June 13, 2010
A grey and dreary day here in Schenectady for the 216th Commencement at Union College. This is probably healthier for the graduates than the years when it's sunny and hot and people pass out in their seats, but it isn't the most pleasant send-off. Then again, my own college graduation was a grey…
June 12, 2010
slacktivist: Sex & Money, part 3
"My conundrum was not unique -- not to me and not to the question of usury. The same dilemma arises whenever we treat the Bible as a rulebook. That's an approach that guarantees -- that manufactures -- conflicts between text and reason, text and experience,…
June 11, 2010
This was supposed to go up earlier, but it turns out that thinking you selected "Scheduled" in the MT back end is not, in fact, enough to schedule the post to appear. So this is showing up after games have already begun, but nothing of consequence has happened yet, so it's no biggie.
Anyway, the…
June 11, 2010
I've got multiple home improvement projects that need work while SteelyKid is out of the house and the weather is reasonably nice, so no deep thoughts about science today. Instead, here's some silly pop culture: a selection of songs from my music collection starting with numbers from one to ten:
"…
June 11, 2010
Will New York Rebel Against Fracking? - Green Blog - NYTimes.com
"A well blowout that shot gas and water polluted with drilling fluids as high as 75 feet into the air in Pennsylvania is a vivid reminder how a new generation of gas drilling is becoming more of a presence in the Northeast.…
June 10, 2010
Kate was away last Thursday, and just got back yesterday, so this is the first time in a week that all of us have been together. In honor of that, we'll break out the fancy camera remote technology for a group portrait (a Baby Blogging first!)
Emmy snuck into the lower left corner of the frame, to…
June 10, 2010
The Science Channel debuted a new show last night, Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, with the premier apparently designed by committee to piss off as many Internet types as possible. The overall theme was "Is there a creator?" and it featured physicist-turned-Anglican-priest John…
June 10, 2010
One of the questions asked of Neil deGrasse Tyson at the WSF thing last week was "When did you change from a mild-mannered astrophysicist to a rock-star scientist?" (or something close to that phrasing). In his answer, he said that after his first tv interview was edited down to a three-second shot…
June 9, 2010
I'm not in the general habit of endorsing candidates for state office in districts where I don't live, but I think I can make an exception in this case:
In a unanimous vote, the Broome County Democratic Committee approved of Town of Triangle Councilman John Orzel to run for the state's 52nd…
June 9, 2010
I'm back in Niskayuna, dealing with mountains of end-of-term paperwork. Which means you get a poll to pass the time:
The best end-of-term evaluation method is:survey software
This poll is brought to you by the number π, the letter q, and the two take-home exams I'm waiting for before I can finish…
June 9, 2010
Sunday Function : Built on Facts
"Let's say you want to prove that all the dominoes are going to fall. One way to do this would be to prove that the fall of one causes the fall of the next, and that the first domino falls. Those two statements combined prove that all the dominoes will fall.…
June 8, 2010
Ethan Zuckerman has an excellent round-up of selection strategies for who to support in the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament. Options include strategic support, support through spite, non-FIFA support, and aesthetic considerations. A couple he left off:
Flopping Artistry: To American eyes, one of…
June 7, 2010
In my write-up about the Hidden Dimensions panel, I mentioned in passing that:
I also would've liked to see an experimental physicist up there, to provide a little more grounding about what the actual problems are, and how you might hope to look for something. But then, I always think there should…
June 6, 2010
A great clip from his World Science Festival appearance the other night, especially the bit toward the end:
"One thing I think that as a nation we should be embarrassed by is that the scientists-- you can do this experiment yourself, I've done the experiment-- the scientists, by and large, know…
June 6, 2010
You might not know this, because I've been so shy about mentioning it here, but I'll be signing How to Teach Physics to Your Dog at 1:30 pm today as part of the Authors Alley program at the World Science Festival Street Fair. It's true.
It looks (at least in the tiny patch of sky I can see out our…
June 5, 2010
Since I was going to be down here anyway to sign books at the World Science Festival Street Fair, Kate and I decided to catch one of the Saturday events at the Festival. It was hard to choose, but we opted for the program on Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace (Live coverage was here, but the…
June 5, 2010
Over at Tor.com, Kate has a Lord of the Rings re-read post about the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, which includes a shout-out to me that I missed because I was driving to NYC:
Ãomer is "scarely a mile" away when the standard unfurls and is clearly seen to bear the White Tree, Seven Stars, and a…
June 5, 2010
We missed the formal presentaion at the World Science Festival stargazing event last night, and it was cloudy enough to prevent actual stargazing, but the giant mock-up of the James Webb Space Telescope is giant and cool even in the dark. More importantly, Neil deGrasse Tyson is awesome. We got…
June 5, 2010
IPN announces Ninth Annual Bastiat Prize Competition | International Policy Network
"For the ninth year, International Policy Network (IPN) is accepting submissions for its annual Bastiat Prize for Journalism. The Prize is open to writers anywhere in the world whose published articles eloquently…
June 4, 2010
Over at Inside Higher Ed they have a news report on complaints about the content of required reading for students entering college. This comes from the National Association of Scholars, a group dedicated to complaining that multiculturalism is corrupting our precious bodily fluids pushing aside the…
June 4, 2010
slacktivist: Sex & Money, part 2
"I'm being too polite here. I need to state this more vigorously because I need to put it in a way that will make my accusers fruitfully angry. So let me try this:
The Bible is not a book about homosexuality and it will not allow itself to be treated as a book…
June 3, 2010
I sometimes get comments asking why so many of the baby blogging pictures are taken from above. The answer is twofold: 1) I'm rather tall, and thus it's hard for me to get down to baby level to take pictures straight on, and 2) when I do try to get down to baby level, most of the pictures come out…
June 3, 2010
A number of SF-related sites have been talking about the "Periodic Table of Women in SF" put together by Sandra McDonald, presumably passed around at Wiscon. James Nicoll has a list of the authors, and SFSignal has a link to the table, which I will reproduce here to save you the annoyance of…
June 3, 2010
This may be a job for the MythBusters, but I'll throw this out as a puzzle for interested blog readers. I don't know the answer to this (though it wouldn't be all that hard to determine experimentally), I just think it's sort of interesting. There's a poll at the bottom of this post, but it…
June 3, 2010
Precautions and Paralysis « Easily Distracted
"The cautionary example that I think is most pertinent for academics is newspaper and magazine journalism. Fifteen years ago, some of the developments that have cast the future of print journalism as we have known it into doubt were already quite…
June 2, 2010
I mentioned in a previous post that one of the cool talks I saw at DAMOP had to do with generation of coherent X-Ray beams using ultra-fast lasers. What's particualrly cool about this work is that it doesn't require gigantic accelerators or nuclear explosions to produce a laser-like beam of x-rays…
June 2, 2010
Sean Carroll is miffed about a science-and-religion panel at the World Science Festival:
The panelists include two scientists who are Templeton Prize winners -- Francisco Ayala and Paul Davies -- as well as two scholars of religion -- Elaine Pagels and Thupten Jinpa. Nothing in principle wrong with…
June 2, 2010
BOOK EXPO AMERICA LUNCHEON TALK
"The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely...more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.
Please don…
June 1, 2010
Thinking from Kansas, Josh Rosenau notices a correlation in data from a Daily Kos poll question on the origin of the universe:
Saints be praised, 62% of the public accepts the Big Bang and a 13.7 billion year old universe. Democrats are the most positive, with 71% accepting that, while only 44% of…
June 1, 2010
While I mostly restricted myself to watching invited talks at DAMOP last week, I did check out a few ten-minute talks, one of which ended up being just about the coolest thing I saw at the meeting. Specifically, the Friday afternoon talk on observing relativity with atomic clocks by Chin-Wen Chou…
