Links Dump
drorzel | May 22, 2011
con_or_bust: Con or Bust NOW taking requests for July-September cons!
"Con or Bust is pleased to announce that as of this very moment, and through May 31, fans of color/non-white fans may request assistance to attend SFF cons in July, August, and September 2011.
Because there was no advance notice that we'd be taking requests, please repost and link to this post far and wide so that people know that assistance is possible. I will announce the precise amount after WisCon, once the T-shirt sales are counted up and I hear from some cons I've contacted, but a minimum of $600 will be available…
drorzel | May 21, 2011
SLR Camera Simulator | Simulates a digital SLR camera
"Practice using an SLR camera...
Experiment with the lighting, ISO, aperture, shutter, and distance settings while observing the readings in the camera viewfinder
Click the "Snap photo!" button
Review your photo!"
(tags: technology pictures internet computing)
Astrogator's Logs » Blog Archive » Area 51: Teen Commies from Outer Space!
"Jacobsen's addition (asserted with a completely straight face and demanding to be taken seriously) is that this craft contained "genetically/surgically altered" teenagers engineered by Josef Mengele at…
drorzel | May 20, 2011
A career as editor « the Node
"In 1993-4, I went on the job market, looking at standard faculty positions. I received some offers, including one from Vanderbilt University, where I am now. But I was resisting accepting a position, and some friends - who were also on the job market at the time - sent me to a career counselor. The counselor's husband was a bench scientist, so she had some sense of my career until that point, and asked me a very simple question, one that I had never asked myself: "If you didn't have to worry about how much money you made, or what anyone else thought of you,…
drorzel | May 19, 2011
News: What They Are Really Typing - Inside Higher Ed
"The authors of two recent studies of laptops and classroom learning decided that relying on student and professor testimony would not do. They decided instead to spy on students.
In one study, a St. John's University law professor hired research assistants to peek over students' shoulders from the back of the lecture hall. In the other, a pair of University of Vermont business professors used computer spyware to monitor their students' browsing activities during lectures.
The authors of both papers acknowledged that their respective…
drorzel | May 18, 2011
Book View Cafe - Exordium 01, by Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge
"Smith and Trowbridge describe the flavor of their five-book space opera Exordium as a cross between Star Wars and Dangerous Liaisons with a touch of the Three Stooges. With its fast-moving blend of humor and horror, of high-tech skiffy and the deep places of the human heart, The Phoenix in Flight launches the reader into a complex, multi-layered universe as Brandon nyr-Arkad, dissolute youngest son of the ruler of the Thousand Suns, abandons the life of Service planned for him and flees into the lawless Rift. Only slowly…
drorzel | May 17, 2011
Generalist's Work, Day 5 « Easily Distracted
"In humanistic writing, I'm struck by the sometimes uncomfortable mixing of a romanticist vision of authorship with the value of scholarship as a collaborative, collective and accumulative enterprise. In peer review, tenure review, grant applications and other venues where we set the benchmark for what counts as excellence, we often expect scholarly work to exhibit the author's "quality of mind", and that in turn is often best established by the degree to which the analysis and interpretation in scholarly writing appear to be original and highly…
drorzel | May 16, 2011
Beta Readers: Best Practices » Inkpunks
"The author-beta relationship is a strange one. The author exposes a vulnerable, still-in-the-works thing to the beta, a fleshy little newborn fiction coated in soft bits. The author is pleased. The author thinks this is an Excellent Thing which they are giving to the beta. The beta takes this dream and proceeds to point out every flaw, fracture, and missing piece. The beta takes this whole beautiful entity and returns a broken thing which the author must go fix.
Then they, like, go see a movie, or something. Get some froyo. Whatevs."
(tags: writing…
drorzel | May 14, 2011
Against Craft « Booklife
""Craft" today is not a counter to the Romantic vision of an artistic elite chosen by the Divine, it is a quasi-proletarian flinch often designed to protect one's work from being compared to art, thus protecting it (and one's ego) from its near-inevitable failure to stack up to the idea of art as a superlative. The craft metaphor also serves the production-driven processes of conglomerate publishing: books are published to fill slots and develop and extend categories on a mass scale, which militates against the individual nature of a piece of art. And yet, writers…
drorzel | May 13, 2011
Writing About Science, and Liking It. In the Pipeline:
"I remember William Rusher, who used to publish National Review, writing about how he had to tell a colleague that "there is no concept so simple that I can fail to understand it when presented as a graph". That made me feel the two cultures divide, for sure. But it's perhaps not as stark as the classic C. P. Snow formulation: there are plenty of scientists who appreciate literature and the arts, and (as McPhee notes), there are plenty of people who know more about the humanities who find that they enjoy scientific topics once they're…
drorzel | May 12, 2011
Atomic clock is smallest on the market - physicsworld.com
"Researchers in the US have developed the world's smallest commercial atomic clock. Known as the SA.45s Chip Size Atomic Clock (CSAC), it could be yours for just $1500. The clock, initially developed for military use, is about the size of a matchbox, weighs about 35 grams and has a power requirement of only 115 mW. Not your everyday timekeeper, the team behind the clock claim that it could have varied and wide-ranging applications, from disabling bombs to searching for oil."
(tags: science technology time atoms optics physics quantum…
drorzel | May 11, 2011
Scientific Study Links Flammable Drinking Water to Fracking - ProPublica
"The group tested 68 drinking water wells in the Marcellus and Utica shale drilling areas in northeastern Pennsylvania and southern New York State. Sixty of those wells were tested for dissolved gas. While most of the wells had some methane, the water samples taken closest to the gas wells had on average 17 times the levels detected in wells further from active drilling. The group defined an active drilling area as within one kilometer, or about six tenths of a mile, from a gas well.
The average concentration of the…
drorzel | May 10, 2011
Shit My Students Write
"Macbeth couldn't have loved Lady Macbeth because he was crazy and too busy hallucinating witches and stuff. Also, crazy people can't do it without going crazy midway through."
(tags: academia education internet silly blogs literature)
Budget Mix-Up Provides Nation's Schools With Enough Money To Properly Educate Students | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
"Sources in the Congressional Budget Office reported that as a result of a clerical error, $80 billion earmarked for national defense was accidentally sent to the Department of Education, furnishing schools…
drorzel | May 9, 2011
Experimental physics as preparation for parenthood « Confused at a higher level
"Before I became a parent, friends and strangers alike would tell me, "You have no idea how much your life will change with the arrival of a baby." I've found my transition to parenthood has been less disruptive than predicted. I credit that, in part, to being an experimental physicist. Here are five ways in which my experience as an experimental physicist helped prepare me to be a new parent."
(tags: academia science blogs physics culture experiment confused-higher-level kid-stuff)
YouTube - Kung Fooled
When…
drorzel | May 8, 2011
Making Light: Epubbing the Backlist
""So," I said, "what the heck. Why not try republishing some of our short stories in electronic versions? All the cool kids are doing it...."
"Why not" included the fact that we didn't have electronic text versions of many of our stories. Stuff that only exists on a 3.5" Atari ST disk (or a 5.25" Atari 800 disk), and we think we saw the disk sometime in 1993, aren't easily converted to e-book formats. But, we're doing it. Fifteen stories so far (roughly half of our corpus), with more to come.
These are promulgating across the world of e-…
drorzel | May 7, 2011
Gary Williams: The greatest craze to hit College Park - The Washington Post
"As soon as you first saw Williams, coaching AU from 1978 to 1982, you knew he was destined for great things. Or else, for a padded room. He was crazy. Good crazy.
You would grab him for a quote as he strutted off the court, but your hand would slip because everything he wore was sopping wet. In 33 years, he has barely changed except somebody pruned his face and slipped a gray wig on him. The body's rail lean; he's still coaching on his haunches. Or he did until he hung up his straitjacket up for good this week."
(…
drorzel | May 6, 2011
Memoirs from Africa: Paring Down a List « Easily Distracted
"In selecting works, I've decided to go for the widest stylistic range I can think of and the widest range of settings, interests and authors. [...] It also provides a surplus of certain kinds of books that I find tedious because they follow such a strong template and are so driven by market fads: memoirs of white women who grew up on African farms that followed on Alexandra Fuller's great memoir of life in Rhodesia and now memoirs of child soldiers and survivors of Darfur. But I think that's an interesting kind of reading in its…
drorzel | May 5, 2011
The Civil War Isn't Tragic - Ta-Nehisi Coates - National - The Atlantic
"Yesterday, Robert Zimmerman was kind enough to link this podcast on the Civil War, and the reasons soldiers, Union and Confederate, offered up for fighting. It's a good segment which I heartily recommend, especially for those of us in the Effete Liberal Book Club. That said, one thing struck me about the conversation, which inevitably comes through any time smart people gather to discuss the Civil War. The conceded common ground was the following--The Civil War was a tragedy.
I think that ground is generally accepted…
drorzel | May 4, 2011
Blog U.: 4 Reasons Why Local Meetings Should Be Conducted with Web Meeting Tools - Technology and Learning - Inside Higher Ed
"Adobe Connect, WebEX, GoToMeeting, LiveMeeting, Skype, Elluminate (what am I missing?), these web conferencing tools are not just for meeting at a distance.
Here are 4 reasons why you should hold more of your meetings online, even if everyone meeting works together on the same campus:"
(tags: academia meetings business inside-higher-ed culture)
Princess Masako - "She's Useless" | The Royal Universe
"Crown Princess Masako of Japan turns 47 on 9 December. It'd be…
drorzel | May 3, 2011
A SETI Infographic « Microcosmologist
"And to put things into perspective, I've whipped up this handy infographic, comparing how $2.5 million compares to so many other things that we absolutely must have, and will not hesitate to pay for:"
(tags: science space astronomy politics funding blogs pictures)
Physics Buzz: Hinting at dark matter
We haven't seen dark matter yet. We haven't, right? Sitting in a plenary talk at the APS April meeting today I started to have my doubts.
(tags: science physics particles experiment astronomy)
News Desk: Notes on the Death of Osama bin Laden : The New…
drorzel | May 2, 2011
The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries - NYTimes.com
"WHEN we don't get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don't blame the soldiers. We don't say, "It's these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That's why we haven't done better in Afghanistan!" No, if the results aren't there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.
And yet in education we do just that. When we don't like the way our…