RPM is dropping his Double Entendre Fridays, which threatens to cut off the world supply of really dorky sex jokes. But never fear, I’m here to pick it up with a physics version! Back when I was a lowly undergrad, I was the TA for an optics lab section, and was helping some students to […]
Month: April 2006
And the Problem is… What, Exactly?
The usual suspects are all upset about John Barrow’s crack about Richard Dawkins: When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer’s Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, “You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you’re not really a […]
Open Thread
I know the cookie bug is still afflicting some commenters– the folks who make Movable Type are aware of the bug, and it will be fixed with the next release, whenever that is. You can get around the bug by either deleting cookies from scienceblogs.com, or by logging out from TypeKey, if you have a […]
We’re Number Two!
A slightly more serious topic, also noted via Inside Higher Ed: Money magazine has deeemd “College Professor” the second-best job in America. The fact that it trails “software engineer” makes me a little dubious about their methodology, but there you go– I have the second-best job in the country. Of course, looking at the detailed […]
You Are Likely to Be Eaten by a Grue
Of special interest to Nathan, evidence that the process of dissertation writing is the same across disciplines: > work on dissertation You spend three hours reading five articles which have nothing to do with the dissertation. > work on dissertation You spend twenty minutes online reading about baseball. > tear out hair Taken. You find […]
But Who Would Win?
Via Inside Higher Ed, a story with the nearly unbeatable headline: Feds Pounce on Student Dresses As a Ninja. Why was a student running around the Georgia campus dressed as a ninja? Ransom told The Red & Black student newspaper that he had left a Wesley Foundation pirate vs. ninja event when he was snared […]
Call for Posts: Enough is Enough
Back when ScienceBlogs was all new and shiny, I did a couple of posts asking questions of the other bloggers. I got involved with other things after a while, and stopped posting those, so I’m not sure this will still work, but here’s a question for other ScienceBloggers, or science bloggers in general, that I […]
Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
The Kuiper Belt Controversy continues, with the lastest round showing up in the Times today: Planet Discovered Last Year, Thought to Be Larger Than Pluto, Proves Roughly the Same Size: The object — still unnamed more than a year after its discovery but tagged with the temporary designation 2003 UB313 and nicknamed Xena by the […]
CSI: Durham Follow-Up
Having previously mentioned the Duke lacrosse mess, I feel obliged to at least note the latest events: DNA tests failed to link any of the players to the crime, but the DA says the alleged victim has identified one of them. I don’t plan to make this a regularly recurring feature, because the whole thing […]
Every Day I Write (in) the (Lab) Book
One of the features I always like in the print edition of Seed is the lab notebook pictorial. Every month (or, at least, all three of the months that I’ve looked at the print edition), they publish a reproduction of a page or two from the lab notebook of a working scientist. It’s sort of […]