Quantum Diaries At the moment anyone who has even a passing interest in particle physics is thinking about the results being presented that European Physical Society High Energy Physics 2011 conference (referred to as simply “EPS”.) It is at EPS that we hear news about the search the Higgs boson, and the news is tantalizing!… Continue reading Links for 2011-07-23
Author: Chad Orzel
Spaced Out
The final Space Shuttle landed the other day, leading to much lamentation over the end of the program, all over the Internet. It was absolutely choking my Twitter feeds for a while, which is mostly what I was thinking about when I re-tweeted this snide comment from Robert Lamb (though, to be fair, most of… Continue reading Spaced Out
Links for 2011-07-22
If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault – Anil Dash “As it turns out, we have a way to prevent gangs of humans from acting like savage packs of animals. In fact, we’ve developed entire disciplines based around this goal over thousands of years. We just ignore most of the lessons that have… Continue reading Links for 2011-07-22
Thursday Sound Asleep Blogging 072111
SteelyKid’s “no pictures” phase continues, meaning that I have to do things like snapping low-light pictures of her after she falls asleep: I used a really wide aperture lens for this– waking her up with the flash would be the end of the world– and had to process the hell out of it to get… Continue reading Thursday Sound Asleep Blogging 072111
Beat the Heat with SCIENCE!
It’s really frickin’ hot in much of the US. Fortunately, we have central air at home, A/C in the car, and convenient local businesses with air conditioning and free wi-fi. The inadequate HVAC systems in the Science and Engineering building on campus aren’t anywhere near being able to cope with this, so I’m working from… Continue reading Beat the Heat with SCIENCE!
The Inevitable Death of the Book, Aleph-Nought in a Series
A lot of pixels have been spilled lamenting the death of Borders books, a rather large fraction of them being used to say stupid things. Particularly in the “they killed off independent bookstores so good riddance to them” vein– it’s great that you lived in a place that had good indie bookstores and enough hipsters… Continue reading The Inevitable Death of the Book, Aleph-Nought in a Series
Links for 2011-07-21
Towards an Opt-Out Button in Left-Liberal Debates | Easily Distracted “Here’s what I want and I think maybe a lot of people, both Americans and otherwise, want. I want what my colleagues Barry Schwartz and Ken Sharpe call “good enough”. I don’t want to grab for the brass ring, be the alpha male, see my… Continue reading Links for 2011-07-21
Being Educated Is All About Half Guessing
Keeping the week’s unofficial education theme, Kevin Drum posts about the latest “kids these days” study, namely the just-released NAEP Geography results. Kevin makes a decent point about the 12th grade questions being fairly sophisticated, but includes one comment that struck me as off base: I gotta tell you: I went through the five sample… Continue reading Being Educated Is All About Half Guessing
Reforming Education: Bonuses Aren’t Enough
One of the standard education reform proposals that gets suggested every time somebody brings up the condition of American public education is that teachers should be offered some form of performance incentive, whether in the form of “merit pay” programs on a continuing basis, or bonuses for reaching particular targets. This is one of those… Continue reading Reforming Education: Bonuses Aren’t Enough
Links for 2011-07-20
The Strategic Plan: Neither Strategy Nor Plan, but a Waste of Time – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education “This interchangeability of visions for the future underscores the fact that the precise content of most colleges’ strategic plans is pretty much irrelevant. Plans are usually forgotten soon after they are promulgated. My university has… Continue reading Links for 2011-07-20