Kate has posted a report on Boskone talk by Brother Guy Consolmagno, on hunting for meteorites in Antarctica. Guy is a Jesuit brother, and also a research astronomer for the Vatican, and a better example of the peaceful coexistence of science and religion would be hard to find. He’s also a very entertaining speaker. I […]
Month: February 2007
Maryland vs. North Carolina
Well, I didn’t expect this… Between that and the Oscars, I’ll never cut it as a telephone psychic. I came back from the intramural game (we lost to a team of football players who had a slight strength and conditioning edge over us) with about 11 minutes left, and it looked pretty much like what […]
Teacher-Firing Followup
There are some comments in the earlier post about firing teachers that probably deserve responses. They don’t deserve the responses they would’ve gotten yesterday, though, as I was grading lab reports all morning, and the snark level was high. Having cooled off a bit, I’ll try to get back to that today (day job permitting). […]
Scorsese Is Doomed
A few days ago, Inside Higher Ed did an Oscar preview, and asked five academics who study film to predict the Best Picture winner. Three of the five picked The Departed to win, and one of the other two preferred it to his predicted winner (Babel). Clearly, Scorsese is doomed to lose yet again. Scalzi’s […]
College Hoops Round-Up
Syracuse beat Providence yesterday, in a good old-fashioned Big East game– on a critical late-game play, a Providence player got smacked across the face hard enough to turn his head, and no foul was called. He missed the shot, Syracuse got the rebound, and it was all over but the free-throw shooting. This was a […]
Original Paella
(Recipe from Mark Bittman’s The Best Recipes in the World) Chicken Stock: 3.5 cups Saffron Threads: 1.0 pinch Extra Virgin Olive Oil: 3.0 Tbs Onion, Minced: 1.0 medium Rice, Short/Medium Grain: 2.0 cups Shrimp, Cut Up: 2.0 cups Salt, Pepper: to taste Parsley: for garnish Pre-heat the oven to 500 F, and warm the stock […]
5-7-5
Haiku about research (Link via Crooked Timber) Go cast your vote now
Iain (M.) Banks Interviewed
Speaking (as we were) of the glamourour life of writers, Bookslut points to an interview with Iain Banks. If you’re not familiar with Banks, he’s a prolific author who alternates “mainstream” literary novels (as “Iain Banks”) with genre SF novels (as “Iain M. Banks”). With a very few exceptions, his books are very smart, fairly […]
The Writing Life
OVer at the Whatever, Senor BaconCat has two long posts on the glamorous life of a successful SF writer: one breaking down his income from SF writing in detail, and the other talking about why he’s talking about money. The comment threads are also lively and interesting in their own right. It’s particularly funny to […]
Firing Idiots
Kevin Drum and Mark Kleiman are both talking about firing teacehrs. Being moderate, wonkish guys rather than fire-breathing ideologues, they mostly say sensible things– Kevin notes that it’s really difficult to document bad teaching, and Mark has a particularly good point about teacher pay: [T]he brute fact is that we’re not currently paying teachers enough […]