Links for 2011-01-31

Rutherford’s alchemy solved Atom’s mystery “He was the first to achieve the alchemists’ dream of changing one element into another, yet he wasn’t an alchemist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry, but he wasn’t a chemist. The work for which he received the Prize was carried out in Canada, but he wasn’t a […]

Links for 2011-01-30

slacktivist: People power in Egypt “We’ve been “promoting democracy” as though the first and most important step involved conducting elections. But the health and success of a democracy isn’t determined as much by the things the public is able to  decide by majority vote as by those things that cannot be voted away. Democracy doesn’t […]

Links for 2011-01-29

The ‘scandal’ of the kilogram (Blog) – physicsworld.com “That’s the name of the game in metrology these days – finding a way of defining mass without just resorting embarrassingly, as we do now, to a lump of metal in the basement of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) outside Paris and saying “that’s […]

Links for 2011-01-28

Promoting Science: MythBusters vs. Sport Science | Wired Science | Wired.com “So, is Sport Science good for science? Is it even science? What about MythBusters? You know it and I know it – I am biased. However, let me pretend that I am not and compare Sport Science and MythBusters in terms of scienceyness.” (tags: science […]

It’s About Time by David Mermin

Subtitled “Understanding Einstein’s Relativity,” David Mermin’s It’s About Time is another book (like An Illustrated Guide to Relativity) that grew out of a non-majors course on physics that Mermin offers at Cornell. It’s also an almost-forty-years-later update of an earlier book he wrote on the same subject. And it’s been a really good resource for […]

Links for 2011-01-27

The Myth of Charter Schools by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books “If we are serious about improving our schools, we will take steps to improve our teacher force, as Finland and other nations have done. That would mean better screening to select the best candidates, higher salaries, better support and mentoring […]