Friday Random Eleven

Having been depressing and/or political for the last few posts, I feel like I ought to do something to lighten the mood. So here are some pop songs (extended beyond the canonical ten because it’s the last day of classes. Woo-hoo!):

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Categorized as Music

Bottomless Stupidity

Scalzi has the proper response to the Bush Administration’s latest insult to the collective intelligence. New York has no national monuments or icons, according to the Department of Homeland Security form obtained by ABC News. That was a key factor used to determine that New York City should have its anti-terror funds slashed by 40… Continue reading Bottomless Stupidity

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Categorized as Politics

Farewell to Warblogging

Matt Welch has a nice post-mortem for the 2001 blogging boom, in which he recalls the days when the whole post-September-11th-attacks thing seemed like it would really shake up American politics, and that weblogs were at the forefront of a grand realignment. That failed pretty spectacularly, didn’t it? It’s a good piece, both recalling what… Continue reading Farewell to Warblogging

Ray Davis Dead at 91

The post title pretty much says it. Raymond Davis Jr., who shared the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work on detecting neutrinos, died Wednesday. The Times obituatary showed up in my RSS feeds today. Davis got his dynamite money for the neutrino detection experiment that he ran for years in the Homestake mine, where… Continue reading Ray Davis Dead at 91

Sporting Event Live-Blogging

A List of Things Thrown Five Mintues Ago is live-blogging the National Spelling Bee. The Internet is large, and contains multitudes. (Via a comment at Making Light.)

Can I Pick ‘Em Or What?

Back in the fall of 2000, I was a post-doc working at Yale, working on a fairly major paper (at least from the my persepctive), and starting to apply for academic jobs at small liberal arts colleges. Kate and I also got engaged that September, so we started doing a bit of wedding planning. We… Continue reading Can I Pick ‘Em Or What?

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Categorized as Personal

The Physicist Trap

Mark Trodden has a post endorsing the BEC videogames at the University of Colordao’s Physics 2000 project. These are a bunch of Java applets demonstrating different aspects of the laser cooling and trapping process. I used to link them from my blog on Steelypips, but in the move to ScienceBlogs, I dropped the “Geek Stuff”… Continue reading The Physicist Trap

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Categorized as Physics

A Hubris-Crazed Monster from the Bowels of the American Dream

Via sennoma (I’m not sure that link will work, as the server appeared to be down this morning), Hunter S. Thompson’s obituary for Nixon: If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of… Continue reading A Hubris-Crazed Monster from the Bowels of the American Dream

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Categorized as Politics