Links Dump
drorzel | October 13, 2009
The Ostrom Nobel -- Crooked Timber
"To amplify what Kieran has just said - political scientists are going to be very, very happy today. I had seen Lin cited as a 50-1 outsider by one betting agency a few days ago, and had been surprised that she was at the races at all, given that economists tend (like the rest of us) to be possessive of their field's collective goodies. I'm delighted to see that my cynicism was completely misplaced."
(tags: economics Nobel blogs crooked-timber social-science politics)
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Princesses and cats: Kij Johnson's…
drorzel | October 12, 2009
Britain's Nobel winner condemns science funding reform | Science | guardian.co.uk
""There is a lot of focus now on trying to get very quick pay-offs in research. It is a huge mistake. Basic science has paid off far more than any directed research," Ramakrishnan said.
"If you don't invest properly in fundamental science, then you won't have the foundations to develop the technologies and applications of tomorrow. Ten years down the line, your technology will be based on obsolete foundations.""
(tags: Nobel science education academia business economics society)
Lazy vs. Bizarre §…
drorzel | October 11, 2009
Physics - Protecting quantum superpositions from the outside world
"Quantum information science relies on superpositions of quantum states with a definite phase relation, but such superpositions are inherently fragile against interactions with their environment. Fortunately, if some kind of common property bounds these interactions, it is possible, though by no means easy in a practical setting, to come up with states that are essentially immune to their environment. In papers appearing in Physical Review A and Physical Review Letters, Magnus RÃ¥dmark and Mohamed Bourennane at Stockholm…
drorzel | October 10, 2009
Green Energy Should Trump Politics: Daniel Lyons | Newsweek Daniel Lyons | Techtonic Shifts | Newsweek.com
"[L]ook at what [scientists] are up against: a noisy babble of morons and Luddites, the "Drill, baby, drill" crowd, the birthers, and tea-party kooks who have done their best to derail health-care reform and will do the same to any kind of energy policy. [OSTP Director John] Holdren has an undergraduate degree from MIT and a Ph.D. from Stanford; he has won countless awards for his work on nuclear proliferation, climate change, alternative energy, and population growth. But now he must…
drorzel | October 9, 2009
From Gourmet to the Daily Gazette « Easily Distracted
"This is the real issue for a lot of old media. They used to be a habit, a tradition, a part of life. As such, you ignored what you didn't use or like the same way you ignore a tear or a stain in a piece of furniture that you otherwise find comfortable and can't afford to replace anyway. But now I think a lot of audiences have a much more active imaginative engagement with what they read, and much less patience for a publication that isn't nimble in its response to the needs and desires of its readership. You go to old media for a kind…
drorzel | October 8, 2009
Less-Convergent Culture « Easily Distracted
"Here's what I find as far as standard commercial outfits [for Halloween costumes]. If you're female and a kid and you want to be a superhero, you're basically out of luck unless Wonder Woman is your favorite. "
(tags: kid-stuff gender stupid comics blogs society culture easily-distracted)
Nobel Physics Prize honors optical fibers and CCD sensors - Physics Update
A compact explanation of the physics behind the Prize.
(tags: science physics technology materials Nobel awards blogs physics-update)
US LHC Blog » A stroll down memory lane!
"I…
drorzel | October 7, 2009
Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
"Beam makes light of Adler's inflexibility, but he does not entirely embrace the by-now clichéd disdain for the Great Books, because they represent something admirable that, perhaps, should be revived in our culture: "The animating idea behind publishing the Great Books, aside from making money for Britannica and the University of Chicago," Beam observes, "was populism, not elitism." The books were household gods. They shared the living room with the television, and they made you feel guilty…
drorzel | October 6, 2009
Career Advice: I'm Sorry I Published - Inside Higher Ed
"Given that it seems to be common wisdom that publications are helpful, two anecdotes I heard in the past week or so scare me a little bit. Both anecdotes are about departments that were searching or are planning a search. Both departments see their department as mainly a teaching department, but they do have research requirements (I think 3/3 or 3/2 loads). Also, according to both anecdotes, these departments consider publications in top journals as counting against a candidate!"
(tags: academia jobs philosophy humanities stupid)…
drorzel | October 4, 2009
Posthumous Novels by Vladimir Nabokov, David Foster Wallace and Ralph Ellison - WSJ.com
"A new wave of posthumous books by iconic authors is stirring debate over how publishers should handle fragmentary literary remains. Works by Vladimir Nabokov, William Styron, Graham Greene, Carl Jung and Kurt Vonnegut will hit bookstores this fall. Ralph Ellison and the late thriller writer Donald E. Westlake have posthumous novels due out in 2010. "
(tags: books literature humanities history culture publishing writing)
Airborne Laser Burns Things Good - Fine Structure
"Boeing has unleashed it's ATL (…
drorzel | October 3, 2009
Effect Size (Again) « Easily Distracted
"I agree that if a researcher can establish that a particular effect or phenomenon has a statistically significant influence or role in social behavior, it matters, that this is a finding worth reporting. The problem is, as McCloskey notes, that some findings matter more than other findings, and that the reason they matter more or less can only be worked out through something other than statistical argument, that the weight we should give such a finding has to come from some philosophical, moral, political or normative claim. "
(tags: statistics…
drorzel | October 2, 2009
Physics Buzz: Space invaders: cosmic rays arrive for their 100th birthday
"Cosmic rays constantly bombard earth's atmosphere at a rate of about 100 per square meter per second, but they don't make it through intact. They collide with atmospheric molecules, setting of a cascading shower of secondary particles, such as neutrinos and muons. Researchers probably wish there was less stuff between us and them; because they're messengers from the deep, so to speak, they could offer clues to black holes and supernova. But most of what eventually reaches the ground is very low in energy; above the…
drorzel | October 1, 2009
slacktivist: In the belly of the fish
"My fundie Bible teachers considered this the main, or even the only, point of this story worth considering. Their task, as they saw it, was to defend the story as being "literally" true, and so they'd share legends (see Bartley, James) of sailors swallowed by whales and go to great lengths to argue that such a thing was possible. This led to some rather strange and uninspiring sermons, the main point of which seemed to be that God is capable of creating a fish that could swallow a man whole and keep that man alive for several days. The message of those…
drorzel | September 30, 2009
Oscar-O-Meterâ¢: The A.V. Club's third annual guide to the fall prestige movies, part one | Film | A.V. Club
"Provided you take our word for it and don't go back into the archives, the A.V. Club's Oscar-O-Meter feature has quickly become the definitive tool for Oscar prognostication. Through a rigorously scientific process, our writers have quantified each prestige movie based on a set of criteria: Is it a literary adaptation? Is it topical without being too controversial? Risky without actually being provocative? Does it feature a star who lost weight, gained weight, or made some sort of…
drorzel | September 29, 2009
YouTube - LittleDog Clips and Outtakes
Very cool walking robot footage.
(tags: robots video youtube technology gadgets science)
Essay - Why Good Writers Can Be Bad Conversationalists - NYTimes.com
"Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I'm writing. I don't claim this merely because there is usually no one around to observe the false starts and groan-inducing sentences that make a mockery of my presumed intelligence, but because when the work is going well, I'm expressing opinions that I've never uttered in conversation and that…
drorzel | September 28, 2009
Smarter people go to college, so average university students less intelligent? : Gene Expression
"Remember that a substantial proportion of college graduates are less intelligent than a substantial proportion of those without college degrees. While the proportion of the population with college degrees increased, and that increase was disproportionately from the higher end of the distribution, it was not such perfect sorting. "
(tags: social-science education academia blogs)
Sex, Drugs, Music, Mud
"I was slightly disappointed to be missing Woodstock until the nightly news reported that it…
drorzel | September 27, 2009
Fantastical Conceits and Turbulent Souls - The Barnes & Noble Review
"[O]ne of the field's premier independent publishers, NESFA Press, has just embarked on a six-volume set, The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, consolidating all of Zelazny's fiction shy of novel length, as well as all his poems and non-fiction, chronologically sorted. (Available now, Volume One is titled Threshold and Volume Two is Power & Light. ) Story notes and annotations, as well as fresh biographical and critical matter, round out the enterprise, which resurrects many obscure minor gems in addition to the…
drorzel | September 26, 2009
Zoom-Whirl Orbits in Black Hole Binaries
Title of the week from PRL.
(tags: science physics articles theory gravity)
Phase-Slip Interferometry for Precision Force Measurements
"We demonstrate a novel atom interferometric force sensor based on phase slips in the dynamic evolution of a squeezed-state array of degenerate 87Rb atoms confined in a one-dimensional optical lattice. The truncated Wigner approximation is used to model our observations."
(tags: science articles physics atoms optics low-temperature experiment theory precision-measurement)
Bose-Einstein Condensation of Alkaline…
drorzel | September 25, 2009
The Microhistorical Unknown « Easily Distracted
"One thing that frustrates me at times about "big history", world history or large-scale historical sociology is the extent to which historians writing in those traditions tend to assume that it's turtles all the way down, that the insights of big history extend symmetrically to the smallest scales of human life, that microhistory contains no surprises or contradictions for the macrohistorian. "
(tags: humanities history blogs easily-distracted society culture)
Confessions of a Community College Dean: The White Glove Test
"I'm thinking it…
drorzel | September 24, 2009
$6/Kg to orbit -- KarlSchroeder.com
"The fact is, there is only one problem worth speaking about in space development, and that is the problem of cost-to-orbit. It currently costs around $10,000/kg to launch anything at all.
That price will never come down as long as chemical rockets are the only technology we use. "
(tags: space economics science technology blogs karl-schroeder)
The Real Cost of Medmal | Mother Jones
"Unfortunately, the real problem with our medical malpractice system isn't that it costs too much. The real problem is that it's a lottery. Some people get money they…
drorzel | September 23, 2009
Infinite Summer » Blog Archive » Summer's End Roundtable, Part I
"How about that ending, huh? "
(tags: books literature blogs infinite-summer)
US LHC Blog » Relationships in Physics Graduate School
"Doing a quick poll of graduate students in our department showed the following:
* Atomic Physics: 5/10 grad students are married (2 of those have kids)
* Particle Physics (CMS group): 1/10 grad students are married (none of those have kids)"
(tags: science physics atoms particles silly academia)
Physics Buzz: Is a Nobel laureate smarter than a fifth grader?
"George Smoot, a UC…