I know nothing about art or music. OK, that’s not entirely true– I know a little bit here and there. I just have no systematic knowledge of art or music (by which I mean fine art and classical music). I don’t know Beethoven from Bach, Renaissance from Romantics. I’m not even sure those are both […]
Month: July 2008
links for 2008-07-26
Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source A classic, having no relevance whatsoever to recent events. (tags: silly internet music) Setshot: Basketball for the Aging and Infirm: Women’s basketball star returns to action–at 50! ” Lieberman has taken old lady hoops to the next level. […]
Proportionate Response
I was just saying at dinner that I didn’t think there was anything interesting to say in response to the whole “cracker” kerfuffle. Then I got home, and saw Daniel Davies’s post, which is too good not to link. My hat’s off to him. No, I’m not going to quote what he said– it’s short, […]
Reader Request Thread
I’ve hit a point in the book-writing where I’m sort of spinning my wheels: waiting for beta-reader comments, fiddling with figures, looking at dog pictures for potential illustrations (my contract calls for me to provide some number of reproduction-quality pictures of the dog). This would be the perfect time to do some blogging. The problem […]
In Which I Defend Co-Education
There’s a piece at Inside Higher Ed today about everybody’s favorite topic, gender bias in science, that opens with an anecdote about a student who showed up to every office hour, and brought her friends. This is familiar to every faculty member, though the author apparently thinks it isn’t: I wonder if Tahnee, as much […]
links for 2008-07-25
Study: No gender differences in math performance “Whether they looked at average performance, the scores of the most gifted children or students’ ability to solve complex math problems, girls measured up to boys.” (tags: gender math education social-science news society) Kids Say The Darndest Things To Evil Spirits | The A.V. Club “[T]here comes a […]
NOVA ScienceNOW
I think there were ads running on ScienceBlogs for PBS’s new science “magazine” show NOVA ScienceNOW, which premiered a while back. I never got around to watching it until last night when I caught the start of it completely by accident (quite literally– I dropped a book on top of the tv remote, and it […]
links for 2008-07-24
A Priest Walks Into Qatar and . . . – washingtonpost.com “Talking with Americans about faith and religion… is like having coffee with Forrest Gump: pleasant enough, but not of much substance.” (tags: religion politics society culture academia education) How are we coming on Phoenix mission success? – The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary […]
Books, Books, Books
Via Tom, a big long list of books with which to showcase either my broad cultural background or pathetic cultural ignorance. As Tom’s original source notes, the claim that most Americans have only read six of these is kind of hard to credit, given that I was assigned more than six of them by the […]
A Question of Publishing Ethics
There’s a classic paper on the Quantum Zeno Effect that I discuss in Chapter 5 of the book. The paper does two tests of the effect, and presents the results in two bar graphs. They also provide the data in tabular form. My question is this: If I copy the data from the table, and […]