Are you a highly skilled worker? (Blog) – physicsworld.com “But what’s this? Kostya’s only got 75 “attribute points” (not counting the 10 each for speaking English and having £800), and he needs 80 to qualify as a highly skilled worker. Bad luck, Kostya! Better go do your Nobel-prize-winning research somewhere else! Yes, as it turns […]
Month: November 2010
Links for 2010-11-21
Friday Night Videos!: The Hits of 1990 | Popdose “Aerosmith – Janie’s Got A Gun: With this video and Madonna’s “Oh Father,” director David Fincher was cornering the market on music videos about child abusers. Also note the prominent use of dudes in hats before backlighting, presaging Det. Somerset in Seven. Also note Steven Tyler’s […]
Short Story Club: “Throwing Stones” by Mishell Baker
The final Short Story Club story is “Throwing Stones” by Mishell Baker. Once again, I find myself without a whole lot to say about it. This is a gender-reversed Asian-flavored fantasy story. The nameless narrator lives in a city with canals and teahouses in an Empire with rigid class and gender roles, a writing system […]
Goodnight Moon, Good Morning California
Here’s the clip from my live-via-Skype appearance on tv in Sacramento this morning. Unfortunately, the Chateau Steelypips Internet connection slowed way down for some reason, and Skype froze up then dropped the call. But we did get a few minutes of me talking about Goodnight Moon and SteelyKid. The field of view is oddly cropped, […]
Links for 2010-11-20
A presumption of guilt makes people angry : Thoughts from Kansas “The virtual strip searches and actual pat-downs now performed by TSA are not selective. Everyone is treated like a terrorist. The pat-down is the same one given to a suspect being arrested, and the strip search is even more invasive. Every air passenger is […]
Hello, California
I keep forgetting to mention this here, but a while back I was contacted by a tv host in California about the Goodnight Moon post. Anyway, I will be appearing via Skype tomorrow morning at 9:20 my time on the Good Day Sacramento program, to talk about bedtime stories, dog physics, and such things. Internet […]
Pop Culture Notes
Miscellaneous pop-culture items from the last couple of weeks: — I’m apparently a sucker for half-finished music, as I bought Dylan’s Witmark Demos album a week or so ago, and Springsteen’s The Promise, a collection of stuff recorded between Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, last night. The Springsteen stuff is […]
Interference of Independent Photon Beams: The Pfleegor-Mandel Experiment
Earlier this week, I talked about the technical requirements for taking a picture of an interference pattern from two independent lasers, and mentioned in passing that a 1967 experiment by Pfleegor and Mandel had already shown the interference effect. Their experiment was clever enough to deserve the ResearchBlogging Q&A treatment, though, so here we go: […]
Links for 2010-11-19
Physics Buzz: It’ll make you laugh; it’ll make you cry. It’s…Science!!! A friend once told me that she never watches the Discovery Channel because she feels some sort of obligation to pay attention and retain the information being presented. I can see where she’s coming from; science can be intimidating. But my message is simple: […]
Thursday Toddler Blogging 111810
Fashion’s been on our minds this week, what with the whole Rock Stars of Science thing rolling out yesterday, so this week we have SteelyKid modeling the latest in toddler headgear: This was the culmination of a game that started with her putting her napkin on her head, and declaring it a hat. We moved […]