November 26, 2006
Speaking of weirdly compelling reads (as I was at the end of the previous entry), Jack McDevitt has a new book out in what I think of as the "Archeologists in Spaaaace!!!" series (which starts with The Engines of God, and includes Chindi, Deepsix and Omega). Odyssey doesn't include any…
November 26, 2006
Wellspring of Chaos is the umpteenth book in the Recluce saga by L.E. Modesitt (who, amusingly, turns out to be a Williams alumn), and even more than the Hodgell book, is not something I would ordinarily give a high priority to in catching up on the book log. If you've read pretty much any of the…
November 26, 2006
To Ride a Rathorn is the fourth book in P.C. Hodgell's Kencyrath series (the previous three are God Stalk, Dark of the Moon and Seeker's Mask), and as such probably wouldn't get to the top of the booklog queue-- there's just too much backstory, and the book wouldn't make any sense to a new reader.…
November 26, 2006
I've been woefully behind on the booklog for a long, long time now, but we'll take a lazy post-Thanksgiving Sunday morning to catch up on a few of the more notable books in the backlog. These comments won't be in any particular order, and, in fact, will start with the most recently read of the lot…
November 25, 2006
We had an enormous turkey carcass left over at the end of Thanksgiving dinner, so I said "Hey, turkey soup." The basic idea is simplicity itself-- cut the carcass into managable pieces, stick it in a big put, cover it with water, and simmer for a good long while. After an hour or two, you've got a…
November 25, 2006
The articles in question are more than a year old, but I didn't see them when they were first posted, so James Nicoll's link to Monte Davis's "Thinking Clearly About Space" series (part one, part two, part three, part four) was very welcome.
Obviously, you should go read the whole thing (the parts…
November 25, 2006
Via Miriam Burstein, everybody's favorite Middle English poet posts about what he's reading these days:
Battlestar Ecclesiastica
by Johannes Wycliffe
In this boke of science ficcion, a man ycleped Wycliffe is the bishop of the gret chirche of Seynt Paules, the which is lyk vnto a mighty shippe…
November 24, 2006
The Thanksgiving advice from Making Light got here too late to do us any good, but we had a fine first Thanksgiving anyway. My parents, sister, grandmother, and one of my great-aunts came up from New York, and Kate's parents came up from Boston, so we packed nine people into our smallish house,…
November 24, 2006
Yesterday's quickie photo-blog post came during the short break between running around preparing for house guests, and the arrival of said house guests (about fifteen minutes after I posted, while I was in the shower). Other than that, I was way too busy to even read blogs, let alone post.
So,…
November 23, 2006
The table is set:
The turkey is in the oven, the house is clean, and two car loads of relatives are on their way. Our first time hosting Thanksgiving dinner is on track.
Wish us luck, and take a moment to be thankful for the Pauli Exclusion Principle, Democratic control of Congress, and friends…
November 22, 2006
Kate and I have a Netflix subscription that we've mostly been using to obtain various anime series. We're running a little low on Japanese cartoons, though, having recently finished Martian Successor Nadesico, and with only four discs left of Trigun (two of which will probably be polished off while…
November 22, 2006
The flip side of the pretty colors I posted about yesterday is that all those nicely colored leaves fall down. Which isn't a big deal with the little ornamental maple in the front yard, but when the fifty-foot oak tree in the back drops its leaves, it kind of makes a mess.
We deal with this in the…
November 22, 2006
I've been way behind in my blogreading the last few weeks, owing to a huge amount of, you know, actual work for my day job, so this may have been all over the Internets already. On the off chance that it hasn't, via Ethan Zuckerman, a link to Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala:…
November 22, 2006
I scan the titles reviewed by the Onion AV Club through their RSS feed every week, and only click over there for things that look particularly interesting. I don't regularly check their feature stories, which is why I'm a week late in noticing that they have an interview with Donald Westlake, one…
November 22, 2006
Steve Cook suggests a holiday for computer nerds:
Far better than World Hello Day would be Hello World Day, celebrating 32 years of every programming manual's stock first example. Global diversity could be honored by recognizing our rainbow of programming languages, from Pascal to Brainfuck, and…
November 21, 2006
Not much commentary required here. This is the ornamental maple in front of our house, taken a couple of weeks ago. It's also a reminder of why fall in New England is one of my favorite seasons, at least when it's not miserably cold and raining...
November 21, 2006
PZ links to a video of a couple of guys dressing like missionaries and knocking on doors for atheism in Salt Lake City. Like most ambush comedy, the concept is better than the execution-- in particular, there's an opening rant about Mormons that goes on way too long. There's some moderately clever…
November 21, 2006
There's a nice article in the Times today about Mythbusters as science television. As is typical of the Times, it sort of overreaches with some of the conclusions:
Their delight in discovery for its own sake is familiar to most scientists, who welcome any result because it either confirms or…
November 21, 2006
New Scientist has decided to commemorate their 50th anniversary by asking a large number of scientists to predict what will happen in the next 50 years. As you might have predicted, the list of responses includes a large number of short essays of the form:
Exciting new developments in my own field…
November 21, 2006
Following up on the weekend's reading suggestions, I should point to John Horgan's list of the Ten Worst Science Books. These aren't obscure self-published tracts on the Theory of Everything, either-- Stephen Jay Gould, Malcolm Gladwell and E. O. Wilson make the list, and there are more best-…
November 20, 2006
Inside Higher Ed has a short piece today on a lecture given to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching by Carl Wieman on how to teach science. Though, from the sound of it, it was mostly about how not to teach science.
During the talk on Friday, Wieman said that traditional science…
November 20, 2006
Over in LiveJournal land, there's this "meme" going around about describing fandoms as relationships. It's not really my sort of thing, but it did lead Rachel Manija Brown to ask why so many people are so mad at The X-Files:
I had a different experience: I drifted away slowly, I think during the…
November 19, 2006
We're out of town for the weekend visiting family, so if you usually depend on this blog for entertainment, you'll need to find something else to do. How about a good book or two?
You can't decide what to read? Well, the Internet is here to provide suggestions. You might, for example, think about…
November 18, 2006
Thursday night's shellacking of St. John's seemed to be mostly about the ineptitude of the Red Storm, rather than an indicator of greatness for the Terps. I fully expected them to come out and lose to Michigan State, who beat a ranked Texas team in their half of the semifinal bracket.
Much to my…
November 18, 2006
Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance and Jennifer Ouellette of Cocktail Party Physics have gotten engaged. All together now: Awwwwww....You crazy kids with your falling in love over the Internet and all.
Actually, we here at Chateaue Steelypips heartily approve of both the institution of marriage and…
November 17, 2006
The dark energy press conference mentioned a couple of days ago happened yesterday, and is written up in the Times. You can also get information straight from NASA.
The basic result here is that astronomers have made a bunch of measurements of supernovae at extremely large distances, which amounts…
November 17, 2006
If you go into any big-box bookstore these days, you'll find a huge section of manga titles (that is, Japanese comic books), including dozens of different series, many of them running to a dozen or more volumes. This section is always impeccably organized, with all the series grouped neatly…
November 17, 2006
I am already sick of Ohio State-Michigan, and the they haven't even played yet. Can we at least get a final score before we declare this the Greatest Football Game of All Time?
I can't quite decide what I'm rooting for, here, but it's either a 0-0 tie, or a 54-0 blowout. Whichever would make the…
November 16, 2006
The college basketball season is officially underway, and as is typical of the early season, there are already some wacky results, the most shocking being Kansas losing to Oral Roberts Wednesday night. Nobody is happier to see that score than Boston College coach Al Saunders-- losing to Vermont is…
November 16, 2006
The last step in the tenure review process (from my end) is the approval of the Procedure section of the report. By rule, the ad hoc committee sends the candidate a copy of the section describing what they did in the course of the review (with the names removed), and the candidate gets a chance to…
