June 22, 2010
A press release from Harvard caught my eye last week, announcing results from Markus Greiner's group that were, according to the release, published in Science. The press release seems to have gotten the date wrong, though-- the article didn't appear in Science last week. It is, however, available…
June 22, 2010
I hate to keep highlighting silly articles in Inside Higher Ed, but they keep publishing silly articles, like Jeffrey DiLeo's argument that humanities journals cannot be ranked because they're all unique and precious flowers too specialized:
Another reason for the roaring silence regarding the…
June 22, 2010
slacktivist: Big shoes
"But what I think people meant about [Manute] Bol's "killer instinct" was that he never seemed to take the game of basketball quite seriously enough. He hadn't chosen this game, it had chosen him. It discovered him in that Sudanese village and plucked him out of it,…
June 21, 2010
Three European countries, France, Germany, and Spain have suffered embarrassing World Cup losses. The French team in particular has appeared to be in complete disarray. Their combined record to this point is just 2-3-1 (W-L-T).
What do these three countries have in common? None of them have…
June 21, 2010
An experiment in Germany has generated a good deal of publicity by dropping their Bose-Einstein Cendensate (BEC) apparatus from a 146 meter tower. This wasn't an act of frustration by an enraged graduate student (anybody who has worked with BEC has probably fantasized about throwing at least part…
June 21, 2010
The Virtuosi has quickly become a staple of the daily Links Dumps here, but the recent series of posts on experimental physics deserve greater prominence, so here they are:
Life as an Experimenter- Day One
Life as an Experimenter- Day Two
Life as an Experimenter- Day Three
Life as an Experimenter…
June 21, 2010
Lost Myths
" Lostmyths.net is a website featuring myths uncovered by writer Claude Lalumière (Tesseracts 12, Witpunk, Objects of Worship) and illustrator Rupert Bottenberg. As cryptomythologists, they study imaginary myths, just like cryptozoologists study imaginary creatures. [...]
The site…
June 20, 2010
I've made a few oblique references to home improvement projects over the last week or so. These weren't for our house, but for SteelyKid's-- Kate's mom got her a playhouse for Christmas, which we finally got around to installing in the back yard. SteelyKid has taken right to home ownership:
Don't…
June 20, 2010
There's a blog post making the rounds of the science blogosphere titled If Sports Got Reported Like Science, which imagines the effect of applying the perceived restriction on scientific terminology to sports reporting:
HOST: In sports news, Chelsea manager Carlo Ancelotti today heavily criticised…
June 20, 2010
Friday's games showcased everything that makes international soccer maddening for Americans to watch: dreadful officiating, lack of scoring, and annoyingly conservative strategy. The referee in the Germany-Serbia game handed out cards like it was a poker tournament, with the result that, in the…
June 20, 2010
Jason Sanford: Why science fiction predictions hold back the genre
"In many ways, the idea that science fiction is about predicting the future is a remnant of the genre's past. During the 1940s and '50s, genre promoters pitched SF as a way to inspire and teach people about science and technology…
June 19, 2010
As I was heading out with SteelyKid to do some shopping, I noticed that the mail had arrived, including a large book mailer from my agent. I was a little puzzled as to what that could be, but left it for my return. Where I was pleased to open the envelope and find:
That's a copy of Como Ensinar…
June 19, 2010
Friday was the last day of the school year hereabouts, so SteelyKid's day care had an end-of-year ceremony for all the preschool classes, which included her group ("Waddlers," which are between "Infants" and "Toddlers"). They gave certificates to all the kids, for a variety of different things.…
June 18, 2010
Today is my birthday-- my age in dog years is now equal to the freezing point of water in Kelvin (to three significant figures). I'm celebrating by not reading anything that might piss me off, and by spending the day at home watching soccer (about which more later) and getting some stuff done…
June 18, 2010
When the Hugo nominees were announced, Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest was the only one of the three Best Novel nominees I hadn't already read that I was pretty sure I would read. I have very little interest in Robert Sawyer's work, and I've read just enough of Paolo Bacigalupi's short fiction to…
June 18, 2010
www.dumpert.nl - Hoe amerikanen voetbal kijken
A good spoof of American sports television, applied to soccer. the titles are Dutch, but the video is in English.
(tags: soccer sports world television silly)
World Cup 2010: Brick-by-brick fussball - England 1-1 USA | Video | Football | guardian.…
June 17, 2010
No elaborate pose this week, just simple, classic Baby Blogging:
A few months back, her weight had failed to increase as quickly as expected, so she had a couple of weight-check appointments scheduled. The latest was this week, when it was discovered that she had gained about three pounds since…
June 17, 2010
Over at the Cocktail Party, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky has a post about the image of scientists that spins off this Nature article on the NSF's "broader impact" requirement (which I think is freely readable, but it's hard to tell with Nature). Leslie-Pelecky's post is well worth reading, and provides a…
June 17, 2010
There's a paper in the Journal of Political Economy that has sparked a bunch of discussion. The article, bearing the snappy title "Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors," looks at the scores of over 10,000 students at the US Air Force Academy over…
June 17, 2010
The Virtuosi: How Long Can You Balance A (Quantum) Pencil
"In this post I'd like to address a fun physics problem.
How long can you balance a pencil on its tip? I mean in a perfect world, how long?
No really. Think about it a second. Try and come up with an answer before your proceed.
What…
June 16, 2010
So, how do things stand with the Uncertain Principles World Cup Contest at the end of the first round?
We have completed the first set of 16 group play games, and to this point, we have 6 ties. Extrapolating from that to the final result (because, of course, you always start with a linear…
June 16, 2010
Inside Higher Ed featured one of those every-so-often articles about the awesomeness of the demographic subgroup of the moment, this time Athur Levine's panegyric about "digital natives", who "grew up in a world of computers, Internet, cell phones, MP3 players, and social networking," and how they'…
June 16, 2010
The A-Team steers clear of Hill Street and avoids St Elsewhere and Cheers
"The A-Team premiered in 1983, a year after Cheers and St Elsewhere, two years after Hill Street Blues, a year ahead of Miami Vice, the fall after M*A*S*H said goodbye, farewell, and amen.
There had always been well-written…
June 15, 2010
Tommaso Dorigo has an interesting post spinning off a description of the Hidden Dimensions program at the World Science Festival (don't bother with the comments to Tommaso's post, though). He quotes a bit in which Brian Greene and Shamit Kachru both admitted that they don't expect to see…
June 15, 2010
We're several days into the World Cup now, and I have just about settled on my rooting strategy for countries I have no personal connection to: I'm going to root for countries where we've sold the rights for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog over countries where the rights haven't been sold yet.…
June 15, 2010
In the Hunt for Planets, Who Owns the Data? - NYTimes.com
"Astronomers everywhere, who have been waiting since Kepler's launch in March 2009 to get their hands on this data, will be rushing to telescopes to examine these stars in the hopes of advancing the grand quest of finding Earthlike planets…
June 14, 2010
At last weekend's Hidden Dimensions event, Brian Greene had a graphic of a Calabi-Yau object (it wasn't this one, but it's the same idea). He put this up several times, but never actually explained what the hell it was supposed to show. It just looked kind of cool.
Last week's Through the Wormhole…
June 14, 2010
I've already read three of this year's six Hugo-nominated novels, and am highly unlikely to read two of the remaining three, but since I have voting rights, and want to be as responsible as I can about this, I started on Palimpsest by Cat Valente last night. The language is very rich, and I'm not…
June 14, 2010
There was a nice story in the Schenectady Gazette about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I'd love to link to it, but the Gazette paywalls everything, so all you really get is the story title, unless you subscribe. And if you subscribe to the Gazette, you don't really need me to tell you there was…
June 14, 2010
In Defense of Evolutionary Psychology: Why They're Asking The Wrong Questions : The Thoughtful Animal
"Evolutionary Psychology suffers from a PR problem, which can be mostly blamed on ignorant (even if well-intentioned) members of the population who don't know what they're talking about.…
