August 2, 2011
I was just tagging this for the Links Dump, but I thought it deserved better. Fred Clark, blogdom's best writer on politics and religion, is putting together a book-like thing from his blog, and has posted the introduction to the section on creationism:
The oldest book in our Bible contains a hymn…
August 2, 2011
Over Twitter, somebody pointed to this article on astronomy outreach (free PDF from that link), which argues that everybody else should stop trying to be Brian Cox:
I've known Brian for years and worked with him before his celebrity status went supernova. I would love to say "I told you so" to…
August 2, 2011
The Virtuosi: Physics in Sports: The Fosbury Flop
"Physics has greatly influenced the progress of most sports. There have been continual improvements in equipment for safety or performance as well as improvements in technique. I'd like to talk about some physics in sports over a series of posts.…
August 1, 2011
When I came up for my reappointment review three years into my professorial career, I was given a list of required materials to submit, which included a "statement of teaching philosophy." The same thing had been required for my job application, and at that time, I wrote about techniques and…
August 1, 2011
As previously mentioned, I'm watching a little bit of Fringe in order to be able to talk sensibly about it later this week. I watch the Season 1 finale last night, and its treatment of parallel universes is about what I'd expect for tv, but being the obsessive dork I am, I got distracted from the…
August 1, 2011
(The semi-automatic method I've been using to post Links Dumps has broken, so here's a hand-edited version of what I've tagged for the last few days. Suggestions of alternative automated ways to post tagged links are welcome in comments.)
Text Editors in The Lord of the Rings --…
July 31, 2011
One of the problems with a long-running series is that it accretes backstory as you go (unless, of course, you go the Rex Stout route and just pretend that time doesn't pass for the characters, even when you have the client in a later book being the son of a character from one of the earlier…
July 30, 2011
SteelyKid's third birthday is next week, but we're going to Kate's mother's for the day itself, so we're having a birthday party today for her and her friends from day care. So, even though all the news is depressing, it's a day to be happy. So here's a happy song:
(OK, I don't quite know what to…
July 30, 2011
I'm going to be talking to someone about treatments of parallel worlds in popular media next week, and as the only going mass media concern with a parallel-worlds plot seems to be the show Fringe, it would be helpful for me to be able to talk sensibly about it. Thus, two questions:
1) Where is the…
July 29, 2011
I'm not a huge Mieville fan, but the descriptions I read of Kraken sounded like good fun. As I like fun books, and a fun book written by China Mieville seemed sufficiently improbable that I just had to see it, I picked it up a little while ago, and read it over the last week or so while biking to…
July 29, 2011
We're having a birthday party for SteelyKid tomorrow, so I have a ton of stuff to do today. I may have something more substantive later, but for the moment, here are a couple of videos to enjoy. First, from the Minute Physics set of videos at YouTube, an explanation of why you have quantum physics…
July 29, 2011
Design View / Andy Rutledge - News Redux
"Digital news is broken. Actually, news itself is broken. Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards for misdirection and…
July 28, 2011
Shhh! There's an Artist at work:
That's SteelyKid hard at work on something. I think she was writing my name, though it might've been writing Emmy's name. It's a little tough to tell from the photographs.
Of course, the real purpose of making art is to be able to discuss it:
This led to my new…
July 28, 2011
Unlike the previous post, this is not a rhetorical question that I will ask and then answer. I genuinely do not know the answer. I could Google it, of course, but I'd like to see if somebody reading this is able to deduce the correct answer from the available evidence.
So, here's the deal: as an…
July 28, 2011
A while back, I explained how polarized sunglasses work, the short version of which is that light reflected off the ground in front of you tends to be polarized, and by blocking that light, they reduce the effects of glare. This is why fishermen wear polarized sunglasses (they make it easier to see…
July 28, 2011
How to turn the GOP into a party of liberals - War Room - Salon.com
"July 28, 2011: Barack Obama announces he's had second thoughts, now fully endorses Boehner debt ceiling plan, "Cut, Cap and Balance," and Reid plan. His new bottom line? He'll accept anything Congress can pass, as long as it isn…
July 27, 2011
There's a lot of stuff in the news lately about asteroids, what with the Dawn mission orbiting Vesta, and the talk of a manned asteroid mission as a possible future step for NASA. Prompted by this, I'm going to dip into the territory usually occupied by Matt and Rhett, and ask a somewhat silly…
July 27, 2011
Kevin Drum is puzzled by default panic:
If we run out of money, the federal government will stop paying some of its bills. That's bad, and it will quite likely have a negative effect on the economy. Corporations are right to be apprehensive about this.
But that's all that will happen. Treasury…
July 27, 2011
For the past few years, astronomer and SF author Mike Brotherton has been running the Launch Pad Workshop, a program bringing interested SF authors to Wyoming (where he's on the faculty) to learn about modern astronomy. The idea is to teach writers the real facts about the weird and wonderful…
July 27, 2011
Workers of the world unite | slacktivist
"So the NFL lockout has ended in some kind of deal that I would summarize here except that the details of professional sports contract negotiations make my eyes glaze over and, since I'm no longer getting paid to edit NFL labor stories for a daily paper, I…
July 26, 2011
Michelle Sagara's rant about convention panelist behavior reminded me that I never did get around to writing up the other panel from this year's Readercon that I wanted to say something about, namely "Why We Love Bad Writing"
James D. Macdonald, Anil Menon, Resa Nelson, Eric M. Van, Harold Torger…
July 26, 2011
One of the benefits of having joined AAAS in order to get a reduced registration fee at their meeting is that I now have online access to Science at home. Including the Science Express advance online papers, which I don't usually get on campus. Which means that I get the chance to talk about the…
July 26, 2011
The Dean Dad asks a question on the minds of lots of faculty: how do you handle early-morning classes?
Wise and worldly readers, have you had good experiences with 8 a.m. classes? Does anybody know of any useful empirical studies done at the college level of the effects of 8 a.m. classes? Is this…
July 26, 2011
A Bedtime Story | Easily Distracted
"Now this is a new thing in my lifetime, I grant you: a Congressman who is going to run on the argument that it's time for America to take its place among the poor and struggling nations of the world. I don't have to study go to Zimbabwe any more to study…
July 25, 2011
Here is a very significant picture:
"What's significant about that?" you ask. "It's slightly out of focus and oddly framed. Why should I care?"
You should care because of the photographer:
That's right, SteelyKid has a camera now-- we gave her my old Canon A95. She was playing with Kate's smaller…
July 25, 2011
Via Bee, we have the BlaBlaMeter, a website that purports to "unmask without mercy how much bullshit hides in any text." Like Bee, I couldn't resist throwing it some scientific text, but rather than pulling stuff off the arxiv, I went with the abstracts of the papers I published as a grad student,…
July 25, 2011
I've got a ton of stuff to do this morning that will keep me from more substantive blogging, so here's a cute toddler picture:
This is SteelyKid playing with the giant magnet in the MRI exhibit at the Schenectady Museum, trying to see how big a tower she could make out of steel washers and hex…
July 25, 2011
nanoscale views: Einstein, thermodynamics, and elegance
"Recently, in the course of other writing I've been doing, I again came to the topic of what are called Einstein A and B coefficients, and it struck me again that this has to be one of the most elegant, clever physics arguments ever made. …
July 24, 2011
Katie Baker on the New York Times wedding section - Grantland
"This renewed series will attempt, through a rigorous quantitative method detailed below, to determine the following:
Which couple best exemplifies both the unique spirit and impossible standards of everything the New York Times "…
July 23, 2011
Contrary to Jo Walton's prediction, I didn't love this book. In fact, I didn't even like it very much.
Much has been made over the long wait for this latest installment in the Song of Ice and Fire series, building it up to the point where actually reading and reviewing it feels a little like being…
