I’m working on a badly-neglected project this morning, so here are a couple of pictures of SteelyKid from yesterday’s trip to the park. (You can see more in my Flickr sets, linked at left.) This one gets you the basic idea of what it’s like taking a very active toddler to the playground: Finish one […]
Month: September 2009
Links for 2009-09-20
Friday, September 18, 2009 « Medium Large Canadian Province and Territory Mottoes: Ontario: So Clean; So Quiet; So Polite, You Just Know That We’re a Serial Killer. (tags: comics silly world Canada) Is String Theory an Unphysical Pile of Garbage? : Starts With A Bang Ethan’s not what you would call “subtle”… (tags: physics science […]
Using Analogies on the Internet Is Like Doing a Really Futile Thing
Josh Rosenau is thinking from California about the role of analogy and metaphor in arguments. This follows from a series of posts arguing with Jerry Coyne et al. about the usual science vs. religion stuff. The analogy thing comes in because in the first post, he made reference to Slacktivist’s excellent post about vampires and […]
Links for 2009-09-19
Views: In Loco Parentis, Post-Juicy Campus – Inside Higher Ed “With the digital age in full swing, colleges must reconceptualize what it means to act in loco parentis, and how, to the extent they can do anything, they can best serve their students. The answer is not to read into OCR investigations a new era […]
The Purposes and Problems of Labs
Over at Jim Henley’s place, Thoreau further justifies his status as an essential academic-physics blogger with a really good post about the problem of introductory labs: In freshman labs, generally you’re trying to measure something (at least as it’s done at many schools). The measurement is never as clean as the stuff being taught in […]
Dorky Poll: State Manipulation
I’m teaching Quantum Optics again this term, talking about the interaction between light and matter in circumstances where you need to account for the quantum nature of one or both of those. We’re starting on the actual interactions today, albeit with a semi-classical approach (Einstein coefficients and the Fermi Golden Rule), but we’ve just finished […]
Links for 2009-09-18
slacktivist: Our trespasses “But then there’s this other phrase which, when we listen to ourselves saying it, is the scariest part of any given Sunday. “Forgive us our trespasses,” we pray, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.”** That’s disturbingly conditional. It’s almost contractual. The conditions laid out there are crystal clear and explicit, […]
Thursday Baby Blogging 091709
SteelyKid says “Yayyy! Baby Blogging on the stairs!” (Not shown: Kate making a similar mouth-wide-open face for a very different reason…)
Notes Toward a Unified Theory of Political Blogging
Theorem: The worthiness of a blog post on a political or social topic is inversely proportional to the number of times derisive nicknames are used to refer to the author’s opponents.
Pain Don’t Hurt
They’re discussing stupid playing-through-injury stories on Mike&Mike this morning– Golic talked about injuring his shoulder badly enough that he couldn’t lift his arm above shoulder level, and using a wall to push his hand up higher than that, so the trainer would let him go back in for the second half. Having separated both shoulders […]