I’m a big fan of review articles. For those not in academic science, “review article” means a long (tens of pages) paper collecting together the important results of some field of science, and presenting an overview of the whole thing. These vary somewhat in just how specific they are– some deal with both experiment and […]
Month: August 2010
Academic Poll: On the First Day…
While I’m still trying not to think about the new academic term that starts in two weeks (yes, the first day of class is Labor Day, grumble mutter grump), it’s beginning to impinge on my consciousness. Thus, this poll on a frequent and annoying phenomenon that recurs with every new academic term: Students who miss […]
Links for 2010-08-23
Washington, We Have a Problem | Politics | Vanity Fair “It’s Obama’s conviction–you hear this from the most senior White House aides again and again, because it reflects the thinking at the top–that by keeping his head down and doing his job he can also pursue a different strategy, one that doesn’t aim to win […]
Credibility Is Easy to Lose: Paleo-Chemical Edition
I was channel-surfing the other night, and stumbled across a History Channel program on paleoanthropology, talking about new-ish theories of how humans first populated the Americas. Coming off my recent read of 1491, this seemed like a good way to pass a little time. After a little bit, it started to talk about some guy’s […]
Idiom Poll: Sales
In honor of the people down the street who are trying to unload some excess personal belongings, a poll: When people take a bunch of stuff they no longer want, put it outside their house, and try to sell it to passersby, this is called:Market Research You can only choose one of these terms in […]
Links for 2010-08-22
News: A Graphic Text – Inside Higher Ed A bunch of professors in MBA programs have written a textbook in graphic novel form. I’d make a joke here about what this says about our future captains of industry, but, really, do I need to? (tags: education comics business academia books) slacktivist: A bank run in […]
Charting Fantasy Art
Nobody who likes both SF and the graphing of odd things as much as I do could possibly fail to link to Orbit’s charts of fantasy art. These include the frequency plot of various elements seen at right, a comparison of fashion trends for urban fantasy heroines, color trends in cover dragons, and a study […]
Don’t Be a Dick
I’m probably about the last person with an interest in such things to get around to watching Phil Plait’s (in)famous “Don’t Be a Dick” speech, but I finally got around to it, and it’s really excellent: Phil Plait – Don’t Be A Dick from JREF on Vimeo. Phil has posted about the speech itself, online […]
Links for 2010-08-21
Swans on Tea » Politics and the Star Trek Effect “There are a couple of episodes of Star Trek that I can recall having some fundamental physics failures, which would lead one to believe that in the Star Trek universe, one cannot do an integral over time. The episodes that come to mind (and it’s […]
How Many Physics Professors Does It Take?
Johan Larson emails a suggestion for a post topic: How many profs would it take to offer a good, but not necessarily excellent, undergraduate physics degree? I can give you an empirical answer to this: Six. I say that because in the course of my undergraduate physics degree at Williams, I took classes from only […]