December 8, 2009
There's been a bit of a kerfuffle in the SF blogosphere about what writers should be paid for short fiction, which has led to a lot of people posting lists of their short fiction and what they were paid for it (Scalzi has links to most of them). This naturally leads me to wonder what the analogous…
December 8, 2009
John Scalzi sends along photographic proof of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog working for a dog who isn't Emmy:
This isn't quite an "in the wild" shot, as it's not at a store or a store-bought copy (John wrote a blurb for the book, so he got sent a copy), but we're getting close. The official…
December 8, 2009
... walk into a bar. No, wait, that's not what I want...
In the interval before this morning's Mike and Mike show became the Tiger Woods Scandal Hour, they were talking about Tim Donaghy and his allegations about the NBA, which basically amount to the league being just a few steps up from the WWE.…
December 8, 2009
News: Lincoln U. Ends Obesity Rule - Inside Higher Ed
"For the past few weeks, "Fitness for Life" may well have been the most discussed college course around. From now on, however, no one at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania will be required to take it.
The course became famous because of a…
December 7, 2009
It's that time of year again when I have to fill out my annual Faculty Activities Sheet, reporting on everything I did last academic year. Technically, I should've done this a while back, but it always slips into the December break.
This always takes much longer than it ought to, in large part…
December 7, 2009
It's officially December, so there are no longer really solid reasons for objecting to the playing of Christmas music. With the exception of the sort of stuff that shows up in Mellowmas, that is. And speaking of Mellowmas, there is this. About which, a poll:
A Bob Dylan Christmas album:(survey…
December 7, 2009
Sunday Conversation: The case for Pluto | SciGuy | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle
The controversy just never ends...
(tags: science astronomy planets media blogs)
Chromoscope
How the Milky Way looks at a variety of different wavelengths.
(tags: astronomy space science pictures physics galaxies…
December 6, 2009
I'm kind of fried from all the recent driving, and I've got some stuff to catch up on. So we'll ease back into regular blogging, by posting a clip from last week's Colbert Report with everybody's favorite Jesuit, Brother Guy Consolmagno, talking about how alien life would affect Christianity:…
December 6, 2009
Questions Odd and Profound - NYTimes.com
"In the following pairs of excerpts, which sample, A or B, is from a Royal Society letter, explaining earnest scientific endeavor, and which is the work of a deeply skeptical satirist in the guise of Lemuel Gulliver? "
(tags: science history literature…
December 5, 2009
Angular Momentum Example : Dot Physics
Rhett explore my favorite demo from intro mechanics.
(tags: science physics education blogs dot-physics)
Luis von Blog: Advice On Grad School Applications
(tags: academia education blogs silly)
December 5, 2009
All Of You Industrial Scientists: Out Of the Room. In the Pipeline:
"It looks as if the accreditation groups decided that they were faced with a choice: commit themselves to judging what sorts of presentations should count for CE credit (which you might think was their job), or just toss out…
December 3, 2009
It's been a while since we had a sleeping-baby picture, so here's SteelyKid at bedtime last night:
I swear I wasn't going for the Catherine Wheel album cover effect, but what can you do?
SteelyKid and I are off to Boston today, where she'll be visiting her grandmother while I head up to Maine to…
December 3, 2009
As a companion piece to Steve Albini's famous rant about how the pop music industry systematically screws its artist, theToo Much Joy blog provides a look at their royalty statement:
I got something in the mail last week I'd been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy royalty statement from Warner…
December 3, 2009
I spent an inordinate amount of time yesterday reading an economics paper, specifically the one about academic salaries and reputations mentioned on the Freakonomics blog. There's a pdf available from that post, if you'd like to read it for yourself.
The basic idea is that they looked at the…
December 3, 2009
The Science and Entertainment Exchange: The X-Change Files: Holy Concussive Incident, Batman
"Batman takes a lot of blows to his head. These come from his fighting activities and from being routinely thrown--or leaping--onto or into hard objects like walls, floors, and moving vehicles. The issue…
December 2, 2009
I've made a couple of oblique references to this over the past couple of months, but I have an article in the new issue of Physics World, on experiments using molecules to search for an electric dipole moment of the electron:
When most of us think about searching for physics beyond the Standard…
December 2, 2009
The big topic-of-the-moment is the hacked stash of emails from a major climate research group. The whole climate change discussion is one of those "no upside" topics that I try to stay out of, but I have some thoughts and comments about issues surrounding the email incident. These are largely based…
December 2, 2009
AMC - Blogs - SciFi Scanner - A Cinematic Voyage Through Hollywood's SciFi Solar System
Our solar system is a wondrous and frightful venue, and from the magmatic center of the sun to the ghost ships orbiting Neptune, Hollywood has explored it all. Join us for a cinematic voyage through the scifi…
December 1, 2009
Back during the DonorsChoose fundraiser, I promised to do a re-enactment of the Bohr-Einstein debates using puppets if you contributed enough to claim $2,000 of the Hewlett-Packard contribution to the Social Media Challenge. I obviously aimed too low, because the final take was $4064.70, more than…
December 1, 2009
The Royal Society has launched a spiffy new site that lets you browse highlights of the last 350 years of science as published in the Philosophical Transactions ("Giving Some Accompt of the Present Understanding, Studies, and Labours of the Ingenious in Many Considerable Parts of the World since…
December 1, 2009
Rhett Allain's Dot Physics has joined ScienceBlogs. Sweet.
Update your RSS readers accordingly. That is all.
December 1, 2009
A Good Author Is Hard to Find - Books - The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper
"Mention the word "slush" to anyone who's worked in publishing for longer than five minutes, and you're likely to get an expression of sheer horror. Slush pile is a term used to refer to the collective mass of…
November 30, 2009
Via Chris Mooney, a Seth Borenstein article about Obama's love for science:
Out in public, Obama turns the Bunsen burner up a notch, playing a combination of high school science teacher and math team cheerleader.
Last week, for example, the president announced that the White House would hold an…
November 30, 2009
The official release date for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is three weeks from tomorrow, but a couple of new reviews have been posted, one linkable, the other not so much. The linkable one is from one of our contest winners, Eric Goebelbecker, at Dog Spelled Forward (an excellent name for a dog…
November 30, 2009
It's always nice to be reminded that the US is not the only country in the world prone to acts of petty and childish xenophobia. The last eight years have been especially rough, but between the Obama administration acting like adults and now this silly minaret ban, we no longer look like the most…
November 30, 2009
On false dichotomies : Thoughts from Kansas
"To the degree that I object to "New Atheism" (an ill-defined entity to which I am not entirely unsympathetic), my objection is to this precise aimlessness. By embracing Radical Honesty and railing against evidence-based communication strategy, they…
November 29, 2009
For a Budding Fan, Basketball The Way It Ought to Be - NYTimes.com
"My older son, Gabe, turned 3 in May, and I knew this would be the season I would finally take him to his first basketball game. I wanted the experience to be fun, the start of what I hoped would be a lifetime of basketball fandom…
November 28, 2009
The New York Times list of "Notable Books for 2009" has been released, which means it's time for my annual rant about how they've slighted science books. So, how did they do this year? Here are the science books on this year's list:
The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn By…
November 28, 2009
Colliding Galaxies For Fun and For Science! : Starts With A Bang
"Galaxy Zoo has developed an outstanding game where you can help astronomers by doing something that humans easily defeat computers at: visually matching galaxies to simulations!"
(tags: science astronomy computing internet blogs…
November 27, 2009
Windows is pleading to be allowed to install updates, so I'm going through closing browser tabs that I opened foolishly thinking I might write about them. In that list is yet another blog post on how electronic books will kill traditional publishing. This one is fundamentally an economic argument,…
