Steve Gimbel at Philosopher’s Playground is calling for the abolition of lab classes:p> As an undergrad I majored in both philosophy and physics and I have a confession my former physics profs will surely not like — everything I know about physics, I learned from my theory classes. You see, science classes come in two […]
Month: March 2007
Class Issues in Perspective
Yes, the unofficial Admissions Policy Month continues here at Uncertain Principles. The problem really is that it’s Admissions Season in academia, so all the navel-gazing academic journals are loaded with articles about it, which means that having wandered into talking about it, I can’t get out without a major effort of will… Today’s worthwhile article […]
Stuck in a (Shining) Moment You Can’t Get Out Of
Via Dave Sez, a good Washington Post article about the post-Maryland career of Byron Mouton: Five years have passed since Mouton helped Maryland win the national title the last time it was held in Atlanta, but the significance of that weekend still casts a shadow over his daily life in the American Basketball Association. Since […]
Class Issues in College Admissions
I can stop blogging about college admisions any time I want. Really. In one of the previous posts, commenter AO noted a New York Review of Books article on class issues in college admissions. here’s the article in question, a review of several recent books about how the current college admissions system favors the wealthy […]
A Smell of Petroleum Pervades Throughout
A little while after dinner last night, I started to feel achy and chilled and kind of light-headed, so I retired to bed. Where I had really spectacular fever dreams about… blogging. Somehow, I had come up with the greatest blog post in human history, or some such. I can’t recall what it was, but […]
In Which I Commit Carpentry
Here’s a project from a couple of weeks ago, that I forgot to post: “Big deal,” you say, “It’s an ugly box.” Ah, but what’s under the box?
Merit Scholarships, Threat or Menace?
This will probably cause some eye-rolling on the part of my local readers, but there’s an interesting article in Inside Higher Ed on the real effect of merit scholarships, which is the term of art for “money given to students for reasons other than financial need.” This is a hot topic, as the article notes: […]
Beyond the Standard (Cosmological) Model
There’s a meeting now underway in London on Outstanding Questions for the Standard Cosmological Model, which is the term for the current Big Bang/ Inflation/ Dark Matter/ Dark Energy/ Accelerating Universe view of the history of the universe. Tommaso Dorigo is attending, and reports on the talks on his blog (and also a description of […]
College Admissions: Inside the Sausage Factory
It’s weird how I get into ruts here. I’m not usually obsessed with the subject of college admissions, but it came up recently, and now there’s just one article after another about it (because, of course, it’s college admissions season). I’m getting a little tired of it, but not so tired that I want to […]
When Grad Students Snap
There’s a story in the New York Times today about a new movie on the infamous Iowa grad school shootings: On Nov. 1, 1991, outraged that his doctoral thesis had been passed over for an academic prize, a young physicist at the University of Iowa named Gang Lu opened fire at a physics department meeting. […]