May 10, 2011
Shit My Students Write
"Macbeth couldn't have loved Lady Macbeth because he was crazy and too busy hallucinating witches and stuff. Also, crazy people can't do it without going crazy midway through."
(tags: academia education internet silly blogs literature)
Budget Mix-Up Provides Nation's…
May 9, 2011
While I've got a few more review copies backlogged around here, the next book review post is one that I actually paid for myself, Lawrence Krauss's Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science, part of Norton's Great Discoveries series of scientific biographies. I'm a fan of the series-- past…
May 9, 2011
A little while back, Jonah Lehrer did a nice blog post about reasoning that used the famous study by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky, The Hot Hand in Basketball (PDF link) as an example of a case where people don't want to believe scientific results. The researchers found absolutely no statistical…
May 9, 2011
Experimental physics as preparation for parenthood « Confused at a higher level
"Before I became a parent, friends and strangers alike would tell me, "You have no idea how much your life will change with the arrival of a baby." I've found my transition to parenthood has been less disruptive than…
May 8, 2011
One of the perils of book reviewing, or any other form of literary analysis is putting more thought into some aspect of a book than the author did. It's one of the aspects of the humanities aide of academia that, from time to time, strains my ability to be respectful of the scholarly activities of…
May 8, 2011
The folks at Harvard University Press were nice enough to send me an advance copy of Ken Ford's new book, 101 Quantum Questions: What You Need to Know About the World You Can't See a few months ago. I've been too busy working on my own book to read any other physics books, though, so the actual…
May 8, 2011
Making Light: Epubbing the Backlist
""So," I said, "what the heck. Why not try republishing some of our short stories in electronic versions? All the cool kids are doing it...."
"Why not" included the fact that we didn't have electronic text versions of many of our stories. Stuff that…
May 7, 2011
Gary Williams: The greatest craze to hit College Park - The Washington Post
"As soon as you first saw Williams, coaching AU from 1978 to 1982, you knew he was destined for great things. Or else, for a padded room. He was crazy. Good crazy.
You would grab him for a quote as he strutted off the…
May 6, 2011
In comments to yesterday's post about precision measurements, Bjoern objected to the use of "quantum mechanics" as a term encompassing QED:
IMO, one should say "quantum theory" here instead of "quantum mechanics". After all, what is usually known as quantum mechanics (the stuff one learns in basic…
May 6, 2011
Maryland head basketball coach Gary Williams announced his retirement suddenly yesterday. He was a player at Maryland back in the 60's, and has been the coach there for 22 years, now. As I didn't start rooting for the Terps until I went there for graduate school in 1993, he's the only coach I've…
May 6, 2011
Memoirs from Africa: Paring Down a List « Easily Distracted
"In selecting works, I've decided to go for the widest stylistic range I can think of and the widest range of settings, interests and authors. [...] It also provides a surplus of certain kinds of books that I find tedious because they…
May 5, 2011
That title isn't a euphemism-- SteelyKid decided to use this week's Toddler Blogging to try to teach an old Appa a new trick. First you go up up up on your head:
Then you flip down:
Ta-daa!!
May 5, 2011
An academic email list that I'm on has started a discussion of lab writing, pointing out that students in some lab classes spend more time on writing lab reports in a quasi-journal-article format format than they do taking and analyzing data. This "feels " wrong in many ways, and the person who…
May 5, 2011
NASA held a big press conference yesterday to announce that the Gravity Probe B experiment had confirmed a prediction of General Relativity that spacetime near Earth should be "twisted" by the Earth's rotation. A lot of the coverage has focused on the troubled history of the mission (as did the…
May 5, 2011
The Civil War Isn't Tragic - Ta-Nehisi Coates - National - The Atlantic
"Yesterday, Robert Zimmerman was kind enough to link this podcast on the Civil War, and the reasons soldiers, Union and Confederate, offered up for fighting. It's a good segment which I heartily recommend, especially for…
May 4, 2011
It's been a hectic day here, so I haven't had time to do any substantive blogging. I did want to quickly note a couple of stories presenting marked improvements in experiments I've written up here in the past:
1) In the "self-evident title" category, there's Confinement of antihydrogen for 1000…
May 4, 2011
Blog U.: 4 Reasons Why Local Meetings Should Be Conducted with Web Meeting Tools - Technology and Learning - Inside Higher Ed
"Adobe Connect, WebEX, GoToMeeting, LiveMeeting, Skype, Elluminate (what am I missing?), these web conferencing tools are not just for meeting at a distance.
Here are 4…
May 3, 2011
I recently participated in a survey of higher education professionals about various aspects of the job. It was very clearly designed by and aimed at scholars in the humanities and social sciences, to the point where answering questions honestly made me feel like a Bad Person.
For example, there…
May 3, 2011
Kevin Drum notes a growing backlash against education reform, citing Diane Ravitch, Emily Yoffe and this Newsweek (which is really this private foundation report in disguise) as examples. The last of these, about the failed attempts of several billionaires to improve education through foundation…
May 3, 2011
A SETI Infographic « Microcosmologist
"And to put things into perspective, I've whipped up this handy infographic, comparing how $2.5 million compares to so many other things that we absolutely must have, and will not hesitate to pay for:"
(tags: science space astronomy politics funding blogs…
May 2, 2011
Over in Scientopia, Janet notes an interesting mis-statement from NPR, where Dina Temple-Raston said of the now-dead terrorist:
[O]ne intelligence officials told us that nothing with an electron actually passed close to him, which in a way is one of the ways they actually caught him.
As Janet…
May 2, 2011
Last summer, there was a fair bit of hype about a paper from Mark Raizen's group at Texas which was mostly reported with an "Einstein proven wrong" slant, probably due to this press release. While it is technically true that they measured something Einstein said would be impossible to measure, that…
May 2, 2011
The New York Times ran a couple of op-eds on Sunday about education policy. One, by Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari is familair stuff to anyone who's heard me talk about the subject before: teachers in the US are, on the whole, given fewer resources than they need to succeed, paid less…
May 2, 2011
The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries - NYTimes.com
"WHEN we don't get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don't blame the soldiers. We don't say, "It's these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That's why we haven't done better in Afghanistan!" No, if the results aren't…
May 1, 2011
Acculturating students to science § Unqualified Offerings
"A student with a very enthusiastic yet serious demeanor, and very responsible habits, recently asked if he could work in my research group. He has few relevant skills at this point, and my crew is pretty full, but I want to help him, so…
April 30, 2011
SteelyKid and Kate are down in Boston this weekend, which has given me time to get some work done around the house, and go to some restaurants that they don't like. It's left me a little deprived of cute, though. So, as a counter to that, some cute video of SteelyKid riding her "motorcycle" (her…
April 29, 2011
Today's blog silence was the result of travel down to and back from New Haven, where I gave a talk at Southern Connecticut State University. Weirdly, this was also a day full of reminders of my own advancing age:
-- After the talk, I wandered around New Haven a bit, visiting places I used to go…
April 29, 2011
Photonist » Blog Archive » Antihydrogen trapped for 1000 seconds
"A new experiment from the ALPHA collaboration, based at CERN, has created and trapped antihydrogen atoms for 1000 seconds, 6000 times longer than their previous attempts which trapped antihydrogen for 172 ms. Having antihydrogen…
April 28, 2011
Kate and I have spent a lot of this week being thwarted by technology in one way or another, so SteelyKid decided to set us straight about how things work. First, she demonstrated how to work the tv:
Then she showed us how to take pictures on her phone (because, of course, all phones take pictures…
April 28, 2011
As previously noted, the Lenovo ThinkPad X61 tablet that I use for my lectures is limping badly these days (it blue-screened this morning, whee). The options for a direct replacement are pretty limited, but in thinking about it a bit, I realized that I hardly use the tablet functions other than to…
