links for 2009-04-02

"The Hold Steady’s Tuesday night performance at Valentine’s was sold-out weeks in advance of the show, which left a lot of mopers without a ticket or a hope of getting in.

Those who’d jumped on the chance early on, though, were treated to a walloping dose of Craig Finn and crew, the likes of which a venue the size of Valentine’s probably won’t see until the band is making the reunion rounds 20 years from now."

"A fake force is one of those forces that introductory texts tell you aren’t real – like centrifugal force. They aren’t real in the sense that they are due to one of the fundamental interactions. Basically, introductory texts (and even blogs like this one – not a bad summary of real vs. fake forces) attack the centrifugal force. This is because it is so common for students to want to use these faux forces in the wrong way. Better to just not use them at all.

Anyway, there are times when faux forces are awesome. Just to be clear, a faux force is needed to use normal newtonian mechanics when the reference frame is accelerating. To show this, let me look at the following problem. I will solve it without and then with fake forces."

"Called Mars-500, the Russian-led project based at the Institute for Biomedical Problems here will culminate in a 520-day simulation beginning early next year of a complete manned mission to the planet — a time frame that incorporates launching to Mars touchdown and back — that scientists hope will edge humanity a little closer to that next giant leap."

"With the advent of electronic databases, laptops, social networking, generation Y study habits, and Starbucks, though, libraries’ missions have changed in some pretty fundamental ways. "

"[A]bout 86 percent of the surveyed students had not participated in a “fraternity or sorority recruitment or intake activity.” These students cited a number of reasons for not participating. Chief among them, 74 percent of these students they did not care to be associated with the “negative stereotypes associated with membership.” Sixty-four percent of them responded that there was “no perceived benefit” to participation in a Greek organization, 62 percent reported they "could not commit to membership.”"

"In the spirit of this age of economic restructuring, I will simply declare how often people may blog. Most of you should average four to six posts a day. If you’re a group blog, you may post once an hour. "

Shot at last night’s show, by somebody standing right next to the keyboard.