Links for 2010-01-30

"I presented my credentials. "I'm non-union, I work hard and I work for free," I told Dan. Usually, that gets me in the door every time. But not here.

"Well, you'd better be pro-union," Dan replied.

I assured him that my profession had no real national union, much less anything resembling a professional certification process. Besides, I said, I have friends who are high up in the Steelworkers. And that was good enough for Dan Harrell.

I was about to take on the greatest temp job I've ever had in my whole entire life: assistant Palestra custodian."

""We show that we can heat hohlraums to temperature and radiation symmetry close to what is needed for ignition," says Siegfried Glenzer, an LLNL researcher who was involved in this research. "When we extrapolate the results of the initial experiments to higher-energy shots on full-sized hohlraums, we feel we will be able to create the necessary hohlraum conditions to drive an implosion to ignition later this year." "

"Of the 842 colleges and universities that participated in the survey this year, the average loss was 18.7 percent - the worst returns since the Great Depression. Those numbers were even bleaker for colleges with endowments larger than $1 billion, which saw one-year losses of 20.5 percent. Colleges with endowments under $25 million - the smallest category surveyed - lost 16.8 percent on average, granting them the dubious distinction of being the best of the worst. "

"This Fall we had enormous enrollment growth, with the fastest growth occurring in the highest-risk group: young men of color. Our Financial Aid rate climbed at twice the rate of our overall enrollment. The student body become younger, lower income, more male, and more 'minority.' All else being equal, we should have expected higher attrition.

It didn't happen. If anything, our success rates increased marginally.

That may sound wonky and bureaucratic, but on a human level, it's HUGE. More of the students who need us the most are actually getting what they need. We're making actual -- small and insufficient, but actual -- progress. "

"Year beginnings are always lazy in both theory and experiment (except for most important decisions being taken, but others write about it). So it's a perfect moment for writing all sorts of summaries. Like, for example, summarizing the entire decade. Here I would like to give the list of the most important experiments in the last decade from the point of view of a particle physicist. The other day I named the noughties the most depressing decade ever, and experiment is one of the main reasons. But not for the lack of trying. The pain is that all these beautiful experiments kept confirming the old truths rather than showing new horizons."

"[The iPad is] not for me either in the current iteration, but I'm enough of a techie that this device isn't really aimed at me. I keep saying it's a computer for people who hate computers, but even that's a wrong answer. It's a consumer device for people who hate computers but like things computers can do. Even if it's a failure--and I don't think it will be--it's a visionary product that I don't expect people with a strong tech over design orientation to want (or grok, even if they intellectually get it). The question is whether people want that vision."

Stay classy, animal rights types.