February 13, 2007
I'm having the sort of morning where I feel like lobbing a grenade at somebody, and the predictable outrage over yesterday's story about a creationist paleontologist is as good a target as any.
The issue here is whether it's appropriate for Marcus Ross to receive a Ph.D. for work in paleontology,…
February 13, 2007
The New York Times reports that Purdue has officially cleared Rusi Taleyarkhan of charges of scientific wrongdoing over his claim to have produced nuclear fusion on a tabletop through the magic of sonoluminescence. You might recall that these claims were made a couple of years ago, but nobody else…
February 13, 2007
The guys over at the World's Fair have created an Order of Science Scouts, for those who find themselves longing for merit badges to display on their blogs. Such as, for example, this one:
The "has frozen stuff just to see what happens" badge (LEVEL III)
In which the recipient has frozen something…
February 12, 2007
So, as mentioned previously, Kate and I are planning to go to Japan for the World SF Convention, and spend a couple of weeks doing touristy stuff. We're down for about a week in Kyoto, and a week in the Yokohama/Tokyo area (where the con is). Then, there are 3-4 days at the end of the trip that we…
February 12, 2007
Via EurekAlert, the American Association for the Advnacement of Science has announced the 2006 winners of their science journalism awards. Most of the written pieces are available online, so if you're looking for science-y things to read, this could be a good source of material.
None of the winners…
February 12, 2007
Light blogging today, because yesterday was a Hoops Day here in Chateau Steelypips. A goog hoops day, too, with victories in all three games that mattered: Syracuse edged St. John's, Maryland beat the hated Dukies, and the intramural team I'm playing on won a tough game last night to more or less…
February 12, 2007
There's an interesting story in the New York Times this morning about a young earth creationist studying paleontology
[Marcus Ross's] subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that, as he wrote, vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago. The work…
February 11, 2007
Here's something a little lighter than the last couple of entries, seeing as it's a weekend and all: Pop-music blogger Jason Hare has a regular Friday feature called "Chart Attack!" in which he posts the Top Ten songs from a past week ending on the same date, and goes through the songs. This week's…
February 11, 2007
Kate passes along a link to a New Scientist article noting this today has been proclaimed Evolution Sunday 2007 by the Clergy Letter Project:
On 11 February 2007 hundreds of congregations from all portions of the country and a host of denominations will come together to discuss the compatibility…
February 11, 2007
I don't have a lot to add to this link, I just wanted to quote Ethan Zuckerman on virtual journalism, from a post about being interviewed for Pitchfork magazine:
The most interesting aspect of the discussion to me was the idea that Chris brought to the table - that we might pay more attention to…
February 11, 2007
I've long been of the opinion that if sanity is ever restored to the relationship between politics and religion in America, it will owe a lot to people like Fred Clark. He writes passionately and persuasively about the many problems caused by the "Religious Right" from a Christian perspective, in…
February 10, 2007
The term "fast break" refers to those situations in the game of basketball in which the offense is attempting to push the ball up the court and score quickly, rather than running a play from their normal offensive set. This usually involves a temporary numerical advantage for the offensive team,…
February 10, 2007
Piled Higher and Deepr nails it this week:
A Pofessor's Negation Field is the unexplained phenomenon whereby mere spatial proximity to an experimental set-up causes all working demonstrations to fail, despite the apparent laws of Physics or how many times it worked right before he/she walked in the…
February 9, 2007
A marginally less cranky physics post than the previous: the big story in my area of physics this week is probably the Harvard experiment involving the storage and transport of light pulses. Like the ILC announcement, this has been written up in the Times, and you can also read the Harvard press…
February 9, 2007
The big story in high-energy physics this week is the release of a report on the projected cost of the International (very nearly) Linear Collider (ILC), which comes out to $6.7 billion-with-a-b (not including labor). There's a story in the Times this morning, and an expert view on Cosmic Variance…
February 9, 2007
Or, um, a banana. Or something...
The Evil Monkey at Neurotopia is soliciting donations to support an essay contest to be run by the Alliance for Science. The idea is to offer prizes for students to write essays about evolution, to encourage students to learn more about the foundations of biology.…
February 8, 2007
Union is opening a new Center for Bioengineering and Computational Biology this week, and the keynote speech was given last night by Steven Vogel of Duke, on "Power from the People: Life When Muscle Was Our Main Motor." Basically, this was an hour-long survey of some speculative ideas on what…
February 8, 2007
Another Thursday, another early lab section. Which means it's time for another audience participation entry...
I think something like this went around ScienceBlogs once before, but if so, it was a while ago, and it's a fun question:
What's the worst job in science?
What's the nastiest, most…
February 8, 2007
Inside Higher Ed reports that Indiana State is eliminating physics and philosophy, among other majors, in a move to streamline their programs. These programs have very few majors relative to the number of faculty (physics has five faculty and nine majors, philosophy four faculty and 19 majors), so…
February 7, 2007
Janet asks "Where do scientists learn to write?" Well, actually, being a good academic, she asks many more questions than that:
Do scientists need to write well? If so, in what contexts and for what audiences? If not, why not?
Where do scientists really learn to write? What kinds of experiences…
February 7, 2007
So, what's the deal with last night's silly obituary? Basically, the main laser in my experiment died because I'm a jackass.
More specifically, the laser in question is a diode laser, similar to the kind found in CD and DVD players. These are broadly tunable, available in a wide range of powers and…
February 7, 2007
Eurekalert has a press release from Yale proclaiming that:
Chemists at Yale have done what Mother Nature chose not to -- make a protein-like molecule out of non-natural building blocks, according to a report featured early online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Nature uses alpha-…
February 7, 2007
Between trip planning and thinking about Boskone, I've been thinking a fair bit about Japan recently. I took a whole bunch of pictures when I was there, with a camera borrowed from my parents, and looking at them now, my first thought is "Boy, I could make these look really good in GIMP..."
Of…
February 6, 2007
SDL 5401-G1, October 2001- February 6, 2007
SDL 5401-G1 ("Sid" to friends) died today of static shock, after five years of service in a grating-locked diode laser system. He had survived three lab floods, and more than a dozen power outages, but succombed to electric shock following a mishap with a…
February 6, 2007
We were away for the weekend, so I'm a day behind in reading the Sunday Times. This week's magazine section has a story about the controversy over "hybrid" dogs:
Bob Vetere, president of the American Pet Product Manufacturers Association, told me, "You're going to have a real battle here" between…
February 6, 2007
For the half-dozen people who care, my Boskone panel schedule for this year, with a few comments. I don't know for sure that this is the final final version-- I might get added to something else-- but it's probably pretty close.
Fri 8:00pm, Visiting Japan
If we attend the Worldcon in Yokohama…
February 6, 2007
President Bush's budget request for next year has been released. Surprising approximately no-one who has followed current events over the last seven years, it's a mixed bag for science:
President Bush rolled out a 2008 spending plan Monday that disappointed advocates for scientific research, even…
February 5, 2007
Cognitive Daily proves it scientifically.
I love it when life imitates Brust.
February 5, 2007
The new issue of Locus arrived just before we left, so I spent some time reading reviews and commentary on the SF field over the weekend. It's actually a pretty good issue-- the retro-review of Isaac Asimov is interesting, and while the John Barnes interview doesn't ask the important question ("How…
February 5, 2007
I watched the game at a Super Bowl party hosted by some of our senior majors, because Kate didn't want to see it. Of course, the guys who hosted the party didn't have cable, so we were watching the game through a haze of static and swirly lines that made the weather look even worse than it was.…
