May 17, 2007
As regular readers know, my friend Paul is a journalist based in the Middle East, and spent a year working as a reporter in Baghdad. He finished that a little while ago, but he's back, and has sent another of his intermittent dispatches.
I've been posting these to the blog when I get them. This one…
May 16, 2007
I have a big stack of exams and lab reports to grade, so I need to go off someplace where I don't have Internet access and do that. In my absence, here's a Dorky Poll question inspired by recent news:
Which Nobel laureate (in any field) is the craziest?
There's no real shortage of scientists who…
May 16, 2007
Miriam Burstein points out the historical antecedents of the "Atheist Two-Step" discussed by Adam Kotsko and Brandon at Siris. This also ties in nicely with Fred Clark on sectarian atheists, as previously mentioned.
Also, speaking of historical screeds by Protestant preachers, Jerry Fallwell is…
May 16, 2007
One of the fun things about EurekAlert is that it allows you to trace the full life cycle of the publicization of science in a way that used to be impossible for a regular person. For example, take the recent "Ring of Dark Matter" story.
First, there's a rumor of a result. This first stage lasts…
May 15, 2007
Via Toby, a detailed proposal for floating colonies on Venus. I heard Geoff Landis talk about this at Boskone a while back-- the basic idea is that the Venusian atmosphere is so dense that you could easily build structures that would float high enough up in the atmosphere to be above the hellish…
May 15, 2007
As you may or may not have noticed, last week's silly dog post got picked up by, well, just about everyone. I think it probably started with a sidelight link at Making Light, then it showed up on Boing Boing, and Digg, and MetaFilter, and something like half the LiveJournals in the world, it seems…
May 15, 2007
The recent discussion over the academic tenure system has sort of wound down, or at least, those parts of it that I feel I can contribute to have wound down. I really ought to note the posts by Bill Hooker and the Incoherent Ponderer, who correctly note that the biggest problem with the academic…
May 15, 2007
There's a big long Dennis Overbye article about the Large Hadron Collider in the Times today. The paginated version runs to seven or eight pages on the web, and Overbye is a good writer, so you can be fairly sure it's exhaustive and detailed and interesting.
I can't say that authoritatively, though…
May 14, 2007
Stuart Coleman of Daily Irreverence is going to be hosting the next edition of the physics blog carnival Philosophia Naturalis in the near future, and he's looking for posts.
So, if you've got physics blog material you'd like to see receive more attention, go over there, and send it to Stuart.
May 14, 2007
Two good "fundamentalism is stupid" posts over the weekend. First up is Scott Aaronson on rules of inference:
In the study of rationality, there's a well-known party game: the one where everyone throws a number from 0 to 100 into a hat, and that player wins whose number was closest to two-thirds of…
May 14, 2007
Here's a picture of some pretty flowers:
These are from the ornatmental cherry tree in our front yard. Like all the other similar trees in the neighborhood, it's absolutely exploded over the past week.
Also, I rode my bike a bunch this weekend:
Saturday, I rode down to Lock 8, stopping for a few…
May 13, 2007
Janet Stemwedel is marking everybody's favorite Hallmark holiday by posting an interview with her mother about going back to school to get a science degree. As Janet says, this was a major inspiration to her:
I would not be who I am or where I am today without my mom, Sally Stemwedel. Although I…
May 13, 2007
When I was an undergraduate, we had more or less annual alcohol crackdowns on campus. My sophomore year, it was a series of "open container" stings, with cops hiding in the bushes outside various dorms, and leaping out to arrest anyone who walked outside with an empty keg cup. My classmates and I…
May 12, 2007
Daniel Davies stakes out a controversial position at Crooked Timber:
I tend to regard myself as Crooked Timber's online myrmidon of a number of rather unpopular views; among other things, as regular readers will have seen, I believe that the incitement to religious hatred legislation was a good…
May 12, 2007
Mark Trodden gave a nice outline of the tenure process over at Cosmic Variance, laying out the general criteria used by most colleges and universities:
The typical criteria in physics are:
Excellence in research, as demonstrated through peer-reviewed publications and (by far the most important…
May 11, 2007
As a newly minted Associate Professor, I sort of feel like I ought to say something about the recent tenure discussions. These were kicked off by Rob Knop's recent despairing post (though it should be noted that Rob's been worried about this for a while), and most of the discussion has taken place…
May 11, 2007
The bizarre saga of Rusi Taleyarkhan (which I've mentioned before) keeps getting stranger. Previously, Purdue University had announced that it conducted an investigation of Taleyarkhan's work and cleared him of any misconduct, without saying, well, anything much about the investigation. Now, after…
May 10, 2007
I'm sitting at the computer typing, when the dog bumps up against my legs. I look down, and she's sniffing the floor around my feet intently.
"What are you doing down there?"
"I'm looking for steak!" she says, wagging her tail hopefully.
"I'm pretty certain that there's no steak down there," I say…
May 10, 2007
The iPod giveth, and the iPod taketh away.
Back in the day, there was this technology called "audio tape," which people used to record music. On a typical tape, you could record maybe ten or elevent pop songs, and then you had to flip it over, and record another ten or eleven songs on the other…
May 10, 2007
Noted author Walter Mosley spoke on campus last night, and a spot opened up at the last minute for the dinner beforehand, so I got to spend an hour or so listening to him talk off-the-cuff in a small group. He's a very charming guy, and had a lot of interesting things to say about writing, politics…
May 9, 2007
The Zeitgeist for today highlights a little New York Times Q & A piece on atomic clocks, answering the question "Why is cesium used in atomic clocks?"
The striking thing about this, to me, is that they don't really answer the question. I mean, they talk about how atomic clocks work in very…
May 9, 2007
Two more quick observations from last night's Wesley Clark event. Or, rather, one from the event, and one from dinner beforehand. Both strike me as fairly general principles about political discourse:
1) Your current political opinions are interesting in inverse proportion to the number of times…
May 9, 2007
I was expounding on my dislike of the routine questions being asked of Wesley Clark last night (see previous post) to a colleague from Math, who suggested "Which do you prefer, C or Fortran? And if you use Fortran, do you declare all your variables?" as an alternative to boring policy questions…
May 9, 2007
As previously mentioned, Wesley Clark spoke on campus last night. The speech was pretty much what you'd expect from a once and future (?) Presidential aspirant with his background: he mostly talked about military matters, stressing that George Bush bad, Americ good, puppies and apple pie, yay! OK,…
May 8, 2007
We had our annual undergraduate research symposium this past weekend, which included presentations from students doing work in all different disciplines. We have enough physics and astronomy majors these days that I spent most of the day Friday listening to them talk, but I did have a break in the…
May 8, 2007
One of the other ScienceBloggers is prone to complaining in the back-channel forums that we don't have enough bloggers who work in some subfield of biology or another-- we need more left-handed shrew ecologists, or some such. This is, of course, patently ridiculous. What we need is a physics…
May 8, 2007
It's spring here in suburbia, which means my neighbors were all out this weekend hastening the doom of the planet by running their gas-powered lawn mowers. Not me-- I was, um, paying our neighbors' teenage son to mow our lawn. With a gas-powered lawn mower.
OK, I'm not exactly staking out the Moral…
May 7, 2007
I was buried in work last week in part because of the annual Steinmetz Symposium, in which we cancel a day of classes and have students report on their undergraduate research projects. Both of my students were giving talks, and there was all sorts of running around involved in the preparation.
One…
May 7, 2007
Former general and presidential candidate Wesley Clark is going to be speaking on campus tomorrow night. I don't expect there to be a lot of question time at this, but I'm fairly good at getting a chance to ask questions at these things, so if anyone has a suggestion of a really good question to…
May 7, 2007
Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll is pining for the good old days:
I'm going through one of my "I would kill for some new SF" phases, SF in this case being defined in a narrow and idiosyncratic way. In particular, I want the modern version of those old SF stories where SF writers, having just…
