The NCAA men’s basketball tournament bracket was announced yesterday, which has kicked off the usual round of people “predicting” the outcomes based on totally silly criteria like the Academic Progress Rate of the schools in question. This is, of course, completely frivolous. What you really need is solid, relevant information. Like predictions based on the… Continue reading The NCAA Physics Tournament
Month: March 2009
Non-Locality Is Created Locally
Scientific American has an article by David Albert and Rivka Galchen with the New Scientist-ish headline Was Einstein Wrong?: A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity and the sub-head “Entanglement, like many quantum effects, violates some of our deepest intuitions about the world. It may also undermine Einstein’s special theory of relativity.” An alternate title for… Continue reading Non-Locality Is Created Locally
What’s Your Name Again?
The Dean Dad takes a question from a reader on a topic of perpetual interest: How do other teachers remember their students’ names? I confess, I am AWFUL with names. My wife and I have gone to the same small church for 20 years and I still go blank on names of people we’ve been… Continue reading What’s Your Name Again?
Not Your Normal Press Release
EurekAlert offered a press release from the American Physical Society over the weekend that may indicate that someone in the press office has won a round of drinks: The American Physical Society (APS) is elated that the Senate has approved the FYO9 Omnibus Bill, which will allow scientists to continue cutting-edge research that will lead… Continue reading Not Your Normal Press Release
links for 2009-03-16
Book Vs. Film: Watchmen | Books | A.V. Club Moore and Gibbons vs. Zach Snyder (tags: comics movies literature books avclub) First Lensman (1950), by E.E. âDocâ Smith | Books | A.V. Club "First Lensman combined a lot of elements that, over the course of reading classic science fiction, have come to drive me nuts:… Continue reading links for 2009-03-16
Lazy Sports Writing Hall of Fame: William Rhoden
I’ve lost a lot of sleep this weekend staying up late to watch Syracuse games, so I’m only getting to some of the Friday articles in my RSS feeds now. I don’t want to let this utterly worthless column by William Rhoden of the New York Times pass without comment though. It’s ostensibly about the… Continue reading Lazy Sports Writing Hall of Fame: William Rhoden
Quick Basketball Notes
I haven’t written much about basketball this year, for the simple reason that I haven’t watched much basketball this year– between SteelyKid, the book, and my day job, I just haven’t had time. This weekend, though, I watched a whole bunch of hoops, mostly involving my two teams, Syracuse and Maryland. Yesterday was a bad… Continue reading Quick Basketball Notes
links for 2009-03-15
Cocktail Party Physics: measles, mumps, rubellaor autism "Let me throw just a few statistics at you, just to illustrate how important vaccines have been in the increasing quality of public health in the US alone. * The incidence of polio dropped to nearly zero by 1960 (polio vaccine introduced in 1955) * Measles cases dropped… Continue reading links for 2009-03-15
Talk Like a Physicist
One of last year’s highest-traffic posts was, weirdly, Talk Like a Physicist. I say “weirdly” because it wasn’t much more than a link to Tom at Swans On Tea. It’s that time of year again, and Tom’s back with an updated list of vocabulary for your physicist-talking needs. I don’t have much to add, but… Continue reading Talk Like a Physicist
Watch Your Back, David Attenborough
One of my colleagues in biology just finished his Comparative Vertebrate anatomy course. For the final class projects, he has teams of students make little videos presenting the results of their research into some aspect of vertebrate anatomy. Such as, for example, this Sesame Street episode on flying snakes: The full set of videos are… Continue reading Watch Your Back, David Attenborough