Look– miniature dinosaurs! OK, fine, they’re not that small: These “dwarf” dinosaurs were slightly longer and heavier than a car, Sander said. “They stopped growing when they reached 6 metres [20 feet] in length and a ton in body mass,” he estimated. Their brachiosaur cousins, by contrast, were up to 45 metres (148 feet) long… Continue reading Next: Pot-Bellied Elephants
How the Other Half Grades
My Quantum Optics class this term is a junior/ senior level elective, one of a set of four or five such classes that we rotate through, offering one or two a year. We require physics majors to take one of these classes in order to graduate, and encourage grad-school-bound students to take as many as… Continue reading How the Other Half Grades
The Mystery of Series
Over at Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse recommends mystery writers, and touches on something that’s always puzzled me about the genre: Like Symons [Robert Barnard] has largely eschewed the detective series, which is probably has kept his profile lower than it could have been, but there is one recurring character–the english way of death. I’ve really… Continue reading The Mystery of Series
The Benefits of Dumber Cookbooks
A little while back, Eugene Wallingford wrote about the dumbing-down of cookbooks as a metaphor for computer science education. As we get a fair number of student in introductory calculus-based physics who can barely take a derivative of a polynomial, I have some sympathy with what he describes. The cookbook thing, though, is interesting from… Continue reading The Benefits of Dumber Cookbooks
Class Implications of the Brain Drain
Over at Gene Expression, Razib responds to my brain drain comments in a way that provokes some twinges of Liberal Guilt: Second, Chad like many others points to the issue of foreign scientists allowing us (Americans) to be complacent about nourishing home grown talent. I don’t totally dismiss this, there are probably many doctors and… Continue reading Class Implications of the Brain Drain
Ask a ScienceBlogger: Brain Drain
Another week, another “Ask a ScienceBlogger” question. This week, the topic is the putative “brain drain” caused by recent US policies: Do you think there is a brain drain going on (i.e. foreign scientists not coming to work and study in the U.S. like they used to, because of new immigration rules and the general… Continue reading Ask a ScienceBlogger: Brain Drain
Page to Screen: Homicide
I’ve been watching Netflix DVD’s of the late, lamented Homicide: Life of the Street lately, and a little while back, I went through the DVED’s of the first season of The Wire, which shares some of the same creative team. In particular, both series were based in part on work by David Simon, whose Homicide:… Continue reading Page to Screen: Homicide
Why Does James Dobson Hate Marriage?
I’m sort of on a roll of unpleasantly political posts lately, which I try to avoid. I can’t really not link Scalzi on the framing of gay marriage, though: There’s a manifest difference in a debate which has as its founding proposition that same-sex marriage is a theoretical construct in the US — which is… Continue reading Why Does James Dobson Hate Marriage?
Steelypips Book Club
Kate’s come up with a semi-ambitious plan for the summer: She’s going to re-read The Lord of the Rings (for the first time since the movies came out), and post chapter-by-chapter thoughts on her LiveJournal. At the moment, she’s only gotten through the introductory material and one critical essay, but there’s already some interesting discussion… Continue reading Steelypips Book Club
Generation in Debt?
Via bookslut, an interview at AlterNet with Tamara Draut, author of Strapped, a book about how hard young people have it today. The basic thesis of the book and the interview is that twenty- and thirty-somethings these days are in a uniquely bad position, because of the rising cost of college and relatively stagnant wages.… Continue reading Generation in Debt?