My New Ride

For those who care, a picture of my new car (I picked it up Tuesday, but didn’t get around to cropping down the pictures until this morning): In keeping with Ford’s general policy, this shot is sort of a three-quarters angle– as Kate pointed out, the glossy brochure from the dealership doesn’t include any pictures […]

You Got General Relativity on My Protein Folding!

There’s a brief squib in the AIP Physics News Updates today about new work on protein folding. “Protein folding” is a simple-sounding term for a really difficult problem: protein molecules are made up of chains of amino acids, which can be bent into a huge number of different possible configurations. In nature, though, these proteins […]

More Job Searching in Academia

Doug Natelson posted the second installment in his inside view of the hiring process for academic physics positions, this one describing the campus visit/ interview process. Again, the description is mostly accurate for a much larger department than ours, at a research insitution, but the basic idea is the same. In our department, candidates making […]

You Are What You Eat

Over at the World’s Fair, David has a post with pictures showing a week’s worth of food for families in various countries. It’s pretty eye-opening– the total volume of food (less packaging) for a family of four in the US or England exceeds that eaten by fifteen people in Mali. Damn, but we’re gluttons.

PowerPoint Never Gets Old

Recently, my post about my SAT Challenge entry has leaped into the Top Five Most Emailed list over on the right, for what reason I can’t really say. That gives me two of the top five, though– eat my dust, Myers. Now there’s only that Deltoid character between me and world domination… The other Most […]

Academic Links Dump

Two quick links from yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed that a browser crash kept me from posting yesterday: 1) A story on a professor at Idaho who asks students to sign a waiver acknowledging that they may be offended by some of the material in his film studies class. There’s a bit of discussion of whether […]

Maryland vs. Illinois

The ACC-Big Ten Challenge is one of those things that seems like a really good idea on paper. They’re consistently two of the top basketball conferences in the country, and both have strongly partisan fans who will argue for the superiority of their conference over all others. Matching them up in the early season seems […]

Dog Bites Man

The Times this morning offers the “Well, duh!” headline of the day, and possibly the week: Energy Use Can Be Cut by Efficiency, Survey Says In other news, the Sun rose in the east this morning. Snark aside, there is an important point in the article: the efficiency savings they’re talking about can be realized […]

We Value Your Business, But Not That Highly

We’ve been having intermittent troubles with our DSL service for the last couple of months, and recently placed a service call to try to get Verizon to do something about it. Just a few minutes ago, I got a “courtesy call” from them, to inform me that they’re still working on the problem, and they […]

Integrate My iPod

Barring some sort of bizarre catastrophe, in a few short hours, I will take possession of a brand new Ford Freestyle. It’s got lots of nifty features that the Taurus doesn’t have, but there’s one thing it lacks: a tape deck. This is important because I have become accustomed to listening to my iPod in […]