links for 2009-03-06

"Since the mid-1960s, college menâs players have made about 69 percent of free throws, the unguarded 15-foot, 1-point shot awarded after a foul. In 1965, the rate was 69 percent. This season, as teams scramble for bids to the N.C.A.A. tournament, it was 68.8. It has dropped as low as 67.1 but never topped 70."

"Secretary of Energy Steven Chu wants the United States to join with other countries on a "true engineering collaboration" to capture CO2 from coal-burning power plants. Testifying today before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Chu said that he's been talking with science ministers from China, Great Britain, and other European countries about their plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars or more to test technologies for capturing carbon from power plants."

Now the calculation of how many photons per second an average light bulb puts out is an easy one, and it's been done to death. Millions of trillions of photons per second as a rough estimate, I believe. Let's do one that's slightly more fun. How many photons are in the room with you right now?

"I mainly learned from this volume that evolutionary theory can have a strangely narcotic effect on the brains of otherwise intelligent people, leading them to take quite bizarre positions."

""Stephon told me that the other two guys hated me because I was the most talented," said Pierce, who said speaking with Marbury was beginning to make him feel uncomfortable. "He said I should beware jealousy because it was 'the green-ey'd monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on.' But I was like, 'Stephon, first of all, Kevin is a way better player than I am.' He just walked away muttering. I don't know what's up with that dude." "

"Before getting to the rules for sigfigs, it's helpful to show why they matter. Suppose that you're measuring the radius of a circle, in order to compute its area. You take a ruler, and eyeball it, and end up with the circle's radius as about 6.2 centimeters. Now you go to compute the area: Ï=3.141592653589793... So what's the area of the circle? If you do it the straightforward way, you'll end up with a result of 120.76282160399165 cm2.

The problem is, your original measurement of the radius was far too crude to produce a result of that precision. The real area of the circle could easily be as high as 128, or as low as 113, assuming typical measurement errors. So claiming that your measurements produced an area calculated to 17 digits of precision is just ridiculous."

Scott's experience of academia continues to be much more interesting than anybody else's.