Lots of my fellow ScienceBloggers have been playing with the Official Seal Generator (Tara, Steinn, Bora, and Josh, and probably others by the time this posts). I’m just punchy enough to play along, but I can’t decide which way to go with this. So, below the fold, I present the competing options for the Official… Continue reading Pick a Seal, Any Seal
Seventeen Books Answers
Here are the answers to last week’s list of quotes from seventeen books:
Banner Month
August was the highest-traffic month since the move, with Google Analytics recording 51,752 “Unique Visits” (whatever that means– it’s not 50,000 different people, I don’t think). I’m sort of boggled by that number, which is about an order of magnitude higher than what I was seeing at the old site. Somewhere in there, we also… Continue reading Banner Month
White Men Can Jump. Sort Of.
A couple of guys goaded me into trying to dunk at the lunchtime basketball game today. “You’ve lost a lot of weight,” they said, knowing I’m a sucker for flattery, “You’ve got to be close.” So I tried, and much to my surprise, succeeded. It wasn’t what you’d call Jordanesque– I barely got the ball… Continue reading White Men Can Jump. Sort Of.
Classic Edition: Advice to New Faculty
Classes for the Fall term start next week, which means that things are starting to gear up on campus. We’ve been sent our class rosters, and lists of new freshman advisees, and have started to have meetings about team-taught courses and department policies and the like. And, of course, the new faculty hired for this… Continue reading Classic Edition: Advice to New Faculty
True Lab Stories: Smells Like… Not Victory, That’s for Sure
(A couple of regular commenters will recognize this one…) Every working research lab has a sort of rhythm to it. There’s always a collection of background sounds, in a particular pattern, that indicates that the lab is functioning properly. When I was a post-doc, the pattern was something like three mintues of white noise (the… Continue reading True Lab Stories: Smells Like… Not Victory, That’s for Sure
Pluto Is Not in Genesis
The American Institutes of Physics run an occasionally updated news feed, Physics News Updates, that I have in my RSS subscriptions. Yesterday, for some reason, it coughed up a squib about last week’s Pluto news, which starts: Just as in the Bible Adam achieved dominion over the objects of the earth by naming them, so… Continue reading Pluto Is Not in Genesis
Real Clock Tutorial: Atomic Clocks
In yesterday’s post, I outlined the history of clocks starting from the essential feature of any clock, namely the “tick.” I ended by saying that the best clock you can possibly make is one based off the basic laws of quantum physics, using the energy separation between two energy levels in an atom to determine… Continue reading Real Clock Tutorial: Atomic Clocks
On “Wussy” Songs
Chuck Klosterman is a dangerous author for me to read. Not just because it leads to me posting quotes that upset people, but because I like his writing in a way that tends to creep into my own writing. After he releases a new book, I have be be really careful when I blog about… Continue reading On “Wussy” Songs
Apples : Oranges :: New SAT : Old SAT
OK, they dumped the analogy questions ages ago, but for oldsters like myself, those are still the signature SAT questions… Inside Higher Ed has a piece today on the new SAT results, which expresses concern over some declines: Mean scores on the SAT fell this year by more than they have in decades. A five-point… Continue reading Apples : Oranges :: New SAT : Old SAT