A bunch of links about recent happenings at everybody’s favorite space agency:/p> Steinn has links to dark energy proposals. Science and Reason on the “Beyond Einstein” program. Those little scamps are having another mysterious press conference tomorrow, to announce something about dark energy. Steinn suggests it has something to do with this guy’s research, but… Continue reading NASA Updates
Lubbock, Fallujah, What’s the Difference?
I wasn’t going to say anything about Bob Knight’s latest little incident, in which he smacked a player on the chin to get him to look up. If it were anyone else, this would be a non-issue, and even though it’s Knight, I don’t think this is worth the energy that sports media are expending… Continue reading Lubbock, Fallujah, What’s the Difference?
Love Does Not Delight in Evil, but Rejoices with the Truth
Fred Clark at Slacktivist is probably the best writer in blogdom, when it comes to matters of religion and the intersection between religion and politics. This might sound like damning with faint praise, given how screechingly awful most blogospheric writing about religion is, but it’s not intended that way. He’s a terrific writer by any… Continue reading Love Does Not Delight in Evil, but Rejoices with the Truth
Has Stephen Hawking Friended You?
The Female Science Professor (whose pseudonym I find unwieldy, but I’m not going to make a TLA out of it…) raises an interesting question in describing a language class experience: By far the strangest experience was when we had to show and talk about photographs of our family and friends. Many of the other students… Continue reading Has Stephen Hawking Friended You?
Sunday Football Commentary
Today is the official last day of classes, though my final class meetings were yesterday. I’m also halfway through grading a big pile of lab reports, which I do electronically, so I’m trying to keep my extra-curricular typing to a minimum, lest I suffer another flare-up of muscle spasms in my neck and shoulder. I… Continue reading Sunday Football Commentary
The Judgement of Borat
Scott Aaronson renders a judgement on the Borat movie (scroll down into the comments), but I think my opinion is best summed up by Kevin Drum: [T]he lesson of the movie wasn’t some razor-sharp subversive point about how we’re all racists and xenophobes an inch under the surface, the lesson was that if you act… Continue reading The Judgement of Borat
The Prestige
Christopher Priest’s Victorian-magician novel The Prestige would appear to be unfilmable. The book is written as two entirely different texts, one a memoir and the other a diary, plus a framing narrative about descendants of the rival magicians Alfred Borden and Robert Angier trying to figure out the secrets behind their rivalry. It’s a very… Continue reading The Prestige
Saturday Football
While all right-thinking people know that the important games are played on Sundays, as God intended, there are some people who insist on watching football on Saturday. Yesterday was a particularly good day for it, with a bunch of highly rated teams losing . While there was, of course, only one actually important result yesterday,… Continue reading Saturday Football
New Car Shopping
(I bet this will get me all sorts of incredibly useful search engine traffic…) Some time back, I asked for car-buying advice, and got a wealth of it in comments. Yesterday, Kate and I did a little car shopping, and visited a handful of local dealers to look at various cars. As with the last… Continue reading New Car Shopping
The Never-Ending Saga of PowerPoint
Some of the discussion in my recent post giving example slides made me realize a problem with the way I posted them– converting the slides to PDF loses the transition effects, which are a significant part of the lecture. In an attempt to address this, here’s a crude simulation of the effect, done by making… Continue reading The Never-Ending Saga of PowerPoint