August 12, 2011
I am an inveterate driver of "back ways" to places. My preferred route to campus involves driving through a whole bunch of residential streets, rather than taking the "main" road leading from our neighborhood to campus. I do this because there are four traffic lights on the main-road route, and…
August 12, 2011
I'm sending a little pedagogical paper off to a journal today, and spent a while yesterday re-formatting it to meet their standards. This was particularly annoying for the references, as I had to go find a bunch of information that I don't usually write down. Which seems like a good topic for a…
August 12, 2011
Shockingly, it does not seem to involve right-wing politics in any way. It's this explanation of why swirling wine in your glass clockwise produces different effects than swirling it counter-clockwise. a sample:
Like all living things wine cells have a magnetic polarity, just like humans and the…
August 12, 2011
Your Picks: Top 100 Science Fiction, Fantasy Books : NPR
The usual mix of "pretty good" and "utterly preposterous" selections.
Exposing a Fake Video Trick | Wired Science | Wired.com
"You know I love videos that may or may not be fake. It gets me pumped up. Ok, here is a video. It is almost…
August 11, 2011
It was another "no pictures" day today, so this shot is from earlier in the week, when SteelyKid got some birthday presents from my Aunt Norma and Uncle Dan:
This shows her playing with the I Spy Preschool Game, which involves matching cards containing pictures of complicated collections of…
August 11, 2011
I continue to be distracted from the paper-writing that I really ought to be doing by thinking about my classes this fall, and Joss Ives isn't helping. By being very helpful-- he posted a nice list of resources for active teaching. His blog has a bunch of other interesting stuff, too.
For the…
August 11, 2011
Fred Clark has an idea for you:
Start with the housekeeping staff at a Manhattan hotel. They've just learned that their next contract includes no raise, but doubles the employee share of the cost of health benefits. The Norma Rae of this bunch -- let's say Jennifer Lopez* -- convinces them to…
August 11, 2011
Yesterday was apparently Gender in Science day here, while the theme for today is Tab Clearance-- a couple of shortish posts about things that deserve more than just a Links Dump mention, but don't really cohere into any kind of grand synthesis of deep thoughts, or whatever.
This particular link…
August 11, 2011
A well-known joke is "Rule 34" saying that anything that exists will have porn about it on the Internet. The introduction to this Inside Higher Ed piece about anti-law-school blogs reminds me that we probably need a higher-numbered rule stating that every field of human endeavor will also produce a…
August 11, 2011
I watched every Coen brothers movie. - By David Haglund - Slate Magazine
"My opinion changed later--not of each of those films (not entirely), but of the Coens' work as a whole. Before coming to that reversal, though, I think it's worth sitting for a moment with that earlier reaction. A lot of…
August 10, 2011
The other big gender-disparity graph making the rounds yesterday was this one showing the gender distribution in the general workforce and comparing that to science-related fields:
This comes from an Economics and Statistics Administration report which has one of the greatest mismatches between…
August 10, 2011
There are two recent studies of gender disparities in science and technology (referred to by the faintly awful acronym "STEM") getting a lot of play over the last few days. As is often the case with social-science results, the data they have aren't quite the data you would really like to have, and…
August 10, 2011
PhD thesis delight | Turning mirrors
"In the beginning vast public funding created heavenly lab-space on earth. Now the labs were formless and empty and the spirited physicists were contemplating over their future experiments. And they said let there be light and they built a grating stabilised…
August 9, 2011
An angle I had hoped to get to in last week's broader impacts post, but didn't have time for, was this piece questioning meet-the-scientist programs by Aimee Stern at Science 2.0:
Over the past several years, a growing number of trade associations, foundations and science and engineering companies…
August 9, 2011
It's that time of year again, when I start thinking about my fall term classes. I would really prefer to put it off for another couple of weeks, and I will put off spending much time on class prep in favor of finishing up some paper-writing and other things, but when the calendar turns to August, I…
August 9, 2011
News: The Education/Religion Connection - Inside Higher Ed
"For years, a commonly held belief has been that more educated Americans are less likely to embrace religion. But an article forthcoming (abstract available here) in The Review of Religious Research suggests that the relationship between…
August 8, 2011
SteelyKid has used a pacifier from very shortly after she was born. We've been slowly working her off it-- she's stopped taking it to day care, or using it other than at bedtime or in the car-- but she's resisted giving it up entirely.
since she's now a great big three-year old, we decided it was…
August 8, 2011
When we got home from visiting Kate's family yesterday, there was a large shipping envelope from my agent waiting for us. This can mean only one thing: author copies of foreign editions!
That's the Czech edition, Jak nauÄit svého psa fyziku, which seems to have used the same glasses-wearing…
August 7, 2011
While future historians will undoubtedly remember August 7th primarily as SteelyKid's birthday (it would be irresponsible of me to encourage people to go edit the Wikipedia date page accordingly, wouldn't it?), there was another locally important event on August 7th, some years earlier: August 7th…
August 7, 2011
Well, you're right. The cutest toddler in the universe turns three today:
Happy birthday, SteelyKid!
August 6, 2011
Chuck Klosterman on Planet of the Apes and Project Nim - Grantland
I'm a pretty massive Planet of the Apes fan, even though I'm never able to watch an entire Planet of the Apes movie without reading a magazine. It's definitely my favorite film franchise that's 80 percent boring. I really, really…
August 5, 2011
Last week, I asked for advice on the show Fringe, because I need to be able to speak sensibly about it for the purpose of talking about parallel universes. I've been working through Janne's list of recommended episodes, watching on my laptop while SteelyKid goes to sleep, and have got up through…
August 5, 2011
Chuck Klosterman on the Pro Football Hall of Fame induction - Grantland
"[T]hat's what's so weird about the whole Hall of Fame process: The public sees it as an argument, but -- within the mind of the elite athlete -- it must be one of the most confusing, painfully personal scenarios they'll ever…
August 4, 2011
As she never tires of telling us, SteelyKid keeps getting bigger and bigger. How big? She can touch the ceiling!
OK, she has to be on my shoulders to do it, but the distance between her head and the ceiling has gotten really small. She's huge!
the picture above was taken by Kate standing a few…
August 4, 2011
I didn't pay that much attention to the mini-controversy over the NSF's proposed revision of its grant evaluation criteria when they were first released, because I was working on the book. I was asked to say something about it yesterday, though, and having gone to the trouble, I might as well say…
August 4, 2011
Back at the AAAS Meeting, I was really annoyed by a session on fracking, the process by which natural gas is extracted from shale deep underground. As I wrote at the time, regarding the industry shills who spoke:
I left before the whole thing had wrapped up, because it was that or start throwing…
August 4, 2011
The science and magic of beer | Andy Connelly | Science | guardian.co.uk
"Beer is the juice of grain skilfully treated: it is liquid bread. The first people to make beers as we know them today were the Sumerians, who cultivated cereal grains specifically for brewing and drank beer to honour their…
August 3, 2011
Several weeks ago, now, SteelyKid flipped out at bedtime. We had told her that the episode of MythBusters playing on the DVR was the last one for the night, but when it ended, she demanded more. When we said no, she went into a full-on toddler freakout, screaming, crying, kicking the floor. I…
August 3, 2011
In the "ideas I wish I'd thought of first" file, the Canberra Times has an op-ed comparing politicians to quantum objects, because they seem to hold contradictory positions at the same time, and are impossible to pin down. It garbles the physics a little, and is very specific to Australia, though,…
August 3, 2011
The Worlds Weirdest Book
A truly unique work of fiction, ââ¬ËThe Codex Seraphinianusââ¬Ë is a book that appears to be a visual encyclopedia of some unknown world or dimension. Written down in one of that worlds beautiful curving languages, the book by Italian artist, architect and industrial…
