Theory 1: “The Internet exists to make me look smart.” —John Scalzi A question for folks more computer-savvy than I: Whenever I cut and paste quotes from some other page into the editing window on Movable Type, quote marks and dashes get mangled into non-standard characters. They look just fine when I’m editing, but when […]
Month: February 2006
Email Management
Pretty much every academic on-line has already commented on the New York Times piece on student email today. As usual, Timothy Burke says most of what I’d like to say: Much of the complaint recorded in the article also seems much ado about nothing. As Margaret Soltan observes, what’s the big deal about answering the […]
Blog Tweaking
A couple of technical notes that may affect your reading and commenting experience: 1) The site developer has tweaked the RSS feeds to include links to the full post, and to the comments section. The comments links on some posts even appear to give a comment tally, which is pretty cool. Of course, implementing this […]
Algebraic Intervention
I really don’t mean to turn the whole blog over to all algebra, all the time, but Richard Cohen’s idiocy has proved to be a good jumping-off point for a lot of interesting discussions (and a surprising number of comments, links, and TrackBacks…). The other ScienceBlogs comment on the whole thing that I’d like to […]
NYT Notes
A couple of science-related items from the New York Times: 1) An article on the Cafe Scientifique phenomenon, in which scientists put on monthly get-togethers for the general public, where recent scientific research is explained in layman’s terms. It’s nice to be reminded that there’s still interest in learning about science– given the numbe of […]
Algebra and Storytelling
(It’s Presidents’ Day, so remember to vote!) Razib over at Gene Expression offers some thoughts on the algebra issue, in which he suggests some historical perspective: The ancient Greeks were not unintelligent, so the fact that many of us (rightly I believe) take symbolic algebra for granted as a necessary feature of our cognitive landscape […]
Top Eleven: Early Returns
A preliminary report on the standings in the Greatest Physics Experiment voting: Michelson-Morley: 13 Faraday: 7 (including one vote in the Farady post) Roemer: 5 Aspect: 4.5 (one indecisive person voted for both Cavendish and Aspect) Galileo: 3 Rutherford: 3 Cavendish: 1.5 Hertz: 1 (in the comments to the Hertz post) Newton, Hubble, and Mössbauer […]
Technical Issues
We’re back after a fun weekend at Boskone– my various panels went well, and I got to meet, talk to, and hang out with some terrifically interesting people. I think the “Weird Quantum Phenomena” talk went rather well (it was scheduled as a half-hour talk, but there was nothing else scheduled for the room, so […]
Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right
Another reminder that Republicans don’t have a monopoly on offensive anti-science stupidity, from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who declares algebra useless in a column directed at a high-school drop-out. If, say, the school asked you for another year of English or, God forbid, history, so that you actually had to know something about your […]
Top Eleven: Time to Vote!
The Top Eleven is now complete. Here’s the full list of experiments, with links to my summaries: Galileo Galilei: ~1610: Discovery of the moons of Jupiter, and measurements of the acceleration of falling objects. Ole Roemer ~1675: Measurement of the speed of light by timing the eclipses of Io. Isaac Newton ~1700: Dispersion of light […]