Friday’s a good day for silly pop music lists, so here’s a couple adapted from a “meme” via Jamie Bowden: Go to http://popculturemadness.com and find the Greatest USA Hits of the year you turned 18. I refuse to spend a bunch of time dinking around with typefaces, and I’m not going to list all 75… Continue reading Top of the Pops
Every Picture Tells a Story
So, what’s the deal with that graph I was talking about the other day? I sort of left it hanging at the end, there, but I ought to actually interpret the figure. It also serves as a nice and fairly simple illustration of how physicists approach experimental data. Here’s a newer version of the plot… Continue reading Every Picture Tells a Story
The Education Gap
The Times last weekend had a big article on the “achievement gap” in education, where poor and minority students are found to lag behind upper- and middle-class white students in many subjects. The author looks at a number of innovative shools that are producing good results with students from the at-risk groups, and considers a… Continue reading The Education Gap
My New Ride
For those who care, a picture of my new car (I picked it up Tuesday, but didn’t get around to cropping down the pictures until this morning): In keeping with Ford’s general policy, this shot is sort of a three-quarters angle– as Kate pointed out, the glossy brochure from the dealership doesn’t include any pictures… Continue reading My New Ride
You Got General Relativity on My Protein Folding!
There’s a brief squib in the AIP Physics News Updates today about new work on protein folding. “Protein folding” is a simple-sounding term for a really difficult problem: protein molecules are made up of chains of amino acids, which can be bent into a huge number of different possible configurations. In nature, though, these proteins… Continue reading You Got General Relativity on My Protein Folding!
More Job Searching in Academia
Doug Natelson posted the second installment in his inside view of the hiring process for academic physics positions, this one describing the campus visit/ interview process. Again, the description is mostly accurate for a much larger department than ours, at a research insitution, but the basic idea is the same. In our department, candidates making… Continue reading More Job Searching in Academia
You Are What You Eat
Over at the World’s Fair, David has a post with pictures showing a week’s worth of food for families in various countries. It’s pretty eye-opening– the total volume of food (less packaging) for a family of four in the US or England exceeds that eaten by fifteen people in Mali. Damn, but we’re gluttons.
PowerPoint Never Gets Old
Recently, my post about my SAT Challenge entry has leaped into the Top Five Most Emailed list over on the right, for what reason I can’t really say. That gives me two of the top five, though– eat my dust, Myers. Now there’s only that Deltoid character between me and world domination… The other Most… Continue reading PowerPoint Never Gets Old
Academic Links Dump
Two quick links from yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed that a browser crash kept me from posting yesterday: 1) A story on a professor at Idaho who asks students to sign a waiver acknowledging that they may be offended by some of the material in his film studies class. There’s a bit of discussion of whether… Continue reading Academic Links Dump
Maryland vs. Illinois
The ACC-Big Ten Challenge is one of those things that seems like a really good idea on paper. They’re consistently two of the top basketball conferences in the country, and both have strongly partisan fans who will argue for the superiority of their conference over all others. Matching them up in the early season seems… Continue reading Maryland vs. Illinois