Everybody and their brother is doing the “which Significant SF books have you read?” thing today, so I might as well play along. The list is below, and just because I’m lazy, I’ve opted to strike out the ones I haven’t read, rather than bolding the ones I have. It’s less typing that way. There… Continue reading Significant SF
Month: March 2007
Dark Aliens in the Times
A good weekend for science in the Sunday New York Times, with a nice magazine article about dark matter and dark energy, and also a piece about the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), inexplicably located in the Book Review section (the article, that is, not the aliens). It’s probably possible to draw some sort of… Continue reading Dark Aliens in the Times
Let’s Hear it for the Little Guy 5
The site was silent yesterday because Kate and I drove down to The City to surprise my grandmother and father (her birthday was yesterday, his is Tuesday), and see a Broadway show (about which more later, maybe). That means a slight delay in the accolades for some little guys, but fortunately only one automatic bid… Continue reading Let’s Hear it for the Little Guy 5
Vitale in the Hall of Fame?
Stealing a topic from sports radio: Dick Vitale is a finalist for the Basketball Hall of Fame. Should he get in? Much as I hate the guy, I think I have to say yes. He’s an absolutely terrible game announcer at this point– more often than not, he’s so busy babbling about other teams, other… Continue reading Vitale in the Hall of Fame?
Pimp Me Pop Music
Light blogging today, because I’m having muscle spasms in my neck and shoulder again. Blogrolling and typing aggravate that, so there will be minimal posting for the rest of the weekend. To fill a bit of space, though, here’s a call for music recommendations: I bought a whole slew of Crowded House/ Finn Brothers stuff… Continue reading Pimp Me Pop Music
My Teams Stink Again
Karma is a bitch. I left work a little early yesterday, because I saw that both Maryland and Syracuse were playing at 2:00, on ESPN networks, and I was finished with my meeting in time to catch most of the second half. Not only did I get home to find that the Maryland game was… Continue reading My Teams Stink Again
March Meeting Updates
Hamish Johnston is live-blogging like a pro, and has entries on invisibility, buckets of BEC, biophysics, and the toy show. Travis Hime knows more than you do about superconducting qubits. And that’s it for the moment.
Conference Blogging
I’ll post a March Meeting update later, but if you like your conferences a little more wide-ranging, Ethan Zuckerman provides extensive reporting from the TED Conference. The speakers range from Steven Pinker and Murray Gell-Mann to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, so there’s a little something for everyone.
Federal Agency or Basketball Conference?
This idea is stolen from Colin Cowherd, a pinhead on ESPN Radio, but even a blind pig finds the occasional acorn. I’m going to list a bunch of abbreviations below, and you tell me which are the initials of conferences in Division I basketball, which are agencies of the US Government, and which could be… Continue reading Federal Agency or Basketball Conference?
The Myth of Post-Tenure Collapse
Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake Young has an anti-tenure post that repeats one of the classic mistaken arguments: 1) Tenure supports bad teachers as much as it supports unproductive researchers. I can’t tell you the number of bad lecturers that I have had over the years. It has to be like 90%. Science in particular… Continue reading The Myth of Post-Tenure Collapse