February 6, 2011
I'm taking some flak in the comments to yesterday's book recommendation request post, so let me illustrate what I meant with an example. Lots of people recommended the Andrew Lang Fairy books, which are freely available online. I looked at the first story in the first book, which is plenty…
February 6, 2011
Evolution in Science Education - Bill Nye on Evolution in Science Education - Popular Mechanics
"Science education: We should support it. Especially elementary school science. Nearly every rocket scientist got interested in it before they were 10. Everybody who's a physician, who makes vaccines,…
February 5, 2011
One of the books in SteelyKid's regular rotation of books to read at naptime and bedtime is this book about a girl visiting characters from fairy tales to ask them what makes somebody happy ever after. It's not the greatest, but she enjoys it.
It occurs to me, though, that while the book references…
February 5, 2011
D-squared Digest -- FOR bigger pies and shorter hours and AGAINST more or less everything else
"There is always a level of civil unrest that outstrips the capability of even the most loyal and largest regular armed forces to deal with. In all likelihood, as a medium sized emerging market, you…
February 4, 2011
I've been watching the Al Jazeera English livestream off and on this week to keep up with events in Egypt. At some point, SteelyKid came in while I had it on, saw shots of the cheering crowds from Tuesday, and said "People dancing!"
Sometime on Wednesday, she marched over to me, and demanded to…
February 3, 2011
Given that the snow banks on the sides of the driveway are taller than SteelyKid, it might not seem like time for golf. If she's going to reach her goal of being the first toddler to win an event on the PGA Tour, though, she can't afford to take time off from practicing:
Swing coach Appa says "You…
February 3, 2011
I make an effort to say nice things about pop-science books that I read, whether for book research or blog reviews. Every now and then, though, I hit a book that has enough problems that I have a hard time taking anything positive from it.
I got David Bodanis's E=mc2: A Biography of the World's…
February 3, 2011
Best Science Books 2010: The top books of the year!!!! : Confessions of a Science Librarian
More good science books than you have time to read.
(tags: books science blogs confess-science-lib)
Locus Roundtable » The Locus 2010 Recommended Reading List
More good SF books that you have time to…
February 2, 2011
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Meritocracy and Hiring
"Is academic hiring meritocratic? The author of this piece assumes that it is. As someone whose job it is to actually hire faculty, I can attest that merit is only a small part of the picture.
The single most important part of the…
February 1, 2011
the Wall Street Journal, of all places, has a profile of college basketball analyst Bill Raftery and how he prepares to call games. This would be nothing more than Links Dump material, save for the fact that bits of it appear to have been written for the benefit of visiting aliens who have never…
February 1, 2011
Wait, Who Has Sinister Connections to Insiders That Influence Their Reporting? « Easily Distracted
"[...]Al-Jazeera! Al-Jazeera, with its mysterious (sinister!) agenda, its undisclosed connections, its desire to influence events!
As opposed to what? The New York Times, the Washington Post, the…
January 31, 2011
This is a difficult book to review, which is probably fitting, because it's a very personal book. My reaction to it is largely personal as well, and may or may not be of any use to anyone else. Given the surprising number of people who had Opinions regarding my recollections of telecommunications,…
January 31, 2011
Rutherford's alchemy solved Atom's mystery
"He was the first to achieve the alchemists' dream of changing one element into another, yet he wasn't an alchemist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry, but he wasn't a chemist. The work for which he received the Prize was carried out in Canada…
January 30, 2011
slacktivist: People power in Egypt
"We've been "promoting democracy" as though the first and most important step involved conducting elections. But the health and success of a democracy isn't determined as much by the things the public is able to decide by majority vote as by those things that…
January 29, 2011
The 'scandal' of the kilogram (Blog) - physicsworld.com
"That's the name of the game in metrology these days - finding a way of defining mass without just resorting embarrassingly, as we do now, to a lump of metal in the basement of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) outside…
January 28, 2011
A somewhat surprising number of people asked for a return of the guess-the-lyrics posts in the who are you? thread, and it seems like a good Friday activity. So, as with the previous rounds, each of the following gives a pair of rhyming (or at least intended-to-rhyme) phrases from a pop music song…
January 28, 2011
Promoting Science: MythBusters vs. Sport Science | Wired Science | Wired.com
"So, is Sport Science good for science? Is it even science? What about MythBusters? You know it and I know it - I am biased. However, let me pretend that I am not and compare Sport Science and MythBusters in terms of…
January 27, 2011
Since we had a Mommy-for-scale picture last week, I thought it was high time we had another Daddy-for-scale picture. So, here's SteelyKid before going off to day care this morning:
(Photo credit: Kate)
She's been more than 0.5 Kate in height for a good long while, but now she's coming up on half a…
January 27, 2011
I probably ought to get a start on the big pile of grading I have waiting for me, but I just finished a draft of the problematic Chapter 7, on E=mc2, so I'm going to celebrate a little by blogging about that.
One thing that caught my eye in the not-entirely-successful chapter on momentum and energy…
January 27, 2011
Subtitled "Understanding Einstein's Relativity," David Mermin's It's About Time is another book (like An Illustrated Guide to Relativity) that grew out of a non-majors course on physics that Mermin offers at Cornell. It's also an almost-forty-years-later update of an earlier book he wrote on the…
January 27, 2011
The Myth of Charter Schools by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books
"If we are serious about improving our schools, we will take steps to improve our teacher force, as Finland and other nations have done. That would mean better screening to select the best candidates, higher salaries,…
January 26, 2011
I'm about halfway through Jo Walton's Among Others, a fantasy novel set in Britain in 1979, featuring an unhappy teenage girl who finds relief in reading science fiction and fantasy, and becoming involved with SF fandom. It's getting rave reviews from a lot of the usual sources, and the concept…
January 26, 2011
I have a Lenovo thinkPad X61 tablet that I use for a bunch of things, but mainly for working on the book in places that aren't my home or office on campus, and lecturing. I do use the tablet features, primarily for marking up my lecture slides (I have PowerPoint slides that I use for class, and I…
January 26, 2011
slacktivist: Anti-Missourian best-sellers
"When some polarizing figure publishes a book, the sales of that book do provide one useful way of gauging the popularity of that figure or that point of view.[...]
But say some less polarizing figure also publishes a book taking the opposite view and it…
January 25, 2011
Over in locked LiveJournal land, I read a post talking about computer science education, and how it's biased against people who aren't already tech geeks coming into college:
Taking an intro CS course if you don't already know how to program is like taking intro Spanish without ever having taken it…
January 25, 2011
Swans on Tea » Blogging: You're Doing it Wrong! (Part III)
"Completely unrelated to this was a session called "How Can We Maintain High Journalism Standards on the Web," and it was attended mostly by the professionals. Most of the session focused on ethics standards and disclosure and avoiding…
January 24, 2011
They say that, in writing, you should steal from the best. Or, failing that, whoever's convenient. Like, say, John Scalzi.
I made a little headway on the book-in-progress over the weekend, which is nice. The problem is, the words I wrote on Saturday were the first new text generated since Tuesday…
January 24, 2011
We've had three pretty decent snow storms here recently, which is nice. Unfortunately, the middle one included a good deal of ice, so we now have a thick layer of snow, covered by a half-inch of ice, with another several inches of snow on top of that. Which makes getting around quite the chore.…
January 24, 2011
Scientists discover snowflake identical to one which fell in 1963 | NewsBiscuit
"'It's one of the last remaining challenges known to science and we've cracked it at last,' said lead researcher, Professor Kenneth Libbrecht. 'The team will soon disband to pursue other major scientific challenges,…
January 23, 2011
offers a suggestion that I heartily endorse. He quotes James Joyner on the problem of feeling obliged to comment:
I frequently see a headline or story somewhere, decide it's not worth my time, and then get drawn into it hours later when I see conversations about it on Twitter or my blog feed reader…
