The History Channel ran a two-hour program on Einstein last night. I had meant to plug this in advance, but got distracted by the Screamy Baby Fun-Time Hour yesterday, and didn’t have time to post. The show restricted itself more or less to the period from 1900, just before his “miracle year” in 1905, to […]
Month: November 2008
links for 2008-11-18
Kevin Drum – Mother Jones Blog: Conservatives and Unions "Overturning Roe is certainly a conservative priority, but it’s only been on the list for about 30 years. Fighting unions has been on the list for more like 130 years. If it’s not central to the conservative identity in America, I don’t know what is." (tags: […]
Nobody Cares About Superconductivity
Nobody reading blogs, anyway. Doug Natelson asked for comments on a recent workshop on iron arsenide superconductors yesterday, and the count of comments still stands at zero. The under-representation of condensed matter physicists among bloggers and blog readers, relative to their abundance in the general population, really is amazing.
Academic Stimulus Package
Regarding the current financial crisis, a consensus has developed that the government needs to do something, and do something dramatic. The argument is, basically, that the normal sources of cash flow that might stimulate the economy out of recession have dried up, either through idiotic investments, or out of fear caused by all the idiotic […]
Think Before You Plot
There’s a link in today’s links dump to a post from Pictures of Numbers, a rarely-updated blog on the visual presentation of data (via Swans On Tea, I think). There’s some really good stuff there about how to make graphs that are easy to read and interpret. I would like to dissent mildly from one […]
links for 2008-11-17
Information Processing: Central limit theorem and securitization: how to build a CDO "[T]he mathematical concepts related to the current financial crisis leave over 95 percent of our population completely baffled. If your Ivy League education didn’t prepare you to understand the following, please ask for your money back." (tags: economics math statistics blogs) Pictures of […]
Strain to SEE
When I’m in the right mood, I’m a sucker for really awful sci-fi movies. For example, Saturday night I stayed up far too late to watch the end of the tv-movie version of The Andromeda Strain, based on the book by the prolific and recently deceased Luddite Fiction writer Michael Crichton. It’s been twenty-plus years […]
links for 2008-11-16
How the subprime good guys give home loans to poor people, strengthen communities, and still make a profit. – By Daniel Gross – Slate Magazine "Since 2003, this for-profit firm based in Orange County–home to busted subprime behemoths such as Ameriquest–has issued $220 million worth of mortgages in the Golden State’s subprime killing fields. More […]
Me On TV (On the Internet)
As mentioned briefly the other day, I recorded a Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation with Jennifer Ouellette on Thursday. The full diavlog has now been posted, and I can embed it here: This was the first time I’ve done one of these, and it was an interesting experience.
… and the Network You Rode In On
Yesterday afternoon, SteelyKid and I dozed off in the living room recliner. When I woke up, it had been three hours since she last ate, roughly her usual between-feedings interval, but she was still sound asleep on my lap. Kate was due home in half an hour or so, though, so I wasn’t sure whether […]