There’s a lot of stuff in the news lately about asteroids, what with the Dawn mission orbiting Vesta, and the talk of a manned asteroid mission as a possible future step for NASA. Prompted by this, I’m going to dip into the territory usually occupied by Matt and Rhett, and ask a somewhat silly question: […]
Month: July 2011
Financiers Aren’t Rocket Scientists
Kevin Drum is puzzled by default panic: If we run out of money, the federal government will stop paying some of its bills. That’s bad, and it will quite likely have a negative effect on the economy. Corporations are right to be apprehensive about this. But that’s all that will happen. Treasury bonds will continue […]
Launch Pad
For the past few years, astronomer and SF author Mike Brotherton has been running the Launch Pad Workshop, a program bringing interested SF authors to Wyoming (where he’s on the faculty) to learn about modern astronomy. The idea is to teach writers the real facts about the weird and wonderful things going on in astronomy […]
Links for 2011-07-27
Workers of the world unite | slacktivist “So the NFL lockout has ended in some kind of deal that I would summarize here except that the details of professional sports contract negotiations make my eyes glaze over and, since I’m no longer getting paid to edit NFL labor stories for a daily paper, I’ve reverted […]
The Bose Condensation Theory of Literature: “Why We Love Bad Writing” at Readercon
Michelle Sagara’s rant about convention panelist behavior reminded me that I never did get around to writing up the other panel from this year’s Readercon that I wanted to say something about, namely “Why We Love Bad Writing” James D. Macdonald, Anil Menon, Resa Nelson, Eric M. Van, Harold Torger Vedeler (leader). In the Guardian, […]
The Physics of Frustration: “Quantum Simulation of Frustrated Classical Magnetism in Triangular Optical Lattices”
One of the benefits of having joined AAAS in order to get a reduced registration fee at their meeting is that I now have online access to Science at home. Including the Science Express advance online papers, which I don’t usually get on campus. Which means that I get the chance to talk about the […]
Revenge of the Morning People: What to Do with 8am Classes?
The Dean Dad asks a question on the minds of lots of faculty: how do you handle early-morning classes? Wise and worldly readers, have you had good experiences with 8 a.m. classes? Does anybody know of any useful empirical studies done at the college level of the effects of 8 a.m. classes? Is this basically […]
Links for 2011-07-26
A Bedtime Story | Easily Distracted “Now this is a new thing in my lifetime, I grant you: a Congressman who is going to run on the argument that it’s time for America to take its place among the poor and struggling nations of the world. I don’t have to study go to Zimbabwe any […]
A Very Significant Picture
Here is a very significant picture: “What’s significant about that?” you ask. “It’s slightly out of focus and oddly framed. Why should I care?” You should care because of the photographer: That’s right, SteelyKid has a camera now– we gave her my old Canon A95. She was playing with Kate’s smaller point-and-shoot camera (I forget […]
Quantitative Analysis of Bullshit in Physics Abstracts
Via Bee, we have the BlaBlaMeter, a website that purports to “unmask without mercy how much bullshit hides in any text.” Like Bee, I couldn’t resist throwing it some scientific text, but rather than pulling stuff off the arxiv, I went with the abstracts of the papers I published as a grad student, which I […]