SteelyKid’s class at her after-school day care has been learning about space for the last month or two (the program is very flexible– the teachers ask the kids what they want to learn about, and then they spend however long on that topic the kids like), so we’ve been getting a lot of tidbits about… Continue reading SteelyKid and the Big Telescope
Category: Science
Work. Finish. Publish.
A couple of days ago, John Scalzi posted a writing advice open thread, asking people to share the best advice they’d gotten on the craft of writing. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, much of it fairly specific to fiction writing– stuff about plotting, the use of synonyms for “said,” how to keep… Continue reading Work. Finish. Publish.
Video Editing Software?
Both SteelyKid’s kindergarten and the snow-day day-care program that the kids go to were closed today, which kind of threw a wrench in things. But it’s also kind of fun, as I got to spend some time playing outside with SteelyKid on her play set in the snow. The “featured image” above is a cell-phone… Continue reading Video Editing Software?
Old Thesis Club: A Specific Effect of X-Rays on Bacteria, by Thomas J. Dietz, 1934
Back in the fall, I did a bunch of write-ups of old Master’s theses that we found when clearing some space in a storage room. I got away from this because I was busy working on the book, but I have a few more that I pulled out to look at, and since all the… Continue reading Old Thesis Club: A Specific Effect of X-Rays on Bacteria, by Thomas J. Dietz, 1934
Uncertain Dots: Episode 3
This week’s hangout with Rhett Allain, in which we talk about how we got into physics, how we find stuff to read, what we enjoyed on physics blogs this week, what we do and don’t like about Twitter, and the revenge of the Sith. The specific blog posts we mentioned: Frank Noschese’s analysis of gravity… Continue reading Uncertain Dots: Episode 3
The Evergreen Topic of Grade Inflation
There was a flurry of re-shares last week for this article about Yale shutting down a site that aggregated student course evaluations, which is fine as far as it goes, but repeats a stat that really bugs me: About 43 percent of college letter grades in 2011 were A’s, up from 31 percent in 1988… Continue reading The Evergreen Topic of Grade Inflation
Five Billion Years of Solitude by Lee Billings
It’s taken me a disgracefully long time to finish the review copy of Lee Billings’s Five Billion Years of Solitude I was sent back in the fall, mostly because I didn’t read anything not immediately related to the book-in-progress for most of November and all of December. Which is to say, the long delay is… Continue reading Five Billion Years of Solitude by Lee Billings
Sports Are Science
Unless you’ve been marooned on a desert island for the last couple of weeks– or, you know, foreign— you’re probably at least dimly aware that the Super Bowl is this evening. This is the pinnacle of the football season, and also the cue for lots of people to take to social media proclaiming their contempt… Continue reading Sports Are Science
On Persistence and the Counting of Things
Kameron Hurley did a blog post on what it took her to become a writer, which I ran across via Harry Connolly’s follow-up. These are fairly long, but well worth reading for insight into what it means to be a writer– and they’re both very good at what they do. You should buy their books,… Continue reading On Persistence and the Counting of Things
Small College, Exotic Particles
Topping the looooong list of things I would give a full ResearchBlogging write-up if I had time is this new paper on a ultra-cold atom realization of “Dirac Monopoles”. This is really cool stuff, but there are a lot of intricacies that I don’t fully understand, so writing it up isn’t a simple matter. The… Continue reading Small College, Exotic Particles