Two nights before my college graduation, I was having a beer in one of the two bars in town, and one of the Deans was at the bar, holding forth. “Do you know,” he said to me and a couple of other students, “there are five people in your class who aren’t going to graduate […]
Month: October 2006
Single-Sex Education
There’s been a lot of discussion of single-sex education in blogdom recently, in the wake of new rules allowing more single-sex schools. Matt Yglesias offers links, and Kevin Drum expresses concern: It turns out, though, that my real fear is just the opposite: what if we try it and Becks turns out to be right? […]
Thoughts on Survey Seminars
I’ve had a tab open for a while containing an Inside Higher Ed article on a new approach to introducing science at Emory University: David Lynn, who chairs the department of chemistry at Emory University, spoke about Emory’s seminar program for entering freshmen. All Emory freshmen must take a seminar the first semester and the […]
Defying the Nobel Prize Jinx
I’m lecturing to our first-year seminar today about Bose-Einstein Condensation, using slides that haven’t been updated since 2002. Given the pace of research in the field, that’s a little crazy, so I spent a good while last night looking at pretty pictures on the Ketterle group web site, among others, so I can report on […]
Because I Need More Stress
Steinn reports a new metric for research productivity that some people are using: the “H-number”: The H-score, takes all your papers, ranked by citation count; then you take the largest “k” such that the kth ranked paper has at least k citations. So, you start off with a H-score of zero. If your 5th highest […]
Atheist Church Socials?
It’s mildly ironic that the recent Dawkins discussion has centered around whether he does or does not do an adequate job of addressing the logical arguments for the existence of God, because that’s one of the few areas where I probably agree with him. I don’t find any of those arguments particularly convincing, either. There […]
Professional Big East Preview
If my thoughts on the upcoming Big East basketball season aren’t good enough for you, the New York Times gets in on the act. Actually, that’s a story about the pre-season coaches’ poll, in which Pitt and Georgetown are picked to finish at the top, and Syracuse is picked third, with one first-place vote. So, […]
Easterbrook on the Lancet
Lots of people are jumping on Gregg Easterbrook for his remarks on the Lancet study of deaths in Iraq. In particular, fellow ScienceBlogger Tim Lambert blasts him for saying: The latest silly estimate comes from a new study in the British medical journal Lancet, which absurdly estimates that since March 2003 exactly 654,965 Iraqis have […]
No Blog For You!
Our DSL was down for a good chunk of the evening, which means I didn’t get to pre-write any blog posts. It also means I haven’t been able to keep up with the comments on recent posts, which is actually probably a good thing, because given how tired I was last night, I probably would’ve […]
Local Realism, Loopholes, and the God Delusion
The recent discussion of reviews of The God Delusion has been interesting and remarkably civil, and I am grateful to the participants for both of those facts. In thinking a bit more about this, I thought of a good and relatively non-controversial analogy to explain the point I’ve been trying to make about the reviews […]