On the way to get SteelyKid from day care last night, I flipped on ESPN radio in the vain hope of getting a baseball score, but wound up listening to former Mets manager and freelance jackass Bobby Valentine talking about how difficult batting is, which included the statement: And the whole thing is over in… Continue reading Know Your Prefixes, Baseball Edition
Month: October 2010
Links for 2010-10-08
A Nobel prize for levitating a frog – The Dayside “Unlike the graphene discovery, frog levitation hasn’t begotten a vast worldwide research effort whose fruits include thousands of research papers and scores of patents. Nevertheless, as Novoselov recounted in an interview with ScienceWatch, the two projects have something in common: ‘The style of Geim’s lab… Continue reading Links for 2010-10-08
Thursday Beloved Arthropod Blogging 100710
SteelyKid has a new friend, who she shows off in this week’s Toddler Blogging: She’s a huge fan of Goldbug in Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, so when we found out that there’s a plush Goldbug toy available on the Internet, it was a real no-brainer. She recognized it immediately, despite… Continue reading Thursday Beloved Arthropod Blogging 100710
Who Is the Velvet Underground of Science?
I’m shamelessly stealing this question from James Nicoll, who asked it about science fiction. The question is a play on the famous comment that only of order a thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground record, but every one of them went on to start a band. So, the question is, who is the Velvet… Continue reading Who Is the Velvet Underground of Science?
How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your UK Dog
Between travel and general work craziness, I completely forgot to note that the UK version of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog has gone on sale: The title for this edition is How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, and the vanity search keeps turning up mentions to it in the Guardian Bookshop,… Continue reading How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your UK Dog
Links for 2010-10-07
Career Advice: Rules for Science Job Talks – Inside Higher Ed “4. Give a strong, conceptually oriented introduction. Be as brief as possible while still making all of your points. Be sharp at the beginning. Remember the 20 Minute Rule: You should show a data slide no more than 20 minutes into your talk (or… Continue reading Links for 2010-10-07
Should We Want Students to Go into Finance?
Via Steve Hsu, a GNXP post about the benefits of elite college educations, based largely on a graph of income vs. US News ranking. While the post text shows some of the dangers of taking social-science data too literally (the points on the graph in question are clearly binned, so I would not attribute too… Continue reading Should We Want Students to Go into Finance?
Congratulations to Heck, Negishi, and Suzuki
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2010 goes to Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki for giving people a reason to care about palladium. OK, it might not be the only reason– I’m not actually sure what palladium is used for other than organic synthesis and cold fusion– but it’s the context in… Continue reading Congratulations to Heck, Negishi, and Suzuki
Links for 2010-10-06
Trains on the moon: John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless / Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts “At the heart of John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless (1993) is a train trip by a group of teenaged roleplayers across the far side of the moon. It’s also the story of how thirteen… Continue reading Links for 2010-10-06
Congratulations to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov
The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Geim and Novoselov for their work on graphene, a material consisting of one-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms in a hexagonal array. This is one of those prizes that was basically inevitable, as graphene is one of the hot materials of the last couple of years. Hardly a… Continue reading Congratulations to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov