Wait, Who Has Sinister Connections to Insiders That Influence Their Reporting? « Easily Distracted “[…]Al-Jazeera! Al-Jazeera, with its mysterious (sinister!) agenda, its undisclosed connections, its desire to influence events! As opposed to what? The New York Times, the Washington Post, the major US TV network news operations, with their still-largely cozy relationship to undisclosed inside… Continue reading Links for 2011-02-01
Author: Chad Orzel
Jo Walton, Among Others [Library of Babel]
This is a difficult book to review, which is probably fitting, because it’s a very personal book. My reaction to it is largely personal as well, and may or may not be of any use to anyone else. Given the surprising number of people who had Opinions regarding my recollections of telecommunications, I almost think… Continue reading Jo Walton, Among Others [Library of Babel]
Links for 2011-01-31
Rutherford’s alchemy solved Atom’s mystery “He was the first to achieve the alchemists’ dream of changing one element into another, yet he wasn’t an alchemist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry, but he wasn’t a chemist. The work for which he received the Prize was carried out in Canada, but he wasn’t a… Continue reading Links for 2011-01-31
Links for 2011-01-30
slacktivist: People power in Egypt “We’ve been “promoting democracy” as though the first and most important step involved conducting elections. But the health and success of a democracy isn’t determined as much by the things the public is able to decide by majority vote as by those things that cannot be voted away. Democracy doesn’t… Continue reading Links for 2011-01-30
Links for 2011-01-29
The ‘scandal’ of the kilogram (Blog) – physicsworld.com “That’s the name of the game in metrology these days – finding a way of defining mass without just resorting embarrassingly, as we do now, to a lump of metal in the basement of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) outside Paris and saying “that’s… Continue reading Links for 2011-01-29
Guess-the-Lyrics: Unusual Rhymes III
A somewhat surprising number of people asked for a return of the guess-the-lyrics posts in the who are you? thread, and it seems like a good Friday activity. So, as with the previous rounds, each of the following gives a pair of rhyming (or at least intended-to-rhyme) phrases from a pop music song in my… Continue reading Guess-the-Lyrics: Unusual Rhymes III
Links for 2011-01-28
Promoting Science: MythBusters vs. Sport Science | Wired Science | Wired.com “So, is Sport Science good for science? Is it even science? What about MythBusters? You know it and I know it – I am biased. However, let me pretend that I am not and compare Sport Science and MythBusters in terms of scienceyness.” (tags: science… Continue reading Links for 2011-01-28
Thursday Toddler Blogging 012711
Since we had a Mommy-for-scale picture last week, I thought it was high time we had another Daddy-for-scale picture. So, here’s SteelyKid before going off to day care this morning: (Photo credit: Kate) She’s been more than 0.5 Kate in height for a good long while, but now she’s coming up on half a me.… Continue reading Thursday Toddler Blogging 012711
Energy from Mass, Mass from Energy
I probably ought to get a start on the big pile of grading I have waiting for me, but I just finished a draft of the problematic Chapter 7, on E=mc2, so I’m going to celebrate a little by blogging about that. One thing that caught my eye in the not-entirely-successful chapter on momentum and… Continue reading Energy from Mass, Mass from Energy
It’s About Time by David Mermin
Subtitled “Understanding Einstein’s Relativity,” David Mermin’s It’s About Time is another book (like An Illustrated Guide to Relativity) that grew out of a non-majors course on physics that Mermin offers at Cornell. It’s also an almost-forty-years-later update of an earlier book he wrote on the same subject. And it’s been a really good resource for… Continue reading It’s About Time by David Mermin