January 7, 2007
I haven't done a straight-up links dump in a while, but it's that kind of weekend, so here's some stuff:
What Would Brian Boitano Do?: Iain Jackson at Grim Amusements, who ought to get more press than he does, watches South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, and finds contemporary political relevance…
January 6, 2007
While working on a review of a book that talks about the fortuitously bio-friendly constants of nature (review forthcoming, don't worry), I mistyped "ratio of proton to electron masses" and "ratio of proton to electron charges." Which is, of course, 1, and thus not a terribly interesting ratio.
But…
January 6, 2007
In that it's bombarded by meteorites, anyway. The object that crashed into a New Jersey house has been confirmed as a meterorite by, well, looking at it:
The family has not yet given permission for physical testing of the meteorite, but from looking at it, Dr. Delaney and other experts were able to…
January 5, 2007
I'm A Boy
I'm A Ghost
I'm A Loner Dottie, A Rebel...
I'm A Man You Don't Meet Every Day
I'm A Midnight Mover
I'm a Rocker
I'm A Terrible Person
I'm A Wheel
I'm Actual
I'm Against It
I'm Allowed
I'm Always In Love
I'm Amazed
I'm Comin' On Back To You
I'm Easy
I'm Free
I'm Free
I'm Goin' Down
I'm…
January 5, 2007
Jack McDevitt is a prolific SF author, with a couple of running series that recently appeared in booklog entries here (see, for example, Antiquities Dealers in Spaaaace!!!). Coincidentally, he's also talked to the Slush God, in an interview posted at SciFi Weekly. He says a bunch of interesting…
January 5, 2007
Via Tobia Buckell, Jeff Bezos is looking for a few good geeks:
Blue Origin; Blue Origin wants you! Actually, Blue Origin needs you and wants to hire you ... assuming you're a hard working, technically gifted, team-oriented, experienced aerospace engineer or engineering leader. If you might be…
January 5, 2007
A Christmas gift from my sister:
Yes, that's an origami Discworld. A big turtle, four elephants, and a flat world inhabited by silly people. All folded out of paper (well, the map was printed and cut out, but the elephants and turtle are origmai).
From a different angle:
The map got badly…
January 4, 2007
It's a little-known fact that gravity is stronger in the vicinity of our couch:
Her Majesty just can't manage to lift her head. I think string theory is involved, but I'm not sure.
January 4, 2007
One of the standard elements of most academic hiring and promotion applications, at least at a small liberal arts college, is some sort of statement from the candidate about teaching. This is called different things at different places-- "statement of teaching philosophy" is a common term for it,…
January 4, 2007
Inside Higher Ed reports on an impressively bad idea from the upper midwest:
"If we can't lure them here, let's tether them here," said Mark O'Connell, executive director of the Wisconsin Counties Association, a lobbying organization, and a member of the Commission on Enhancing the Mission of the…
January 4, 2007
The Times has an article announcing the discovery of methane lakes on Titan:
The discovery, reported yesterday by an international team of researchers, was made by a radar survey of Titan's high northern latitudes by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn and its retinue of…
January 4, 2007
I've got lab this morning, so I don't have time for detailed physics blogging today. Happily, there's a new edition of the physics-centered blog carnival Philosophia Naturalis posted today, which should provide plenty of physics content to get your day off to a good start.
January 3, 2007
Today is the first day of classes, so I'm going to be kind of busy at work. Here's a bit of pop-culture silliness to lighten things up while I'm teaching and setting up labs.
The Neil Diamond chestnut "Sweet Caroline" got brought up in a back-channel discussion, prompting much revulsion from the…
January 3, 2007
A little bit before Christmas, I spent an afternoon swapping mirrors out of one line of the apparatus. I was losing too much of the laser light before it went into the chamber, and replacing the mirrors increased the power entering the apparatus by a factor of two or so.
Here's a picture of the two…
January 3, 2007
As you know if you've been reading these occasional updates, my friend Paul has been working as a reporter in Baghdad for the last year. He's based in Cairo, but has been spending six weeks at a stretch in Baghdad, with breaks of a week or two at home.
His Iraq shift has come to an end, and he's…
January 3, 2007
The January issue of Physics World magazine has just hit the electronic newstands, and they're doing a special issue on physics on the web. Among the free on-line offerings, they have a discussion of blogs and Wikipedia with various comments pro and con, and an essay about physics blogging by Sean…
January 2, 2007
Classes start tomorrow, so I spent some time last week filing papers and cleaning off my desk. I've been here just long enough to fill up the file drawers in my desk, so I went through and pulled out a few old papers:
That stack is a collection of graded exams and lab reports from the 2001-2…
January 2, 2007
The 2007 World Science Fiction Convention will be held in Yokohama, Japan this year, and Kate and I are going. It's a bit of a delayed celebration for my tenure-- I'll be on sabbatical in the Fall, so I won't need to worry about prepping a class for September, and we can make it a nice vacation.
We…
January 2, 2007
Kind of an arcane philosophical point, here, so I'll be a little surprised if anybody responds, but this occurred to me while writing the previous post, and I thought I'd throw it out there. In the previous post, I quoted Feynman's one sentence for the future:
Everything is made of atoms.
and…
January 2, 2007
Some time back, Dave Munger called me out for the one sentence challenge, originally phrased thusly:
Physicist Richard Feynman once said that if all knowledge about physics was about to expire the one sentence he would tell the future is that "Everything is made of atoms". What one sentence would…
January 2, 2007
So, remember a month or two back when everybody was whining about how Michigan got screwed out of a shot at the Mythical National Championship? They lost to USC last night.
USC, you'll recall, demonstrated their inferiority to Michigan by losing to UCLA, which is how they ended up in the Rose Bowl…
January 1, 2007
As usual, John Brockman has asked a large number of prominent science types to answer a broad and general question, and posted the results to the Web. This year's question:
WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT? WHY?
Many of the answers are of the form "I am optimistic that my personal research topic or…
January 1, 2007
Well, that was a cranky post. Not a good start for New Year's Day, is it?
To make up for that, how about a good recipe:
Cheesy Poof (From Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food)
Ingredients:
270 g all-purpose flour
10 g baking powder
9 g dry mustard (1.5 teaspoons)
100 g eggs (2 large eggs)
43 g…
January 1, 2007
Over at The Island of Doubt, James Hrynyshyn (pronounced, no doubt, just like it's spelled) points to an article by Daniel Dennett in which he refuses to let a bad idea die:
In July, 2003, I wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times entitled "The Bright Stuff", where I drew attention to a budding…
January 1, 2007
I lost a lot of weight, read a lot of books, taught a lot of classes, did a bit of research, and oh, yeah, I got tenure. I think that last outweighs the miserable stomach problems by, oh, quite a bit.
And now, that's officially last year, at least for those using the Western calendar system. Happy…
December 31, 2006
Having booklogged two heavy and confusing books already today, let's throw in something light. A. Lee Martinez's debut novel Gil's All Fright Diner is a comic fantasy featuring a couple of redneck-y guys named Duke and Earl, who stop by a diner in rural Texas for a quick bite to eat. Of course,…
December 31, 2006
Having finally posted about Gaudeamus, I might as well get the other great "WTF" book in the stack out of the way. Hal Duncan's Vellum has been described as "cubist fantasy," and while I'm not quite sure what that means, it's probably as good a description as any.
Vellum takes place in 2017, and…
December 31, 2006
In some ways, John Barnes's metafictional novel Gaudeamus is the proximate cause of the huge backlog in my book logging. I was more-or-less caught up at one point, but then stalled on this book, unable to think of what to say about it. I'm still not entirely clear on it, but I'm just going to bang…
December 30, 2006
Matt Yglesias nails it when talking about faux-outrage over people complaining about the execution of Saddam Hussein:
Do these guys not understand the concept of principles? The point of the belief that all people are entitled to fair trials before receiving criminal sentences is that all people…
December 30, 2006
I've got to be close to the last person on the Internet to link to this, but in the unlikely event that you haven't already seen it, Phil Plait presents the best astronomy pictures of 2006. My personal favorite of his images is probably this one:
We haven't sent all that many probes to Mars, and…
