Yesterday’s post on applying intro physics concepts to the question of how fast and how long football players might accelerate generated a bunch of comments, several of them claiming that the model I used didn’t match real data in the form of race clips and the like. One comment in particular linked to a PDF […]
Month: April 2012
Links for 2012-04-18
What’s up in the solar system in April 2012 – The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary Society Lest you get too depressed about the mothballing of the Space Shuttles, a roundup of all the cool space probes out there producing real science. Yes, I Took My Ninth Grader on a College Tour (and It […]
The Physics of Sprints and Kickoff Safety
Over at Grantland, Bill Barnwell offers some unorthodox suggestions for replacing the kickoff in NFL games, which has apparently been floated as a way to improve player safety. Appropriately enough, the suggestion apparently came from Giants owner John Mara, which makes perfect sense giving that the Giants haven’t had a decent kick returner since Dave […]
Links for 2012-04-17
A few thoughts on Hilary Rosen, moms and work But instead of engaging Rosen’s points, the media storm is about how Democrats Hate Mothers. Or, Democrats Hate GOOD Mothers — you know, the kind who stay at home. The women the Democrats like are those slutty Planned Parenthood sluts, or something. And while all the […]
My New Favorite Review of How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to Your Dog
My Google vanity search for my name and the book titles is really frustratingly spotty, often missing things in major news outlets that I later find by other means. For example, I didn’t get a notification about this awesome review in the Guardian, from their children’s book section: I am a ten year old who […]
Links for 2012-04-16
Sparks Fly Over Shoestring Test Of ‘Holographic Principle’ ” “The beauty of it is that we have the people who can come up with this low-risk, high-reward experiment,” says Fermilab’s Raymond Tomlin. “It’s one shot, and if you discover something you go to Stockholm [to collect a Nobel Prize]. And if you don’t see anything, […]
Necessary Cuteness
We found out yesterday that one of my great-aunts, who recently moved out of a retirement community because she wanted to live by herself, fell and banged her head badly. While she apparently seemed okay at the time, a short while later she collapsed, and is vanishingly unlikely to recover. While it seems weird to […]
Links for 2012-04-14
Microsoft Word is cumbersome, inefficient, and obsolete. It’s time for it to die. – Slate Magazine Nowadays, I get the same feeling of dread when I open an email to see a Microsoft Word document attached. Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone’s archaic habits. A Word file is the story-fax […]
Ten Years Before the Blog: 2002-2003
As threatened a little while ago, this is the first of ten hopefully weekly posts looking back at the ten years this blog has been in operation. This one covers the period from the very first post on June 22, 2002 to June 21, 2003. When I started doing this look back, I was more […]
EBooks and Agencies
The big publishing news this week is the US Department of Justice bringing an anti-trust suit against the major book publishers and Apple for allegedly colluding to force the “agency model” of ebook pricing on Amazon and other retailers, resulting in higher prices for consumers. I already links dumped an article about the detailed charges, […]