Category: Links Dump

Meet the real victims of Bush-era lawlessness: his lawyers. – By Dahlia Lithwick – Slate Magazine “Those who distorted and upended the legal rules during the Bush era have hermetically sealed themselves inside a legal tautology that provides that lawyers cannot be held accountable for merely offering legal advice, and nonlawyers cannot be held accountable… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-29

The Art of Sleeping in Seminars | Department of Physics at the U of I “Through long years of experience, we have accumulated the following useful set of rules. These should be helpful to beginning research students. However, we have also observed seasoned veterans making some of these simple errors. For advanced students, these rules… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-28

slacktivist: To bigotry no sanction “During Washington’s presidency, of course, most Americans did not “possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.” The man who wrote “to bigotry no sanction” also imagined he had the right to own other humans and the authority to vote on Martha’s behalf. But yet we can see here… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-27

YouTube – I Will Derive! Gloria Gaynor, meet Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton. Leibniz, Newton, Gloria Gaynor. (tags: video math music youtube silly education) Cocktail Party Physics: the nays have it “[W]hile browsing the science section on Amazon this weekend, looking for new or overlooked science books, I thought it might be fun to highlight… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-26

Why tenure won’t disappear, just shrink § Unqualified Offerings “1) Did you notice the part where I said I’d want a higher salary to compensate for having less security? Yeah. See, lots of people are willing to slave away in grad school and postdoc positions and adjunct positions in exchange for a shot at the… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-25

Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 040504 (2010): Room-Temperature Implementation of the Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm with a Single Electronic Spin in Diamond “The nitrogen-vacancy defect center (N-V center) is a promising candidate for quantum information processing due to the possibility of coherent manipulation of individual spins in the absence of the cryogenic requirement. We report a room-temperature implementation… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-24

slacktivist: Credit scoring and unemployment “Say you’re unemployed and you decide to work your tail off to land a new job, so you send out 40 résumés a week. Half of the companies might decide to do a credit-check before getting back to you. This sets off alarm-bells at the credit-rating agencies. Twenty credit-checks in… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-23

More Online Astronomy Resources for Writers “A few years ago I compiled a list of online astronomy resources for writers following that year’s Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers. Every year there are new links we pass around and discuss, so I wanted to do an addendum, if you will, adding more links to the… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-22

Physics Buzz: APS hits ComicCon with the first superhero science comic “For the rest of this week I’ll be blogging from the madness that is sure to be ComicCon 2010. APS will be the first professional society to bring a comic book, so us public outreach folks are excited to be rolling in with 2.5… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-21

NASA Mercury Messenger Finds Surprises – NYTimes.com “On its third swing past Mercury, NASA’s Mercury Messenger spacecraft discovered an unexpectedly young lava plain, rapid rufflings of the planet’s weak magnetic field and an unanticipated dance of elements in the thin atmosphere. “I think the biggest surprise for the community is that the planet is turning… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-20