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The Origin Of Life

In 1953 a student named Stanley Miller did an experiment showing that the simple chemicals present on the early Earth could give rise to the basic building blocks of life. Miller filled a flask with water, methane, hydrogen and ammonia--the main ingredients in the primordial soup. Then he zapped the brew with electricity to simulate lightning, and, voila, he created amino acids, crucial for life. Now, scientists have reanalyzed this classic experiment, and found that the results were even more remarkable than Miller had realized. Jeffrey Bada, a former student of Miller's, preserved the…

Bible says 'spare the rod, spoil the child' ... he would be screaming that as he beat us

He remembers when his father would force him and his siblings to run five to ten miles around the high school track every night. One evening another boy was riding his bicycle along the outer lanes of the track, and Fred began yelling at him to leave. The boy's response was to keep riding on the track, and Fred's was to push him off the bike. The boy left, screaming, and 20 minutes later a truck came screeching into the parking lot. The boy had brought his father, who approached Fred and knocked him to the ground. "The man was threatening to sue him," said Nate. "Then my old man yelled at us…

T. Boone Pickens: please go away

I want to officially complain about T. Boone Pickens. What an offensive dit. I am tired of his commercials (the most recent having just been aired ... the post debate commercial) telling us that we need to become energy independent, and blaming the very same politicians that he has been buying off and paying off for decades as the cause of our oil dependence. If Pickens really wanted energy independence, why did he spend so much money to ensure that George Dub Bush got elected two times in a row? Is this thing he is doing now penance? Since 1980, Pickens has made over $5 million in…

She would be a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ before she would be the Vice President

For the last three or four decades, a delusional cult has spread within the United States, the leaders of which have every intention of taking over the country, in fact, the world. Sounds funny, but it really is not. If you don't think this is true, you are naive, and if you have not seen this happening you are not really looking. Sarah Palin's Churches and The Third Wave from Bruce Wilson on Vimeo. If John McCain is elected president, it will be because of the strength of this cult, in combination with the power of racism manifest as the so-called "bubba vote" whereby a large…

Good News and Bad News about what you can eat.

You say tomato, I say tomalley . Tomalley. Mmmmmm... That is the green yeck inside the body of a lobster that seems to be neither muscle or organ. But you can eat it and it tastes good. But don't eat it for now if your lobster is from Maine... The Maine Center for Disease Control said Friday Maine has a center for disease control? Oh, OK... The Maine Center for Disease Control said Friday that lobster meat is perfectly safe but that people should not eat the tomalley ... High levels of toxic algae known as red tide have been recorded along Maine's coast this summer, forcing the state…

Drugs for brains

Here's an interesting question: "if you could take a pill which enhanced attention and cognition with few or no side effects, would you?" Shelley says yes. Janet says no. I say it depends on that qualifier, "few or no side effects" — if that were true, I'd say "Yes! Gimme more!" This is no dilemma at all. Of course, that's cheating. There's no such thing as a drug that has no side effects. The real dilemma would crop up if a cognitive enhancer were available that did have problematic side effects — then my worry would be that pressure to succeed in my classes would be driving students to…

The luxury of anti-vaccinationism: Part III

Part I: HPV Part II: Measles Part III: More Measles Its July 18th. A little over half-way into 2011. And in Ethiopia, about 18,000 people have gotten measles, with a touch over 100 dead. There has also been an outbreak in Somali refugee camps in Kenya, with almost 500 sick and 11 dead. Meanwhile, here in the US, we have antivaxers throwing money away on snake-oil to cure their children of autism (and the collection of non-medically recognized that seem to go along with seeing woo-treatment from autism experts charlatans, like OCD-like dietary rituals and paranoia about 'multiple chemical…

A new source for fake science

Answers in Genesis, fresh from their success at aping real science with their fake "Museum," has a new dishonest enterprise in the works: they're starting a fake science journal, the Answers Research Journal, which will publish "cutting-edge research that demonstrates the validity of the young-earth model, the global Flood, the non-evolutionary origin of'created kinds,' and other evidences that are consistent with the biblical account of origins." Isn't it sweet how they declare up front exactly which answers they'll accept? I hope they're planning to have a very tight review process. They're…

Chat with one of the people who literally wrote the book on viruses

Tuesday, May 17th, at noon (Central Time), Trine Tsouderos is hosting a live-chat with one of the people who literally wrote the book on viruses, Vincent Racaniello. LINKY!! I know you all have *ME* to chat with :P But I do encourage you all to submit questions to Vince and Trine, partly because this is a really neat opportunity, and really my expertise is retroviruses, while Vinces is more broad, but mostly because I dont want them to get flooded with more idiotic 'questions' from Dr. Cuckoo Bananas, MD and her troupe of stupid ass anti-vaxers. :) Hey, AoA. Hey. Its not a cover-up. ITS…

ERV Starship

I guess Im going to have to change the name of 'ERV'. Before I was just concerned. Now, ERVs are officially not so special at all. Viruses, all kinds of viruses, are all over the place in genomes-- from insects to humans. Endogenous Viral Elements in Animal Genomes Carl Zimmers take: Your inner viruses: the trickle becomes the flood My quick-and-dirty take: Every form of virus-- retrovirus, ssRNA(-), ssRNA(+), dsRAN, dsDNA, ssDNA-- every form of virus has an endogenous component now. Theyre all over the place. Every organism has these 'alternative' endogenous viruses. Theyre inserted all…

Even 'Rocky' had a montage! MONTAGE!

Last Fridays xkcd: A scene from 'Big Bang Theory'. This is why there will never be a movie/reality TV show made about Real Science(TM). I can make my experiments sound dramatic: Setting up steel-cage death-matches between various variants of HIV-1. Epic gladiator battles where only the fittest survives to fight another day. Everything glows-- red, green. There are lazers involved. I also create mutant swarms of HIV-1 and ask them to do my bidding. The ones that do the job the best survive (well, their babies are allowed to live). The ones that fail are killed. That sounds AWESOME,…

EXPELLED, Salem Hypothesis, 'controversy', yada yada yada

The jokes write themselves. Oklahoma City Engineering Club invited 'Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education' big-wig Vic Hutchison at their next meeting. It was actually kind of nice-- Biologists make fun of the engineer-->Creationist connection (aka the Salem Hypothesis), and here in OKC we have an engineering group happy to hear about biology! They even had Dr. Fincke speak a while back! Yay! Yeah, you know that couldnt last. The Creationists in OKC Engineering Club finally had enough. They threw a tantrum, and Vic was 'disinvited' from speaking. I regret to inform you that I…

Ben Stein: EXPELLED AGAIN!

HT to the Queen of AtBC, Kristine. lol Ben Stein sucks so hard. So like, you know how Dawkins is one of the worlds most famous living biologist, and 'charges' $30K for speaking engagements, but waived/waives it for educational institutions? And like, Ben Stein is like, an actor or comedian or something, who charges $60K for speaking engagements? Well because of the budget crunch hitting colleges and universities in the US, a Stein speaking engagement at Emory (ugh, yes, he was supposed to speak at Emory) had to be canceled because they didnt have the money to pay him anymore. Stein is such…

Schrödinger abuse

I'm feeling left out. The mathematicians — Mark, Blake, and Tyler — are having so much fun bullseyeing a certain womp rat over there in Creationist Canyon. Yeah, Slimy Sal Cordova has poked his pointy head up and claimed that, somehow, Intelligent Design and Advanced Creation Science (whatever the heck that is) are built on Fourier transforms and Schrödinger's equation. It's a pathetic spectacle — Cordova simply throws up a formula with some Greek symbols in it, waves his hand with a flourish, and says, "A-ha!" After a time of his readers staring blankly at him, he says, "A-ha!" again,…

America's Worst Colleges

It's that time of year again! That most worthless of weekly news mags, U. S. News and World Report, has just published its annual list of America's Best Colleges. As usual, they tinkered with their ranking system again, for the sole purpose of fiddling with the order, thereby creating some news. Will Princeton or Harvard be number one? Yawn. Happily, Radar magazine has come out with a far more useful feature: America's Worst Colleges. They explain: This year, U.S. News & World Report announced that their new college rankings system would involve “substantial changes in methodology…

Uncertain Dots 21

Our little hangout thing is now old enough to drink, in episode-years anyway, and to celebrate, we finally figured out how to get live audience feedback during the hangout. Which takes the first couple of minutes of the video, because we're highly trained professional scientists. Once we got that sorted, we talked about a bunch of stuff, including but not limited to crazy space drives, the history of major concepts in physics, space probes and asteroids, and "native advertising" and how it relates to blog history. Some links: -- My post on the impossible space drive, which has links to…

Friday Tab Clearance

Here's some stuff I've had open in Chrome for a while, and want to close before we go out of town for the weekend: -- Statistics on the professionalization of science blogging, a topic I have banged on about in the past. Nothing really new, but nice to have it somewhat quantified. -- Speaking of quantifying things, this New York Times piece on metrics is less stupid than I expected. Which is about as high as praise is likely to get for op-eds on this subject. -- If I didn't get bored with topics after a while, I could just write endless responses to pieces about the state of science…

Job Posting and Hangout

The Pip was sick this weekend, I had a deadline for a bunch of administrative crap that I pushed off back in December when I was rushing to finish the book, and I'm giving an exam on Thursday. So, I'm not doing lengthy blogging right now, but two quick notices: 1) A reminder (I think I posted this before) that the Union College Department of Physics and Astronomy is hiring a visitor, for up to three years (contingent on performance). If you're in the market for an academic job, albeit a temporary one, check out the ad. If you know anybody who might be interested, point it out to them. 2)…

Michael Medved, defender of the indefensible

I mentioned before that Michael Medved was joining the Discovery Institute, and now Amanda comments: I love the move, because it's so transparent. The weak claims to be an institution dedicated to scientific research fall away; Medved is no scientist, just a dedicated culture war soldier. Which of course means that the Discovery Institute is less interested in discovery than in squelching any perceived threat to the cultural dominance of white Christians of a fundamentalist stripe. Medved no doubt was hired because of his willingness to lie, deceive, conceal, and distract from any realities…

God's Approval Rating?

I'm not quire sure what what to make of this. t doesn't appear to be from The Onion. More than half of U.S. voters approve of God's job performance, according to a new poll, making God more popular than all members of Congress. The poll -- which was conducted by the Democratic research firm Public Policy Polling (PPP) -- surveyed 928 people and found that 52 percent of Americans approved of God's overall dealings, while only 9 percent disapproved. Questions about God were asked as part of a larger survey assessing American opinions of congressional leaders in the midst of the ongoing debt…

God and Pseudomathematics

In the next day or two I will post a detailed account of my experiences at the Gathering for Gardner, which I can honestly say is one of the most enjoyable math conferences I have ever attended. In the meantime, you might enjoy this essay by Burkard Polster and Marty Ross. Polster is a mathematician at Monash University in Australia, and I had the pleasure of meeting him at the conference. His column has nuggets like this: There may not be much left to argue, but argument continues regardless. For instance, there is the famous Oxford theologian Richard Swinburne. He fell in love with…

If That Was Swine Flu Then I am Unimpressed

The main reason I haven't been blogging lately is that I have been seriously under the weather for the past week or so. These days people are seeing swine flu in every case of the sniffles, but I am unconvinced. My symptoms: fever, cough, general achiness, fatigue, sore throat are certainly consistent with swine flu, but they are also pretty generic. All I can say is that even when things were at their worst on Monday and Tuesday (I was shivering in eighty-five degree weather) things never went from “Very Unpleasant” to “Pondering the Afterlife.” I didn't even cancel any of my classes,…

Cat Blogging

I have a cat named Isaac who is currently tipping the scales at around twenty pounds. In an attempt to control his weight I feed him light cat food (Science Diet, to be exact), and give him the absolute minimum he will let me get away with. A number of people have suggested getting a laser pointer. Kitty sees the red dot on the ground and goes a little crazy trying to catch it, thereby getting his heart rate up and burning a few calories. So I finally got around to buying one. Brought it home. Isaac greeted me at the door (he's very sweet). Pulled out the pointer and tried it out.…

The Early Days of Quantum Engineering

Buried in the weekend links dump at the arxiv blog was Scalable ion traps for quantum information processing: We report on the design, fabrication, and preliminary testing of a 150 zone array built in a `surface-electrode' geometry microfabricated on a single substrate. We demonstrate transport of atomic ions between legs of a `Y'-type junction and measure the in-situ heating rates for the ions. The trap design demonstrates use of a basic component design library that can be quickly assembled to form structures optimized for a particular experiment. At first glance, this isn't a sexy paper…

Academic Poll: Paper Torture

I'm sitting here finding new and inventive ways to not write the pedagogical paper I'm working on at the moment. This seems like a good excuse for a poll! The hardest part of writing a paper is:(survey) As you can tell from the list of elements, I have scientific papers in mind, here, but other sorts of scholarly work are also fair game. The question is really what you find to be the absolute worst part to write when you're working on some sort of scholarly publication. I'm talking specifically about the writing of the text, here. There are a whole host of headaches associated with…

New Grants Program for Solar Energy

Whether because I'm a blogger, or because I'm a previous recipient of their money (I suspect the latter), I recently got email from the Research Corporation announcing their new Scialog 2009: Solar Energy Conversion program: Scialog will focus on funding early career scientists and building research teams to undertake groundbreaking studies in solar energy conversion. This initiative will be entitled Scialog 2009: Solar Energy Conversion. Scialog 2009 will accept proposals describing fundamental research at the molecular and nanoscale level that show high potential to impact advanced energy…

Academic Novels and a Comment Experiment

Female Science Professor is revisiting an old topic, namely, the academic novel: I was thinking about the general topic of academic novels because I was looking for some books to read and was looking through the lists in the links above. And then I wondered: Why do I want to read an academic novel during the summer? Why do I want to read an academic novel at all? What is it that I like about (some of) them? This seems like a good opportunity to both have a discussion and do some science. There are three steps to the experiment: Leave a comment here saying what your favorite academic novel…

Going Mobile

I don't intend to turn this entirely over to Video Baby Blogging, but SteelyKid has been adding new tricks at an amazing rate, and I have the camera... Here, she showcases her newfound mobility, and her inherited taste in entertainment: The odd one-leg-under crawling style seems to be a local maximum-- she can get up on all fours in the classic crawling posture, but she doesn't have the mechanics entirely worked out, and makes faster progress with her left leg folded under. In the tradition of her experimentalist father, she doesn't see an immediate need to fix what's basically working. The…

links for 2009-05-17

Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Magic, family, uncertainty: Lisa Goldsteinâs <em>Tourists</em> A brilliant book that ought to be much better known than it is. (tags: culture SF books review fantasy tor) The Big Lebowski | Film | A.V. Club "Inspired by Raymond Chandler detective novelsâand the hazy L.A. vibe of Robert Altmanâs brilliant Chandler adaptation The Long Goodbyeâthe Coens have created a character not far removed from Elliott Gouldâs Marlowe in the Altman movie, a laid-back gumshoe dragged reluctantly into a case his conscience (and curiosity)…

Links for 2010-11-21

Friday Night Videos!: The Hits of 1990 | Popdose "Aerosmith - Janie's Got A Gun: With this video and Madonna's "Oh Father," director David Fincher was cornering the market on music videos about child abusers. Also note the prominent use of dudes in hats before backlighting, presaging Det. Somerset in Seven.  Also note Steven Tyler's big mouth, presaging Steven Tyler's big mouth." (tags: popdose music nostalgia video blogs) Seth's Blog: Groping for a marketing solution: TSA and security theater There's plenty of controversy about the new full body scanners that the TSA is installing at…

Books for Reading Out Loud?

SteelyKid and I are currently on our second pass through the Winnie-the-Pooh book my parents got her (which is identical to the one I had as a kid). We read one story every time she goes to bed, so that's one every night, and one at weekend nap times. She only sort of pays attention to the details of the stories, but she likes pointing to the occasional pictures, and waving her stuffed Pooh and Piglet around. I wouldn't mind some more variety, though I'm not entirely sure what the options are for read-aloud books at the appropriate level (she's two-and-a-quarter). But that's what the Internet…

Links for 2010-11-13

slacktivist: Fix the deficit: Cure diabetes "My grand scheme for long-term debt-reduction would improve the lives of tens of millions of people while saving everyone else a ton of money. It's an attempt to solve problems, rather than to luxuriate in enduring them and savoring the suffering they produce. And that goes against everything the serious people stand for. And but so anyway, here is my plan, my GS for LTDR -- are you ready? -- it's short: Cure diabetes. That's it. That's my plan. Cure diabetes. Eradicate it. Create a post-diabetes world in which people say, "Hey, remember when…

And a pleasant evening was had by all

This is going to be a big problem. I'm at this gathering of bloggers, which means they're all going to be posting stuff about our meeting here at Americans United, and I'm outnumbered — I can't keep up. I had dinner with Blue Gal, BAC, DCup, and One Pissed Off Veteran, and some of them already have pictures up. And after dinner we had the combined Pharyngula/Bad Astronomy gathering, which seemed to have a majority of BA fans, to my chagrin. I think more failed to show up because they know I shoot laser beams out of my eyes. We also got a surprise visit from Tara and an Evil Monkey. The…

Who Is the Velvet Underground of Science?

I'm shamelessly stealing this question from James Nicoll, who asked it about science fiction. The question is a play on the famous comment that only of order a thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground record, but every one of them went on to start a band. So, the question is, who is the Velvet Underground of science? That is, who is the best example of somebody whose work was only read by a tiny number of people, but ended up being incredibly influential on those people and subsequent generations? The physics example that comes to mind immediately is Sadi Carnot. Carnot wrote a…

Links for 2010-10-06

Trains on the moon: John M. Ford&rsquo;s Growing Up Weightless / Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts "At the heart of John M. Ford's Growing Up Weightless (1993) is a train trip by a group of teenaged roleplayers across the far side of the moon. It's also the story of how thirteen year old Matt Ronay discovers what growing up means, and how his father Albin writes a symphony about water on the moon. It's set four generations after Luna became independent--and that's Lunna, not Loonam, and absolutely never call it "the Moon," as if it were something Earth owned. This is a…

The Bohr-Einstein Debates, With Puppets

Back during the DonorsChoose fundraiser, I promised to do a re-enactment of the Bohr-Einstein debates using puppets if you contributed enough to claim $2,000 of the Hewlett-Packard contribution to the Social Media Challenge. I obviously aimed too low, because the final take was $4064.70, more than twice the threshold for a puppet show. So, I put together a puppet show. It took a little while, because I couldn't find any Niels Bohr puppets (maybe in Denmark?). I found an acceptable alternative, though, and put together a video of the Bohr-Einstein debates, using puppets. Here's the whole thing…

Poll: New York State of Mind

Kate has a court appearance in New York tomorrow, and we're making a long weekend of it. I'm typing this from my parents' house, where I'm dropping SteelyKid off for some quality time with Grandma and Grandpa, and tomorrow, I'm heading down to The City. I've got some meetings scheduled tomorrow afternoon, and Friday at lunch, and then we're going to kick back and enjoy New York. Of course, one of the paralyzing things about NYC is the sheer variety of cultural options. There's the AMNH, with lots of geeky exhibits, the Met, where you can spend days and not see everything, and MOMA, for a…

Dead Dinosaurs and Denialism

Yesterday, EurekAlert served up a press release titled New blow for dinosaur-killing asteroid theory, reporting on Gerta Keller of Princeton, who says that the Chicxulub crater isn't really from the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. Keller thinks the crater had nothing to do with the extinction event, and claims to have found evidence that the impact was as much as 300,000 years before the dinosaurs died out. One or two of the quotes in the piece sounded kind of snotty for a scientific report, but I marked this down as something to look at later. Later in the day, Ethan "Nitro"…

links for 2009-03-13

Spaceflight Now | Breaking News | Did the Phoenix spacecraft find liquid water on Mars? Maybe. (tags: science astronomy news space planets) How Vise Grip Pliers Saved My Life - Stories about How Vise Grips is a Toolbox Hero - Popular Mechanics "Can Vise-Grips save a life? Sure, and they can replace a stick shift, save a marriage and clamp blood vessels. They can do all this, and so much more. PM shares ten "unbelievable tales" of rescue and ingenuity from Irwin's "Tell Us Your Vise-Grip Story" contest." (tags: silly tools) Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / The Wheel…

You Can't Get To DAMOP From Here

I'm looking travel arrangements for this year's DAMOP meeting in Charlottesville, VA in May, and, boy, do the options suck. Flying into Charlottesville itself involves at least one stop, and undoubtedly one of those ridiculous little prop planes that require me to spend the whole flight in something close to a fetal position. Driving would take better than eight hours, according to Google, which isn't something I'm fired up to do (it's better than a prop plane, though, and wouldn't take all that much longer once you figure in time sitting in airports). Probably the best option is to fly into…

links for 2009-02-09

A physics history-mystery: magnetism from light? « Skulls in the Stars "Iâve been looking into Faradayâs contribution to the understanding that light is an electromagnetic wave. That investigation led me to some early work by other researchers on the light/magnetism connection, and led me in turn to a puzzler: how significant and accurate is that earlier research? I donât have a good answer, so I will pose the questions to the physics/blog community in the post." (tags: science physics blogs optics history E&M) Adventures of the Learning Assistant (Part 3) « Morning Coffee Physics…

Change Physicists Can Believe In

Cosmic Variance (among others) reports that 1997 Nobel Laureate in Physics Steve Chu will be the next Secretary of Energy. Sean gives a good run-down of the many reasons why this is a Good Thing. Like Sean, I've met Chu in person. Unlike Sean, my one meeting with him doesn't shed any light on anything. I met him at a reception at the National Academy of Sciences in honor of the American science laureates (Chu, Bill Phillips, and... somebody else). I was talking to Paul Lett, one of the permanent members of Bill's group about something or another when Chu stopped to say hi to Paul. He was…

Uncertain Principles, Certain Results

From yesterday's snail mail: On behalf of President Bush, thank you for your correspondence about the President's Fiscal Year 2009 Budget. We appreciate hearing your views and welcome your suggestions. So, there you go. I'm appreciated and my suggestions are welcomed. Of course, it took me a while to figure out when I might've contributed anything to the White House budget process... I think this was a response to the form letter I sent as part of the annual DAMOP letter-writing campaign. Since that was aimed at obtaining some supplemental science funding, I suppose you can say that it got…

Assume a Spherical FutureBaby...

Welcome to today's exciting episode of "How Big a Dork Am I?" Today, we'll be discussing the making of unnecessary models: In this graph, the blue points represent the average mass in grams of a fetus at a given week of gestation, while the red line is the mass predicted by a simple model treating the fetus as a sphere of uniform density with a linearly increasing radius. The "model" was set up by taking the 40-week length reported at BabyCenter, and dividing by two to get an approximate radius for the spherical baby. Then I assumed that the actual radius increased linearly from zero to the…

links for 2008-05-17

World Science Festival Blog Of course they have a blog-- it's 2008, for God's sake... (tags: blogs science society culture education theater television movies art physics biology chemistry environment) Pharmaceuticals in the Environment, Information for Assessing Risk » Home "The database provides information on prescribed amounts, levels detected in aquatic environments, chemical structure, molecular weight, octanol-water partition coefficients, water solubility, environmental persistence, general toxicity information and sp (tags: science environment chemistry medicine drugs)…

links for 2008-05-09

Solar System Visualizer Look at those planets and moons go! (tags: astronomy planets science computing internet gadgets) Polar vortex replicated in a bucket - physicsworld.com "The centre of the vortex is usually circular, but occasionally it assumes a triangular or even a square shape. Now researchers in Canada claim to have replicated this behaviour for the first time in the laboratory -- using nothing more than water in a c (tags: science physics pictures news) The Quantum Pontiff : In Probability We Trust? "How well has classical probability theory been tested?" (tags: physics…

Cephalopod Awareness Day Alert #4

One last compendium, I think, unless I find unusually large quantities of Cephalopod Awareness links in my mailbox tomorrow. A whole museum dedicated to octopus balls? The Japanese can be very strange, Tikistitch. How to eat a cephalopod, if you're a mosasaur. Nifty squid art. What? A whole collection of squid posts at Progressive Gold, and I've been missing them? What? Is that woman vomiting up a tentacle? Or is that supposed to be her tongue? I don't know whether I'm supposed to gag or be aroused. Babies are always cute. A Nude, Transexual, Pornographic LOLCthulhu. Enough…

links for 2008-04-01

Hackers Assault Epilepsy Patients via Computer People suck. (tags: internet computing medicine evil stupid) Word Munger » One-letter google searches The alphabet, according to Google. (tags: internet computing silly) The Gashlycrumb Tinies "M is for Maud who was swept out to sea/ N is for Neville who dies of ennui" (tags: books comics silly art literature) Researchers study why high school boys dodge 'Phys Ed' '"Often boys who don't feel at ease are terrified to go to the locker room or class, fearing they will be mocked for their size, their lack of athletic prowess, or that they…

links for 2008-03-19

First-ever spring break quidditch tour March 22-29 The Middlebury Quidditch Club hits the road. (tags: academia books sports silly SF) Tenure, the Movie :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, and Views and Jobs "I'm not sure how much I'll expect accuracy out of a Luke Wilson comedy about my profession," he said. "As long as the film is a relatively sympathetic portrayal of the difficulties of going through the tenure process and has a decent indie rock (tags: academia movies silly culture society) Loopy photons clarify 'spookiness' of quantum physics A remarkably…

Beagle Is Way Cool

The August issue of Linux Format has an article showing how all the the most-anticipated features of Windows Vista are available today, on Linux.  Although Microsoft touts these as "innovations," they are not new, or at least won't be new by the time Vista is actually on retail shelves.   One of these features is href="http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/features/foreveryone/searchorg.mspx">Instant Search.  It indexes everything on your hard drive, so you can find anything quickly.   The comparable Linux tool is Beagle.  It not only reads and indexes the contents of text files, but…