A News of the Stupid story that’s too good to pass up. I mean, how can you not click on a headline like “Men Accused of Wrestling Python Outside McDonald’s”: MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Two men were arrested after bewildered diners at a McDonald’s spotted them wrestling a 5-foot (1.5 meter) python named Boris in […]
Month: September 2010
Academic Etiquette Poll: Office Hours
A simple one, that I’m sure all the faculty in the audience will recognize. What is the proper approach to meeting with a professor outside of class: You email a professor asking to meet, and he responds “My office hours are from X:00-Y:00, or I’m free at Z:00.” You:online survey Even if we’re talking about […]
Relativity, Quantum, and the Internet
When Kate and I were walking Emmy last night, we were talking about the historical development of relativity. As one does, when walking the dog. I mentioned a couple of the pre-1905 attempts to explain things like the Michelson-Morley experiment, and how people like Lorentz and FitzGerald and Poincare were on the right track, but […]
Links for 2010-09-10
NFL 2010: The biggest thing fans don’t understand about life in pro football. (1) – By Stefan Fatsis, Nate Jackson, Josh Levin, and Tom Scocca – Slate Magazine A great discussion of the modern NFL, including a couple of former players. (tags: sports football slate culture) I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat […]
Thursday Shana Tova Blogging 090910
SteelyKid goes to day care at the Jewish Community Center, which is closed today and tomorrow for Rosh Hashanah. Here we see her calling all her friends on the phone in her play house to wish them a happy new year, and let Appa offer his own greetings: The two-day closing is, as you might […]
College Turning Points
Over at EphBlog, Stephen O’Grady has a post giving advice to the entering class at Williams. A bunch of this stuff is school-specific stuff that will only make sense to another member of the Cult of the Purple Cow, but there’s some good general advice in there as well. I particularly liked his story about […]
How to Read Scientific Papers Without Reading Every Word
Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton is surprised that people skim over boring bits of novels. While she explicitly excludes non-fiction from her discussion, this immediately made me think of Timothy Burke’s How to Read in College, which offers tips to prospective humanities and social science majors on how to most effectively skim through huge reading […]
Links for 2010-09-09
Swans on Tea » I’m Not Willing to Believe You “I’m perfectly willing to believe that the data one uses for one’s thesis is gathered in three months, and my experience is similar, but that’s not the whole story. A Ph.D. is not just the dissertation — you can’t just write off the experience leading […]
Counterfactual Physics: Lorentz Variance?
The theory of relativity takes its name from a very simple and appealing idea: that the laws of physics should look the same to moving observers as to stationary ones. “Laws of physics” here includes Maxwell’s equations for electricity and magnetism, which necessarily means that moving observers must see the same speed of light as […]
Teacher Self Management vs. Going to the Dark Side
The New York Times has an article about the opening of a teacher-run school in The City. It sounds like an interesting experiment: Shortly after landing at Malcolm X Shabazz High School as a Teach for America recruit, Dominique D. Lee grew disgusted with a system that produced ninth graders who could not name the […]