Links Dump
drorzel | August 10, 2010
Why Public Employees Are The New Welfare Queens | The New Republic
"To what extent is the problem that the retirement benefits for unionized public sector workers have become too generous? And to what extent is the problem that retirement benefits for everybody else have become too stingy?
I would suggest it's more the latter than the former. The promise of stable retirement--one not overly dependent on the ups and downs of the stock market--used to be part of the social contract. If you got an education and worked a steady job, then you got to live out the rest of your life comfortably.…
drorzel | August 9, 2010
Young Engineer Uses Webcam, Laser to Build Budget 3-D Scanner | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
"Using little more than a webcam and a laser, a young engineer has built a cheap 3D scanner that dovetails perfectly with the Makerbot and other desktop fabricators. It could be used as part of a copying system that would allow hobbyists to duplicate solid objects at home.
"The technology exists to do this kind of thing, but it's much more expensive," said Andy Barry, a research engineer in the Autodesk Innovations Lab at NASA Ames Research Laboratory in Mountain View, California. "My goal is to make it…
drorzel | August 6, 2010
Turn or go straight? Quick! : Dot Physics
This is a classic problem. You are in a car heading straight towards a wall. Should you try to stop or should you try to turn to avoid the wall? Bonus question: what if the wall is not really wide so you don't have to turn 90 degrees?
(tags: physics education blogs dot-physics science)
Stax | Music | Gateways To Geekery | The A.V. Club
"In the 1960s, Stax Records blazed the trail for sweaty, funky Southern soul, pioneering an earthy sound that was rougher and more immediate than the glossy productions of Phil Spector or Motown. Founded by brother…
drorzel | August 5, 2010
Judge Walker's decision to overturn Prop 8 is factual, well-reasoned, and powerful. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine
"It's hard to read Judge Walker's opinion without sensing that what really won out today was science, methodology, and hard work. Had the proponents of Prop 8 made even a minimal effort to put on a case, to track down real experts, to do more than try to assert their way to legal victory, this would have been a closer case. But faced with one team that mounted a serious effort and another team that did little more than fire up their big, gay boogeyman screensaver for two…
drorzel | August 4, 2010
The Virtuosi: Steak Dinner
"I recently got a new digital meat thermometer. My plan was to slowly cook the steak until the internal temperature got to be about 140 degrees Fahrenheit with the oven at 200 degrees, take it out, wrap in tin foil, crank the oven to 500 degrees, stick it back in, and give it a nice exterior, reaching an internal temperature of about 150 degrees which would put it at about medium.
After I put the steak into the oven though, I started to watch the temperature go up on my digital thermometer and thought, why not take data. And so I did. Here are the results."
(tags…
drorzel | August 3, 2010
Scientopia
A new non-profit science blog collective, including several people who left ScienceBlogs in Sodamageddon.
(tags: science blogs internet academia)
Experimental Error: Don't Try This at Home - Science Careers - Biotech, Pharmaceutical, Faculty, Postdoc jobs on Science Careers
"So if you're Doktor Kaboom!, Professor Ker-Splat, or Nobel Laureate "I Didn't Think It Would Blow Up But Then It Totally Went Pfweeeeeeeeeeeee!," maybe it's time to vary the act a bit. Forget about the eyedropper in the 2-liter soda bottle and put together a show based on what scientists actually do.
Good…
drorzel | August 2, 2010
Busted Explanations for Karate Breaking | Rennie's Last Nerve
"Martial arts are my hobby and explaining science is my job, so the recent appearance of "How karate chops break concrete blocks" on io9.com naturally caught my eye. Unfortunately, not only did it fall far short of my hopes of offering a lucid explanation, it parroted misleading statements from an article on exactly this same subject that has been annoying me every time I remembered it for 10 years. (Oh wonderful Web, is there no old error you can't make new again?) Indulge me while I try belatedly to set the record straight."
(…
drorzel | August 1, 2010
Kwiat Quantum Information Group
The quantum physics version of "24." Can Professor Paul Kwiat save his research group from striking grad students, visiting sponsors, broken lasers and a missing password without violating the University of Illinois ethics regulations?
(tags: physics academia silly video television quantum)
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Best & Worst Job Prospects in the Urban Fantasy Economy for 2011
"WORST PROSPECTS
We do not recommend the following fields for 2011:
1. Physicist
This profession has abnormally high levels of insanity in the urban…
drorzel | July 31, 2010
slacktivist: If you can make it there
"Newcomers are often insecure, and a debt of gratitude can make anyone feel a bit awkward, so I try my best to be patient with some of the sillier things often said by those from the American "heartland" about supposed "East Coast elites" in general and New York in particular.
But that patience has its limits and I may have reached those limits listening to various non-New Yorkers bloviating about where and how New Yorkers ought to be allowed to worship. (I'm from the heartland of New Jersey, myself, where I was taught that real Americans don't imagine…
drorzel | July 30, 2010
Getting young scientists into the science teacher pipeline: IU News Room: Indiana University
"Producing science teachers who can keep up with rapidly advancing fields and can also inspire students is not an easy task. With a grant from the National Science Foundation's Robert Noyce Scholarship Program, the School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis is challenging science majors -- individuals who enjoy and appreciate science -- to transfer their enthusiasm and knowledge to students in middle school and high school classrooms.
Through the Noyce Summer Internship…
drorzel | July 29, 2010
Meet the real victims of Bush-era lawlessness: his lawyers. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine
"Those who distorted and upended the legal rules during the Bush era have hermetically sealed themselves inside a legal tautology that provides that lawyers cannot be held accountable for merely offering legal advice, and nonlawyers cannot be held accountable because they believed that what they did was legal. But now we are poised to drown in an even more dangerous tautology--first offered up by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey--which holds that the Bush administration lawyers made…
drorzel | July 28, 2010
The Art of Sleeping in Seminars | Department of Physics at the U of I
"Through long years of experience, we have accumulated the following useful set of rules. These should be helpful to beginning research students. However, we have also observed seasoned veterans making some of these simple errors. For advanced students, these rules can also be applied to regular courses. "
(tags: academia education presentations silly)
Blog U.: Rethinking Research "Productivity" - Library Babel Fish - Inside Higher Ed
"My frustration with graduate training is that from my (admittedly removed)…
drorzel | July 27, 2010
slacktivist: To bigotry no sanction
"During Washington's presidency, of course, most Americans did not "possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship." The man who wrote "to bigotry no sanction" also imagined he had the right to own other humans and the authority to vote on Martha's behalf. But yet we can see here in Washington's own words the inevitable, inexorable trajectory leading toward the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments.
Deprive any minority -- whether a religious minority, an a-religious minority, a disenfranchised gender or ethnic group or race or sexual…
drorzel | July 26, 2010
YouTube - I Will Derive!
Gloria Gaynor, meet Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton. Leibniz, Newton, Gloria Gaynor.
(tags: video math music youtube silly education)
Cocktail Party Physics: the nays have it
"[W]hile browsing the science section on Amazon this weekend, looking for new or overlooked science books, I thought it might be fun to highlight a few of the more entertaining negative reviews of some popular science books."
(tags: science books review silly blogs cocktail-party physics history math)
drorzel | July 25, 2010
Why tenure won't disappear, just shrink § Unqualified Offerings
"1) Did you notice the part where I said I'd want a higher salary to compensate for having less security? Yeah. See, lots of people are willing to slave away in grad school and postdoc positions and adjunct positions in exchange for a shot at the tenure lottery. Dilute the value of the prize, and suddenly people start wanting more money in return. A lot of smart, highly-educated people will start looking at other white collar career paths if academia doesn't provide a shot at life-long security, or at least higher pay…
drorzel | July 24, 2010
Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 040504 (2010): Room-Temperature Implementation of the Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm with a Single Electronic Spin in Diamond
"The nitrogen-vacancy defect center (N-V center) is a promising candidate for quantum information processing due to the possibility of coherent manipulation of individual spins in the absence of the cryogenic requirement. We report a room-temperature implementation of the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm by encoding both a qubit and an auxiliary state in the electron spin of a single N-V center. By thus exploiting the specific S=1 character of the spin system,…
drorzel | July 23, 2010
slacktivist: Credit scoring and unemployment
"Say you're unemployed and you decide to work your tail off to land a new job, so you send out 40 résumés a week. Half of the companies might decide to do a credit-check before getting back to you. This sets off alarm-bells at the credit-rating agencies. Twenty credit-checks in one week? There goes your credit score. And there goes your hope of landing a new job.
This is what the use of credit scoring in employment decisions means: Looking for a job disqualifies you from being hired."
(tags: politics economics class-war blogs slacktivist US…
drorzel | July 22, 2010
More Online Astronomy Resources for Writers
"A few years ago I compiled a list of online astronomy resources for writers following that year's Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers. Every year there are new links we pass around and discuss, so I wanted to do an addendum, if you will, adding more links to the ones I've previously posted (and which I feel are still excellent resources)."
(tags: books writing blogs science astronomy internet)
Books vs. reviewers, in pictures « The Book Publicity Blog
"One of a book publicist's jobs is to get reviews for books. Which is tricky these…
drorzel | July 21, 2010
Physics Buzz: APS hits ComicCon with the first superhero science comic
"For the rest of this week I'll be blogging from the madness that is sure to be ComicCon 2010. APS will be the first professional society to bring a comic book, so us public outreach folks are excited to be rolling in with 2.5 tons of Spectra comics. For you unaquanited, the convention combines all things nerd under one massive roof for a week every year. All those people in Princess Leah or Batman or Wolverine or extra #554 from scene 3 on Tatooine in A New Hope comtumes? This is their summer sanctuary. I'm not knocking…
drorzel | July 20, 2010
NASA Mercury Messenger Finds Surprises - NYTimes.com
"On its third swing past Mercury, NASA's Mercury Messenger spacecraft discovered an unexpectedly young lava plain, rapid rufflings of the planet's weak magnetic field and an unanticipated dance of elements in the thin atmosphere.
"I think the biggest surprise for the community is that the planet is turning out to be much more dynamic than people appreciated," said Sean C. Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington who is the principal investigator for the Messenger mission. "
(tags: science astronomy planets nytimes space)
The…