When Kate and I were walking Emmy last night, we were talking about the historical development of relativity. As one does, when walking the dog. I mentioned a couple of the pre-1905 attempts to explain things like the Michelson-Morley experiment, and how people like Lorentz and FitzGerald and Poincare were on the right track, but… Continue reading Relativity, Quantum, and the Internet
Links for 2010-09-10
NFL 2010: The biggest thing fans don’t understand about life in pro football. (1) – By Stefan Fatsis, Nate Jackson, Josh Levin, and Tom Scocca – Slate Magazine A great discussion of the modern NFL, including a couple of former players. (tags: sports football slate culture) I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat… Continue reading Links for 2010-09-10
Thursday Shana Tova Blogging 090910
SteelyKid goes to day care at the Jewish Community Center, which is closed today and tomorrow for Rosh Hashanah. Here we see her calling all her friends on the phone in her play house to wish them a happy new year, and let Appa offer his own greetings: The two-day closing is, as you might… Continue reading Thursday Shana Tova Blogging 090910
College Turning Points
Over at EphBlog, Stephen O’Grady has a post giving advice to the entering class at Williams. A bunch of this stuff is school-specific stuff that will only make sense to another member of the Cult of the Purple Cow, but there’s some good general advice in there as well. I particularly liked his story about… Continue reading College Turning Points
How to Read Scientific Papers Without Reading Every Word
Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton is surprised that people skim over boring bits of novels. While she explicitly excludes non-fiction from her discussion, this immediately made me think of Timothy Burke’s How to Read in College, which offers tips to prospective humanities and social science majors on how to most effectively skim through huge reading… Continue reading How to Read Scientific Papers Without Reading Every Word
Links for 2010-09-09
Swans on Tea » I’m Not Willing to Believe You “I’m perfectly willing to believe that the data one uses for one’s thesis is gathered in three months, and my experience is similar, but that’s not the whole story. A Ph.D. is not just the dissertation — you can’t just write off the experience leading… Continue reading Links for 2010-09-09
Counterfactual Physics: Lorentz Variance?
The theory of relativity takes its name from a very simple and appealing idea: that the laws of physics should look the same to moving observers as to stationary ones. “Laws of physics” here includes Maxwell’s equations for electricity and magnetism, which necessarily means that moving observers must see the same speed of light as… Continue reading Counterfactual Physics: Lorentz Variance?
Teacher Self Management vs. Going to the Dark Side
The New York Times has an article about the opening of a teacher-run school in The City. It sounds like an interesting experiment: Shortly after landing at Malcolm X Shabazz High School as a Teach for America recruit, Dominique D. Lee grew disgusted with a system that produced ninth graders who could not name the… Continue reading Teacher Self Management vs. Going to the Dark Side
Links for 2010-09-08
Ancient brew masters tapped antibiotic secrets ” A chemical analysis of the bones of ancient Nubians shows that they were regularly consuming tetracycline, most likely in their beer. The finding is the strongest evidence yet that the art of making antibiotics, which officially dates to the discovery of penicillin in 1928, was common practice nearly… Continue reading Links for 2010-09-08
Language Poll: The Most Threshold
Not prompted by anything specific, but something I’ve occasionally wondered about: what’s the threshold for “most”? Thus, a poll: The minimum percentage of X doing Y that you would need to feel justified saying “Most X do Y” is:survey software I know I tend to use “most” to mean something considerably more than just 51%,… Continue reading Language Poll: The Most Threshold