Joseph Lowery wins the Inauguration. Obama’s speech was no slouch, either, but anybody who gets a hundred thousand people to yell “Amen!” wins. I’m wearing a T-shirt today that says “I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.” And I can’t really express how happy I will be… Continue reading “Let all those who do justice and love mercy, say amen.”
Month: January 2009
links for 2009-01-20
A Sample Book Proposal: Newton and the Counterfeiter | ScienceOnline09 "I donât mean to suggest that this is a generalizable model, just an example of one approach that worked in the marketplace. As noted in the Wiki page for the session â to be moderated by David Munger and myselfâbesides the fact that this proposal… Continue reading links for 2009-01-20
Students Know What Physicists Believe, But They Don’t Agree
This is flagged as a ResearchBlogging post, but it’s a different sort of research than I usually write up here, as this is a paper from Physical Review Special Topics– Physics Education Research. This is, however, a legitimate and growing area of research in physics departments, and some of the findings from the PER field… Continue reading Students Know What Physicists Believe, But They Don’t Agree
Checklist: Check!
SteelyKid was delivered by Caesarean section (MacDuff won’t stand a chance…). They let me in to the operating room just before the moment of delivery, and I stuck around while they cleaned her up and did the early tests that they do on newborns, before they brought her over for me and Kate to see.… Continue reading Checklist: Check!
Course Report: Modern Physics
Back in the “Uncomfortable Questions” thread, Thony C suggested that I should do running updates on the course I’m teaching now. I meant to get to this sooner, but last weekend’s bout with norovirus kind of got in the way… I like the idea, though, so below the fold are a bunch of comments on… Continue reading Course Report: Modern Physics
Why I Won’t Make It as a Philosopher
I think I missed this the first time around, but this weekend, I watched the bloggingheads conversation about quantum mechanics between Sean Carroll and David Albert. In it, David makes an extended argument against the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics (starting about 40:00 into the conversation). The problem is, I can’t quite figure out what… Continue reading Why I Won’t Make It as a Philosopher
Closed Notebook Science
Over at Biocurious, Philip is thinking about digital notebooks, and has found a system that works for him: My computer algebra system of choice is Mathematica, and because of Mathematica’s notebook system, it became extremely straightforward to include sufficient commentary among the analysis and calculations. The important “working” details of my day are recorded on… Continue reading Closed Notebook Science
links for 2009-01-19
Information Processing: The Age of Computing "Historians of science have seen fit to ignore the history of the great discoveries in applied physics, engineering and computer science, where real scientific progress is nowadays to be found. Computer science in particular has changed and continues to change the face of the world more thoroughly and more… Continue reading links for 2009-01-19
From Mooney to Zimmer
Looking for a way to kill some time on a Sunday morning? You could do worse than yesterday’s bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation between Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer: It’s a wide-ranging conversation, covering what to expect from the Obama administration, artifical life, the possibility of life on Mars, Sanjay Gupta, and the future of science… Continue reading From Mooney to Zimmer
Andrew Wyeth
Arts & Letters Daily has an item announcing the death of Andrew Wyeth (the link goes to the New York Times obit). This is noteworthy to me because he’s one of a very few artists whose work (in poster form) has ever hung on my wall. Specifically, this painting, titled “Soaring”: I picked it up… Continue reading Andrew Wyeth