Inspired by a thread at Fark, John Lynch asks an interesting question: If you could go back in time and tell your 12-year old self one thing, what would it be? Janet has some thoughts as well. Leaving aside obvious stuff like “Buy Microsoft stock,” what I would say to my twelve-year-old self is this: […]
Month: October 2006
Dawkins and Theology
This week’s New York Times Book Review features a review of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion that judges the book fairly harshly: The least satisfying part of this book is Dawkins’s treatment of the traditional arguments for the existence of God. The “ontological argument” says that God must exist by his very nature, since he […]
Three Feet High and Rising
We had some heavy rain on Friday, so when I went for a bike ride on Saturday, the Mohawk was pretty high. It was particularly impressive at Lock 8: A closer view is below the fold:
I Am a Unique Flower
The “How many people have your name?” thing has come across my RSS feed a dozen or so times already, most recently via the very common John Lynch. I was finally bored enough to put my name in, and here’s what I get: There are 0 people in the U.S. named Chad Orzel. While both […]
Falsify Data, Go to Jail
The New York Times Magazine this week has a troubling story of scientific misconduct, involving the fraudulent research of Eric Poehlman: Before his fall from grace, Poehlman oversaw a lab where nearly a dozen students and postdoctoral researchers carried out his projects. His research earned him recognition among his peers and invitations to speak at […]
The Doggie In the Water
We have a small ornamental pond in the back yard, with a little bubbler in it to keep it from turning into nothing but a stagnant mosquito ranch. Here we find the Queen of Niskayuna contemplating the pond: (I’m not quite sure what she’s looking for, but it was cute. Sometimes she drinks the water, […]
New Teaching Evaluation Study
Inside Higher Ed, in their “Quick Takes” points to a new study of teaching evaluations that they summarize thusly: Students care more about teaching quality than professorial rank when evaluating professors, and professors who receive good evaluations from one group of students typically continue to do so in the future, and to have students who […]
Conference Blogging
It’s not the sort of thing I usually follow, but Ethan Zuckerman is blogging about the talks at the Pop!Tech conference (Pop!Tech 2006 site). There’s an impressive variety of topics, and Ethan gives good summaries of the talks (well, at least, the summaries themselves are pretty readable– I can’t speak for the accuracy, as I […]
Bipolar Basketball
Not a lot of love for the ACC Preview post from earlier this week, and I got buried in work, so I didn’t get a chance to write up the Big East and A-10 previews. I’ll try to do at least one this weekend, but until then, the three basketball fans among my readers may […]
It’s Not Science Without Graphs
After months and months of nothing, behold! Signal! Explanation below the fold.