For I’m not sure what reason, Scott Eric Kaufman is blogging a close reading of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. I suspect this may be a new frontier in procrastination, but I’m not up on the latest developments in that field. In the course of his reading, he helpfully updates one stanza into modern… Continue reading Literature in Translation
Author: Chad Orzel
Mr. Toad’s Wild Vacuum System
I’m in charge of the senior major seminar, in which we have the senior physics and astronomy majors meet once a week to talk about topics of interest to them. I’ve also been making them give short “progress reports” on their thesis research projects. Last week, one of my students was tapped for a progress… Continue reading Mr. Toad’s Wild Vacuum System
Gregariousness Is the Refuge of Mediocrity, and Bosons
In the previous installments, I talked about identical particles and symmetry, and what that means for fermions. Given that there’s only one other type of particle in the world, that sort of means that I need to explain what symmetry means in the case of bosons. When I explain this to the first-year seminar, I… Continue reading Gregariousness Is the Refuge of Mediocrity, and Bosons
Shorter Hours for Doctors
Via Inside Higher Ed‘s Quick Takes, some good news about the medical profession: The proportion of medical residents who said they had worked more than 80 hours a week in the previous four weeks at any point during the 2005-6 academic year fell to 2.4 percent, spread among 18.7 percent of all residency programs, the… Continue reading Shorter Hours for Doctors
Queen Emmy the Vigilant
This might not look it, but this is actually a happy dog picture. On windy days, she’ll sit like this at the edge of the patio, just letting the wind blow interesting smells past her. You can’t see it from a still photo, but she’s constantly sniffing, and her ears are twitching, and she’s generally… Continue reading Queen Emmy the Vigilant
Clauses You Don’t See Often Enough
The Onion AV Club has a review of the Aardman Animation CGI flick Flushed Away that contains a sentence starting with: Once the film introduces a pack of French frog ninjas led by Jean Reno,… Really, it doesn’t much matter what comes after that. I don’t really intend to see the movie, but it pleases… Continue reading Clauses You Don’t See Often Enough
“Someone might tell Dr. Jones that in academia ‘publish or perish’ is the rule”
Like most pieces in McSweeney’s, the lette denying Indiana Jones tenure goes on a bit too long, but it has its moments: The lone student representative on the committee wished to convey that, besides being an exceptional instructor, a compassionate mentor, and an unparalleled gentleman, Dr. Jones was extraordinarily receptive to the female student body… Continue reading “Someone might tell Dr. Jones that in academia ‘publish or perish’ is the rule”
Na No NO Wri Mo
November has been dubbed “National Novel Writing Month” or “NaNoWriMo” for those with too short an attention span to handle full words, in which people will commit to trying to write an entire novel in just thirty days. If you look around a bit, you’ll see lots of blogs and LiveJournals tracking the progress made… Continue reading Na No NO Wri Mo
In the Zone
While I know that there’s no great love for basketball in these parts, I can’t let Jonah Lehrer’s post on the “Hot Hand” go without comment. It’s about a paper analyzing the statistics of jump shooting, which finds that contrary to popular belief among basketball players, they don’t really get “hot” in a statistically significant… Continue reading In the Zone
Like The Lorax, With More Formal Mathematics
Scott Aaronson speaks for the computer scientists, partly in response to the same Times piece that I blogged about recently.