May 6, 2007
In the two weeks since the previous report, I managed only two round-trips to campus, for a total of 9.6 miles. Either the weather was lousy, or I had things I needed to do that precluded riding the bike. I got a good ride in today, though:
Total Distance: 16.6 miles
Maximum Speed: 30.1 mph…
May 6, 2007
It's common in math and computer science for people to prove important theorems sort of in passing, on the way to some other result. At least, it looks that way to an outsider-- Fermat's Theorem and the Poincare Conjecture are the high-profile examples that come to mind.
In that spirit, Scott…
May 6, 2007
Yesterday's New York Times features an article about SF conventions, in the travel section, of all places.
Officially, the 25th annual staging of MidSouthCon, a three-day-long celebration of science fiction, role-playing games, fantasy artwork, medieval weaponry and just about every leisure pursuit…
May 6, 2007
Having gotten a fair number of visits via the search string "Jim Boeheim's Wife" (and once or twice "Jim Boeheim's Hot Wife," presumably by people who are looking for something more salacious than me griping about how inappropriate it is for Dick Vitale to talk about her attractiveness all the…
May 5, 2007
At lunch Friday, I was talking to a few colleagues about how smart our pets can be. I haven't done gratuitous dog-blogging in a while, and it's been a long week, so here are some of the more impressive of our Emmy's intellectual achievements:
She's managed to learn two or three English phrases…
May 5, 2007
Having disagreed (somewhat) with Tobias Buckell in the previous post, let me follow that up with something positive: He's got a new book, Ragamuffin coming out soon, and he's putting excerpts up on the official Ragamuffin page. You can get RTF files of the first two chapters, and he's promised a…
May 5, 2007
Earlier this week, while I was buried in work, Tobias Buckell pointed to a post at the Guardian blog in which China Mieville calls for more kid-lit agitprop. It's a nice example of why I have a hard time with Mieville. Or, quoting Toby because he puts it more concisely:
I'm left of two minds. One,…
May 4, 2007
I came home Wednesday night to find a message on the answering machine. This is somewhat unusual, as most of the people who call us are trying to get us to donate money to some cause or another, and they don't leave messages. I hit play:
Hi, this is [Name] from [Gastroenterology Practice]. This…
May 4, 2007
We were talking about student recruitment the other day, as faculty are wont to do, and our chair suggested that we really ought to have a "Why You Should Major In Physics" page as part of the department web page. As I'm currently the web page coordinator, it will fall to me to write whatever goes…
May 4, 2007
As mentioned previously, there was a talk on campus last night by a couple of activists, Michael Berg and Joan Mandle. Berg is an anti-war activist, best known as the father of Nick Berg who was infamously beheaded on video in Iraq. He's also a former Green Party candidate for Congress in Delaware…
May 3, 2007
Two links to things promoting science on the web:
1) What's the Greatest Innovation? Spiked online asked a bunch of famous people to describe the greatest innovation in their field, and compiled the responses. As with most of these things, there's some interesting stuff in the responses, and a lot…
May 3, 2007
Believe it or not, yesterday's post started as an honest question. I phrased it provocatively because this is, after all, the Internet, but I wasn't just poking atheists with sticks.
This actually started quite a while ago, during one of the previous rounds of squabbling over Dawkins and his ilk,…
May 3, 2007
No, this has nothing to do with duck genitalia. Instead, it's about a basic principle of music: You've got to put down the duckie if you want to play the saxophone.
Via Scott. It's also a nice reminder of why Sesame Street was such a brilliant show (and may still be, for all I know...)-- not only…
May 2, 2007
There's going to be a dinner/ discussion event tomorrow night featuring Michael Berg and Joan Mandle, who I gather are anti-war activists of some standing (I'll post some of the biographical information from the announcement below the fold). Anybody have any questions they're dying to ask either of…
May 2, 2007
Are there reasons for being religious that don't easily reduce to "God said so"?
What are they?
(I probably don't have the right audience for this to really work the way I'd like, but let's give it a try anyway...)
May 2, 2007
Via a pseudonymous LiveJournal, an online study that combines the fun of clicking radio buttons with the thrill of doing SCIENCE!
* The study URL is: http://www.homeport.org/~kcat/study3/
* It takes about 15 minutes. You listen to 8 short clips and answer questions about how the people sound. It…
May 2, 2007
Are there reasons for being an atheist that don't easily reduce to "Religion is stupid"?
Should there be?
May 1, 2007
So, looking at the SRI studies of undergraduate research and its effects, it seems like the solution to a lot of problems. Involvement in research has been shown to increase student interest in science careers and increase the likelihood of graduate school, regardless of the race and gender of the…
May 1, 2007
I wrote yesterday's post about the undergraduate research study very quickly, basically just to note the existence of the survey. It's sparked some good discussion, though, and I'd like to take another post or two to expand on what I think it means.
Of course, the beneficial effect of undergraduate…
April 30, 2007
Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake notes an article in Science about a survey of undergraduate research. The actual article is behind a paywall, but you can get access to the survey reports from SRI directly, which is even better.
The study finds a large number of benefits from undergraduate research,…
April 30, 2007
Kate was scheduled to argue a case Friday morning in Federal court in Manhattan, so we decided to make a weekend of it. I drove down after class on Friday, and we went to dinner with Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden on Friday night, and spent Saturday at the Met, getting some culture.
Kate's a big…
April 30, 2007
You might not have noticed, but John Scalzi has a new book out. The Last Colony is the third book in the Old Man's War series. It's narrated by John Perry from Old Man's War, now happily married to Jane Sagan from The Ghost Brigades, and working as a colonial administrator on a planet called…
April 30, 2007
The Skinner is another book in the same Polity universe as Gridlinked, though it appears to be more or less self-contained. It doesn't share any characters with the other book, though it does share bits of technology and a general attitude to the world.
The book is set on Spatterjay, a planet with…
April 29, 2007
"The Fossil-Maker's Blues", by Steven Brust. Inspired by a comment in this post about paleoarcheology.
It's calcium and marrow and mix 'em fine
I'm on the job from nine to nine
Oh lord won't someone set me free
From the Devil's Fossil Factory.
April 29, 2007
You bet your sweet ass I am.
Yeah, there are about six people on the Interweb who will get that joke...
This little guy lives in our back yard somewhere. He's damnably elusive, though, and never stays in one clearly visible place long enough for me to find the camera and get a picture. He was…
April 29, 2007
Over at Mixing Memory, Chris is annoyed with Larry Moran and PZ Myers for comparing themselves to suffragists:
It's difficult, at this point, to say anything other than, "Are you kidding me?" Watching white, middle-class, mostly ex-Protestant males (the dominant new atheist demographic) compare…
April 27, 2007
Pretty much all of the songs that I thought anybody might possibly guess were guessed, so I might as well reveal the answers. If you'd still like to try your hand, don't click through to the rest of this post until after you've finished...
Those of you who have given up can find the full list of…
April 27, 2007
How can you tell that it's spring? Look at the Queen of Niskayuna:
When she's regally reclining under the swing in the back yard, then it's definitely spring.
April 27, 2007
Over at Cognitive Daily, Dave asks about splitting articles in RSS feeds. The ScienceBlogs feeds do not provide the full text of our posts, just the "above the fold" portion, and this practice rubs some people the wrong way.
The reason for this is that our Corporate Masters are trying to support…
April 26, 2007
Inside Higher Ed notes in passing a new bill from the Senate supporting scientific research. There's a lot of bafflegab there, but if you scroll to the bottom, you can find the executive summary:
More specifically, the Commerce and Science Division of the America COMPETES Act would:
Increase…
