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skookumchick | October 8, 2008Okay, I need to confess. I usually peg myself as an indie/alternative/progressive/folkie music person. But I am really finding myself working well when I start playing the following playlist (care of the new Genius playlist on iTunes):
Online - Brad Paisley
Landslide - Dixie Chicks
I Feel Lucky - Mary Chapin Carpenter
If I had a boat - Lyle Lovett
Rambler's Anthem - Yonder Mountain String Band
There's Your Trouble - Dixie Chicks
Baby, Now That I've Found You - Alison Krauss & Union Station
Long Time Gone - Dixie Chicks
That's Right (You're Not From Texas) - Lyle Lovett
The Fox -…
gregladen | October 7, 2008Harry Truman drove around the country in his Dodge to root out war profiteering.
Norm Coleman compared his oversight record to Harry Truman's, but didn't hold a single hearing into war profiteering in Iraq.
Norm dodged his responsibility -- and now he's desperate to dodge blame.
gregladen | October 7, 2008
This is Obama after the debate:
And this is McCain:
But don't worry, Jonny, you can still get your hug....
When someone keeps calling me "his friend" again and again and again, I tend to reach for my wallet.
In both of the last two debates, polls of independent and/or undecided voters overwhelmingly indicated that Obama/Biden won handily, yet the rhetoric out there in the news agencies and on the blogosphere is that "debates don't matter" and "debates don't change people's minds" and "nobody wins these debates, each side says hooray for their own side and that's it" .... because that is…
mspringer | October 7, 2008How'd the test go? Eh, ok I think. In particular I vapor-locked on a pretty easy question involving transforming E & B fields to another reference frame. There was another question where you had to prove that the energy-momentum tensor was Lorentz invariant, and I didn't get that one either. The rest were pretty good as far as I can tell.
Momentum happens to be what's currently being taught in Physics 201, which of course I'm a TA for this semester. Having done force and energy already, momentum's not too hard to describe. Momentum is just mass times velocity. Unlike forces, there'…
grrlscientist | October 7, 2008Here's a new (to me) blog carnival that you might enjoy reading, Homesteading carnival, issue #68. This blog carnival is all about rural living.
pharyngula | October 7, 2008The University of Oklahoma joins the ranks of the many universities that are offering a year of Darwin celebrations. I hope the Oklahoma community takes advantage of the opportunity — the calendar has plenty of public lectures and tours and exhibits.
cortex | October 7, 2008A fundamental problem in the financial markets right now - a problem that's often traced to the failure of Lehman Brothers last month - is the breakdown of trust. Because financial institutions don't "trust" the solvency of other institutions and corporations, they aren't willing to lend money. The end result is a frozen credit market. This is precisely what happened during the Great Depression. After Black Friday, the public lost confidence in the economy, and people began to hastily withdraw their money from banks. The result was a rash of bank failures, and an even larger push to withdraw…
drorzel | October 6, 2008
Interview with Chad Orzel
It's me, doing a blog interview on how I got into science, how I got into blogging, and the future of science outreach.
(tags: science blogs physics academia)
xkcd - A Webcomic - Depth
Negative powers of ten, xkcd style.
(tags: science comics xkcd)
Seeing race and seeming racist? Whites go out of their way to avoid talking about race
"Our findings don't suggest that individuals who avoid talking about race are racists," Apfelbaum explained. "On the contrary, most are well-intentioned people who earnestly believe that colorblindness is the culturally sensitive…
grrlscientist | October 6, 2008Here's a few more blog carnivals that have been published recently for your edeucation and enjoyment;
Friday Ark, #211. This blog carnival links to images of animals, and is a great way to start a Monday, if you ask me.
Medicine 2.0 blog carnival. This is filled with LOTS of essays about medicine!
Europe Travel Carnival, 6 October 2008 issue. All about traveling in Europe on a shoestring!
grrlscientist | October 6, 2008The NYC millionth comment party has been scheduled! ScienceBlogs has rented out the top floor of the Delancey and will be providing pizza and a bar tab up to about $600 (drinks over that amount will not be covered) -- FREE! The Delancey will be suspending their usual cover charge, just for us.
ScienceBlogs' NYC area Millionth Comment party:
Date: Tuesday, 7 October 2008
Time: 7pm ET until ???
Location: the top floor of The Delancey Bar and Nightclub, 168 Delancey Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side [map]
SciBling hosts: ME and some of my ScienceBlogs colleagues, PhysioProf and Jake Young,…
gregladen | October 6, 2008
Eh, hoserz... this little dairy cow makes us Minnesodans look like those New Yorkers, eh?
mspringer | October 6, 2008Today is Judgment Day number 1 of 3. "Why today, and why are there three of them?" you ask.
Well ok, I exaggerated. It's just the first of three exams in my electromagnetic theory class. Let's see what's on the test... "special relativity, Lorentz covariance of Maxwell's equations, scalar and vector potentials, gauge invariance, relativistic motion of charged particles, action principle for electromagnetism, energy momentum tensor"
It's not as bad as it sounds. The test does have to be doable in two hours, despite containing eight or so problems. I'm not super-comfortable with all this…
cortex | October 6, 2008I'm pretty sure that if Dante had known about locked-in syndrome he would have rewritten the chapter in the Inferno devoted to the ninth circle of hell. In the most recent Esquire, Joshua Foer has an excellent profile of Erik Ramsey, who suffered a devastating injury to his brain stem, leaving him entirely paralyzed. (The only muscles Erik could consciously control were the ones that moved his eyeballs up and down.)
There are stories of people being locked-in for years before anyone notices the fully conscious person hiding inside the paralyzed body. In 1966, a thirty-two-year-old woman named…
goodmath | October 6, 2008 I don't have a lot of time to write; I'm having my fifth (I think) upper endoscopy done tomorrow, which means that the day's going to be a wash; and Yom Kippur is thursday, and I need to cook, so between the personal crap and work, I'm not going to have much time for blogging. So I'm trying to make use of the time I have to write one short but (hopefully) interesting post.
One thing that I've mentioned in passing is the distinction between message confidentiality, and message integrity.
Confidentiality is most of what we've been talking about
so far. Confidentially provides a guarantee…
cortex | October 6, 2008My latest article in the Boston Globe Ideas section is on presidential decision-making and the virtues of metacognition, or being able to think about thinking:
For the last eight years, America has had a president with an audacious approach to making decisions. "I'm a gut player. I rely on my instincts," President Bush has said repeatedly. It doesn't matter if he's making a decision about invading Iraq, the intentions of a foreign leader, or pushing ahead with Social Security reform: Bush believes in the power of his intuition.
Critics have lampooned this aspect of the Bush presidency.…
gregladen | October 5, 2008I want to thank Brian at Laelaps for digging this up. Normally, I would just link to him and send you to his excellent site, but this is so freakin' good that I cannot pass this up. But go read Brian's comments on this anyway, please.
As Brian points out, Palin explicitly says that she believes that god put this cup in her hand.
At least she is getting the point: Yes, Sarah Palin, you ignorant slut, what you say will be used against you. So, you could just: Shut. Up.
But please don't. Frankly, I prefer you keep going. I'm rather enjoying this fiasco you call a candidacy.
What does…
gregladen | October 5, 2008Of highly autochon ... allotou ... no, allochtonoo...allochthunu... no, that's not right either...
.... highly allochthonous!!!!.
Give him a visit and say hey!
gregladen | October 5, 2008... one by the reporter (listen carefully), the other .... well, the other is running for vice president. On one of the tickets.
gregladen | October 5, 2008
The Tangled Bank
The Festival of the Trees 28 - Art and Arboreality
The Carnival of Evolution #3
Shakespeare Blog Carnival #7
Working at Home Blog Carnival-105th Edition
Cancer Research Blog Carnival #14
Just Write Blog Carnival
carnival of the vanities
Carnival of Cinema: Episode 95 - Do the Blog Thing
gregladen | October 4, 2008
The Carnival of Space at Alice's Astro Info
The Replace Michele Bachmann Carnival!!!
New and Exciting in PLoS ONE at A Blog Around the Clock
the Athletic Alley blog carnival
Friday Ark #211
I and the Bird #85 - The Show Must Go On