Two more quick observations from last night’s Wesley Clark event. Or, rather, one from the event, and one from dinner beforehand. Both strike me as fairly general principles about political discourse: 1) Your current political opinions are interesting in inverse proportion to the number of times you use the word “fascist” or variants thereof. Likewise… Continue reading Laws of Discourse?
Dorky Poll: Presidential Questions
I was expounding on my dislike of the routine questions being asked of Wesley Clark last night (see previous post) to a colleague from Math, who suggested “Which do you prefer, C or Fortran? And if you use Fortran, do you declare all your variables?” as an alternative to boring policy questions that produce nothing… Continue reading Dorky Poll: Presidential Questions
Wesley Clark vs. Rote Protesters
As previously mentioned, Wesley Clark spoke on campus last night. The speech was pretty much what you’d expect from a once and future (?) Presidential aspirant with his background: he mostly talked about military matters, stressing that George Bush bad, Americ good, puppies and apple pie, yay! OK, not so much the puppies and apple… Continue reading Wesley Clark vs. Rote Protesters
Two Cultures Divided by Scheduling
We had our annual undergraduate research symposium this past weekend, which included presentations from students doing work in all different disciplines. We have enough physics and astronomy majors these days that I spent most of the day Friday listening to them talk, but I did have a break in the morning when I saw a… Continue reading Two Cultures Divided by Scheduling
The Mystery of “Supersolid” Helium
One of the other ScienceBloggers is prone to complaining in the back-channel forums that we don’t have enough bloggers who work in some subfield of biology or another– we need more left-handed shrew ecologists, or some such. This is, of course, patently ridiculous. What we need is a physics blogger from the condensed matter world,… Continue reading The Mystery of “Supersolid” Helium
History of Lawns?
It’s spring here in suburbia, which means my neighbors were all out this weekend hastening the doom of the planet by running their gas-powered lawn mowers. Not me– I was, um, paying our neighbors’ teenage son to mow our lawn. With a gas-powered lawn mower. OK, I’m not exactly staking out the Moral High Ground,… Continue reading History of Lawns?
The Trouble With KeyNote
I was buried in work last week in part because of the annual Steinmetz Symposium, in which we cancel a day of classes and have students report on their undergraduate research projects. Both of my students were giving talks, and there was all sorts of running around involved in the preparation. One of my students… Continue reading The Trouble With KeyNote
Questions for Wesley Clark?
Former general and presidential candidate Wesley Clark is going to be speaking on campus tomorrow night. I don’t expect there to be a lot of question time at this, but I’m fairly good at getting a chance to ask questions at these things, so if anyone has a suggestion of a really good question to… Continue reading Questions for Wesley Clark?
Thrilling Tales of Astrophysics
Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll is pining for the good old days: I’m going through one of my “I would kill for some new SF” phases, SF in this case being defined in a narrow and idiosyncratic way. In particular, I want the modern version of those old SF stories where SF writers, having… Continue reading Thrilling Tales of Astrophysics
Bicycling Report
In the two weeks since the previous report, I managed only two round-trips to campus, for a total of 9.6 miles. Either the weather was lousy, or I had things I needed to do that precluded riding the bike. I got a good ride in today, though: Total Distance: 16.6 miles Maximum Speed: 30.1 mph… Continue reading Bicycling Report