Passing thoughts
jstemwedel | December 20, 2007The grades are filed! I have officially dodged the bullet of delaying the family's get-away with my incessant grading (since it turned out to be cessant, I guess).
It seems only right to mark the occasion with a meme -- the "seven random things about me" meme, for which I have been tagged twice.
Here are the rules:
Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
Share 7 random and or weird things about yourself.
Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.…
jstemwedel | December 17, 2007Grades are due this Friday. Last Friday, the grader assigned to one of my courses was supposed to get me the grades for the online reading discussions that he was weeks behind on grading.
He didn't.
Nor has he responded to the emails I've sent him since then inquiring as to when he will give me these grades.
Nor has he been answering his cell phone, on whose voicemail I have been leaving increasingly frantic messages.
There is a real possibility that I will have to do this grading that the "grader" has already been paid for (since he is "salaried" this term -- as my grader). This could well…
jstemwedel | December 15, 2007When I partook of this last year, I thought it was a one time thing. But by golly, John Lynch seems to have established this meme as an annual tradition, and I kind of like traditions.
The rule: post the first sentence of the first post for each month.
January: Don't update your blog for a few days.
February: I simply cannot accept the final judgment in Bravo's Top Chef (season 2).
March: The inaugural edition of Scientiae, the new women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics blog carnival, has been posted at Rants of a Feminist Engineer.
April: In case you somehow missed…
jstemwedel | December 15, 2007Today I stumbled upon a story the elder Free-Ride offspring wrote. Possibly intended to strike a Charles Dickens-like tone, I think it ended up a bit closer to Dostoevsky.
Of course, I have to share it:
When Mice Go Caroling
When mice go caroling, you better watch out.
When they're done, they will ask for cookies.
OK, so at this point I'm expecting a plot arc of the sort found in the classic book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Likely there will be some unforeseen consequence -- or some elaborate chain of unforeseen consequences -- following upon this innocent act of generosity. Hilarious…
jstemwedel | December 11, 2007David Ng at The World's Fair asks what kind of scientist Santa Claus might be. I'm not sure I have the answer to that, but I at least have a hunch about what kind of scientist might make the most headway studying Santa. (Of course, if Santa followed Socrates' advice to "Know thyself," that would be the kind of scientist Santa should be.)
So, here are the facts as we know them:
Santa delivers gifts or toys to millions of locations in a fairly narrow window of time in the same night.
Despite his reputed girth, Santa manages to make it down the chimney.
Observing Santa at work is a Very Bad…
jstemwedel | December 10, 2007Do furnaces break more frequently in the winter than the summer, or do people just have occasion to notice non-functional furnaces when the weather gets really cold?
(Why yes, our furnace has broken, and our temperatures have been dipping below freezing. Why do you ask? Is it my pathetic chattering?)
jstemwedel | December 8, 2007My better half and I have been catching up on movies (thanks to Netflix and our DVD player). Last week we watched 28 Days Later .... Last night we watched 28 Weeks Later. It is my better half's view that the rage virus has burned itself out, so to speak, and that there won't be another movie in the franchise.
But the drive to make sequels of sequels in inexorable, and I believe a recent news item from the UK holds the key to the next movie in the franchise.
First, the news, as reported in The Mail:
Abandoned baby hedgehogs are too weak to hibernate
by DAVID DERBYSHIRE
... The RSPCA says…
jstemwedel | December 7, 2007Signs are not the boss of me (or of you), but they often convey useful information. For example, this sign reminds of us of responsibilities that come with being a dog owner (or dog guardian, depending on your jurisdiction):
You'll notice that the sign advising you to clean up after your pet actually dispenses biodegradable gloves with which you can scoop the poop. This is a sign doing everything it can to help you follow its directions.
Other signs are more focused on our safety than on getting us to behave responsibly towards others in our shared public spaces. For instance, this sign…
jstemwedel | December 6, 2007Taking a very brief break in the dungeon of grading to partake of this meme, with which I have been hoping to be tagged for months. (Indeed, I wasn't really officially tagged -- Julie was, but she's busy writing papers and stuff, so I'm helping her out by pinch-hitting for her on the meme.)
No mere time-waster, this meme was started by PZ Myers at Pharyngula as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace.
The rules:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".
Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify…
jstemwedel | December 5, 2007If you're "writing" a philosophy paper and you're going to plagiarize, why would you plagiarize a sub-optimal source like Wikipedia? Why wouldn't you at least rip off a top-notch source like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy?
It seems to me there was a time when cheaters took more pride in their craft.
Disclaimer: Regardless of the quality of your source material, plagiarism is wrong. Don't plagiarize!
jstemwedel | December 1, 2007
Near the beginning of November, I announced my intention to jump on board with International acaDemic Writing Month. I put up a list of writing projects on which I was going to try to make some serious headway.
And my commenters asked, essentially, whether I was nuts.
My commenters are very, very smart. They hardly ever lead me astray, and this matter is no exception.
First, let me note that I did, in fact, accomplish some academic writing that I might not have without pledging that I'd be making some progress. Here's my original list of writing projects with what I actually did noted in…
jstemwedel | November 28, 2007Do you know that feeling one gets that is characteristic of "about to come down with something", where you have an off taste in your mouth and your head feels fuzzy, and it seems like the very best thing you could possibly do is just lay your head on your desk for a few moments and close your eyes?
Yeah. I've had that feeling all day.
However, I have absolutely zero time to actually come down with something at this particular juncture. Therefore, I will be conducting a Mind Over Immune System experiment (not a very scientific one, I'll admit) in which I see whether telling myself sternly…
jstemwedel | November 27, 2007This is not breaking news (unless your news cycle is more geological), but it strikes me as relevant on the day that I deliver my penultimate lecture in the newly-created ethics module in the Introduction to Engineering class at my university:
Can you trust an ethicist to behave ethically?
Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust asked other philosophers, who presumably have a good bit of data on the everyday conduct of professional ethicists. The majority seemed to think that ethicists were no more ethical in their behavior than are other sorts of philosophers.
Brian Leiter suggested that a finer…
jstemwedel | November 17, 2007... as a result of the incessant drive to make learning too darn safe.
Not that this is a terribly new development (I wrote about this sort of thing here and here), but it appears that anxieties about terrorists and meth-labs are sucking all the chemically goodness out of chemistry sets:
Current instantiations are embarrassing. There are no chemicals except those which react at low energy to produce color changes. No glass tubes or beakers, certainly no Bunsen burners or alcohol burners (remember the clear blue flames when the alcohol spilled out over the table). Today's sets cover perfume…
jstemwedel | November 14, 2007Over at The World's Fair, David Ng dangles another meme before us:
... this meme asks that you come up with your own scientific eponym. What's that exactly? Well, first read this excellent primer by Samuel Arbesman, which basically provides a step by step description of how to do this effectively. Then have a go at your own blog. If all goes well, I'd like to create a page at the Science Creative Quarterly, that collects (and links to) the good ones.
Since it is well known that I am a tremendous Luddite, it will come as no surprise that my scientific eponym is a measure of how tremendous a…
jstemwedel | November 8, 2007... despite the fact that I'm deeply suspicious of claims that getting the most votes is truly indicative of being the best.
Anyhow, the category in which your vote might make a real difference (here at the last minute) is Best Science Blog:
I'm a big fan of In the Pipeline, Bootstrap Analysis and Invasive Species Weblog (and I hear that "Pharyngula" guy is a good read), in terms of the maximization of quality and "electability", I urge you to vote for Bad Astronomy.
Cast your vote now, before it's too late!
jstemwedel | November 3, 2007
Via ScienceWoman, I learn that there's a month for those of us who aren't ready to write a novel, namely, International acaDemic Writing Month.
I am so there.
Back when I was disserting (the second time) a bunch of us who were at the stage of our studies where it felt like we ought to be getting serious writing done formed a kick-in-the-butt club. We met roughly twice a month (possibly weekly for certain stretches, if I'm remembering correctly), talked about what we had accomplished since the last meeting, brainstormed ways to face down writer's block, and most importantly, we set goals for…
jstemwedel | October 24, 2007David Ng at The World's Fair wants me to play along before I head to the airport. Here are the rules:
I'd like to suggest a meme, where the premise is that you will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we'll take the other country specific ones if need be), you'll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.
This takes a bit of effort since finding these statements takes a little trial and error, but I'm going to guess that this meme might yield some interesting insight on the blog in question.
To make it easier…
jstemwedel | October 6, 2007Yesterday, one of the elder Free-Ride offspring's teammates brought a Rubik's Cube to soccer practice. While this youngster fiddled with the cube during a water break, I mentioned that I knew how to solve it. I was asked to transmit this knowledge, and I promised to write it up and send it to the player at this morning's soccer match.
And I thought, "You know, there are probably others who might like this information." So I made a quick detour to the scanner, and am sharing the very same information with you all.
I'm pretty sure that revealing this knowledge won't get me drummed out of the…
jstemwedel | October 4, 2007I'm sure my jaw shouldn't drop at this sort of glimpse at the thinking of dorm-dwelling undergraduates, and yet it does. Every single time.
From an article in the school paper about violations of the university's student conduct code:
Some students say one problem is students might not know the policies and consequences and that maybe why they break them.
"I don't know the consequences," [one freshman] said. "I know it's in the student handbook, but I don't think anyone reads that."
[Another freshman] agreed.
"I think it's in the student handbook," she said. "But that's like 50 pages long,…