March 21, 2006
Alex Palazzo offers a taxonomy of biologists, and takes some heat in the comments for leaving people out or mischaracterizing subdisciplines. This reminded me that I did a similar post about physics quite some time ago-- almost four years! That's, like, a century in blog-time...
I'll reproduce the…
March 21, 2006
So, how's my winning NCAA strategy going, you ask? Shut up, I reply.
Well, OK. I'm currently in a four-way tie for tenth place in the ScienceBlogs pool (of 23) on Yahoo. Of course, unlike some gloating people, all four of my Final Four picks are still alive... I still don't have much chance of…
March 21, 2006
Janet Stemwedel over at Adventures in Science and Ethics has a new post on experiment vs. theory:
Someone makes a comment about hot water making ice cubes faster than cold water. Someone else, familiar with thermodynamics, explains in detail why this cannot be the case. No actual ice cube trays…
March 20, 2006
Question on the evaluation form:
If there was a writing component in this laboratory, please comment on the attention given to it with respect to the improvement of your writing
Student response:
Dude, my writing totally improved.
And so, we close the book on another academic term...
March 20, 2006
To say I'm a lapsed Catholic would be an understatement. I haven't set foot in a church in years, other than for a couple of weddings. I've never cared for parts of the official doctrine, and I think they blew it when they made Giblets Pope. In terms of general attitude toward religion, I'm sort of…
March 18, 2006
I want there to be a non-prescription anti-inflammatory drug that doesn't seriously screw up my stomach. One of you med-chem types get on that, will you?
Background: Last year about this time, I had severe muscle spasms in my neck and shoulder that led to a 2am trip to the emergency room. A…
March 17, 2006
I passed on the first set of games in favor of playing some basketball with the usual lunchtime crowd, but made it home in time to see Bucknell finish up winning against Arkansas, and Northwestern State hit a wild three at the buzzer to beat Iowa. What state is that? That'd be Louisiana. Now you…
March 17, 2006
So, the big question in college basketball yesterday, "Can Syracuse sustain their Big East Tournament run through the NCAA's?" was answered with a resounding "No." They made a decent run at it, but Gerry McNamara didn't have any legs left, and went without a field goal for the first time in his…
March 17, 2006
While chasing links for a religion-in-politics post that may or may not get posted (my opinions on the subject are aggressively moderate, and while I could use the traffic, I don't know that I want the headache), I ran across the swear-to-uphold quote again. PZ cites an unsourced blog post for the…
March 16, 2006
If you'd like some actual science from your ScienceBlogs, here's the big news in the physical sciences today: The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) team has released a bunch of new data on the latest observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation. This is the relic radiation…
March 16, 2006
All right, we're back from our walk, and Emmy is very proud of the way she taunted the big scary German Shepherd up the road, so it's back to the games.
5:53 Marquette's three-point ace Steve Novak misses an open shot with eight seconds to play, and it's all over but the intentional fouling and…
March 16, 2006
One of the few perks of working in academia is that I can take the occasional day off for no reason at all. I handed in my grades yesterday, and spring beak starts Monday, so I can feel free to take the afternoon off to sit on my ass and watch some basketball. And bring back First Round Live-…
March 16, 2006
I've seen the idea of an "Opposite Day" popping up lots of places in the political blogosphere (most recently from Big Media Matt and Will Wilkinson), and it sounds sort of cool. The idea is that you commit to writing blog posts on topics chosen by readers, taking the opposite position from what…
March 15, 2006
(For reasons unclear to me, Mixed States doesn't seem to pick up scheduled posts in the RSS feed, even after they're published. I don't know if other RSS aggregators have the same problem, but if you were wondering what happened to the promised True Lab Story, here it is.)
A question from…
March 15, 2006
(Series explanation here.)
When I was in grad school, I worked in a lab with an incredibly high density of laser technology. We had not one but two Ti:sapphire systems, with 15 W argon ion lasers pumping Coherent 899 ring lasers, plus a pulsed YAG/ dye laser system, and a couple of miscellaneous…
March 15, 2006
Every good blog needs a signature recurring element. Dave and Greta have Casual Fridays, RPM has Double Entendre Fridays, Grrlscientist has Birds in the News, PZ has Say Mean Things About Religious People Days-That-End-In-Y, Orac has EneMan...
I'm not organized enough to commit to posting things in…
March 14, 2006
I'm with Kevin on this one: this whole "Pi Day" thing is just too dorky for words (I'm looking at you, Clifford...)
However, as noted by Arcane Gazebo, it's also Einstein's birthday, which is an occasion much more worth commemorating. So celebrate as the man himself would have: invent a new theory…
March 14, 2006
The final exam for my class is today (9-11 am), so I'm a little preoccupied. After giving the test, I have to grade it, but then, I get a whole week of "vacation." The scare quotes are because of the multitude of things that need doing-- I have to prep two classes for next term, start assembling…
March 13, 2006
So RPM thinks he's all clever, with the Double Entendre Fridays-- he's not the only one who can game search engine traffic...
If you're one of those philistines who doesn't like basketball go revel in nostalgia ("Cow... yup, yup yup.."), because we're all about the hoops this morning. It's that…
March 12, 2006
I'd be required to turn in my fan card if I didn't at least mention Syracuse winning the Big East Championship in one of the more improbable runs I've ever seen (the AP story is tarted up with ESPN graphics here). They looked dead heading into the tournament-- having lost by 39 to lowly DePaul…
March 10, 2006
ScienceBlogs is well stocked with people who will comment at length on the latest news from biology or climate science, which is nice, because I don't usually feel moved to remark on those subjects. The large amount of quality commentary on those subjects does make me fell like I ought to make a…
March 9, 2006
It's apparently PZ Myers's birthday, which has triggered an orgy of "happy birthday" posts on ScienceBlogs. It's so, so... LiveJournal. Still, everybody else is doing it, so, hey, man, happy birthday. Celebrate with some spicy baked cuttledfish:
("Mr. Squid" image from this page of weird Asian…
March 9, 2006
As a sort of cautionary counterpoint to the anecdote in my How to Tell a True Lab Story post, Derek Lowe has the story of somebody who pulled the same trick with a big commercial liquid nitrogen tank:
The cylinder had been standing at one end of a ~20' x 40' laboratory on the second floor of the…
March 9, 2006
I'm generally sort of hesitant to take part in the various "meme" things that float around the Internet, because I'm just contrarian enough that it feels wrong to link to something just because everybody else is. Orac's got a good one, though, for a worthy cause.
Recently, somebody tried to burn…
March 8, 2006
Next term, I'm slated to offer one of our "Advanced Topics in Physics" upper-level elective classes. I was originally asked to do atomic physics, but looking at the syllabus and available texts, I decided I'd rather take a different tack, and agreed to develop a new course instead.
I call myself an…
March 7, 2006
I'm not sure what I did to PZ Myers to make him draw my attention to Fred Hutchison, but whatever it was, I apologize. Mr. Hutchison is apparently a columnist writing for a web site run by Alan Keyes-- the right-wing kook for people who find David Horowitz to be a little too sedate-- and prides…
March 7, 2006
Skot Kurruk explains the Best Picture result (below the fold, for those with sensitive ears):
In the end, after all the talk of whether or not Hollywood (and, by laughable extension, our whole beknighted country) was ready to fully laud a film where rabbit-eyed cowboy Jake Gyllenhall happily takes…
March 7, 2006
Via BioCurious, the Public Library of Science offers an op-ed titled Ten Simple Rules for Getting Published. The advice is aimed at biologists, but it's broadly applicable. I especially like:
Rule 4: If you do not write well in the English language, take lessons early; it will be invaluable later.…
March 6, 2006
Over at Jacques Distler's blog, someone has posted what strikes me as an eminently sensible system for solving the Trackback problem with the ArXiv. I attempted to post a comment to that effect over there, and got the following message:
Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:
You…
March 6, 2006
There are active discussions among the ScienceBlogs bloggers and the folks at Seed about what features the main ScienceBlogs page ought to include. As you might expect, this has revolved around how best to draw traffic, both to the individual sites and in the aggregate.
It occurs to me that people…
