Inside Higher Ed has a story about the recent student elections at Penn State, which ended up with the winning candidates being belatedly rejected after making inappropriate comments: Jay Bundy won a plurality of votes in last week’s campus election and was poised to take over leadership of the University Park Undergraduate Association, recognized by… Continue reading Kids These Days (Student Government Edition)
Exciting Technical Development!
I have discovered a marvelous proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, which is too long to fit in the Excerpt box. Which means that people reading this blog via RSS have no chance of seeing it, as the combined feed is currently showing only the excerpts. It’s not clear whether this is a glitch or a… Continue reading Exciting Technical Development!
Physics of Basketball
Well, at least, the physics of the new NBA basketball, at any rate… For those who haven’t heard the story already, the NBA is changing the style of the basketballs used in its games this season. They’re moving away from the traditional leather basketballs to a new synthetic material, which is supposed to hold up… Continue reading Physics of Basketball
Only We Can Do That to Our Pledges
It’s fraternity pledging season on campus, which means there are dozens of slightly addled sophomores wandering around being forced to do silly things by upperclassmen. This, combined with the passing mention of cable-making in the college advice post, got me thinking about scientific hazing– the sort of crap jobs that get given to first-year grad… Continue reading Only We Can Do That to Our Pledges
For Small Values of “Real”
Over at Learning Curves, Rudbeckia Hirta takes a look at the myth of the “real world”. A colleague tried to defend a zero-tolerance attendance policy by saying, “If she had a job and missed a meeting, she’d be fired.” That’s not really how it works, though: We have people who don’t show up to class,… Continue reading For Small Values of “Real”
Leaf Peeping
It’s fall, which means lots of good things: football on tv, college basketball just around the corner, apple cider donuts (mmm…. donuts…), and the leaves turning colors. One of the real highlights of living in New England is the spectacular foliage. Sadly, it tends to bring out the leaf-peepers, people from down toward New York… Continue reading Leaf Peeping
The All-Important “House Band” Question
Ben over at the World’s Fair is looking for a house band for ScienceBlogs. He goes on for a while about Phish, which is kind of bizarre– you can’t be stoned enough to appreciate Phish while also retaining the ability to do math. He also suggests a few slightly more obvious nerd bands– Devo, They… Continue reading The All-Important “House Band” Question
Classic Edition: You Talkin’ to Me?
This post dates from all the way back in July of 2002, and contains a bunch of thoughts on the preparation of different types of scientific presentations. I’ve re-covered some of this ground in the previous post, but there’s enough different material to justify a separate Classic Edition post. Since posting this, I’ve given several… Continue reading Classic Edition: You Talkin’ to Me?
Two Cultures At Meetings
For some reason, I was forwarded a link to an old article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about how to give a scholarly lecture. (It’s a time-limited email link, so look quickly.) As with roughly 90% of all Chronicle pieces, it’s aimed squarely at the humanities types. The advice given thus ranges from pretty… Continue reading Two Cultures At Meetings
College Choice
Sean Carroll is offering more unsolicted advice (though it is in response to a comment, which makes it borderline solicited…), this time about choosing an undergraduate school. He breaks the options down into four categories, with two small errors that I’ll correct in copying the list over here: Liberal-Arts College (LAC), such as Williams or… Continue reading College Choice