January 7, 2009
In response to my request for uncomfortable questions, Lou asks:
As a private college professor and a new parent, I'm sure you are aware that the current rates of tuition growth are unsustainable indefinitely. When do you expect to see the rates drop back to inflation levels, rather than continuing…
January 6, 2009
Discovering Biology in a Digital World : Another reason why science education sucks
"According to the article almost 40% of the 59 science education specialists, surveyed in the California University system, were "seriously considering leaving" their current jobs and some (20%) were considering…
January 6, 2009
In response to my call for uncomfortable questions, Ewan goes for the jugular:
what do you think your biggest failing as a father has been to date?
See, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about...
The answer is "I get frustrated too easily."
The first few weeks SteelyKid was home, I could get…
January 6, 2009
I'm feeling kind of uninspired, blog-wise. I've got a few ResearchBlogging type posts in the mental queue, but they're not going to get written before the weekend, and the other obvious topics are things that I've written about N times before, and I'm not fired up for iteration N+1. So, we'll…
January 6, 2009
Classes started yesterday for the winter term. This is the first time I've had to teach in six months, thanks to juggling my schedule so as to let me stay home for much of the Fall term. I'm always surprised by how much I forget, and how much I remember about the process.
The remembered stuff is…
January 5, 2009
EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect
"The middle fifth of the income distribution begins at a yearly income of $34,738 per household. Assume they pay 20 percent in total taxes (it's probably a bit higher), and they're left with $27,798 to live on. That's fairly rough if you're raising a…
January 5, 2009
It's NFL playoff time, which means that sports fans will be treated to the sight of the most high-stakes farce in sports, namely the ritual of "bringing out the chains" to determine whether a team has gained enough yards for a first down. We've all seen this: the play is whistled dead, a referee un…
January 5, 2009
As Kate notes, I am a paid-up member of this year's Worldcon, and thus entitled to nominate works for the Hugo Awards. Of course, there are a zillion categories, and I'm not entirely sure what to nominate for any of them.
So, if you are a reader or watcher of science fiction and/or fantasy, this is…
January 5, 2009
Rebecca Goldstein's Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel is another book in the Great Discoveries series of short books by noted authors about important moments in the history of science, and the people behind them. Previous volumes include Everything and More and A Force of Nature,…
January 4, 2009
Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind: Donald Westlake, R.I.P.
With links galore.
(tags: books writing mystery)
A question of mass? « Physics and cake
"The Penrose interpretation of quantum mechanics...
...states that the mass of a system affects the system's ability to maintain quantum…
January 4, 2009
The posts selected for the 2009 edition of The Open Laboratory, collecting the best writing on science blogs for the year, have been announced. My We Are Science post made the list, which is nice.
Amusingly, this showed up in my inbox at the same time that the ScienceBlogs front page is featuring…
January 4, 2009
Fannish regions of the Internet are all abuzz today, with the introduction of Matt Smith as the next actor to play the lead role in Doctor Who. Sadly, this is not the Matt Smith I went to college with (who would've been a really unusual choice for the part...)-- he's still comfortably obscure to…
January 3, 2009
TheStar.com | Entertainment | Cultural resolutions: bigger, better, closer, stronger
"No offence to those of you who buy all your books online, but whenever anyone asks why I invariably prefer to purchase my reading matter in a bricks-and-mortar establishment, I have one simple answer: because I…
January 3, 2009
A couple of smallish items that came up in recent days, that can be grouped together under the general heading of "data presentation oddities." First, over at Crooked Timber, Kieran Healy tries out a semi-hemi-demi-log plot for a graph of WPA expenditures.
The problem he's trying to address is the…
January 3, 2009
The world is a very strange place:
An intruder received a taste of divine reckoning as he was chased from the Edinburgh flat he was breaking into by a man dressed as the Norse god Thor.
The housebreaker leapt from the first-floor window of the building to escape Torvald Alexander who was dressed-up…
January 2, 2009
Refuted economic doctrines #1: The efficient markets hypothesis at John Quiggin
"I'm starting my long-promised series of posts on economic doctrines and policy proposals that have been refuted or rendered obsolete by the financial crisis. [...] Number One on the list is a topic I've covered…
January 2, 2009
Many years ago, when I was a kid growing up, I used to be a regular at the Mary Wilcox Memorial Library in town, and tore through most of their kids' books before mounting an assault on the adult section. The librarian at the time, Mrs. Sinclair, was a terrific woman who knew pretty much everybody…
January 2, 2009
Because there's no better form of procrastinatory blogging than making traffic graphs:
That's how you know it's Science!
Unlike the last couple of years, 2008 did not see any gigantic spikes in traffic, despite a couple of posts that I thought would really have some juice. Shows what I know.
The…
January 1, 2009
So it goes.: A Day in the Life
"I wake up to the sun's early morning glow or from the Luganda streaming through my mosquito net, which I'm not sure. It is another day in Uganda, a handful of kilometers beneath the equator. I can easily recall the first days in Africa when the sun did not wrestle…
January 1, 2009
Captain's Log, Stardate 010109
USS BabyPod
Space Commander SteelyKid reporting
"Our mission to explore the dining room is progressing well. It is almost time for Baby Blogging, and--"
"Commander, sensors have detected a ship!"
"On screen!"
"What the heck is that?
"It's an alien space raider!…
January 1, 2009
2008 was a rotten year for a lot of people, I know, but I'll always have a soft spot for it, because it marked the beginning of the SteelyKid Era. There was plenty that sucked about 2008, but not nearly enough to outweigh that.
(There will be Baby Blogging later today, but the Empress of Eastern…
December 31, 2008
slacktivist: Clean shoes
"Getting down on his knees and taking unclean things in his hands was more than just a pattern with Jesus -- it was something like an obsession. This goes beyond a mere motif or refrain in the Gospels. Jesus looked at the purity codes and the holiness codes and the long…
December 31, 2008
Terry Pratchett knighted:
Terry Pratchett, the author of the Discworld series of novels that have sold more than 55 million copies worldwide, said he was "stunned, in a good way" after receiving a knighthood in the New Year's Honours List.
The 60-year-old writer, below, whose first book was…
December 31, 2008
This is going around again (I think Kottke is Patient Zero), so here's a list of places where I spent at least one night in 2008 (other than Niskayuna, where we live):
Albany, NY (I spent four nights in a smoking room-- I get to count it on the list)
Boston, MA
Lewisburg, PA
State College, PA…
December 31, 2008
Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau calls out unnamed ScienceBloggers for cognitive dissonance:
I think scientific training is of great intellectual and practical benefit to students with the interest and ability to pursue it. I would like to see more people choose to study science (whether at…
December 31, 2008
I generally enjoy Gregg Easterbrook's football writing-- he gets a little repetitive, and the shtick is starting to overwhelm any insight, but he makes some good points, and is usually entertaining. For example, I really enjoyed his take on the Dallas Cowboys at the end of this week's column (…
December 30, 2008
Auto Destruct
"[F]or all of Detroit's mistakes, it is also a victim of something it did right: ensuring a middle-class lifestyle for bluecollar workers. When the carmakers, pushed by unions, agreed to provide workers with a steady level of purchasing power, comprehensive health benefits lasting…
December 30, 2008
Inside Higher Ed has an article on athletics and admissions based on an investigative report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The report compares the SAT scores of football and basketball players to those of other students, but what it really highlights is the difference between science and…
December 30, 2008
ScienceWoman has a post about plans and publications that opens with a comment about what makes a dissertation that struck me as odd:
Three papers, an introductory chapter and some broad conclusions. Those are the ingredients of a Ph.D. dissertation in it's simplest form.
[...]My first PhD paper…
December 29, 2008
The Quantum Pontiff : A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Introduction
"Gladwell's books are fun, but I find myself often disagreeing with his analysis, so I thought it would be entertaining to take my time reading his latest and jot down my thoughts as I progress. "
(tags: science…
