November 16, 2006
The fad of the moment among the physics majors is a shareware game called Pocket Tanks, in which players on opposite sides of the screen fire various weapons at one another, adjusting the launch angle and overall power in order to hit the target. Every time I walk into a room with two or more…
November 15, 2006
A bunch of links about recent happenings at everybody's favorite space agency:/p>
Steinn has links to dark energy proposals.
Science and Reason on the "Beyond Einstein" program.
Those little scamps are having another mysterious press conference tomorrow, to announce something about dark energy…
November 15, 2006
I wasn't going to say anything about Bob Knight's latest little incident, in which he smacked a player on the chin to get him to look up. If it were anyone else, this would be a non-issue, and even though it's Knight, I don't think this is worth the energy that sports media are expending on it.
I…
November 15, 2006
Fred Clark at Slacktivist is probably the best writer in blogdom, when it comes to matters of religion and the intersection between religion and politics. This might sound like damning with faint praise, given how screechingly awful most blogospheric writing about religion is, but it's not intended…
November 14, 2006
The Female Science Professor (whose pseudonym I find unwieldy, but I'm not going to make a TLA out of it...) raises an interesting question in describing a language class experience:
By far the strangest experience was when we had to show and talk about photographs of our family and friends. Many…
November 14, 2006
Today is the official last day of classes, though my final class meetings were yesterday. I'm also halfway through grading a big pile of lab reports, which I do electronically, so I'm trying to keep my extra-curricular typing to a minimum, lest I suffer another flare-up of muscle spasms in my neck…
November 14, 2006
Scott Aaronson renders a judgement on the Borat movie (scroll down into the comments), but I think my opinion is best summed up by Kevin Drum:
[T]he lesson of the movie wasn't some razor-sharp subversive point about how we're all racists and xenophobes an inch under the surface, the lesson was that…
November 13, 2006
Christopher Priest's Victorian-magician novel The Prestige would appear to be unfilmable. The book is written as two entirely different texts, one a memoir and the other a diary, plus a framing narrative about descendants of the rival magicians Alfred Borden and Robert Angier trying to figure out…
November 12, 2006
While all right-thinking people know that the important games are played on Sundays, as God intended, there are some people who insist on watching football on Saturday. Yesterday was a particularly good day for it, with a bunch of highly rated teams losing .
While there was, of course, only one…
November 12, 2006
(I bet this will get me all sorts of incredibly useful search engine traffic...)
Some time back, I asked for car-buying advice, and got a wealth of it in comments. Yesterday, Kate and I did a little car shopping, and visited a handful of local dealers to look at various cars. As with the last time…
November 12, 2006
Some of the discussion in my recent post giving example slides made me realize a problem with the way I posted them-- converting the slides to PDF loses the transition effects, which are a significant part of the lecture.
In an attempt to address this, here's a crude simulation of the effect, done…
November 11, 2006
Matt McIrvin reminds me to look at the nifty Saturn pictures on the Cassini-Huygens Mission page. The hot image of the moment is the big storm at the south pole, but there's lots of good stuff, like this:
(Explanation of the ring shot here.)
November 11, 2006
Via The Little Professor, a poem sure to touch most academics, Tom Wayman's "Did I Miss Anything?":
Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are…
November 11, 2006
I spent a while idly channel-surfing after we watched the final couple of episodes of Martian Successor Nadesico last night, and ran across the new Battlestar Galactica on the Sci-Fi Channel. Lots of smart people like the show, but I didn't get into the premiere, and the occasional attempt to watch…
November 10, 2006
This isn't actually another political post, though Allen conceding to Webb is certainly happy news, and something to be thankful for.
No, this post is about the holiday of Thanksgiving. Specifically, the fact that Kate and I will be hosting Thanksgiving at our house for both sets of parents, plus…
November 10, 2006
No, this isn't a post about a big Bernie Sanders/ Babara Mikulski throwdown. the University of Maryland played the University of Vermont Wednesday night in basketball, and I'm just getting around to writing about it.
Much to my surprise, the game was on tv. Of course, that was the day I had my…
November 10, 2006
I would post some sort of wrap-up about the Lisa Randall chat yesterday, but Discover is broken. They don't have a link to a transcript on the site-- in fact, they haven't updated the front page to reflect the fact that the chat was yesterday, and is now over. There was a link that would sort of…
November 10, 2006
John Holbo comes a little unglued, but it's entertaining reading. Or, possibly, I need to get out more.
Also, what does Fictional Jimbo Wales think of this?
November 9, 2006
Having talked at length about my theories of how to do an effective PowerPoint talk, I probably ought to provide some examples. These are converted to PDF because it's more generally readable than PPT, and because the files are slightly smaller. The conversion is done using CutePDF writer, which…
November 9, 2006
Well, it's not really much of a round-up, as that has a connotation of completeness, and this is pretty scattered. But, really, if I'm your only source for political links on the Web, you need to get out more. This is just a collection of links to a few things that I thought were particularly worth…
November 9, 2006
Discover magazine is hosting a live web chat with Lisa Randall this afternoon at 2 pm. Randall is famous for developing some ideas relating to the physics of extra dimensions, and has recently published a popular book (Warped Passages) on the subject.
This is supposed to be a one-hour live chat,…
November 8, 2006
The Female Science Professor reviews an article from <Physics Today on getting a liberal arts college job. Unfortunately, the article itself seems to be subscriber-only. I have a subscription, but I haven't read the article yet, and can't tell you what it says, or whether the advice is good. The…
November 8, 2006
The college basketball season started off well last night, with Maryland defeating Hampton in the first game of the "Coaches v. Cancer Classic" pre-season tournament. Or possibly the "2K Sports College Hoops Classic"-- I've heard both, and don't really care.
"Big deal," you say, "it's another…
November 7, 2006
Rhymes With Orange explains the state of the art in dog surgery, and the Queen of Niskayuna demonstrates the technique:
(The patient is an Awful Mad Kitty from Fat Cat Toys, who make great dog toys.)
November 7, 2006
Two links from the always interesting Tim Burke, on "Free Speech Kabuki", and a humorous student response to it.
The former will sound familiar to most academics, the latter is the sort of thing that makes this job rewarding.
November 7, 2006
Two links to speed you on your way to the polls:
1) Jim Macdonald writing to Democrats.
2) John Scalzi writing to Republicans.
Now step away from the keyboard, and go vote. The Internet will be here when you get back.
(This assumes you're a US citizen, or coincidentally holding an election in your…
November 6, 2006
I'm going to be too busy to blog much for the next few days. This is partly a matter of it being the end of the term, with lab reports due (drafts tomorrow, the final reports Thursday), and exams (next Thursday), and grading, and an end-of-term push in the lab with one of my research students. But…
November 6, 2006
Having strongly stated my opinion that PowerPoint is not actively evil, but can be used to give good scientific presentations as well as soul-crushingly dull bullet-point talks, I feel like I ought to say something to back it up. Here, then, are some of the rules of thumb I use when putting…
November 6, 2006
I'm officially about three "Ask a ScienceBlogger" questions behind, but I didn't want to pass this one up completely:
What's the most important local political race to you this year (as a citizen, as a scientist)?
It's tough to say, because the answer is either "all of them" or "none of them." I…
November 6, 2006
So, the Cowboys-Redskins game yesterday apparently had a wild finish. There were three field goal attempts in the final 31 seconds, one of them blocked and partially returned, with a penalty setting up the game-winning attempt with no time on the clock. Wild stuff, sure to be good highlight fodder…
