Confessions of a Community College Dean: An Unmarked Car "[A]t work, I can wear, say, a gray suit, and be both situationally appropriate and utterly impersonal. On dress down days, the alternate uniform of tie-less Oxford and khakis (or a close variant) gets the job done. There’s nothing terribly interesting about either ensemble, but that’s […]
Month: June 2009
That’s What You Get for Talking Physics with Skaters
Via email, a news story from San Francisco with the headline “Physics discussion ends in skateboard attack“: A homeless man is on trial in San Mateo County on charges that he smacked a fellow transient in the face with a skateboard as the victim was engaged in a conversation about quantum physics, authorities said today. […]
Desert Island Blogs
I’m thinking of paring my RSS feeds down again, as I’m feeling a little overextended at the moment, and could stand to spend less time reading stuff on the Internet. This brings up the obvious question of which blogs to keep, and which blogs to jettison, and that, in turn, lends itself to a reader […]
Not All Physics Is On the Arxiv
Via a comment by Christina Pikas, there’s a post at the Scholarly Kitchen about a new study quantifying the use of the arxiv: Employing a summer intern, Ingoldsby conducted an arXiv search of nearly 5,000 journal articles published by the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society. Their methodology was painstakingly robust, looking […]
Talk to the Paw
There’s an interview with me, plus bonus comments from Emmy, over at Paw Talk: Words of advice for fellow pet owners? If you’re looking to get a dog, I’d recommend visiting your local animal shelter, as you can find lots of great dogs there. And take walks with your dog– every now and then, I […]
links for 2009-06-24
Video analysis of hammer explosion lifting a guy | Dot Physics Can an exploding hammer lift a guy? Inquiring minds want to know… (tags: science physics video blogs education dot-physics silly) The Last 100 Years: 1950s & The Tragedy of Fred Hoyle : Starts With A Bang "This is the only instance in all of […]
Why the Silent Majority Is Silent
Chris Mooney has found new digs, and, revitalized by the more congenial atmosphere, has been taking up the science vs. religion fight again. Yesterday, he had a post asking what can be done to get moderate scientists more involved in the argument over whether science and religion can coexist: At the same time, though, let’s […]
The Limits of Elven Vision
Kate’s Tolkien re-read has reached Rohan, and her latest re-read post includes a reference to a comment I made about Legolas’s improbable visual acuity: Re: Legolas seeing the Riders: I have since been advised by the resident physicist that the size of a pupil is a limiting factor on the resolution possible–if I understood properly, […]
All Physics Is Not Particle Physics
A wag of my finger at the Corporate Masters, for their new article about traffic jams, with the subhead “For particle physicists who study phase transitions, a traffic jam is simply a solid made up of idling cars.” In the body of the article, we find: While the concept of critical density has been repeatedly […]
links for 2009-06-23
Cynical-C Blog – » Sign for the Night "Keep being AWESOME!" (tags: silly food internet) Unscientific America "Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, a journalist-scientist team, offer an updated "two cultures" polemic for America in the 21st century. Just as in Snow’s time, some of our gravest challengesâclimate change, the energy crisis, national economic competitivenessâand gravest […]