Monday is the decision deadline for accepted students to decide whether they’re coming here next year, and we’ve had a slow parade of people getting tours of the department and suchlike over the last few weeks. We’ve also had a couple “Open House” events, where accepted students and their families are invited to campus to […]
Month: April 2006
Dear Mr. Fantasy
The NFL Draft is this weekend, and ESPN is entering their 57th day of intense, round-the-clock coverage of the draft. I have one simple thing to say to them: Stop. You’re hurting America. This isn’t even a real sports story– this is a fantasy sports story. This is like college basketball recruiting, only even less […]
Why Are You Asking Me?
I’ve found myself in the weird position of giving career advice twice in the last week and a half. Once was to a former student, which I sort of understand, while the second time was a grad student in my former research group, who I’ve never met. I still don’t really feel qualified to offer […]
Methadone Basketball
In a previous post, I dissed the NBA as being a haven for ugly pseudo-basketball. It does serve a purpose, though, as a sort of methadone program to ease the way down from the hoops-jukie high of March to the Great Sports Desert between the end of the NBA and the start of the NFL. […]
Greetings from the Swampland
Why is this dog sulking, you ask? (Answer below the fold)
Thank You for Grief-Pimping
Kate and I went to see Thank You for Smoking yesterday (Short review: About as good an adaptation of the original book as you could hope for, and much more my thing than Kate’s). The set of trailers we got was generally excruciating– lots of film-festival material about quirky families being awful to one another. […]
Inside the Sausage Factory
As someone who reads a lot, I have a certain amount of interest in the way publishing works. It’s sort of fascinating to get to hear about the day to day operations, and how a manuscript becomes a book. In that vein, alg on LiveJournal (I’m hazy about whose names are public and whose aren’t, […]
Most Shafted Physicist: A Biased Response
Over at the Seed editors blog, Maggie Wittlin asks who’s the most overlooked scientist: Which scientist (in your field or beyond) has been most seriously shafted? This could be taken two ways: Who deserves to be more recognized, revered and renowned today than he or she is? Who got passed over, ridiculed, etc. the most […]
True Lab Stories: The Definition of Insanity
I’m still feeling pretty lethargic, but I hope that will improve when I get to lecture about the EPR paradox in Quantum Optics today (it’s going to be kind of a short lecture, unless I can ad-lib an introduction to Bell’s Theorem at the end of the class, but then I’ve been holding them late […]
What’s On Your Syllabus?
When I teach introductory classes, I use a somewhat more complicated homework policy than most of my colleagues. As a result, my syllabus tends to run longer than theirs, by at least a page or two. I sometimes worry that this is excessive, but happily, Inside Higher Ed is here to prove me wrong: By […]