Over at Slate, John Dickerson has a piece expressing amazement that “numbers guy” Mitt Romney was so badly misinformed about the election. While I’ll admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude about the general bafflement of the Romney campaign and the Republicans generally, this particular slant (which Dickerson isn’t the only one to take, just… Continue reading Financiers Still Aren’t Rocket Scientists
Author: Chad Orzel
Twilight of the Elites and the Rise of the Culture
In which I use my double license as a physicist and a science fiction fan to engage in some half-assed futurism spinning off Chris Hayes’s much-discussed book. ————- I don’t read a lot of political books, because I tend to find them frustrating. They’re usually surprisingly ephemeral, trying to spin Deep Meaning out of a… Continue reading Twilight of the Elites and the Rise of the Culture
What’s FiveThirtyEight Good For?: The Inevitable Nate Silver Backlash
Now that we’ve apparently elected Nate Silver the President of Science, this is some predictable grumbling about whether he’s been overhyped. If you’ve somehow missed the whole thing, Jennifer Ouellette offers an excellent summary of the FiveThirtyEight saga, with lots of links, but the Inigo Montoya summing up is that Silver runs a blog predicting… Continue reading What’s FiveThirtyEight Good For?: The Inevitable Nate Silver Backlash
Four More Years…
…and The Pip will be five. Happy birthday, Little Dude! Oh, yeah, there was also some kind of election. In which a bunch of crazy people lost, and a guy I played rugby with was elected a US Senator. Which is a great way to celebrate the one-year anniversary of this momentous occasion. And here’s… Continue reading Four More Years…
Get Out the Vote
If you’re in the US, it’s Election Day, so go vote. I’d like to say something here about how I don’t care who you actually vote for, but of course that’s not true– I would strongly prefer it if you were to vote for Barack Obama and other Democrats, and against Mitt Romney and a… Continue reading Get Out the Vote
Outland It’s Not: Billionaires Plan Asteroid Mining
I’m about a week late talking about this, but I’ve mostly resigned myself to not doing really topical blogging these days. Anyway, there was a lot of excitement last week over the announcement that an all-star team of nerd billionaires is planning to do commercial asteroid mining. (The post title is a reference to the… Continue reading Outland It’s Not: Billionaires Plan Asteroid Mining
Links for 2012-04-30
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Class Dismissed In my darker moments, I sometimes wonder if the root of the problem with public higher education in America is that it was designed to create and support a massive middle class. And we’ve tacitly decided as a society that a massive middle class is not a… Continue reading Links for 2012-04-30
It’s Organic Pixie Dust, from Fair-Trade Pixies
SteelyKid: Daddy, would you like to go to visit Jake and the Never Land Pirates? Me:: In principle, sure. But it’s a cartoon. We can’t go there, it’s not a real place. SteelyKid: Yes it is. Never Land is real, we can go there. Me: Well, look, if you find some pixies dust that we… Continue reading It’s Organic Pixie Dust, from Fair-Trade Pixies
Links for 2012-04-28
Learning about science education from the experts: Kids « Boundary Vision By far the best panel on science education I’ve seen recently was given by a few of the most important people in the field: kids.
Bad Reporting About Women in STEM
This is apparently my day to be annoyed at the reporting of pieces about gender differences in STEM, because a bunch of people are linking to this PBS NewsHour article about women in engineering, which is linked to an interview with Maria Klawe of Harvey Mudd College, who I ran across a few weeks back… Continue reading Bad Reporting About Women in STEM