August 5, 2007
Because for the past week, this has been the view from my balcony:
We're back in the Capital District now, after a travel day about which the less said the better, but for a week there, damn, life was good.
August 3, 2007
I'm on vacation this week, and taking this opportunity to clear out a large backlog of news items that I flagged as interesting, but never got around to commenting on. I'll group them thematically, just to spread things out over a few days, and this post lumps together some results from biophysics…
August 2, 2007
I'm on vacation this week, and taking this opportunity to clear out a large backlog of news items that I flagged as interesting, but never got around to commenting on. I'll group them thematically, just to spread things out over a few days, and this lot is a bunch of articles about fiendishly…
August 1, 2007
I'm on vacation this week, and taking this opportunity to clear out a large backlog of news items that I flagged as interesting, but never got around to commenting on. I'll group them thematically, just to spread things out over a few days, and this lot is a bunch of articles about new developments…
July 31, 2007
I'm on vacation this week, and taking this opportunity to clear out a large backlog of news items that I flagged as interesting, but never got around to commenting on. I'll group them thematically, just to spread things out over a few days, and this lot is a bunch of articles about nifty new…
July 30, 2007
I'm on vacation this week, and taking this opportunity to clear out a large backlog of news items that I flagged as interesting, but never got around to commenting on. I'll group them thematically, just to spread things out over a few days, and this post highlights a couple of new things in the…
July 27, 2007
I'm off for a much-needed vacation, and will be Internet-less for the next week. Woo-hoo!
The plan of the moment is to set up a handful of physics "news" items to appear next week (the scare quotes are because some of these items are weeks old), but otherwise there won't be any updates. If you're…
July 27, 2007
That's the conclusion of a new study from Harvard and the University of Virginia, anyway:
Researchers at Harvard University and the University of Virginia have found that high school coursework in one of the sciences generally does not predict better college performance in other scientific…
July 27, 2007
DonorsChoose, the educational charity we ran a fundraiser for last year, has made it to the final round of five in the American Express Members Project charity giveaway, and they're looking for votes to help them win $5 million.
They're up against some stiff competition, and really, it'd be…
July 26, 2007
It's been a few days since I linked to Inside Higher Ed, and the Internet itself was threatening to collapse. They're got a provocative article today about university endowments, though, so disaster is averted. The author, Lynne Munson, compares colleges and universities to private foundations, and…
July 26, 2007
No, this isn't about the theological component of NASCAR (though the popularity of auto racing is perhaps best explained by sophisticated brainwashing techniques)-- it's much more important: A story on ESPN.com about the Williams-Amherst rivalry:
Although the unusual history of the two schools…
July 26, 2007
There's a story about theft of supplies at NASA in the Times today. It's an eight-paragraph wire service blurb, which wouldn't be worth a mention, but for this:
In one instance documented by the accountability office, an unidentified worker explained the fate of a missing laptop, worth $4,265:
"…
July 25, 2007
Live Granades has a survey of current SF, done in the form of a school walk-through with new principal Michael Capobianco (who won the SFWA election discussed earlier this year). It's pretty amusing if you know the authors involved, but one bit made me just about spit my drink at the monitor:
Of…
July 25, 2007
I can't resist the snarky title, but this is a serious topic. Tara Smith has a review of a math book by Danica McKellar, titled Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail. It's aimed at getting middle-school girls to have more positive feelings…
July 25, 2007
Some time back, I was offered a review copy of Why the Sky Is Blue by Götz Hoeppe by Princeton University Press. Looking at their web site, I noticed a forthcoming book by an emeritus professor at my alma mater, so I asked if they'd send me a copy of that, too. I'm all about the free books.
The…
July 25, 2007
The Weekly World News is shutting down its print operation at the end of August, though the web site will continue to be active. Long lines in the supermarket will be that much duller.
Actually, a moment of silence is probably the wrong tribute. Maybe a moment of screeching like a bat child found…
July 25, 2007
If you'd like to know what hapens in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows without having to read two hundred pages worth of camping-related program activities, there's a slightly snarky scene-by-scene summary at Gibberish in Neutral:
Yaxley: HAI I IZ DEATHEATER NOT APPEARING IN PREVIOUS BOOKS. YOU…
July 24, 2007
In the previous post about light polarization, I promised to post an explanation of why it is that "Polarized" is a selling point for sunglasses. Given that sunlight is unpolarized, the only obvious benefit would be that polarized sunglasses will automatically block half of the light hitting them,…
July 24, 2007
No, I'm not talking about Harry Potter books-- there won't be any more of those for a while, at least until J. K. Rowling decides she really needs to buy Bolivia. I'm talking about "Harry Potter" the cultural phenomenon-- the inescapable, endlessly hyped mass-culture Event that everybody talks…
July 23, 2007
Kate was out of the house around nine on Saturday morning, which usually only happens if we have a plane to catch, which should tell you the importance Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had for her. She tore through it by dinnertime.
I'm not that big a fan, but I hate missing out on a Cultural…
July 23, 2007
One of my tasks this week, before heading off to the Caribbean for a relaxing vacation, is going to be to find a new pair of polarized sunglasses that aren't ridiculously ugly. This seems like a decent hook of a physics post, explaining why "polarized" is a selling point for sunglasses, but first,…
July 23, 2007
There's a quick mention in Inside Higher Ed today of the latest news on the college presidents opposed to the US News rankings. They're up to 61 signatures on their letter committing college presidents to 1) refusing to provide information for the rankings, and 2) refusing to use the rankings in…
July 23, 2007
Why is it that when non-famous people are quoted in the news media, their ages are always given? Just about every story in the paper features a sentence like:
"Of course, I'm aware of the wave nature of matter," said Tallulah Johnstone Black, 47, a homemaker from Waterloo who witnessed the incident…
July 22, 2007
There's been some discussion recently in places I can't link to about the Purpose of Blogging, and whether it's really appropriate to be using the medium to exchange silly pictures of cats. Ethan Zuckerman made an important point about the utility of banality (that link 404's at the moment, but I…
July 22, 2007
The random pla feature on my iPod coughed up Warren Zevon's cover of "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" this morning, which got me wondering. I own at least four different versions of that song (Dylan, Clapton, Zevon, G'n'R), and iTunes offers over a hundred different versions (not counting the twenty-odd…
July 21, 2007
Next weekend will mark the start of Vacation Season here at Chateau Steelypips. Or, rather, out of Chateau Steelypips, as we'll be spending four of the next seven weeks in other places.
This, of course, will require books for me to read on the various airplane flights needed to reach our vacation…
July 20, 2007
A week or two ago, one of my students measured the power output of a grating-locked diode laser, and came into my office saying "I think I may have killed the laser." The power output was much too low for a laser of that type, which is a bad sign.
So, we went down to the lab, and looked at the…
July 20, 2007
John Scalzi makes a startling admission:
I've never read a Harry Potter book.
In the same post, he also links to an old piece expressing the heretical opinion that the Lord of the Rings movies are better than the books.
He's got reasons for both of those, and you can go read them, but what this…
July 20, 2007
Inside Higher Ed reports on two new NSF studies showing a decline in American scientific publishing. Sort of.
What the studies found, however, was that besides the well-known decrease in the relative share of journal articles originating from the United States, there was a slowdown in absolute…
July 19, 2007
Emmy says "Boring posts about religion and politics make me sad. You should post more about me."
There'll be news to make her happy in the next week or so. Until then, here's a picture.
