A seasonally appropriate poll, brought to you by this morning’s frigid dog walk (15F/ -9C), and the memory of a newscast back when I was in Maryland that referred to an overnight low temperature of 22F/-6C as “Bitter, bitter cold”: The maximum (daytime high) temperature I would characterize as “bitter cold” would be:survey software For […]
Category: Culture
Bad Words and Great Books
There’s a new wrinkle in the endless controversy about Huckleberry Finn, with NewSouth Books preparing an expurgated edition replacing “nigger” with “slave” throughout. Sentiment in the parts of the Internet I frequent is mostly against the change, which has been made with the goal of getting it back on high school reading lists, which it […]
Humor Matters
What with one thing and another, I forgot to tag anything for the links dump yesterday, which means no links dump this morning. But that’s all right, because Fred Clark’s post about humorless prigs deserves a more prominent link. The proximate cause is yet another story about a crazy religious group working themselves into a […]
2010: The Year in Blog
Because I’m sure everybody is as fascinated by blog stats as I am, here’s the traffic to this blog for 2010, in graphical form: In case you can’t numerically integrate that in your head, I’ll tell you that the total number of pageviews represented there is a bit more than 908,000. We have yet to […]
Monday Miscellany
A bunch of smallish items that have been failing to resolve into full-fledged blog posts for a little while now, thrown together here because I don’t have anything better to post this morning: — When is doubt, start with self-promotion: Physics World includes How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in their holiday gift books […]
Dorky Poll: How Do You Say That Again?
I’m going to be at a media training session for most of the day. I had hoped to have a long and silly post about physics to schedule today, but, well, that didn’t happen. So here’s a silly poll to pass the time. The name of element number 13, chemical symbol Al, is pronounced with […]
The Problem of the Humanities
I’ve probably gotten a dozen pointers to Gregory Petsko’s open letter in support of the humanities, addressed to the President of SUNY-Albany, over the last couple of weeks (the link is to a reposting of the letter at Inside Higher Ed; it was originally on Petsko’s own blog). I haven’t linked to it or commented […]
Rock Stars of Science
So, if you look at this picture: You might be asking yourself “Why does Debbie Harry rate Secret Service protection?” But no, this isn’t a photo from some alternate universe where the lead singer of Blondie went on to become leader of the free world, it’s part of the Rock Stars of Science campaign by […]
Bakery Poll: The _____ on the Cake
Having posted not one but two snarky political entries in recent days, I feel like I owe the Internet a couple of ResearchBlogging posts to make up for it. It’s the last week of classes here, though, which means I have a lot of frantic work to do. Thus, a frivolous poll inspired by the […]
Pop Culture Poll: Wedding Music
Prompted by an off-line conversation, a question about the magnum opus of Jim Steinman and Marvin Lee Aday: Playing “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” at a wedding reception is:online surveys I’m sure you can come up with lots of songs that would be even less appropriate. Feel free to leave them in the comments.