links for 2009-03-26

"The ideal curve would have a mean of about 50%. If itâs too much above 50%, then most of what youâre putting on there is easy for everyone, so it should just be a given. If itâs too far below 50%, then most of what youâre putting on there is too hard for everyone, so it should just be a given that they canât do it and testing them is pointless." Yikes. And we wonder why physics has a bad reputation.

"[O]ne of the wisest sales reps I knew from my bookstore days, who ran a university press for years before hitting the road, told me something I never forgot: âPublishing is a manufacturing industry.â The materiality of books, their status as made things, their existence as objects to be constructed, stored and shipped, tells. With the flourishing of e-books this is what is fated to change, but the fact that it is a change probably constitutes a good bit of the problem for the industry: making physical objects to ship and sell was a central characteristic of the industry and that conditioned the experience and thinking of its leaders. The habits of the old industry wonât necessarily help guide people in the new one."

"The posts I write that get the least comments are those with actual reporting in them: Congress did this, or an administration official explained that. The second worst are wonky posts. It's easy enough to understand why those pieces end with single digit comment sections: There's less to say about a fact than about an argument. But since I, like many bloggers, use the vibrancy of my comment sections as a way to not feel like a crazy person ranting in cyberspace, too many low comment posts in a row and I itch to write some pieces that generate a bit of discussion and prove that my cyberfriends are still out there. I'm not sure that's always the best impulse."

"We all know the story. But what do we know about Krypton? Any information would be a dramatic coup for astronomers of all varieties. Superman couldn't tell us, he was just an infant when he left[2]. We might have to do some deduction. I propose we start by trying to determine the orbital period of Krypton - in other words, how long a Kryptonian year was."

An awesome mechanics lesson that I plan to steal for this term.

"Journalists are paid to cover stories of wide interest, to get multiple perspectives on new results, and to be as objective as possible in separating the wheat from the chaff. Science bloggers are sometimes going to blog about something newsworthy, but most canât be bothered trying to cover every interesting story, and years will pass before a typical blogger picks up a phone to interview a source before posting. Instead, they bring a special expertise and inside knowledge to a field that no general-purpose journalist can hope to match."