Passing thoughts
jstemwedel | September 6, 2006A real nerd can combine love of math and poetry, like so:
{(12+144+20+3(4)^0.5)/7}+5(11) = 81 + 0
It's a true equation. And, it's a limerick. Read it out loud and you'll see:
A dozen, a gross, and a score
Plus three times the square-root of four,
Divided by seven,
Plus five times eleven,
Is nine squared and not a bit more.
(Actually, since it's not dirty, this might not officially qualify as a limerick.)
jstemwedel | September 6, 2006Let's start with a song:
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall,
Aleph-null bottles of beer.
Take one down, pass it around,
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall!
When you're done with that:
Q: Why do computer geeks get candy-corn in their stockings?
A: Because OCT 31 = DEC 25.
Q: Why is six afraid of seven?
A: Because 7-8-9.
This neutron walks into a bar, orders a beer, drinks it down, and asks the bartender what he owes him. The bartender says, "For you, no charge."
Did you hear that electron belch as he dropped from an excited state? No? Well, he did it discretely.
jstemwedel | September 6, 2006As the nerd-off rages on (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) I turn to the sprogs as evidence of my madly nerdy parenting skillz.
Elder offspring (whose mousing skills my better-half feared might not be on track, developmentally, when elder offspring was about a year old) has joined Game Boy Nation since turning 7. This has led to frequent use of Froogle (to investigate prices of games and platforms), as well as use of Google to locate game "cheats" (whose very existence were revealed to elder offspring via a Google search on the name of the favorite game).
This…
jstemwedel | September 6, 2006Other ScienceBloggers may think they're nerdy. They haven't spent time with me at a party.
Fun activity when standing around with your Solo cups of beer or wine:
(Taught to me by a mathematician friend; always a hit with the geekerati.)
First nerd tilts Solo cup gently from side to side. "Ahh, Bessel function!"
Second nerd gives the Solo cup of the first nerd a forceful thwack upward. "Oooh, Neumann function!"
Passing the time with a group of philosophers:
Taking turns giving famous philosophers' proofs that p. Party-going nerds get extra adulation for (a) correctly mimicking the accent…
jstemwedel | September 6, 2006Perhaps not every ScienceBlogger is hot, but almost all of them are nerds. The time has come to see just how high those geek flags fly.
It's time for a nerd-off.
My opening volley after the jump, starting where one does: my momma.
The nerd apple doesn't fall far from the tree. My momma programs in COBOL.
Circa 1989, my momma emailed me ASCII cow-art. Some of it was NSFW.
When I was little, I thought all holiday wreaths were made out of computer punch cards, 'cause that's what my momma used to make wreaths.
Momma raised a nerd.
jstemwedel | September 5, 2006Hottest sciencebloggers.
But come on, you already knew this was a blog of ideas, right?
Personally, I think the non-human primates were robbed.
jstemwedel | August 30, 2006Suddenly your inbox is overflowing with messages from people you've never met expressing their intense interest in your subject.
And, driving across town in the morning takes twice as long as it did just a month ago.
And, your laptop takes a tumble and breaks a hinge.
Plus, the photocopier at work seems to be involved in a work action (but, curiously, can't be bothered to make a placard to announce its grievances).
And, the combination-locked computer-enabled classroom is suddenly without its all-important doorstop (which lets students get into the classroom), so you're reduced to cramming…
jstemwedel | August 18, 2006As I noted earlier, the population density in my office at school decreased enough to free up some room for a couch. The original plan had been to adopt an ugly orange love seat from a colleague's apartment, but it looks like the UOLS will be going in his office, since the couch he was planning to bring in for himself won't fit his office.
So, I hied myself to IKEA and bought the maximum amount of couch that would fit in the trunk and folded-down back seat of my car. (If you must know, it's a Prius. Not cavernous, but good with the mileage.) And seriously, if the flat-packed box of couch…
jstemwedel | August 17, 2006From field reporter Andy, proof that the Flying Spaghetti Monster supports our troops.
jstemwedel | August 17, 2006Because Julie tagged everyone:
The rules: "Go here and look through random quotes until you find 5 that you think reflect who you are or what you believe."
I'll add: Go with the first five that work for you (i.e., don't worry about getting global optima). It took me two bundles of quotations with the randomizer, but here's what I end up with:
"Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient." -Eugene S. Wilson
"The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two…
jstemwedel | August 17, 2006*Updating syllabi to reflect the coming semester's actual meeting days and assignment due dates? Really, really boring. The boredom further propagates when it requires updating a kazillion webpages, then uploading the updates to your site (one at a time, since Fetch thinks it's cute today to "lose" the connection when you use the feature that lets you set up the whole list of files to "Put" all at once). And don't get me started on the tedium of undoing the MS Word crappy formatting when you turn your word document into a webpage. I'm guessing there would be buckets of money (plus rose…
jstemwedel | August 16, 2006David at The World's Fair has posed another, "Ask a ScienceBlogger, Sort Of" question:
Essentially, as scientific types who tend to analyse, over-analyse, supra-analyse things, and who like to categorize and follow empirical trends, I'm interesting in hearing what you think it is that sparks these viral outbursts of information outreach? This question (and apologies for its convolution) also relates directly to your role as a blogger, where the assumption is that you revel in increased traffic, and are kind of looking for these tricks anyway. I guess, I'm just interested in hearing a…
jstemwedel | August 15, 2006Chatting with the chair of the philosophy department at one of the local community colleges:
CC Dept. Chair: Yeah, so I'm scheduled to teach six classes this term.
Me: Six?! While you're the chair?!!
CC Dept. Chair: Yeah, six. We have big enrollments, the full-time faculty are fully scheduled, and I can't find enough part-timers to teach all the sections.
Me: Good grief! So you have to teach them yourself?
CC Dept. Chair: The enrollments are what will get us permission to hire another full-timer, so I can't not teach them.
Me: Yikes!
CC Dept. Chair: Also, I need to counteract the…
jstemwedel | August 15, 2006Walking outside with a well-known local blogger:
WKLB: I never did take a chemistry course.
Me: Why not?
WKLB: I'm not good at memorizing stuff, and there's that whole big periodic table ...
Me: Hey, my memorization skills are pretty worthless, too. But in chemistry, you don't need them as much as you do in a field like biology.
WKLB: Really? You don't ever have to, like, write out the periodic table from memory?
Me: Hell no! The idea is to learn how to turn the periodic table into a device for predicting stuff about the different elements -- like a secret decoder ring. They always…
jstemwedel | July 30, 2006Greetings from the BCCE! Well, actually from a cafe down the street from the BCCE, since the wireless accounts that were supposed to be set up for conference goers are not currently functional. (The lengths to which I'm willing to go to satisfy my readers!) The immediate result of this situation is it will take comments a bit longer to go up.
But, I have gathered (from the talks on how to convey the "nature of science" to students) some fun facts about famous chemists.
Mendeleev (who came up with the periodic table) liked cowboy novels and hated Dostoyevsky. He never believed in electrons…
jstemwedel | July 28, 2006Duane Smith at Abnormal Interests tagged me, and I loves me some books, so who am I to refuse to be mimetic?
1. One book that changed your life?
Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic
2. One book you have read more than once?
T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
3. One book you would want on a desert island?
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
4. One book that made you laugh?
Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World
(My answer for #5 would also work here.)
5. One book that made you cry?…
jstemwedel | July 26, 2006Here are a few items that have been bouncing around in my head of late. Are they connected to each other? You be the judge.
"In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks." That is, hands down, my favorite sentence in K.C. Cole's article in the May/June 2006 Columbia Journalism Review. The article tries to explain why editors (and their penchant for making things absolutely clear) can get in the way of good science journalism, but it has some interesting observations on the nature of science, too.…
jstemwedel | July 23, 2006The name of the ice cream and coffee blended concoction Cappachillo makes me think immediately of some chimeraical combination of a chinchilla and a chupacabra (blended with coffee and ice cream, of course).
Do you suppose this is an indication of caffeine deficiency, heat exhaustion, or both?
jstemwedel | July 15, 2006It's been warm in these parts lately. In weather like this, by evening the indoors is stiflingly hot, while the outdoors is just staring to cool down. So, it makes sense that we'd be driven outdoors. Perhaps it makes less sense that, after escaping the heat indoors, I'd build a blazing hot fire over which to cook.
Life is full of mysteries.
Anyway, while I'm working on the promised post about what non-scientists can do to improve commuications with scientists, I'm curious to find out who else runs to the grill, and how you do it. If you want to consider this a meme, you should also…
jstemwedel | June 30, 2006First I saw it at Feministe, and then at Pandagon, so I had to try the face recognition program that matches one's face to the faces of celebrities. I used the picture of me in the sidebar. Here's what I discovered.
Eva Peron. OK, I'm not entirely comfortable with this, but the people loved her, so I could do worse.
Mary-Kate Olsen. I think this counts as doing worse. Is Mary-Kate the one with the eating disorder and/or drug problem? In principle, I would have no objection to being an evil twin, but I'd prefer to be one who held less fascination for the people in the supermarket…