August 23, 2009
Jo Walton has a very nice review of Karl Schroeder's Permanence over at Tor.com, which contains a terrific summary of what makes Schroeder great:
The problem with talking about Permanence (2002), or any of Schroeder's work really, is that it's too easy to get caught up in talking about the…
August 22, 2009
Via Bora on FriendFeed, a cute little art project from MIT that takes a name, scans the Web for mentions of that name, and produces a color-coded bar categorizing the various mentions of that name. Here's what you get if you put my name in:
You can click on it for a bigger image, that makes the…
August 22, 2009
Dan Brown tops Oxfam's chart of most-donated books | Books | The Guardian
"But as secondhand bookshop shelves flood with battered editions of Angels and Demons and Digital Fortress, Brown can comfort himself with the fact that he's also Oxfam's second most bought author: there are, apparently,…
August 21, 2009
It's that time of year again, when the US News rankings come out (confirming my undergrad alma mater as the Best in All the Land) and everybody in academia gets all worked up about What It All Means. There are always a few gems in there with all the pointless hand-wringing, though, and Timothy…
August 21, 2009
The Dean Dad had a great post about staff yesterday:
Politically, hiring office staff is a harder sell than hiring faculty. Faculty are conspicuous, and the tie to the classroom is obvious. Back-office support staff are inconspicuous, and show up in public discussion as 'overhead' or '…
August 21, 2009
So, I was checking to see that last night's Baby Blogging post had posted properly, when I noticed something unpleasant in the right column:
I recognize that this is the price we pay for being ad-supported, here at ScienceBlogs. It's unreasonable to expect every ad company on the Internet to…
August 21, 2009
Liberal Arts Rankings - Best Colleges - Education - US News and World Report
The annual clown show begins anew. Williams is #1, Union #43, for those who care.
(tags: academia education silly us-news)
Francis Collins' "Five Themes" for the NIH : Respectful Insolence
"In the end, I don't give the…
August 20, 2009
This week's Baby Blogging breaks new ground: Outdoor Baby Blogging!
SteelyKid says "Stop mugging for the camera, Daddy! This is about me!"
This picture also serves to show off her new stroller. It's less collapsible than the previous one, but more maneuverable, and has a larger carrying capacity…
August 20, 2009
I have a bunch of errand-running to do today, so I will leave you with a Dorky Poll question for entertainment, this time regarding the work of the great Sir Isaac Newton:
Which of Isaac Newton's Laws is your favorite?(trends)
We're still dealing with classical physics, here, so superpositions of…
August 20, 2009
... to write a guest post at the Science and Entertainment Exchange blog. So I did, on science communication:
I was asked to write a guest-blog post about "increased incentives for scientists to develop their communications skills." I'm happy to oblige, but in typical ornery-blogger fashion, the…
August 20, 2009
I tagged Steinn's post on publishing a comment a few days ago, because I thought it was pretty funny. In the interim, it's been picked up by the usual suspects as more evidence of the need to completely discard the current publishing model in favor of something more blog-like.
None of the…
August 20, 2009
Cosmological Gravitational Radiation : Dynamics of Cats
Steinn explains what the LIGO null results mean
(tags: science astronomy cosmology blogs cat-dynamics)
PaulCornell.com: Thirty Comics for Hugo Voters
"The Hugo Awards for 2009 are going to be presented at the World Science Fiction…
August 19, 2009
Kate recently signed up for Facebook, and I was talking to her earlier about some of the options for wasting tons of time entertaining yourself with Facebook, and mentioned the ever-popular trivia quizzes and "personality tests" and the like. Of course, I had to caution her that most of the quizzes…
August 19, 2009
The results, however, are amusing for the rest of us:
It's nice to see somebody in a safe district taking advantage of essentially having tenure. We could use more of this.
August 19, 2009
Regifting Robin. How does it work? | Dot Physics
The simple math behind a silly game.
(tags: science blogs math silly dot-physics)
As 81-year-old Mubarak heads to Washington, Egyptians wonder about their leader's health -- latimes.com
An update from Uncertain Principles Senior Middle East…
August 18, 2009
One of SteelyKid's birthday gifts from my parents was a wheeled wooden penguin on a stick. If you roll it along the ground, the wings flap, with a very satisfying clacking noise. It took SteelyKid a little while to get the hang of it, but she's got the idea now:
Really, I don't have anything to say…
August 18, 2009
One of the blogs I hyped at the science blogging panel at Worldcon was Built on Facts, Matt Springer's blog explaining introductory physics concepts. You might not think that you want to read a blog that goes through freshman physics problems in detail-- I would've been dubious on the concept, had…
August 18, 2009
The New York Times yesterday had a story with the dramatic headline DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show, explaining that, well, there are nefarious tricks you can pull to falsify DNA evidence, provided you have access to a high-quality biochemical laboratory. The story is a great boon…
August 18, 2009
slacktivist: The IndigNation
"That's an example of what's often missing today in dealing with the IndigNation. These people are offended and outraged and so politicians and journalists respond by trying not to further offend or enrage them. As though that were possible. Indignation is their…
August 17, 2009
Caught on video:
It's very difficult to decide which of the many, many toys in the toybox is the right toy...
August 17, 2009
The results of the estimation contest are in. There were 164 serious entries (I excluded the $12,000 and $1,000,000 "guesses" from the final data). The mean value guessed by commenters was $83.30, and the median was not far off, at $77.12. The standard deviation was high-- $43.10-- but as you would…
August 17, 2009
Via I-no-longer-remember-who (the tab's been open for several days), there's a list of What You Might Not Know About Scientific Journals, outlining some of the facts about scientific publication. There's some good stuff, but as you can tell from my title, a lot of it is fairly specific to…
August 17, 2009
I mentioned a few times that one of our physics graduates from 2008 was spending a year in rural Uganda, working at a clinic and school there as part of a college-run fellowship program (with Engeye Health Clinic. Steve is back in the US now, and headed to graduate school in Seattle in Atmospheric…
August 17, 2009
In a Queens Park, Duke Riley Leads a Battle on the Low Seas - NYTimes.com
"This was an art exhibition -- a term that perhaps conjures a more subdued event. But the art in this show, called "Those About to Die Salute You," involved humans in motion, boats on water and those tomatoes. It was the…
August 16, 2009
As a parent of a newly mobile one-year-old, I have a can't-fail suggestion for a toy product that would fuse two popular technologies: realistic infant simulators (baby dolls that cry, wet themselve, etc.) and vacuum-cleaning robots.
All you need to do is mount a baby doll on a Roomba chassis, and…
August 16, 2009
Rick Perlstein -- Birthers, Health Care Hecklers and the Rise of Right-Wing Rage - washingtonpost.com
"The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest."
(tags: politics stupid evil…
August 15, 2009
Making Light: Panels and parlor games
"So all you lucky devils went to Worldcon and I didn't. And now I get to read panel reports, which are always both fun and tantalizingly vague.
So let's have a game of it. What fictional characters would you put on a panel, what would you have them talk about…
August 14, 2009
This wooden box sits on top of my dresser, and every afternoon when I come home, I dump the change from my pockets into it. It's getting close to full, as you can see:
I've got a couple of extra galley proofs kicking around, so here's a contest:
Guess the total dollar value of the change in this…
August 14, 2009
I have a thousand things to do today, and blogging isn't high on the list. So here's a dorky poll to pass the time, because it's been a while:
What's your favorite Law of Thermodynamics?(polls)
We're working in the classical limit, here, so you're not allowed to choose a linear superposition of…
August 14, 2009
A cosmologist, a science writer, three best-selling science fiction authors, a best-selling mystery novelist, and a Nobel laureate walk into a bar--
Oh, wait, that's not the opening to a joke. That's the list of people who have provided blurbs for my book... Kind of an eclectic bunch, but I'm…
