Ready for Her Close-Up

“Dude, what is your deal?” “What? I’m just taking a couple of pictures.” “A couple? You’ve taken, like, forty pictures of me already today. You’re cramping my style. I’m trying to go for a walk, here. I’ve got bushes to sniff, lawns to pee on, critters to chase– I don’t have time for photography.” “Sorry, […]

Free Money from Six Apart

If you like free money, Six Apart (owners of Movable Type and LiveJournal) have an offer for you: send them an email, and they’ll send you $30. “What’s the catch?” you say. Because there has to be a catch… And, indeed, there is a catch: the $30 is in the form of a gift certificate […]

Giant Machine Creates Science

America’s Finest News Source has the last word in generic science articles: According to the scientists, the electromagnetic science-maker will make atoms move and spin around very quickly, though spectators at the hearing said afterward they could not account for how one could get some atoms to move around faster than other ones if everything […]

Lazy Video Post: Head Butt!

Via a mailing list, two giraffes beating each other up: I’m sure that an actual biologist could explain something about what this odd behavior signifies, and there’s probably some fascinating biophysics in the way that they whip their necks around like that. But, really, in the end, my main reaction is “Dude! Head-butting giraffes!” (YouTube, […]

Superconducting Quantum News

Physics World had a news story about developments in quantum computation, covering two new papers in Nature: Coupling superconducting qubits via a cavity bus from the groups of Steve Girvin and Rob Schoelkopf at Yale, also described in this press release. Coherent quantum state storage and transfer between two phase qubits via a resonant cavity […]

Direct Instruction: Scripts are Not the Issue

The libertarian side of the blogosphere is all abuzz about “Direct Instruction” at the moment, thanks to a Marignal Revolution post by Alex Tabarrok touting the method: Ayres argues that large experimental studies have shown that the teaching method which works best is Direct Instruction (here and here are two non-academic discussions which summarizes much […]

Requiem for the Space Age

The New York Times is commemorating the 50th anniversary of Sputnik with a huge clump of articles about, well, space. I’m a little surprised that I haven’t seen more said about these– they turned up in my RSS feeds on Tuesday, but I’ve been both busy and slightly ill, and haven’t gotten around to blogging […]