Links Dump
drorzel | January 9, 2010
The Atlantic Online | January/February 2010 | What Makes a Great Teacher? | Amanda Ripley
"Until now, Teach for America has kept its investigation largely to itself. But for this story, the organization allowed me access to 20 years of experimentation, studded by trial and error. The results are specific and surprising. Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school--like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood--don't seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling--like a teacher's extracurricular accomplishments in college--tend to…
drorzel | January 8, 2010
Strange Horizons Reviews: Avatar, reviewed by Roz Kaveney
"As well as being the Great White Saviour, Jake is that most useful of plot devices, the protagonist who has to be told things; he is also the Man Who Learns Better, and discards earlier convictions; he is also someone who cheerfully signs up for complicity with what he comes to realize is atrocity, and has quite a lot of expiation to do. Yes, the story is about him, but all stories have to be about somebody--Jake is somebody who has been part of the most negative aspects of human society and who comes to understand that he has been…
drorzel | January 7, 2010
slacktivist: Genie in a bottle
"Saudi Arabia's laws against sorcery, it seems to me, are incompatible with its laws against heresy. The heresy laws are based on the idea that there is one and only one true religion. The sorcery laws are based on the idea that other religious beliefs may be powerfully true, but yet forbidden. The state cannot condemn a person for sorcery without thereby taking the official position that sorcery is true and real and powerful. And thus the state cannot enforce its own anti-sorcery law without itself violating its own anti-heresy law."
(tags: religion…
drorzel | January 6, 2010
Owl City and the Slow Earth : Built on Facts
"Does planet Earth turns slowly? It depends on how you look at it. At the equator it's roaring along at more than 1000 miles per hour. This is pretty fast by terrestrial standards, and perhaps what Owl City had in mind. But on the other hand its angular velocity is just one rotation per day, or a very sedate 0.000694 RPM. Kids sometime imagine the earth as a spinning basketball and wonder why we don't fly off, and that's pretty much why: spin a basketball at 0.000694 RPM and I bet any ants on its surface will keep their grip just fine."
(tags:…
drorzel | January 5, 2010
America: Too Stupid To Cook | Ruhlman.com
"That one sentence crystallized the issue for me, turned my frustration from a wall into a lens. Americans are being taught that we're too stupid to cook. That cooking is so hard we need to let other people do it for us. The messages are everywhere. Boxed cake mix. Why is it there? Because a real cake is too hard! You can't bake a cake! Takes too long, you can't do it, you're gonna fail!
Look at all those rotisserie chickens stacked in the warming bin at the grocery store. Why? Because roasting a chicken is too hard, takes FOREVER. An…
drorzel | January 4, 2010
Remembering the giddy futurism of Omni magazine. - By Paul Collins - Slate Magazine
"The magazine was a lushly airbrushed, sans-serif, and silver-paged vision dreamed up by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione and his wife, Kathy Keeton. It split the difference between the consumerist Popular Science--which always seemed to cover hypersonic travel and AMC carburetors in the same page--and the lofty Scientific American, whose rigor was alluring but still impenetrable to me. But with equal parts sci-fi, feature reporting, and meaty interviews with Freeman Dyson and Edward O. Wilson, Omni's…
drorzel | January 3, 2010
Ringing in Kepler's Year : Built on Facts
"Happy new year! While we're thinking about years, why don't we think about one of the first guys to explore the physical reason behind the year?"
(tags: science astronomy planets education math blogs built-on-facts)
The Universe within 12.5 Light Years - The Nearest stars
A handy reference for interstellar tourism.
(tags: astronomy space maps science planets)
BOOK VIEW CAFE BLOG » Ways to Trash Your Writing Career: The Wall of Books
"If you've been to a science fiction convention you have likely encountered The Wall of Books. You go into a…
drorzel | January 2, 2010
Interstellar Cyclers -- KarlSchroeder.com
"To me, the idea that you should expend billions or trillions of dollars to accelerate a starship, only to decelerate it again, is pure lunacy. 90% of the ship's mass is support structures--either power or life support systems. The key to viable interstellar transport, in my view, is simple: if you've got it all in motion, keep it in motion and re-use it. The only thing you want to decelerate at your destination is your cargo."
(tags: space sf astronomy physics relativity energy books)
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog at Barnes & Noble -…
drorzel | January 1, 2010
Giro.org » Grace, Internets. Internets, Grace.
"Grace is snoozing away in Anne's arms while our lunch (rice and dumplings) and dinner (roast chicken with pesto) cook away. This will be the first non-hospital food we've had in two days, though I recall us sneaking in a patty melt and milkshake from Izzy's the night she was born. Really, this is all a blur of plastic bassinets, rotating nurses, and a tiny, tiny person with a mighty grip."
(tags: kid-stuff blogs)
Tell me what to agree with, and I'll agree § Unqualified Offerings
"Indeed, even if we restrict ourselves to hypothesizing that…
drorzel | December 31, 2009
Sketches and Paintings by Richard Feynman | Amusing Planet
"Richard Feynman started taking art lessons at the age of 44, and continued drawing for the rest of his life. These include portraits of his close friends, wife and daughter and professional models that posed for him at his friend's studio. Feynman was also an avid supporter of topless bars, which he used to frequent a lot while he was at Caltech, which also explains why he loved drawing nude models."
(tags: art science history sex)
Backreaction: What is a scientific prediction?
"In the last decade in high energy physics one…
drorzel | December 30, 2009
YouTube - Tom Waits ã Heigh Ho ã ( The Dwarfs marching song ) from Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs
Creepiest. Disney song cover. EVER!
(tags: music movies video youtube)
Gallagher | DVD | Interview | The A.V. Club
Kind of a surreal extended get-offa-my-lawn rant, only vaguely related to the questions being asked.
(tags: comedy avclub interview silly politics culture)
drorzel | December 29, 2009
Why your boss is incompetent - life - 17 December 2009 - New Scientist
"The "Peter principle" undoubtedly appeals to the cynic in all of us. It is also quite possibly true, if subsequent academic studies are to be believed. The longer a person stays at a particular level in an organisation, the more most measures of their performance fall - including subjective evaluations and the frequency and size of pay rises and bonuses. It is a finding entirely consistent with the idea that people eventually become bogged down by their own incompetence."
(tags: business psychology social-science jobs…
drorzel | December 28, 2009
John Crowley Little and Big - Health Care Reform
"At least where I live, and I bet for almost everyone with health insurance, it's very difficult to avoid making several trips to the pharmacy to have various prescriptions filled. If you take (say) four pills a day, and will forever (or until death parts you from them), and you have prescriptions for a month's worth of each, it would be very nice to be able to go to the drugstore and pick them all up each month at once. However, if it so happens that one or another of these was first filled on a different day from the others, it can only…
drorzel | December 23, 2009
Trapped in the USA: You're Just Not that into Science
"It's sad to say this but most people I work with are just not that into science. It's not that they're not good at it - they clearly are - it's just that they're interested only in their little niche, and are thoroughly satisfied with all that it entails."
(tags: science academia culture education writing essay blogs)
Jim C. Hines - Are Booksignings Worth It?
Define "worth it."
(tags: books publishing blogs sf business)
Teachers Defy Gravity to Gain Students' Interest - NYTimes.com
High-school teaches take parabolic flights to…
drorzel | December 22, 2009
The Mid-Majority
"Sports information is like electricity or water. When the power's on and everything's flowing regularly, nobody notices. Everybody takes these things for granted. But whenever anything goes wrong, people act like it's the end of the world. Sports information directors are expected to be perfect, to have the entire school record book on the tip of their tongues, to make sure everything along every scorer's table runs correctly and efficiently during games. And they usually are perfect, spending their days in perfect anonymity.
Which is why they're the true saints of this…
drorzel | December 21, 2009
Make it Sir: Star Trek's Patrick Stewart to be knighted | SCI FI Wire
Sadly, William Shatner is not British.
(tags: sf silly television movies theater world awards)
Are Texas' auto safety inspections worth the hassle? | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Latest News
"Texas is one of 19 states left that require a periodic safety review - down from a peak of 31 states in the 1970s. The District of Columbia recently disbanded its inspection program because of high costs and a lack of evidence that the inspections saved lives.
There is no serious discussion about eliminating Texas…
drorzel | December 20, 2009
Upper Mismanagement | The New Republic
"Since 1965, the percentage of graduates of highly-ranked business schools who go into consulting and financial services has doubled, from about one-third to about two-thirds. And while some of these consultants and financiers end up in the manufacturing sector, in some respects that's the problem. Harvard business professor Rakesh Khurana, with whom I discussed these questions at length, observes that most of GM's top executives in recent decades hailed from a finance rather than an operations background. (Outgoing GM CEO Fritz Henderson and his…
drorzel | December 19, 2009
The Mighty Power of Blogosaurus? | The Loom | Discover Magazine
"I've heard this sort of story many times before, and this is where it usually ends. Blogosaurus slinks back to his office and sulks.
But today the story has another ending. Wedel now reports that someone from the Discovery Channel called him up and is going to make things right. I can only guess that blogs do actually make a difference some of the time. Or maybe just this once."
(tags: media science dinosaurs journalism blogs television)
Bad Year for Weird Fiziks § Unqualified Offerings
"So, a bad year for people hoping to…
drorzel | December 18, 2009
Creating Citizen Scientists § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
"A few days ago, sitting in my office, I contributed to peer-reviewed scientific research in biology, astronomy, and psychology. Even though I don't hold degrees in any of these fields, my contributions will help advance science: I was doing real investigative work, not the prosaic replications of classic experiments that are typically taught in introductory lab courses. I was taking part in a blossoming "citizen science" movement occurring across a wide swath of scientific fields."
(tags: science seed computing astronomy biology psychology…
drorzel | December 17, 2009
slacktivist: Preferring nightmares
"What I don't get is the kind of deliberate delusion in which a person chooses to pretend the world is more horrifying and filled with more and more-monstrous monsters. Why would anyone prefer such a place to the real world? Why would anyone wish for a world filled with socialist conspiracies, secret Muslim atheists, Satan-worshipping pop stars and bloodthirsty baby-killers?
But the Tea Partiers cling to these nightmares with a desperate ferocity. They get angrily defensive at the suggestion that this world isn't actually as horrific as they're pretending…