silliness
drorzel | August 6, 2006Written on the whiteboard in the student lounge (which has been serving as a convenient surface for student grafitti for the whole summer) last week:
Little Known Fact: Prof. Orzel is actually an evil genius working on a gigantic laser which he plans to use to hold the world ransom for $1,000,000,000,000,000.
Sadly, it was erased (and replaced with more typical cryptic comments about students) before I could get a picture of it (and the various responses).
If I promise to give 1% of the money to the college endowment, do you think that would help my tenure case?
drorzel | August 3, 2006This is a few days old, now, but Truth and Beauty Bombs has done something I would've thought impossible: They've suggested a way to make Garfield amusing. Who woulda thunk it?
It's not as deeply and gloriously wrong as yesterday's Medium Large, but it's weirdly compelling.
(Via a mailing list.)
drorzel | July 26, 2006So, here's a different sort of scenario for an audience-participation post:
Imagine that you are in a weirdly well-stocked karaoke bar, and you have to sing a song. There's no way out of it-- if you don't you'll lose your job, rabid squid will eat your family, deranged America-hating terrorists will kill a puppy, whatever. The bar has absolutely any song you might want, no matter how obscure, and you only have to do one.
What song would you sing?
This post really begins with a conversation at Readercon, where it was noted that the World SF Convention will be held in Yokohama in 2007. Kate and…
drorzel | July 25, 2006Well, the extremely dorky poll on favorite fundamental constants seems to have petered out at 48 comments, two short of the threshold at which it would've become non-dorky. Still, that was a good effort.
Since that worked pretty well, here's another dorky poll question: What's your favorite fundamental particle? And, for the sake of concreteness, let's stick to particles that have actually been shown to exist-- the six quarks (up, down, strange, charm, bottom, top), six leptons (electron, muon, tau, electron neutrino, muon neutrino, tau neutrino), massive force carrying bosons (W and Z), and…
drorzel | July 16, 2006Slow blogging this weekend, as yesterday was taken up with activities that will be blogged about later. Today promises to be a sticky and unpleasant day outside, so I'll probably end up doing a lot of blogging in my nice, comfortable, air-conditioned home office. Of course, there's not much point in posting lots of stuff on a Sunday, so I'll probably just schedule posts for later in the week. But, you know, that's something to look forward to. Or something.
If you'd like a way to pass the time, Scott Aaronson has announced a Best Anthropicism Contest, to see who can come up with the best…
drorzel | July 11, 2006Among other things, pointing me to silly bits of pop-culture ephemera that I haven't noticed before. Such as, for example, The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny:
this is the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny
good guys, bad guys, and explosions as far as the eye can see
and only one will survive, I wonder who it will be
this is the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny
(This is probably old news to those readers who spend more time watching silly Flash music videos than I do, but I only found out about it today, when some students put it on at the summer seminar series talks...)
drorzel | July 10, 2006Rob Knop offers a nice discussion of the speed of light, in response to last night's question. This post is not about that, though you should go read it.
This post is about my odd reaction to Rob's title: "'Speed of Light' : a bad name for a great fundamental constant?" The notion of a "great fundamental constant" sort of suggests the possiblity of a not-great fundamental constant. Which leads to the extremely dorky poll questions:
What is your favorite fundamental constant?
What is your least favorite fundamental constant?
Post your answers in the comments (I'm too lazy to set up clicky-…
drorzel | July 5, 2006As you've no doubt seen elsewhere on ScienceBlogs, Nature posted a little story about popular science blogs that included a list of said blogs, including a link to yours truly (tied with Deltoid for 11th in their list by Technorati rank order.
My ranking has actually climbed slightly since then (#8312 accoring to my most recent vanity search), but I had noticed the quote ranking of #8,365 last week, and I have to say, I'm absolutely gobsmacked to be in the 99.98th percentile of blogs ranked by Technorati. It's sufficiently surprising, in fact, that I need to resort to British slang.
OK,…
drorzel | June 27, 2006My traffic has been down a little in the past couple of weeks, which of course can't possibly be because I haven't posted anything really interesting in that time. No, clearly, it must be that I'm not playing the game right.
Thus, I have performed an extensive study or high-traffic blogs, to determine what it is that they post that I don't, and the answer is clear: Internet personality quizzes. Thus, here are some quiz-type things for your amusement and edification:
A timed online IQ test. You get 13 minutes to answer 38 true/false questions, and then it tells you how smart you are. (Via…
drorzel | June 25, 2006Some sort of network problem at Verizon cut Chateau Steelypips off from the Intenets yesterday, but that was all right, as we were hosting a party for some friends from work, and had other things to do. The weather, which had been predicted to be lousy, turned out to be fine, and a good time was had by all.
The party was a particular hit with the children of a professor from the Math department, who were absolutely enthralled with the Nerf dart gun we usually keep on the mantle, next to the samurai sword:
They spent hours shooting little Nerf darts around the yard (on one occasion getting…
drorzel | June 22, 2006OK, it's not an official Ask a ScienceBlogger question (that answer will show up next week), but over at the World's Fair, they've raised an important scholarly question via a scene from The Simpsons:
Marge: Homer?
Homer: Yelloh?
Marge: There's a man here who thinks he can help you.
Homer: Batman?
Marge: No, he's a scientist.
Homer: Batman's a scientist.
Obviously, this leads to the question : "What sort of scientist is Batman, anyway?" Some of my colleagues are trying to claim him for psychology or genetics, but the real answer is after the cut:
It's a trick question. Batman isn't a…
drorzel | June 20, 2006From Lara Beaton:
Some people are like Slinkies - They serve no useful purpose, but they do give you a smile when you push them down a flight of stairs.
(Of course, anybody in physics education would probably quibble with the statement that Slinkies are useless, but I'm willing to overlook that for a well-turned phrase...)
drorzel | June 17, 2006It's been a while since I looked at the search engine keywords on Goggle Analytics for this site. It's a little depressing to find that PZ Myers turns up three times ("pharyngula," "Pharyngula," and "PZ Myers") before my own name. Worse yet, Aaron Bergman, who doesn't even have a blog any more, also shows up three times before I do. Aaron, start blogging again. Or get a LiveJournal account, given that "aaron bergman livejournal" is the fifth most popular search term on this site. Give the people what they want, already.
There are also lots of people wanting to know how many substitutions you…
drorzel | June 14, 2006Via Dave Sez, Chris Chase has all the J.J. Redick DUI jokes you could possibly want:
* Redick's arrest could actually help his draft status, as the Portland Trail Blazers are currently sitting at #4.
* To keep up with his pal, Adam Morrison plans on knocking off a Seattle-area liquor store this evening.
Special extra bonus: poetry!
(Well, OK, maybe you don't really want to hear J.J. Redick jokes, but I needed to test something, and it's a cheap excuse for a post...)
drorzel | June 12, 2006One of my least favorite end-of-term rituals for faculty is the dreaded student course evaluations. These have two components: the numerical bubble-sheet evaluations, which provide the pseudo-quantitatvie evaluation used to compare courses, and written responses to a half-dozen very general questions. The latter are at least potentially more useful, particularly when the standard questions are supplemented with some class-specific questions, and end up providing some of the most useful feedback on my teaching (though this sometimes includes things I can't do much about, such as the student…
drorzel | June 9, 2006Kate mentioned this story to me yesterday, and today, it's made the New York Times:
Fed up with the inability of two lawyers to agree on a trivial issue in an insurance lawsuit, a federal judge in Florida this week ordered them to "convene at a neutral site" and "engage in one (1) game of 'rock, paper, scissors' " to settle the matter.[...]
The proximate cause of Judge Presnell's ruling, issued Tuesday, was a motion saying the two lawyers in the case could not agree about where to conduct the deposition of a witness. The choices were the building where they both work, four floors apart, or a…
drorzel | June 5, 2006Locus is the semi-official magazine of SF-- its reviews are quoted almost as prominently as those of better-known mass media outlets in cover blurbs and the like-- but it remains a small operation, a "semi-prozine" in Hugo ballot terms. That means most issues aren't edited quite as carefully as they might be, and there are usually some typos or grammar errors in the reviews.
This month, there's a real gem, in Tim Pratt's review of Joe Lansdale's Retro-Pulp Tales:
Alex Irvine's "New Game in Town" is an exquisite story of small-time crooks and poo hustlers that takes a sharp turn into uncanny…
drorzel | June 1, 2006A List of Things Thrown Five Mintues Ago is live-blogging the National Spelling Bee.
The Internet is large, and contains multitudes.
(Via a comment at Making Light.)
drorzel | May 26, 2006Gandalf or Magneto?
(Look, it's the ninth week of our ten-week Spring term, and including the Winter term, we've been in session since January with only a one-week break. I'm getting a little punchy, all right?)
drorzel | May 14, 2006Via Jim Henley, a handy guide to the key denominations, terms, and concepts in Christianity:
Catholics
Catholics are the New York Yankees of Christianity. They are the biggest and wealthiest team, and their owner is intensely controversial (this makes St. Francis of Assisi the Derek Jeter of Catholicism: discuss). Catholics all wear matching uniforms, and are divided into "parishes," or "squadrons," to make choosing softball teams easier. Catholics are rigidly controlled by a hidebound hierarchy that starts with priests and ends with priests' housekeepers. Catholics are not allowed to read…