I’m about a week late talking about this, but I’ve mostly resigned myself to not doing really topical blogging these days. Anyway, there was a lot of excitement last week over the announcement that an all-star team of nerd billionaires is planning to do commercial asteroid mining. (The post title is a reference to the… Continue reading Outland It’s Not: Billionaires Plan Asteroid Mining
Month: April 2012
Links for 2012-04-30
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Class Dismissed In my darker moments, I sometimes wonder if the root of the problem with public higher education in America is that it was designed to create and support a massive middle class. And we’ve tacitly decided as a society that a massive middle class is not a… Continue reading Links for 2012-04-30
It’s Organic Pixie Dust, from Fair-Trade Pixies
SteelyKid: Daddy, would you like to go to visit Jake and the Never Land Pirates? Me:: In principle, sure. But it’s a cartoon. We can’t go there, it’s not a real place. SteelyKid: Yes it is. Never Land is real, we can go there. Me: Well, look, if you find some pixies dust that we… Continue reading It’s Organic Pixie Dust, from Fair-Trade Pixies
Links for 2012-04-28
Learning about science education from the experts: Kids « Boundary Vision By far the best panel on science education I’ve seen recently was given by a few of the most important people in the field: kids.
Bad Reporting About Women in STEM
This is apparently my day to be annoyed at the reporting of pieces about gender differences in STEM, because a bunch of people are linking to this PBS NewsHour article about women in engineering, which is linked to an interview with Maria Klawe of Harvey Mudd College, who I ran across a few weeks back… Continue reading Bad Reporting About Women in STEM
The Writing Process
9:30am Thursday, Starbucks Work steadily on the work-in-progress, researching a few points here and there, adding a bunch of words, making various line edits. 11:15am Thursday, Starbucks Realize that the stuff I added would work better if split off into a new subsection. 11:30am Thursday, Union College Meeting with the Dean. No writing. Sigh. 1:30pm… Continue reading The Writing Process
Baffling Demographic Math: Women in Computing
Somebody on Twitter linked this article about “brogrammers”, which is pretty much exactly as horrible as that godawful neologism suggests. In between descriptions of some fairly appalling behavior, though, they throw some stats at you, and that’s where it gets weird: As it is, women remain acutely underrepresented in the coding and engineering professions. According… Continue reading Baffling Demographic Math: Women in Computing
Links for 2012-04-27
Animals Disappointed in your College Performance This ostrich begs to differ with you. Grammar does matter. Boston Review — Claude S. Fischer: The Loneliness Scare Social scientists have more precisely tracked Americans’ isolation and reports of loneliness over the last several decades. The real news, they have discovered, is that there is no such epidemic;… Continue reading Links for 2012-04-27
Book Roundup: People Talking About Dog Physics
I’ve been falling down on the shameless self-promotion front, lately, but that doesn’t mean I’m not tracking How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog obsessively, just that I’m too busy to talk about it. Happily, other people have been nice enough to talk about it for me, in a variety of places: The most significant,… Continue reading Book Roundup: People Talking About Dog Physics
Links for 2012-04-26
What Particle Are You? | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine I am not a particle! I am a HUMAN BEING!! Studies in Everyday Life: Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist: My Comments on the Limits to Growth This is my response to the recent post by UCSD physicist Tom Murphy, in which he questions an economist… Continue reading Links for 2012-04-26