A thousand curses on Kevin Drum for making me read some idiocy from the National Review’s attempts to find things wrong with Sonia Sotomayor: Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural […]
Month: May 2009
Sigma Xi Talk: Tropical Glaciers Are Weird
Tuesday night was the annual Sigma Xi induction banquet on campus (I’m currently the president of the local chapter, and have been scrambling to organize the whole thing in between all my other responsibilities these past few weeks). Sigma Xi, for those not familiar with it, is the scientific research honor society– like Phi Beta […]
This Isn’t Basketball
It’s that time of year when I check in to the giant methadone program that is the NBA, to help ease my way from college basketball season into the long, dull, summer when nothing worthwhile happens, sports-wise. Thus, I watched the second halves of most of last week’s playoff games (I didn’t get back to […]
links for 2009-05-27
Unscientific America: The Table of Contents | The Intersection | Discover Magazine 2009 promises to be a good year for science-y books by people with blogs. (tags: books science social-science society politics intersection culture) Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Is the right book winning the Hugo? "The problem we usually […]
Projectile Motion, Uncertainty, and a Question of Ethics
We no longer do what is possibly my favorite lab in the intro mechanics class. We’ve switched to the Matter and Interactions curriculum, and thus no longer spend a bunch of time on projectile motion, meaning there’s no longer room for the “target shooting” lab. It’s called that because the culmination of the lab used […]
links for 2009-05-26
At NIF, a Quest for Fusion Energy (or Maybe Folly) – NYTimes.com "The $3.5 billion site is known as the National Ignition Facility, or NIF. For more than half a century, physicists have dreamed of creating tiny stars that would inaugurate an era of bold science and cheap energy, and NIF is meant to kindle […]
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in Languages I Don’t Speak
I’m still recovering from DAMOP, so no really substantive blogging today. I did want to mention a couple of recent developments regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I think I mentioned a while back that the Portugese rights had been sold. Not long after that, the Korean rights were sold, and last week, […]
What Happens When You Publish a Book
Over at the Inverse Square Blog, Tom Levenson is doing a series of blog posts walking through the steps involved in getting a book published. Unfortunately, there isn’t a compact way to link to the whole series, but the posts to date are: Part 0: Introduction to the Series Part 1.0: The Proposal (with an […]
links for 2009-05-25
The Physics of The (Football) Wave : Built on Facts Why people at a football game are like atoms in a gas. (tags: science physics blogs built-on-facts) The Speed of Short People : The Frontal Cortex Modern neuroscience explains why I have so much trouble keeping up with short little guards. (tags: science neuroscience biology […]
DAMOP Day 3-3.5
Friday morning at DAMOP was probably the thinnest part of the program, at least for me. Annoyingly, this was the day that my cold (or possibly allergies– whatever it was that had my head full of goo) let go, so I was the most awake and alert I managed for the entire conference. I watched […]