Kij Johnson’s “Ponies” is the second on Locus’s Short Story Club list of award-nominated stories. More than that, though, it’s an actuall award winner, having claimed a share of the Nebula for Best Short Story. I enjoyed Johnson’s two novels, The Fox Woman and Fudoki quite a bit, so I’m happy to see her doing […]
Month: May 2011
Links for 2011-05-28
Bob Dylan is turning 70: Let’s take a look at some of the weird shit he’s done | Music | The A.V. Club Twin Cities “Dylan’s musical brilliance is already a solidified fact, his onstage antics have already been covered, and plenty more ink has been spilled about his standing as a prickly interview subject, so […]
Calendrical Innovation
Union operates on a trimester calendar, with three ten-week terms (September-November, January-March, April-June), rather than the two 14-15 week semesters used by most other colleges and universities. This has some advantages in terms of flexibility– even science and engineering students get to take terms abroad, which is harder to swing in a semester system– and […]
What Goes Around Is Really Round: “Improved measurement of the shape of the electron”
The big physics story of the week is undoubtedly the new limit on the electric dipole moment (EDM) of the electron from Ed Hinds’s group at Imperial College in the UK. As this is something I wrote a long article on for Physics World, I’m pretty psyched to see this getting lots of media attention, […]
PNAS: Richard Lobinske, Hazardous Waste Manager
(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Richard Lobinske, a Hazardous Waste Manager (meaning he handles chemicals, such as these decades-old pesticides, not particularly noxious low-level employees). The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options […]
Links for 2011-05-27
The Power of Hunger and Stairs: House of Stairs | tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Blog posts “House of Stairs may be one of the most disturbing and memorable young adult science fiction books ever. I first encountered it in junior high, and it left a chill that has never completely left. Written […]
Thor’s-day Toddler Blogging 052611
Kate is off at Wiscon (or at least en route– her flights are all screwed up), and SteelyKid is off at Grandma and Grandpa’s for the weekend. Which means I don’t have an Appa picture this week, but in honor of the pagan origins of the name of the day, here’s a picture of SteelyKid […]
The Test(ing) of Time: Measuring the Performance of a Stopwatch
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m schedule to teach a class on “A Brief History of Timekeeping” next winter term as part of the Scholars Research Seminar program. Even though I have a hundred other things to do, I continue to think about this a lot. One of the goals of the course is to introduce […]
PNAS: Darren Anderson, Start-Up Chief Technology Officer
(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Darren Anderson, the Chief Technology Officer for Vive Nano. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their future careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.–post-doc–academic-job track.) 1) What is your non-academic […]
Links for 2011-05-26
Career Advice: 10 Tips for Junior Faculty – Inside Higher Ed The usual mix of sound general advice and “Thank God I don’t work at a big university/ in the humanities.” (tags: academia jobs tenure inside-higher-ed) 6 Civil War Myths Everyone Believes (That Are Total B.S.) | Cracked.com “Now, we know what you’re thinking: What […]