September 13, 2009
A Smoove Evening | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
"The plan to seduce Michelle Obama in both body and soul has also not moved forward during the last few months. She and her people have stopped returning Smoove's phone calls, and his letters, and the elaborately arranged fruit…
September 12, 2009
I almost forgot about yesterday's anniversary-- I didn't think of it at all until the fulsome tribute before Thursday night's football game. I actually waffled for a bit about whether to put up the annual moment-of-silence post. It's been eight years, everybody's concerns have shifted to other…
September 12, 2009
Sorority Row | Film | A.V. Club
"Late in the dire college slasher flick Sorority Row, the killer takes some time away from impaling hateful victims to explain why the world will be a better place without all the awful people who didn't survive the movie. And you know what? The psychopath has a…
September 11, 2009
slacktivist: Vampires & crosses
"Most vampires don't believe in the cross, but that hardly matters. It's the idea of the thing that gives them fits. The cross confronts vampires with their opposite -- with the rejection of power and its single-minded pursuit. It suggests that no one is to be…
September 10, 2009
SteelyKid is cutting a couple of molars at the moment, and Cathy at day care mentioned that she was getting some relief by using a pretzel rod as a sort of edible teether that could reach all the way to the back of her mouth. So we picked some up, and they've been a big hit. Here we see SteelyKid…
September 10, 2009
A couple of things that I'm not excited to blog about, but sort of feel like I ought to say something about:
1) The Washington Monthly article about StraighterLine, an online program that lets you take college courses for $99/mo. The article is all breathless excitement about the revolutionary…
September 10, 2009
NASA Unveils Images From Repaired Hubble Telescope - NYTimes.com
"Dr. Weiler noted that the telescope was now in the best shape of its 19-year life in orbit, far surpassing the ambitions of its founders, and that it could last for at least another five years.
"Hubble gets better and better and…
September 9, 2009
One of the odd things about the C-list celebrity life of a semi-pro blogger is that I get a bunch of requests to review books on physics-related topics. Some of these take the form of a book showing up out of the blue, others are preceded by a polite request from the author. Aaron Santos's How Many…
September 9, 2009
The Dean Dad and the Tenured Radical are having a really good discussion of service responsibilities, or as TR puts it, the "Just Say No" problem:
The Just Say No (to everyone but me) issue is a problem that, frankly, untenured people, adjuncts and visitors are not responsible for managing; and…
September 9, 2009
We did the far right column of the periodic table, so here's one for the left: the coolest-chemistry-demo-ever column, the alkali metals:
What's your favorite alkali metal?(surveys)
While you can make heteronuclear alkali dimers, at least in a transient way, we're talking atoms here, not…
September 9, 2009
slacktivist: Same to you, buddy
"A $100 account with no fees costs the bank more in paperwork and tellers' time than it's worth. In the long-run, such accounts can help depositors develop savings habits and savings balances, developing into the sort of customers banks can and do make money from.…
September 8, 2009
Like every other blogger with a political opinion, I read Paul Krugman's essay on economics last week, and tagged it for Saturday's Links Dump. And while I appreciate Eric Weinstein calling me out as part of the "high end blogosphere," I'm not sure I have much to say about it that is useful. But,…
September 8, 2009
Via the Infinite summer roundup, Infinite Detox has a post about the novel's treatment of my favorite supporting character, whose title I have shamelessly stolen:
The problem I have is that from a dramatic standpoint, the wave of Pemulis-bashing that gathers force on p. 774 and crests in endnote…
September 8, 2009
Sunday Function : Built on Facts
One of the most useful functions in math isn't really a function in the usual sense.
(tags: math physics blogs built-on-facts science)
Hitler finds out about another Downfall parody from dawsonbros - Video
"Maybe we should just make one of these ourselves. Do…
September 7, 2009
It's Labor Day today in the US, and Emmy and SteelyKid have both categorically refused to work on the holiday. So here's a picture of some pretty yellow birds.
(That's a thistle seed feeder hanging outside the bay window in our living room. It's shot through the glass, which accounts for the…
September 6, 2009
"Dude, we need to talk."
"About what?"
"Your priorities are all out of whack. I mean, everything is about your puppy these days-- puppy blogging, taking the puppy on trips, buying the puppy toys. You need to get back to basics."
"Meaning what, exactly?"
"Well, more me, obviously. Don't get me wrong…
September 5, 2009
We're headed out for a last road trip before the start of classes, taking SteelyKid to visit her great-grandmother and great-great-aunts. Why? Because she's this cute:
If you had a baby that cute, wouldn't you take her on the road? I thought so.
Normal-ish blogging will resume Tuesday. I'm…
September 5, 2009
slacktivist: TF: No heroes
"Here is the scene LaHaye and Jenkins are stumbling toward: Nicolae sits in his office, meditating on his evil scheme and the worldwide suffering it will cause. In walks the hero.
If that hero is anyone other than Buck Williams, then we're in for some fireworks. Pick a…
September 4, 2009
I'm clearing out browser tabs before the weekend, which has reminded me that I've been terribly remiss in not passing along information about the Quantum to Cosmos festival being held next month at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario.
For 10 exciting days this October, Perimeter Institute'…
September 4, 2009
(I think that's the right number...)
I've got a ton of stuff to do today, and it's the last Friday of summer, so here's a little light entertainment. As in previous editions, each of the two-word phrases on the list below should hopefully uniquely identify one pop song. If you think you recognize…
September 4, 2009
Physics Buzz has a nice article about Paul Erdos and the Erdos Number Project (mine is 6), which ends with a good question:
I for one, am wondering: who would be the Paul ErdÅs of the physics world?
It's a tough question, complicated further by the existence of really gigantic collaborations in…
September 4, 2009
Summer is drawing to a close, which means we're finally starting to get some actual sports to talk about, after a long, dull stretch of nothing but baseball. So I've started listening to "Mike and Mike" again in the mornings in my office. Which may have been a mistake because I've just had to…
September 4, 2009
Pfizer Launches 'Zoloft For Everything' Ad Campaign | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
""At first, Zoloft was only used to treat depression," Pugh said. "But what is depression, really? Who died and gave doctors the authority to dictate who is and isn't depressed? One man's hangnail could…
September 3, 2009
I thought we'd go with a change of scene for this week's baby blogging, so we took Appa out into the back yard. Trouble is, it's a little hard to get a good Baby Blogging photo there because there are so many other things to catch SteelyKid's attention:
We haven't been outside much this summer,…
September 3, 2009
The building where my office is is on a small hill off toward one edge of campus, and to get to the Campus Center, you used to be able to go out the main door, and go either left down a gently curving path to the other academic buildings, or right, where the sidewalk runs along the top of a…
September 3, 2009
"...Can you name the six noble gases?"
As this could be no poser for an economic geographer, I rattled them off in their proper aristocratic order. "Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon, and -er- Radon. They were raised to the peerage in the eleventh year of England's George Fifth, and Neon was…
September 3, 2009
So, I upgraded my desktop at home recently to a machine running Vista. One of the minor annoying features of this is that it defaults to requiring a password whenever it wakes up, so if I walk away for half an hour, I come back and rather than just moving the mouse to wake it up, I have to move the…
September 3, 2009
Physics Buzz: The Surprising Physics of Pipe Organs
"In 1877, English physicist Lord Rayleigh observed that when two almost identical organ pipes are played side by side, something strange happens. Rather than each blaring their own tone, the two pipes will barely make a whisper. But put a…
September 2, 2009
I sort of feel like I ought to have something to say about the recent controversy over creationists on bloggingheads.tv, which has caused Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer to renounce the whole site. If you're too lazy to click through those links, the basic problem is that bloggingheads has twice…
