April 13, 2006
A slightly more serious topic, also noted via Inside Higher Ed: Money magazine has deeemd "College Professor" the second-best job in America. The fact that it trails "software engineer" makes me a little dubious about their methodology, but there you go-- I have the second-best job in the country.…
April 13, 2006
Of special interest to Nathan, evidence that the process of dissertation writing is the same across disciplines:
> work on dissertation
You spend three hours reading five articles which have nothing to do with the dissertation.
> work on dissertation
You spend twenty minutes online reading…
April 13, 2006
Via Inside Higher Ed, a story with the nearly unbeatable headline: Feds Pounce on Student Dresses As a Ninja. Why was a student running around the Georgia campus dressed as a ninja?
Ransom told The Red & Black student newspaper that he had left a Wesley Foundation pirate vs. ninja event when he…
April 12, 2006
Back when ScienceBlogs was all new and shiny, I did a couple of posts asking questions of the other bloggers. I got involved with other things after a while, and stopped posting those, so I'm not sure this will still work, but here's a question for other ScienceBloggers, or science bloggers in…
April 12, 2006
The Kuiper Belt Controversy continues, with the lastest round showing up in the Times today: Planet Discovered Last Year, Thought to Be Larger Than Pluto, Proves Roughly the Same Size:
The object -- still unnamed more than a year after its discovery but tagged with the temporary designation 2003…
April 12, 2006
Having previously mentioned the Duke lacrosse mess, I feel obliged to at least note the latest events: DNA tests failed to link any of the players to the crime, but the DA says the alleged victim has identified one of them.
I don't plan to make this a regularly recurring feature, because the whole…
April 11, 2006
One of the features I always like in the print edition of Seed is the lab notebook pictorial. Every month (or, at least, all three of the months that I've looked at the print edition), they publish a reproduction of a page or two from the lab notebook of a working scientist. It's sort of cool to…
April 11, 2006
On a note related to the previous entry, Inside Higher Ed had a longer story about Carl Wieman leaving Colorado for Canada (following in the footsteps of his post-docs?), another guy putting his money where his mouth is:
First, he contributed $250,000 of his Nobel Prize award to the Physics…
April 11, 2006
There's a nice profile of Randy Olson, the biologist-turned filmmaker behind A Flock of Dodos, which takes a hard look at both sides of the creationism wars:
The biologist, Randy Olson, accepts that there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the…
April 10, 2006
Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog, and an excellente planne for a worke of grete literarye merit, including:
The dog-maysteres Tale: the dog-mayster (talle, curtel of greene), his dogge, and his companiounes do fynde an olde wool-quaye that semeth to be havnted by a foule spectre - one of them has those…
April 10, 2006
One of the standard conservatarian responses to anyone suggesting government-funded universal health care is to start talking about how universal health care will inevitably lead to faceless, heartless bureaucrats denying or delaying treatment for stupid reasons. My response to these stories is "…
April 10, 2006
Inside Higher Ed takes a look today at a new survey about how students choose colleges. They make an effort to make the results sound surprising, but it's really about what I'd expect:
A survey of 600 students who scored over 1100 on the SAT, half of whom scored at least 1300, found that campus…
April 9, 2006
"Mint Flavorings" is quite prominent on the list (provided by my gastroenterologist) of foods that heartburn sufferers should avoid (along with pretty much anything else you might want to eat...).
If you go to the store to buy some over-the-counter heartburn remedy-- Maalox, Mylanta, whatever--…
April 9, 2006
Over at Bookslut, the Specfic Floozy takes another look at the subgenre (or possibly sub-subgenre) of "steampunk," which she defines thusly:
For the uninitiated, steampunk, a term that is prominently tossed around in the late '80s. is one of the many subgenres of cyberpunk (others -- some more…
April 9, 2006
The New York Times Book Review section this week features a big two-page ad for the Penguin Classics/ NBA cross-promotion. This involves a handful (well, four-- a shop-teacher handful) of NBA/ WNBA stars promoting books in the Penguin line, the best of the lot being Dwyane Wade talking about Pride…
April 8, 2006
Since the previous batch of lecture notes were surprisingly popular, here's the next couple of classes worth:
Lecture 5: Stellar Interferometry, coherence, intensity correlation functions, Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment.
Lecture 6: Non-classical light, photon anti-bunching, single-photon…
April 8, 2006
It's kind of a dismal grey day today, so I find myself planning to spend a good chunk of the day working in the lab (which I haven't been able to do during the week, because of my teaching responsibilities). I have a student who's going to present a poster at DAMOP this year, and I need to do a few…
April 7, 2006
Hypothesis: The outcome of any pick-up basketball game depends more strongly on the match-up between the two worst players on each team than the match-up between the two best players on each team.
Argument: If the talent differential between the worst players is sufficiently large, then on defense…
April 7, 2006
Katherine Sharpe asked about the best science books ever, as a proxy for "what got you into science?" I wasn't able to give a really good answer to that question, but I will share a science-related anecdote from when I was a kid.
There's a good chance that this will come off as either painfully…
April 7, 2006
Over at the new Seed blog, here on ScienceBlogs, Katherine Sharpe asks about the best science books ever (a topic that was also discussed at Cosmic Variance some time back.
I've been sort of swamped this week, but that's only part of the reason why I haven't responded. The main reason is a shameful…
April 7, 2006
Mark Chu-Carroll has a very nice discussion of what "extra dimensions" actually mean in theories like string theory. It's not the same thing that hack SF authors mean when they talk about "dimensions" in which the Nazis won WWII (that's "multiverse theory" or possibly "landscapeology" or possibly "…
April 6, 2006
Via Peg Kerr's LiveJournal, an ABC News story that says we're living in a Jorge Luis Borges story:
So what is in the Gospel of Judas? It is a dialogue that claims to be a conversation between Jesus and Judas in which Jesus asks Judas to betray him.
(And of course, you just know it has a webpage…
April 6, 2006
1) This week's Inforgraphic: Job and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
2) Music reviews containing sentences like: "[The new Flaming Lips record] frequently sounds like Steely Dan as heard from the other end of a machine shop."
Which reminds me, I need to go down to the machine shop…
April 6, 2006
As anybody who has read my comments on basketball knows, I have an intense dislike of the Duke men's basketball team, mostly due to their fans, who combine the arrogance typical of fans of a dominant program with a sort of snobbery regarding their own class and cleverness. This is particularly…
April 5, 2006
As someone who has derived a surprising amount of blog traffic from posting about weight loss, I feel like I really ought to say something about Alas, A Blog's case against dieting (which I first noticed via a Dave Munger comment). It's a comprehensive collection of data (with graphs, so it must…
April 4, 2006
With hoops season having wound down, we're slipping into that time of the year when I don't have anything to watch on tv. ESPN shows nothing but baseball, the NBA, and Mel Kiper, and there's very little on regular tv that's worth a damn. Happily, I have a pile of Netflix DVD's from back before…
April 4, 2006
The post title is a famous William Gibson quote, referring to the tendency of high-tech gadgets to be put to uses the manufacturers never expected. By "the Street," he meant people in general, with maybe a slant toward the sort of underclass element he focusses on in his books, but he might well…
April 3, 2006
If you're wondering about the slow posting hereabouts, it's because I'm spending a lot of time on my classes. Having a day job sucks that way.
I've mentioned before that I'm doing a senior-level elective class on Quantum Optics. This is very much an idiot experimentalist's approach to the material…
April 3, 2006
While I managed to correctly re-set the clock yesterday, in the process, I turned my alarm off, so I'm running late. Which means no lengthy science blogging this morning. Even running late, though, I can't pass over Fred Clark's message to the evangelicals who organized an anti-pop-culture rally in…
April 2, 2006
There's a little squib in the New York Times today about the return of the Dawn mission to visit a couple of asteroids, one of their little not-quite-a-full-story things in the "Week in Review" section of the print edition (we get the Sunday Times delivered, because I find it much more civilized…
