I remember when the story of the blood shooting lizard of the American Southwest was first figured out. The native people of the area had always spoken of the ability of a particular lizard to spew a stream of blood from its eyes. This would be done to thwart attackers. Naturally, as is often the case, scientists working in the area wrote…

An Important Victory for Climate Science

You've heard about "ClimateGate." ClimateGate was a very successful but illegal campaign by anti-science to discredit climate science and climate scientists. Rest assured, the climate science is fine and the climate scientists are just trying to do their jobs, and doing quite well at that. Nonetheless, a combination of inaccurate representation of the contents of various emails written between climate scientists and what amounts to unethical treatment of climate science by the press resulted in a shift among the general populous in the US from about half of the people thinking that Global…

How much like Byron Smith is the average gun owner?

I refuse to live in fear. I am not a bleeding heart liberal. I have a civic duty. I have to do it. Burglars are not human, they are vermin. I try to be a good person, to do what I should, be a good citizen. Those are among the words uttered by Byron Smith shortly after he murdered two teenagers in his home last Thanksgiving. There had been numerous break-ins in Smith’s neighborhood near Little Falls, Minnesota. Byron set a trap, making his home look vulnerable and unoccupied. If the burglars were to break into his home, they would come in a certain way, and end up descending the stairs into…

Climate Change = Extreme Weather = More Climate Change

The last several decades of climate change, and climate change research, have indicated and repeatedly confirmed a rather depressing reality. When something changes in the earth's climate system, it is possible that a negative feedback will result, in which climate change is attenuated. I.e., more CO2 could cause more plant growth, the plants "eat" the CO2, so a negative feedback reduces atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas bringing everything back to normal. Or, when something changes in the earth's climate system, we could get a positive feedback, where change in one direction (…

Final Notes on a Toy Model of the Arrow of Time

We're in the home stretch of this term, and it has become clear that I won't actually be using the toy model of the arrow of time I've talked about in the past in my timekeeping class this term. These things happen. Having spent a not-insignificant amount of time playing with the thing, though, I might as well get a final blog post about it, with something that sort-of worked and something that shows why I'm not a computational physicist: First, the thing that sort-of worked: in thinking about trying to use the code I wrote, I was struggling to come up with a way to quantify the apparent…

Most Difficult Course?

Regular reader Johan Larson sends in a good question about academic physics: You have written about teaching various courses in modern physics, a subject that has a fearsome reputation among students for skull-busting difficulty. That suggests a broader question: what is the most difficult course at your university? Or even more broadly, how would one determine what course is the most difficult? This is a good question, but hard to give a single answer to. The most difficult course at the college as a whole would be nearly impossible to determine, because different students find different…

Gunz: constitutionalism and majoritarianism

As the increasingly sparse readership of this blog will have noticed, I'm writeing less and less about science - science is hard, and increasingly GW science isn't terribly interesting, whatever James may say - and becoming increasing interested in the fringes of politics and philosophy, in which any old fool can have an opinion, and usually does. But as a terrible warning to anyone feeling too clever, my image for this post is a "welcome" leaflet for Emma chapel, doubtless thought to be very deep by those who commissioned it, but felt to be less than tactful by many others. Recently, gunz…

The Republican Brain by Chris Mooney

This has been out for a little while now, and Chris has been promoting it very heavily, and it's sort of interesting to see the reactions. It's really something of a Rorschach blot of a book, with a lot of what's been written about it telling you more about what the writer wants to be in the book than what's actually in it. A lot of conservative responses to it are basically case studies in the sort of motivated reasoning Chris is writing about, but I've even seen some liberals jumping on it as completely confirming their own pre-existing biases, for example, claiming that this means Chris…

The Bottleneck Years by H.E.Taylor - Chapter 68

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 67 Table of Contents Chapter 69 Chapter 68 Estrangement, February 1, 2059 I hadn't seen Jon in the flesh for almost three years. I was shocked by how much he had changed. He was harder and smoother somehow, as if he had an invisible barrier just above his skin. Nothing stuck to him. At first I thought it was shock over Matt's death, but there was more to it than that. Jon drifted through the funeral like an alien. He talked, he laughed, he shared old stories, but it was all surface. There was a distance and a calculation in him that made me…

What did temperatures do as the last glacial minimum ended 120K years ago?

A commenter on the most recent edition of het's AWOGWN asks an interesting set of questions: How would temperature data have been seen during the last 10,000 years prior to the peak of each of the previous Milankovich cycles? What caused the temperature to reverse course in those cycles and why would we not expect it to occur again this time? First, here are the quick answers to those three questions, then some discussion.  1. It is not currently possible to resolve the temperature record that long ago to anything close to what we have today.  2. The cause of the temperature reversal is not…

Sullivan on Kerry's Mention of Mary Cheney

For some reason, a lot of people are all upset that John Kerry mentioned Mary Cheney by name when discussing the subject of gay marriage and whether people choose to be gay or not. This boggles my mind, and Andrew Sullivan hits it just right, I think: I keep getting emails asserting that Kerry's mentioning of Mary Cheney is somehow offensive or gratuitous or a "low blow". Huh? Mary Cheney is out of the closet and a member, with her partner, of the vice-president's family. That's a public fact. No one's privacy is being invaded by mentioning this. When Kerry cites Bush's wife or daughters, no…

The Discovery Institute: Still Dishonest about Peer Review

The DI has, predictably, issued a press release spinning yesterday's announcement from the board of the Biological Society of Washington. Also predictably, it contains several misrepresentations. That's what you have to do when the facts are against you, so it's hardly a surprise. The distortions being with the very first sentence: For the past few years the Darwinian lobbyists at the National Center for Science Education (NSCE) have falsely complained that scientists who support the theory of intelligent design don't publish peer-reviewed articles and don't make their case at scientific…

The NBA Draft

Okay, time for a basketball break. First and foremost, leave this page immediately, go read the Sports Guy's draft diary, and remind yourself why this guy is the best sportswriter on the planet today. This exchange alone cements his status: 9:33 -- Utah takes 7-foot-5 Pavel Prdzswsbqzpdne, who stands up and immediately whiffs on two high-fives. Not a good start for the Pavel Era. Katz calls it a "safe pick." Of course, the USA Today's scouting report mentioned that Pavel "takes medication for a hormonal disorder related to pituitary gland." I don't know if "safe" was the best choice of words…

Welcome to the Hellmouth

Jennifer Ouellette is coming to campus this week to give a talk about her book The Physics of the Buffyverse. Having never been a Buffy fan, and not seen more than snippets of a few episodes here and there, I figured I should at least watch a few representative episodes before the talk, just to have some context. Accordingly, I got the first two discs of Season 1 from Netflix, and asked a colleague who is known to be a huge fan for recommendations (he loaned me his Season Five DVD's, and particularly recommended Episodes 5 and 12). Kate and I watched the first two episodes last night. She…

Academic Stimulus Package

Regarding the current financial crisis, a consensus has developed that the government needs to do something, and do something dramatic. The argument is, basically, that the normal sources of cash flow that might stimulate the economy out of recession have dried up, either through idiotic investments, or out of fear caused by all the idiotic investments. The government, then, is the only entity with the financial resources needed to get things moving, and they should be pumping cash into the economy through infrastructure projects and the like, to get things moving again. There is another…

Laws of correlation and the derivation of evolutionary patterns from developmental rules

Cuvier, and his British counterpart, Richard Owen, had an argument against evolution that you don't hear very often anymore. Cuvier called it the laws of correlation, and it was the idea that organisms were fixed and integrated wholes in which every character had a predetermined value set by all the other characters present. In a word, the form of the tooth involves that of the condyle; that of the shoulder-blade; that of the claws: just as the equation of a curve involves all its properties. And just as by taking each property separately, and making it the base of a separate equation, we…

Table-Top X-Ray Lasers

I mentioned in a previous post that one of the cool talks I saw at DAMOP had to do with generation of coherent X-Ray beams using ultra-fast lasers. What's particualrly cool about this work is that it doesn't require gigantic accelerators or nuclear explosions to produce a laser-like beam of x-rays-- it's all done with lasers that fit on a normal-size optical table in an ordinary lab room. The specific talk I saw was by Margaret Murnane of JILA, who co-leads their ultra-fast laser group, and dealt with a new technique for producing soft-x-rays (~500 eV photons) with ultrafast lasers. We'll do…

Syracuse-Villanova

They pushed the curtain back a few feet at the Carrier Dome, opening up a few more seats so they could set a new record for largest on-campus crowd to see a college basketball game for Syracuse playing Villanova for a share of the Big East regular season title. This is the sort of atmosphere where I'm used to seeing Syracuse teams really tense up and play tight, something they really couldn't afford to do against the Wildcats, so I was kind of nervous about this one. When I came downstairs from putting SteelyKid to bed, and they were down six, that seemed totally justified. I was very…

Worlds In Collision ... Literally (from NASA)

The wreckage of the collision between two planets has been observed in outer space. An animation of the event can be downloaded here. NASA has spotted an interplantery collision. Two planets, both rocky, one about the size of our moon and the other about the size of mercuery, smashed into each other several thousand years ago flinging all kinds of crap into outer space. This happened in another solar system. "This is not supposed to happen!" claimed a NASA executive. "These planets are supposed to watch where they are going" Well, OK, no one from NASA actually said that, but they did…

Home Chemistry: A New Guide for Hobbyists and Home Schoolers

Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture (DIY Science) is a new book by Robert Thompson. The premise is simple. The coolest thing in the world is a home chemistry set like this one from Gilbert, which combined both chemistry and microscopy: Chemistry Set Combine the sciences of Chemistry and Microscopy in one big laboratory set! Microscope has a magnification of 60 power, plus unique Polaroid device that shows the brilliant colors of specimens under the lens. Set includes "Fun With Gilbert Chemistry", "Gilbert Microscope", "Glass Blowing" manuals and dissecting…

Debbie Schlussel might become a Muslim terrorist any day now

Really, I don't read Debbie Schlussel's blog—a reader sent me a link, so I put on the waders and gas mask and climbed down into the sewer. I'm now completely baffled; why is this insane and deeply stupid person ever put on television? Her response to the CNN complaints is illustrative, and even if you sympathize with her, you've got to recognized the big picture here: she's not very bright. Something happened over the last 24 hours. Beginning last night, my inbox became populated with vile hate-mail from atheists. No skin off my back. But it is entertaining and amusing. It's hard to believe…

The One True Editor

Emacs is exactly like a religion. A western religion, at least, operates by testing the faith of its participants. The god coldly allows babies to die of unexplained illnesses, violence to affect the innocent, wars to break out, natural disasters to ruin everything. That we mortals have faith that this is a loving and intelligent, all knowing god causes us to question reality itself, our selves, our church or temple, and our religious leaders. But this questioning followed by resolve, strengthens character. Or, ruins character. It could really go either way, which is why so many object…

Male vs. Female Brains

The male and female human brains are different. Some of the better documented differences are similar to differences seen in other mammals. They are hard to find, very small, and may or may not be of great significance. Obviously, some are very important because they probably relate to such things as the ability ... or lack thereof ... to bear offspring. But this is hardly ever considered in the parodies we see of these differences. [Repost from Gregladen.com] You have all seen the sometimes funny, sometimes not cartoon depictions of these differences, for example this one: Obviously,…

The Emergence of Treatment-Resistant Fungus

It is hard to kill fungus. Well, not really. They can't handle being burned and chlorine does them in and lots of other chemicals are bad for hem. But when a fungus infects a person ... like with Aspergillos, an infection with Aspergillus in the lungs, fungi are tricky. To kill an infectious agent, one typically poisons it somehow, but to ingest, inject, inhale, or even topically apply a chemical may also affect the person. The reason it is relatively easy to kill an infecting bacterium than it is to kill an infecting fungus is, in part, because fungi are phylogenetically more closely…

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

I realize I've been away a little longer than usual, but I have a good excuse. I just spent the past week with my family at Beaches resort, on Turks and Caicos. You see, my father turned 80 this year, and we marked the occasion by schlepping the whole family down to the Caribbean. My peeps! There's Mom, Dad, my older brother Neil, my niece Sonia and nephew Noah (age 8 and 10 respectively), and my sister-in-law Elana. I'm sure you can figure out who is who. Actually, Dad and Elana got a little shortchanged in this one. So here's Noah trying to get Grandpa's attention: And here's Dad…

Can Intelligence Bring Universes Into Being?

One frustration I had in my radio debate with Sean Pitman was that the topic kept changing in such a rapid-fire way that it was not really possible to discuss anything properly. Happily, I have no such restrictions here at the blog! So let's devote a post or two to clarifying some of the issues that arose during the debate. One of Pitman's talking points was the idea that natural selection is not capable in principle of crafting complex biochemical systems. Of course, this is standard fare for ID folks. Pitman made the claim that there is some level of functional complexity beyond which…

Must Atheists Be Nihilists?

Writing in The Week, Damon Linker has a strange essay arguing that atheists who are honest about the consequences of their beliefs ought to be sad and mopey. The subtitle of his essay is, “That godlessness might be both true and terrible is something that the new atheists refuse to entertain.” This is a trope that arises from time to time in anti-atheist rhetoric, but it is one I find incomprehensible. Partly this is because I contrast atheism with the alternatives on offer, and find it fares well in the comparison. The most common forms of Christianity, for example, tell me that human…

Are Science and Religion “Compatible?”

If the assertion, “Science and religion are incompatible,” simply means, “It is highly unreasonable to accept simultaneously the claims of modern science and the claims of traditional Christianity,” then I agree with it. The trouble is that the word “incompatible” is vague. People often take it to mean something like “logically contradictory,” and I do not agree that science and religion are incompatible in that sense. For this reason I prefer to avoid the language of compatibility/incompatibility, and talk instead about “tensions” between science and traditional faith. When I am feeling…

In Praise of Teachers's Unions

Over at Talking Philosophy, Mike LaBossiere offers a defense of teachers's unions. He is a bit too tame for my taste, and he is far too respectful towards anti-union arguments that have far more to do with general hostility to public education than they do with measured criticism, but in the end he arrives at the right place: In general, it would be rather odd if unions did not cause some problems. If they did not, they would be truly unique. However, it seems more sensible to address these problems rather than simply condemning unions. Given the fervor with which these unions are being…

Dawkins at OU: Super Mega Ultra Win

Chelsea: Hey, Scott just called. Me: ... Yeah...? Chelsea: Were on the volunteer list. Me: $^&#(&!! I never got an email from that chick telling us what to do! I thought they didnt want us?!?! Chelsea: Me too... But we might as well go get a free T-shirt! Me: FREE T-SHIRT! Ill be in Norman in 15 minutes! When I got to Norman, I was expecting a circus. Instead I was greeted by several hundred people casually standing in line, happily chatting with new friends about our dip-shit legislators, having a grand ol time. So my 'volunteer' duties consisted of doing what I do best: Being…

REPOST: Alpharetroviruses: Bane of Chickens

This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P I dont trust them staying up at Blogger, and the SEED overlords are letting me have 4 reposts a week, so Im gonna take advantage of that! I am going to try to add more comments to these posts for the old readers-- Think of these as 'directors cut' posts ;) Retroviruses: They like causing cancer. Therefore, you really, really dont want endogenous retroviruses to be functional. But you dont have to take my word for it *rainbow shoots across the screen* Chickens so rarely get honorable places in history. Yet they do have at…

Another Democratic Cave

On the subject of national politics, I come from the blind loyalty wing of the Democratic Party. When I look at the sort of things Democrats do when they have power compared to the sorts of things Republicans do, it seems clear to me that the Dems do a far better job of running states and countries. I have no patience for people who think that what is needed is a third party, or who think that voting for Ross Perot or Ralph Nader makes then independent and above the fray. Politics is a dirty business under the best conditions, but to the extent that there is any hope that the government…

Trains of Clocks

My Gen Ed relativity course has mostly been me lecturing about stuff to this point, so on Wednesday I decided to shake things up a bit and convert a chapter of David Mermin's It's About Time. The idea was to get students up and moving around a bit, and actually making some measurements of stuff. Mermin's scenario as adapted for class is this: you have two trains of six cars passing in opposite directions. Each car contains a narrow window through which the other train can be seen, a clock facing the window, and an observer with nothing better to do than note the readings of the clocks in the…

Trapping Neutrinos?

One of the chapters of the book-in-progress talks about neutrino detection, drawing heavily on a forthcoming book I was sent for blurb/review purposes (about which more later). One of the little quirks of the book is that the author regularly referred to physicists trying to "trap" neutrinos. It took me a while to realize that he just meant "detect"-- coming from the AMO community, I naturally assume that "trap" means "localize to a small-ish region of space for a long-ish period of time." That is, after all, what I spent my Ph.D. work doing-- trapping cold atoms. SteelyKid had a rough…

PowerPoint Is a Tool

Over at NPR, Adam Frank has an ode to the use of chalk for teaching science, including a bit of warm fuzzy nostalgia: I have powerful memories of tracking through derivations presented in class when I was a student. When done well, they pinned my attention down. The act of copying what was appearing on the board was a kind of meditation. You had to stay awake and aware, like a man walking across a frozen pond. Let your mind wander for a moment and BAM! You were lost. You couldn't see how the professor had gotten from one step to the next. But keep your focus and you'd be rewarded with that…

How Many Licks? or How to Estimate Damn Near Anything by Aaron Santos

One of the odd things about the C-list celebrity life of a semi-pro blogger is that I get a bunch of requests to review books on physics-related topics. Some of these take the form of a book showing up out of the blue, others are preceded by a polite request from the author. Aaron Santos's How Many Licks? is one of the latter, which helps bump it up the list of things to do... This is a short little book-- 176 pages total-- built around the idea of Fermi Problems, the order-of-magnitude estimates that Enrico Fermi was famous for. The idea is that, with a little basic knowledge and some really…

Historical Quantum Smackdown Explained

This was delayed a day by yesterday's ranting, but I wanted to explain the significance of the people in Monday's lesser-known quantum mechanic smackdown. I'm happy to see that, as of this morning, three candidates have rallied past the "unique flower" option. In reverse order of popularity: Hendrik Kramers was a Dutch physicist who spent a long time working as a student and assistant to Bohr, and thus was involved in a lot of the early attempts to make a working quantum theory. He's best known for work in condensed matter physics, and for being the "K" in the WKB approximation. Arnold…

Progress Report: No Proposal Outline Survives Contact with the Writing Process

Blogging will continue to be minimal, as I'm buried in grading, and feeling significant time pressure regarding the book-in-progress. I thought I'd pop up briefly, though, to provide a look at the current status of the book-in-progress. The way this process works (or at least has worked for me) is that I write up a proposal describing what I plan to write about and giving some samples. For both books, this has included one full chapter worth of prospective text, plus a bunch of dog dialogues for other chapters. My agent then shops this around to publishers, one of whom buys it and sets a…

Grenade Tossing About Grade Inflation

Via Thoreau, a paper from a physicist in Oregon that's pretty much a grenade lobbed into the always-explosive grade inflation discussion: We use four years of introductory astronomy scores to analyze the ability of the current population to perform college level work and measure the amount of grade inflation across various majors. Using an objective grading scale, one that is independent of grading curves, we find that 29% of intro astronomy students fail to meet minimal standards for college level work. Of the remaining students, 41% achieve satisfactory work, 30% achieve mastery of the…

Making Cold Atoms Look Like Electrons

One of the things I forgot to mention in yesterday's post about why I like AMO physics is that AMO systems have proven to be outstanding tools for solving problems from other fields of physics. In particular, ultra-cold atoms have proven to be a fantastic venue for studying problems from condensed matter physics. There's a comprehensive review of the subject in this Reviews of Modern Physics paper, which is also freely available on the arxiv. I say "comprehensive review," but, of course, it's almost certainly already out of date, given how much work is going on in this area. To understand why…

Links for 2009-10-13

The Ostrom Nobel -- Crooked Timber "To amplify what Kieran has just said - political scientists are going to be very, very happy today. I had seen Lin cited as a 50-1 outsider by one betting agency a few days ago, and had been surprised that she was at the races at all, given that economists tend (like the rest of us) to be possessive of their field's collective goodies. I'm delighted to see that my cynicism was completely misplaced." (tags: economics Nobel blogs crooked-timber social-science politics) Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Princesses and cats: Kij Johnson's…

First Round Thoughts

The good news is, I'm solidly ahead of Barack Obama in my NCAA pool. The bad news is, the success rate of my serious picks is distressingly close to that of the Physics Grad Programs backet... Various and sundry thoughts on the first two days of NCAA tournament action: -- Not that many big upsets, and six of the ten lower seeds to win were from power conferences, and thus deficient in charm. The USC win over Boston College, in particular, was quite possible the dullest close win by a double-digit seed that I've ever seen. Even the crowd seemed bored. Compare that to, say, East Tennessee State…

Quick Basketball Notes

I haven't written much about basketball this year, for the simple reason that I haven't watched much basketball this year-- between SteelyKid, the book, and my day job, I just haven't had time. This weekend, though, I watched a whole bunch of hoops, mostly involving my two teams, Syracuse and Maryland. Yesterday was a bad day, as both lost, but they each had a good run leading up to that. Various and sundry comments in no particular order: -- One thing I have not missed in my non-hoops-watching winter has been the "announcing" team of Mike Patrick and Dick Vitale. I swear, these two reach a…