October 7, 2010
Career Advice: Rules for Science Job Talks - Inside Higher Ed
"4. Give a strong, conceptually oriented introduction. Be as brief as possible while still making all of your points. Be sharp at the beginning. Remember the 20 Minute Rule: You should show a data slide no more than 20 minutes into…
October 6, 2010
Via Steve Hsu, a GNXP post about the benefits of elite college educations, based largely on a graph of income vs. US News ranking. While the post text shows some of the dangers of taking social-science data too literally (the points on the graph in question are clearly binned, so I would not…
October 6, 2010
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2010 goes to Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki for giving people a reason to care about palladium. OK, it might not be the only reason-- I'm not actually sure what palladium is used for other than organic synthesis and cold fusion-- but it's the…
October 6, 2010
Trains on the moon: John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless / Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts
"At the heart of John M. Ford's Growing Up Weightless (1993) is a train trip by a group of teenaged roleplayers across the far side of the moon. It's also the story of how…
October 5, 2010
The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Geim and Novoselov for their work on graphene, a material consisting of one-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms in a hexagonal array. This is one of those prizes that was basically inevitable, as graphene is one of the hot materials of the last couple of years…
October 5, 2010
YouTube - John Orzel - Treading Water
My uncle's tv ad for his NY State Senate campaign.
(tags: politics video television new-york youtube)
Americans Are Horribly Misinformed About Who Has Money - Politics - GOOD
In other news, the Sun rose in the east today.
(tags: class-war politics…
October 2, 2010
A quick check-in from Tuscaloosa, where we're getting ready to head out for the football tailgating. While I've got a minute, though, here are the slides from my public lecture, via SlideShare:
What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics
View more presentations from Chad Orzel.
These are…
September 29, 2010
There's been a lot written in the last day or so about this Pew Foundation Survey on who knows what about religion. Like most such surveys these days, they have a really easy online quiz version that you can take and marvel that anybody missed any of these questions.
My first thought was to just…
September 28, 2010
I am in Alabama at the moment, the temporary owner of a ginormous Ford SUV and a hotel room that even I think is a little more air-conditioned than strictly necessary. Which means that it's time for the How to Teach Physics to Your Dog mini-tour of the Southland. On Wednesday, I'll be driving to…
September 27, 2010
It's that time of year again-- the Swedes will be handing out money to famous scientists, with the announcements of who's getting what starting one week from today. Thus, the traditional Uncertain Principles Nobel Prize Picking Contest:
Leave a comment on this post predicting the winner(s) of one…
September 26, 2010
I'm way, way behind the discussion of this week's story, but having read it, I thought I'd post a couple of comments. This will be short, because there isn't a lot to say.
This is a sort of alternate Christianity story, a story in which Jesus gave in to the temptations offered by the devil in the…
September 23, 2010
SteelyKid has been expanding her repertoire of songs lately-- it now includes "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and "The Alphabet Song" along with "Ring Around the Rosey," "The Wheels on the Bus" and "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes"-- so for this week's picture, she decided to get in touch with her…
September 23, 2010
One of the things I've been stressed about lately is next week, when I'm making a trip to the South, specifically Georgia and Alabama. As I mentioned here earlier, the original inspiration was a get-together with friends from college for the Florida-Alabama football game next Saturday, but it seems…
September 23, 2010
Learning the Rules « Easily Distracted
"Today, for a zillion complicated reasons, many of them having nothing to do with the academy itself, the discrete knowledge that constitutes meaningful cultural capital within various professional and social worlds is much more fragmented, as are those…
September 22, 2010
Class « The Reality-Based Community
"Real class is what the economic aristocracy of our country has almost entirely lost. The American rich are wallowing in a moral slough, grasping for more and more money they have no clue what to do with, and venting their frustration that climbing over each…
September 21, 2010
Got a big box in the mail today, which included author copies of two Asian editions: the Japanese edition, which I had seen before, and this:
That is, obviously, the Chinese edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I say "obviously" mostly because I know that edition was about ready to roll…
September 21, 2010
On my walk with Emmy this morning, I noticed that a house a couple streets over has just gone on the market, and they had one of those "Please take one" boxes on the yard sign, with a bunch of one-page fliers about the house. Even though we have no intention of moving any time soon (and, in fact,…
September 20, 2010
6 Famous Unsolved Mysteries (That Have Totally Been Solved) | Cracked.com
"One of our favorite pastimes here at Cracked is sucking the mystery out of life like the cream out of a Twinkie, leaving only the bland, dry sponge cake of reality behind. To that end, we've decided to list the often…
September 18, 2010
Hannu Ranjaniemi's The Quantrum Thief has generated a lot of buzz, but doesn't seem to be available on this side of the Atlantic (not without exorbitant shipping charges, anyway). As a result, I haven't read anything of his, so I was happy to see "Elegy for a Young Elk on the Short Story Club list…
September 18, 2010
Rally to Restore Sanity
"We're looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn't be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it's appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on…
September 17, 2010
http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/debut-author-lessons-10-things-about-signing-books/
Good, solid advice on signing books, some of which I've stumbled on myself, others I wish I'd known a year ago.
(tags: books publishing blogs)
Interference | Flickr - Photo Sharing!
An awesome picture…
September 16, 2010
For this week's Toddler Blogging, a shot of Family Reading Time:
SteelyKid looks very serious, because she's going about the important job of locating Goldbug in Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. Grandma and Grandpa still have the copy of this that I loved when I was little, and…
September 16, 2010
In a place I can't link to, I encountered the somewhat boggling statement that "Nature leans more in the direction of Popular Science than Critically Peer Reviewed [Journal]." Thus, a quick poll:
Nature is:online surveys
Context is for the weak.
September 16, 2010
What higher education costs § Unqualified Offerings
"There's a lot of talk going around about the cost of higher education. Let's look at some numbers in the state university system here, which focuses on undergraduate education."
(tags: academia education economics blogs unqualified-offerings…
September 15, 2010
So, I'm looking at the couple-dozen tabs I have open in Chrome for stuff that I think would be worth blogging about, and the slides for this afternoon's lecture that need revising, and the student poster that needs to be completed before tomorrow, and the committee stuff that I ought to be doing,…
September 15, 2010
Lunch at McDonald's - The Amateur Gourmet
"I won't be the first food writer to note that McDonald's makes terrific fries. I've read interviews with chefs who try to emulate that crispy exterior and moist interior, that perfectly pleasing balance of salty, savory and sweet. These fries are…
September 14, 2010
Not long ago, a new preprint on the fine structure constant got a bunch of press, nicely summed up by the Knight Science Journalism Tracker last week. I meant to say something about this last week, but what with it being the first week of classes and all, I didn't find the time.
I still think it's…
September 14, 2010
While waiting for SteelyKid to stop bouncing off the walls long enough to be put to bed last night, I watched a bit of the Jets losing to the Ravens on Monday Night Football. I saw most of the first half, and the end of the fourth quarter, and I noticed the announcers talking a lot about two things…
September 14, 2010
Via Tom, the folks pushing for a Stephen Colbert rally on the Mall in DC (because if a clown like Glen Beck can do it, why not an actual comedian?) have found a uniquely useful way to try to boost their signal: encouraging charitable donations:
See, anyone can join a reddit or Facebook group or…
September 14, 2010
Geocentrism: Was Galileo Wrong? : Starts With A Bang
No. An exhaustive explanation of how we know the Earth goes around the Sun.
(tags: science astronomy physics planets blogs starts-with-bang stupid education)
Testing, the Chinese Way - NYTimes.com
"Professor Cizek, who started his career as a…
