Links Dump
drorzel | February 4, 2012Duke's Cameron Crazies Lose Their Enthusiasm - NYTimes.com
There is growing sentiment that Cameron has lost some of its craziness, and there is definitive evidence that it has lost some of its Crazies. About 1,200 seats are earmarked for Duke's undergraduates, but this season students have filled about 700 a game while classes are in session. Over the last three years, the university has filled the gaps by regularly selling hundreds of student-section tickets to nonstudents, giving the famed Section 17 an unusual look.
Stephen Colbert is winning the war against the Supreme Court and Citizens…
drorzel | February 3, 2012Whither The Occupation - Ta-Nehisi Coates - National - The Atlantic
"There's an argument that the process of federal legislation, at this point, is crippled by deep systemic problems. The filibuster is an obvious example. It's also worth pointing out that there is a space for activism beyond electoral politics. But laws exist for a very good reason. They are--roughly put--a compact between citizens and the state detailing the guidelines for governance. Laws--and their alteration or abolishment--are the means by which we change the compact. The alternative, to my mind, is revolution. At the…
drorzel | February 1, 2012slacktivist » Fine-tuning the keywords on your résumé
They don't warn you about the bewildering, befuddling vertigo that comes with having done everything they say to do, all to no avail, and having no idea what to do next. There you are, willing and eager to wear away whatever leather there still is on your shoes, but you have no idea what direction to walk. There sits the phone, but you have no one left to call. And you've refined your online job-searching skills to the point where it takes you only a fraction of the time to confirm that there's nothing out there. Now what? What happens…
drorzel | January 31, 2012Quantum Diaries
Science is complex. There's no getting around that. But it's essential that everyone engage constructively with it. That's particularly true of the political and business leaders in Davos, whose decisions on science-based subjects can influence everything from the well being of our children to the future of the planet. It's vital that those decisions are taken from an informed position and on rational grounds. The challenge that science faces is that we live in a world where it's de rigueur to know your Shakespeare, Molière or Goethe, but quite all right to be proudly…
drorzel | January 30, 2012BOOK REVIEW: How To Teach Relativity To Your Dog By Chad Orzel - Science News
It may sound like a strange setup, but the somewhat kooky concept works well for explaining a field of physics that can sound, well, kooky to the uninitiated. Emmy is the stand-in for the everyman (or everydog) who has never quite managed to grasp the idea of spacetime, or why moving clocks tick slower than stationary ones. The imagined back-and-forth banter between author and dog keeps the book engaging while Orzel lays out the theoretical framework of particle physics, explains why neither dogs nor neutrinos can…
drorzel | January 26, 2012slacktivist » Mark Driscoll, John Woolman, Zacchaeus and grace
That [Quaker abolitionist John] Woolman was so miraculously persuasive suggests to me that he likely wasn't as monomaniacally focused on a single subject as the old preacher in the story I shared in the previous post. And the more I think about that story and Woolman's, the more I want to qualify my commendation of such a single-minded relentlessness. Woolman certainly was single-minded and relentless. He did one thing for decades, obsessively. Yet he also convinced people to change -- he convinced hundreds of people to change…
drorzel | January 20, 2012Ben Franklin's 200+ Synonyms for "Drunk" - Mental Floss
Today we're celebrating Ben Franklin's 306th birthday. If you're celebrating at home, perhaps one of these phrases from The Drinkers Dictionary will come in handy. The lengthy list of expressions meaning "inebriated" was first published by Franklin in the Pennsylvania Gazette on January 6, 1737. Feel free to add your own phrases in the comments.
Inky Fool: The Fifty Most Quoted Lines of Poetry
Shakespeare doesn't make the top ten and Gertrude Stein is more quoted than Byron. Bet you didn't see that coming.
BBC News - Children's science…
drorzel | January 19, 2012What I Wish Wikipedia and Others Were Saying About SOPA/PIPA
The blackout and other protests today are the result of a long, sustained, full-court press against legislation that's being pushed through despite widespread opposition. Yet, Lamar Smith and many other members of the U.S. House and Senate have been plowing ahead full-steam. Why? Yes, in part because they're well-funded by the entertainment industry, and it wants the bill passed, but also because they think they can. The dirty little secret of SOPA is not that the entertainment industry has far more influence than it ought to have…
drorzel | January 17, 20121 job good, 2 jobs better? § Unqualified Offerings
Inspired by FSP's post on 2-body problems in hiring, i.e. situations where both members of a couple are seeking academic jobs, I'd like to pose some challenges to those of my readers with opinions on academic hiring. This topic is usually considered as a moral issue, rather than as a resource issue, and often people do not think through the implications of their stances. Consider several applicants, each of whom provides the information indicated. What effect, if any, should that information have on your hiring decision:
Hey Look, Some…
drorzel | January 16, 2012Swans on Tea » The Scientists' Dilemma
I recently had an interesting discussion with someone who is interested in science, but without training or experience as a scientist. The question was, basically: Why don't we (scientists) all just lie to each other? i.e. what compels scientists to truthfully share their research results? It's a fair question -- we're human and competitive to some degree, and at first blush there would seem to be a lot to gain from keeping competitors off-balance by feeding them false clues. I will draw a distinction here between non-cooperation, i.e. secrecy, and…
drorzel | January 13, 2012In Praise of Footnotes (Polar Bear Cub/Anything But The Republicans Dept.) « The Inverse Square Blog
Exit, pursued by a [actual, live, polar] bear.
OCD, Vampires, and Rants, oh my! - Men's Versus Women's Poses
As mentioned yesterday, I took some inspiration from Jim C Hines's Striking A Pose blog entry and figured I'd do some experimentation on my own. And hey, while I was at it, why not take things one step further and contrast the female poses with some male poses? So I wrapped my bad knee and grabbed my husband, some props, and a camera, and we spent the evening doing a rather ridiculous…
drorzel | January 11, 2012Confessions of a Community College Dean: What If Colleges Ran Attack Ads?
The rise of Super PACs and the glorious display of democracy that is the Republican primary season got me thinking about attack ads in other contexts. What if colleges ran attack ads?
How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? - NYTimes.com
he new Colbert has crossed the line that separates a TV stunt from reality and a parody from what is being parodied. In June, after petitioning the Federal Election Commission, he started his own super PAC -- a real one, with real money. He has run TV ads, endorsed (sort of) the…
drorzel | January 10, 2012The Active Class » Blog Archive » Do they do the reading? Helping students prepa...
It's a common complaint: Students don't read the book before class. It's probably equally true in the humanities, but my main experience is in the sciences. Science textbooks are dense, full of extraneous diagrams and pictures, and it's a real challenge for an introductory student to muddle their way through all that information to try to extract useful information from it. So most don't bother -- they go to class to see what content the professor thinks is important, and then use the textbook to help…
drorzel | January 6, 2012Frontier experiments: Tough science : Nature News & Comment
As the media spotlight shines on the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and its high-profile hunt for a certain boson, other scientists are pressing forward with experiments that are just as challenging -- and just as potentially transformative. These often unsung researchers are willing to spend years or even decades getting a finicky instrument to run smoothly; setting up proper controls to minimize spurious results; beating back noise that threatens to swamp their signal; and striving for an ever more painstaking level of…
drorzel | January 5, 2012The Messenger - Ta-Nehisi Coates - Politics - The Atlantic
I've thought a lot about Farrakhan, recently, watching Ron Paul's backers twist themselves in knots to defend what they have now euphemistically label as "baggage." I don't think it makes much sense to try to rebut the charges here. No minds will be changed. Still let us remember that we are faced with a candidate who published racism under his name, defended that publication when it was convenient, and blamed it on ghost-writers when it wasn't, whose take on the Civil War is at home with Lost-Causers, and whose take on the Civil…
drorzel | January 3, 2012Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us | Magazine
For "Science" read "Medical Science" throughout, but other than that, it's a good discussion of the problem of biological complexity.
Teach For America: A Review of the Evidence | National Education Policy Center
Teach For America (TFA) aims to address teacher shortages by sending graduates from elite colleges, most of whom do not have a background in education, to teach in low-income rural and urban schools for a two-year commitment. The impact of these graduates is hotly debated by those who, on the one hand, see this as a way to…
drorzel | December 31, 2011Determining the ultimate champion from the year that was - Grantland
It wasn't until I attempted to fill a draw of 64, and got stuck at 7, did I realize what a huge year this was for losers. If you weren't getting financially screwed over, you were probably getting divorced, locked up, or pepper sprayed. That's how I'll always remember 2011. With that said, I was still determined to identify and either celebrate or hate on the winners of 2011. After days of Googling "best _____ of 2011" and "who still has a credit score going into 2012", a draw of 32 was completed, with people, innovations,…
drorzel | December 29, 2011Tests Cast Doubt on F.A.A. Restrictions on Kindle and iPad - NYTimes.com
The Federal Aviation Administration has its reasons for preventing passengers from reading from their Kindles and iPads during takeoff and landing. But they just don't add up. Since I wrote a column last month asking why these rules exist, I've spoken with the F.A.A., American Airlines, Boeing and several others trying to find answers. Each has given me a radically different rationale that contradicts the others. The F.A.A. admits that its reasons have nothing to do with the undivided attention of passengers or the fear…
drorzel | December 28, 2011Armageddon Rock by Alan Smale | Lightspeed Magazine
The Doomsday Asteroid is coming. An immense boulder with our name on it is cruising through the Solar System, and we all know what will happen when it arrives.
Innumeracy on the Faculty! | Blog
I'm convinced that the Standards for Mathematical Practice are doomed to fail in most schools. Why? Because it seems that most teachers and principals don't understand a simple fact: to teach elementary school math well, you have to know elementary school math really well. And most people (be they teachers, principals or otherwise) simply don't…
drorzel | December 22, 2011Reminder: Tis the Season Not to Be an Ass Ä°Ëâ¬" Whatever
But -- but -- what about all those horrible atheists taking over holiday displays with crucified Santa skeletons? Surely that's evidence of a war! Well, no, it's evidence of some non-believers taking a page out of the PETA playbook, i.e., being dicks to get attention and to make a point. I do strongly suspect that if we didn't have some certain excitable conservatives playing The War on Christmas card when a business says "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas," and such, there would be less incentive for certain excitable non-…