December 4, 2006
"I'm gonna owe God fifty bucks if I don't get enlightened soon."
I hate it when that happens.
December 4, 2006
So, the participants are set for the Mythical "National Championship" of college football. It's Florida vs. Ohio State, thanks to USC's loss to UCLA, and we're going to be treated to about three weeks' worth of whining about how Michigan got jobbed.
I pretty much agree with Charles Kuffner on this…
December 4, 2006
Another idle thought inspired by the Bond movie (I may or may not post comments about the movie as a whole, but you can check out Kate's spoiler-laden comments. I liked it a little more than she did, but I'm more familiar with the genre, and willing to cut them more slack...):
From what I can tell…
December 4, 2006
The Union of Concerned Scientists has a statement on scientific integrity denouncing the various abuses of the scientific process perpetrated by the Bush Administration. If you're a scientist, and you're concerned about the politicization of the science used for policy-making, you might want to…
December 3, 2006
I have a tablet PC that I am borrowing from work to see if I like the way it works. As a test of it's usefulness, I'm going to attempt to live-blog at least part of the Giants same. So, let's see how this works...
The Giants score on their first posses, on, after Dallas missed a FG. Guess…
December 3, 2006
As an avowed Giants fan, I suppose I really ought to say something about the epic meltdown they suffered in the past week, ideally before today's game with the Cowboys. The trouble is, last week was so horrendous that it's hard to say anything coherent...
I ought to say something, though, so I'll…
December 3, 2006
Kate and I saw the new Bond flick last night (short review: nice re-launch of the franchise, Daniel Craig does a great job with the role), and as the final credits started to roll, they played that signature James Bond riff-- the "dum di-di dum, da-da-da" bass line, the "da-da di dahh, di dah-…
December 3, 2006
I don't normally do blog carnival announcements. I'm not really organized enough to remember the deadlines, and most of the carnivals out there don't interest me all that much.
The first edition of a new one has just been posted, though, and it's definitely worth publicizing: "Help Us Help…
December 2, 2006
The Queen of Niskayuna is being repressed:
Actually, ignore the reproachful look. She spends every night, and all day on weekdays in her crate, and she's perfectly happy to go in there. In fact, most of the time, she goes in there of her own accord, some time before we're actually ready to leave…
December 2, 2006
One of the options that came with my new car (I bought one that they had on the lot) was an "Eight-Way Power Driver's Seat." As a physicist, I thought this sounded pretty exciting, because, you know, we appear to live in a three-dimensional world, and to get eight directions of adjustability would…
December 1, 2006
Stolen from a discussion on an email list, a small usage question:
What's the difference between a "fiasco" and a "debacle"? Is there a difference, or are they perfect synonyms?
My thoughts below the fold.
Personally, I'm with the person on the listserver who said that "there should be a touch of…
December 1, 2006
Friday's a good day for silly pop music lists, so here's a couple adapted from a "meme" via Jamie Bowden:
Go to http://popculturemadness.com and find the Greatest USA Hits of the year you turned 18.
I refuse to spend a bunch of time dinking around with typefaces, and I'm not going to list all 75…
December 1, 2006
So, what's the deal with that graph I was talking about the other day? I sort of left it hanging at the end, there, but I ought to actually interpret the figure. It also serves as a nice and fairly simple illustration of how physicists approach experimental data.
Here's a newer version of the plot…
December 1, 2006
The Times last weekend had a big article on the "achievement gap" in education, where poor and minority students are found to lag behind upper- and middle-class white students in many subjects. The author looks at a number of innovative shools that are producing good results with students from the…
November 30, 2006
For those who care, a picture of my new car (I picked it up Tuesday, but didn't get around to cropping down the pictures until this morning):
In keeping with Ford's general policy, this shot is sort of a three-quarters angle-- as Kate pointed out, the glossy brochure from the dealership doesn't…
November 30, 2006
There's a brief squib in the AIP Physics News Updates today about new work on protein folding. "Protein folding" is a simple-sounding term for a really difficult problem: protein molecules are made up of chains of amino acids, which can be bent into a huge number of different possible…
November 30, 2006
Doug Natelson posted the second installment in his inside view of the hiring process for academic physics positions, this one describing the campus visit/ interview process. Again, the description is mostly accurate for a much larger department than ours, at a research insitution, but the basic…
November 30, 2006
Over at the World's Fair, David has a post with pictures showing a week's worth of food for families in various countries. It's pretty eye-opening-- the total volume of food (less packaging) for a family of four in the US or England exceeds that eaten by fifteen people in Mali.
Damn, but we're…
November 29, 2006
Recently, my post about my SAT Challenge entry has leaped into the Top Five Most Emailed list over on the right, for what reason I can't really say. That gives me two of the top five, though-- eat my dust, Myers. Now there's only that Deltoid character between me and world domination...
The other…
November 29, 2006
Two quick links from yesterday's Inside Higher Ed that a browser crash kept me from posting yesterday:
1) A story on a professor at Idaho who asks students to sign a waiver acknowledging that they may be offended by some of the material in his film studies class. There's a bit of discussion of…
November 29, 2006
The ACC-Big Ten Challenge is one of those things that seems like a really good idea on paper. They're consistently two of the top basketball conferences in the country, and both have strongly partisan fans who will argue for the superiority of their conference over all others. Matching them up in…
November 29, 2006
The Times this morning offers the "Well, duh!" headline of the day, and possibly the week:
Energy Use Can Be Cut by Efficiency, Survey Says
In other news, the Sun rose in the east this morning.
Snark aside, there is an important point in the article: the efficiency savings they're talking about…
November 29, 2006
We've been having intermittent troubles with our DSL service for the last couple of months, and recently placed a service call to try to get Verizon to do something about it. Just a few minutes ago, I got a "courtesy call" from them, to inform me that they're still working on the problem, and they…
November 28, 2006
Barring some sort of bizarre catastrophe, in a few short hours, I will take possession of a brand new Ford Freestyle. It's got lots of nifty features that the Taurus doesn't have, but there's one thing it lacks: a tape deck.
This is important because I have become accustomed to listening to my iPod…
November 28, 2006
Professor Office Sex is trying to study the real-time dynamcis of the blogosphere, by manufacturing a "meme" that he'll then track:
While you do that, a script I've written will track this meme (via Technorati) across the internet in 10 minute intervals. It will record the number of links to this…
November 28, 2006
There's a nice article in the New York Times today about applications of the theory of vibrating strings. It turns out to be a lot more practical and useful than you might think, and there are people doing some amazing things with it.
What?
November 27, 2006
One of my current thesis students has been plugging away for a while at the project described in the A Week in the Lab series last year, and he's recently been getting some pretty good data. I've spent a little time analyzing the preliminary results (to determine the best method for him to use on…
November 27, 2006
I'm worried about Jay Bilas's job.
For those who aren't college basketball junkies, Jay Bilas is a former Duke player who is currently the best college basketball analyst in the business. He's smart, well-spoken, funny (listen to him banter with Bill Raftery and Sean McDonough when the three of…
November 27, 2006
Another update from my friend Paul, working as a journalist in Baghdad, this time on an unfortunate collision between the Sci-Fi Channel and reality:
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Today two suicide bombers walked into a police commando recruitment center and blew themselves up, killing 35 recruiting hopefuls.…
November 27, 2006
The Times this morning has a nice article on the Archimedes Palimpsest, which turns out to contain more than just important works on early mathematics:
An ambitious international project to decipher 1,000-year-old moldy pages is yielding new clues about ancient Greece as seen through the eyes of…
