Just a reminder, if you’re someone who’s eligible to vote for this year’s Hugo Awards, the deadline to do so is tomorrow. Of course, you probably already know that– they sent out reminder emails last night. They want me to vote so badly, in fact, that I got four reminder emails last night, two with… Continue reading Hugo Voting
Author: Chad Orzel
links for 2009-07-02
Newton, P.I. | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine "Happily, Tom Levenson (of The Inverse Square, and one of our honored guest bloggers) has provided us with a fascinating peek into a telling episode in Newtonâs later life â his career as a criminal investigator. Not really âP.I.â, as Newton was acting in his capacity as… Continue reading links for 2009-07-02
Baby Swimwear Note
Whoever came up with the idea of making little string bikinis in infant sizes should be beaten to death with Barbie dolls. Seriously. The world does not need 6-9 month size versions of the useless “swimwear” that gets modeled in Sports Illustrated. We barely need the adult versions.
Plagiarism, Garbling, and Superluminal Motion
I no longer recall who pointed me to this current.com post titled “Scientists Make Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light “— somebody on Facebook, I think. As it would be a pretty neat trick to make light move faster than light, I took a look. The opening is fairly standard semi-gibberish: Scientist John Singleton insists… Continue reading Plagiarism, Garbling, and Superluminal Motion
Infinite Jest: My Favorite Footnote
The Infinite Summer people got me to start re-reading Infinite Jest, but I’m not really going to attempt to hold to their proposed reading schedule. Not because I find it hard to find time to read, but because I have trouble putting it down to go to sleep, let alone in order to keep pace… Continue reading Infinite Jest: My Favorite Footnote
links for 2009-07-01
Acephalous: Infinite Summer: Morbid? Culturally Imperial? Morbidly Culturally Imperial? "In the end, whatâs interesting about the 25-year-old Kleinâs post about the 46-year-old Foster Wallaceâs novel is the notion that someone who was 18 years old when the Clash first performed in America and someone who was 18 years old the year Joe Strummer died can… Continue reading links for 2009-07-01
Should Undergraduate Research Be Required?
Over at Confused on a Higher Level, Melissa has been thinking about undergraduate research: As a member of the Physics and Astronomy Division of the Council of Undergraduate Research (CUR), over the past few months I’ve gotten several e-mails about the effort by CUR, the Society of Physics Students, the American Astronomical Society, and the… Continue reading Should Undergraduate Research Be Required?
Math and the Teaching Thereof
Firday’s quick and sarcastic post came about because I thought the Dean Dad and his commenters had some interesting points in regard to high school math requirements, but we were spending the afternoon driving to Whitney Point so I could give a graduation speech. I didn’t have time for a more detailed response. Now that… Continue reading Math and the Teaching Thereof
links for 2009-06-30
Physics Buzz: A day at the International Submarine Races "Last weekend, travelers at a rest stop in Minnesota became alarmed when a group of college kids pulled up in a U-haul truck, carefully unloaded a large, sleek object from the back, and set to work on it with power tools. About the length of a… Continue reading links for 2009-06-30
Total Proposal Security
The National Science Foundation uses a computerized proposal-and-report submission system called FastLane. When I first submitted a proposal, this required three things to log in: your last name, your Social Security number, and a password of your choice. Sometime in the last year, they stopped using the SSN, and switched to a randomly generated nine-digit… Continue reading Total Proposal Security