A big event took place at noon Eastern time today. That’s right, the soccer World Cup has started, and as I type this, Germany leads Costa Rica 2-1. Oh, yeah, and because the science nerds need something to do while the sports fans are all obsessing over soccer, the new, improved ScienceBlogs front page launched,… Continue reading The Big Kick-Off
Month: June 2006
True Lab Stories: Maybe You Should Ask a Rocket Scientist
It’s been a while since I did a True Lab Story, and it seems like an appropriate sort of topic for a rainy Friday when I have grades to finish. I’m running out of really good personal anecdotes, but there are still a few left before I have to move entirely to hearsay. And who… Continue reading True Lab Stories: Maybe You Should Ask a Rocket Scientist
New Frontiers in Alternative Dispute Resolution
Kate mentioned this story to me yesterday, and today, it’s made the New York Times: Fed up with the inability of two lawyers to agree on a trivial issue in an insurance lawsuit, a federal judge in Florida this week ordered them to “convene at a neutral site” and “engage in one (1) game of… Continue reading New Frontiers in Alternative Dispute Resolution
Friday Dog Blogging
It’s very, very hard to be the Queen of Niskayuna:
Best Novels of the 1990’s
Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll (SF reviewer and walking True Lab Story) is discussing the best novels of the 1990’s. He doesn’t have the “SF” in there, but it’s sort of implicit, because that’s what James does. Keeping up the literary/ pop culture bent of the last couple of weeks (there’ll be science stuff… Continue reading Best Novels of the 1990’s
The ScienceBlogs Diet, Mid-Year
Because it’s not science without graphs: (Click for larger image.)
Next: Pot-Bellied Elephants
Look– miniature dinosaurs! OK, fine, they’re not that small: These “dwarf” dinosaurs were slightly longer and heavier than a car, Sander said. “They stopped growing when they reached 6 metres [20 feet] in length and a ton in body mass,” he estimated. Their brachiosaur cousins, by contrast, were up to 45 metres (148 feet) long… Continue reading Next: Pot-Bellied Elephants
How the Other Half Grades
My Quantum Optics class this term is a junior/ senior level elective, one of a set of four or five such classes that we rotate through, offering one or two a year. We require physics majors to take one of these classes in order to graduate, and encourage grad-school-bound students to take as many as… Continue reading How the Other Half Grades
The Mystery of Series
Over at Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse recommends mystery writers, and touches on something that’s always puzzled me about the genre: Like Symons [Robert Barnard] has largely eschewed the detective series, which is probably has kept his profile lower than it could have been, but there is one recurring character–the english way of death. I’ve really… Continue reading The Mystery of Series
The Benefits of Dumber Cookbooks
A little while back, Eugene Wallingford wrote about the dumbing-down of cookbooks as a metaphor for computer science education. As we get a fair number of student in introductory calculus-based physics who can barely take a derivative of a polynomial, I have some sympathy with what he describes. The cookbook thing, though, is interesting from… Continue reading The Benefits of Dumber Cookbooks