January 10, 2011
McSweeney's Internet Tendency: FAQ: The "Snake Fight" Portion Of Your Thesis Defense.
"Q: What does it mean if I get a small snake that is also very strong?
A: Snake-picking is not an exact science. The size of the snake is the main factor. The snake may be very strong, or it may be very weak. It…
January 9, 2011
A reader from the UK, James Cownie, was kind enough to send this picture of the "New and Bestselling" shelf at a WH Smiths " at one of the service stations on the M20." You might not recognize the cover immediately, but in the #11 spot on that list is occupied by How to Teach Quantum Physics to…
January 9, 2011
Every genre reviewer in the world seems to be raving about Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, so I picked it up for Hugo nomination consideration. I'm about a third of the way into it, now, and to be honest, it's kind of bugging me. There are some good bits, but also…
January 9, 2011
Graphic Stories for your Hugo 2011 Nomination Consideration | Tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Blog posts
"As I noted the last time around, there seems to be a trend for Hugo nominators to stay comfortably inside their reading boxes--comics by folks already famous in other corners of SFF,…
January 8, 2011
The Web Is a Customer Service Medium (Ftrain.com)
"A medium has a niche. A sitcom works better on TV than in a newspaper, but a 10,000 word investigative piece about a civic issue works better in a newspaper.
When it arrived the web seemed to fill all of those niches at once. The web was…
January 7, 2011
A story to improve your opinion of humanity:
Egypt's majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the…
January 7, 2011
There's a new wrinkle in the endless controversy about Huckleberry Finn, with NewSouth Books preparing an expurgated edition replacing "nigger" with "slave" throughout. Sentiment in the parts of the Internet I frequent is mostly against the change, which has been made with the goal of getting it…
January 7, 2011
Barack Obama will be visiting Schenectady next Tuesday, and local notables are suggesting things he might do. Particularly notable was this:
Assemblyman Jim Tedisco, R-Glenville, a basketball enthusiast like Obama, suggested that some hoop should be organized for the occasion.
"I'd like to…
January 7, 2011
What with one thing and another, I forgot to tag anything for the links dump yesterday, which means no links dump this morning. But that's all right, because Fred Clark's post about humorless prigs deserves a more prominent link. The proximate cause is yet another story about a crazy religious…
January 6, 2011
It's really flattering when your kids start to imitate you:
This is SteelyKid playing with the toy laptop she got for Christmas in her basement kitchen. Sadly, not only is she imitating her father's computer-addict tendencies, she's also copying my poor laptop-using posture. We'll have to work on…
January 6, 2011
I've reached a point in the book-in-progress where I find myself needing to talk a little about particle physics. As this is very much not my field, this quickly led to a situation where the dog asked a question I can't answer. But, hey, that's why I have a blog with lots of smart readers...
The…
January 6, 2011
Not an exhaustive list, but since I'm noodling around with my calendar, I might as well note some of the stuff I'll be doing this year:
I'll be on a panel about international science testing at the AAAS Annual Meeting in February. This will be a different experience-- not only have I never been to…
January 6, 2011
The decline of the serial killer. - By Christopher Beam - Slate Magazine
Serial killers just aren't the sensation they used to be. They haven't disappeared, of course. Last month, Suffolk County, N.Y., police found the bodies of four women dumped near a beach in Long Island. Philadelphia police…
January 5, 2011
Kate and SteelyKid have colds (well, they're sharing the same cold), so SteelyKid is waking up a lot during the night. Since Kate needs rest as well, she put earplugs in last night (she's a much lighter sleeper than I am), and I took baby-soothing duty. So I was up half the night.
I come in for my…
January 5, 2011
Back in the fall, I got an email from my UK publisher asking me if I'd be willing to read and possibly blurb a forthcoming book, The Four Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality by Richard Panek. The book isn't exactly in my field, but there really…
January 5, 2011
To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor - NYTimes.com
"Today, however, Brazil's level of economic inequality is dropping at a faster rate than that of almost any other country. Between 2003 and 2009, the income of poor Brazilians has grown seven times as much as the income of rich Brazilians. …
January 4, 2011
There was a faintly awful essay by Melissa Nicolas at Inside Higher Ed yesterday, giving MLA job candidates advice on how to dress:
Let's start with your shoes. Anyone who has been to MLA knows that it is a big conference, and whether you are on a search committee, attending sessions, or…
January 4, 2011
nsf.gov - SRS The End of Mandatory Retirement for Doctoral Scientists and Engineers in Postsecondary Institutions: Retirement Patterns 10 Years Later - US National Science Foundation (NSF)
"Mandatory retirement in postsecondary educational institutions ended in 1994. In this paper, examination of…
January 3, 2011
The clock in my classroom for this term appears to be set five minutes slow. Which is an improvement over the one in the hall that's ten minutes slow, but kind of plays hell with starting and ending class on time. It is, however, a great excuse for a poll:
Clocks in academic buildings should be…
January 3, 2011
It's the first day of the new term, and the projector bulb that was working on Friday decided to stop working by Sunday. After that bit of excitement this morning, plus my lecture, I'm beat. I always forget how much talking is involved in intro physics lectures.
My class for the term is the first…
January 3, 2011
Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems
"I know what you're thinking : crystallographic and thermodynamic data of ternary alloy systems is a such a hackneyed plot device. But Landolt-Börnstein work their magic in such a subtle and layered way that at 3am…
January 2, 2011
Because I'm sure everybody is as fascinated by blog stats as I am, here's the traffic to this blog for 2010, in graphical form:
In case you can't numerically integrate that in your head, I'll tell you that the total number of pageviews represented there is a bit more than 908,000. We have yet to…
January 2, 2011
I had vaguely meant to do a year-in-review post yesterday, like every other blogger running on the Gregorian calendar, but SteelyKid blew that plan to bits by refusing to take her nap until 2pm. It's also kind of difficult to say much of anything coherent about 2010. It was a good year in a lot of…
January 2, 2011
What's stats got to do with it? - Expression Patterns Blog | Nature Publishing Group
"I recently learned that I have an above average number of legs. This is no cause for concern: most of you do, too. It was something I first learned when watching Hans Rosling's The Joy of Stats BBC documentary.…
January 1, 2011
How can I be a more awesome crackpot?
"Let me begin by saying that the vast, vast majority of the emails and questions I get are really good. But every now and again, I'll get an email where the implied question (if there is any) isn't so much,"Is this theory any good?" but:
How can my crackpot…
December 31, 2010
Late last year, Matthew Beckler was nice enough to make a sales rank tracker for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Changes in the Amazon page format made it stop working a while ago, though, and now Amazon reports roughly equivalent data via its AuthorCentral feature, with the added bonus of…
December 31, 2010
Lookit the shiny:
That's a new Droid X smartphone, and it's mine. I got it yesterday after discovering the existence of a slightly cheaper "data only" plan that is so secret only about 10% of Verizon Wireless employees know it exists. As my previous phone was a freebie LG flip phone from about…
December 31, 2010
Christopher Guest | Film | Gateways To Geekery | The A.V. Club
"No comic filmmaker is more intimately associated with improvisation than Christopher Guest, an alum of The National Lampoon Radio Hour and Saturday Night Live who made his name as a filmmaker co-writing, directing, and co-starring in…
December 30, 2010
I nearly forgot to post tonight's Toddler Blogging photos, which would've been a Bad Thing, as you can tell from this picture. Toddler Blogging is Serious Business:
That's not the best Appa-for-scale picture, but I love the intense look on her face. This was taken in our spiffy, newly refinished…
December 30, 2010
I've shifted the iTunes shuffle from the Christmas-music playlist over to the top-rated songs of the year playlist because, well, it's the time of year when anybody with any pretension of writing about pop culture does some sort of Top N list to wrap up the year. And, since I've got "pop culture"…
