Gandalf or Magneto?
Kids These Days
Over in the right-hand sidebar, Seed is pushing a short piece on Laurie Pycroft, a 16-year-old Briton who founded Pro-Test, an organization supporting animal testing. This was all over the UK papers a couple of months ago, and a little Googling turns up a piece by Pycroft himself telling the story of the group’s origins.… Continue reading Kids These Days
The Numbers Game
Today finds Kieran Healy counting words, and Hedwig the Grrlscientist tallying visits, so that must count as a blog statistics meme. Or something. Out of curiosity, I checked the Google Analytics stats for this site, and was bemused to discover that as of sometime this morning, there have been 141,183 unique visits to this site… Continue reading The Numbers Game
Get Your Flamewar On
It’s not really all that flame-tastic, but Janet has a nice post on the women in science thing, taking off from yesterday’s post, and my comment that I don’t really have the energy to wage a “women in science” flamewar at the moment. If you do have the energy, head over to Janet’s blog. But… Continue reading Get Your Flamewar On
The Scores Are Falling?
The science story of the day is probably the Department of Education Report on science test scores, cited in this morning’s New York Times. They administered a test to fourth, eight, and twelfth-graders nationwide, aking basic science questions, and compared the scores to similar tests given in 1996 and 2000. (Update: John Lynch has some… Continue reading The Scores Are Falling?
Nerdify the World
Scott Aaronson takes up the eternal question of why there are so few women in science. His contribution to the nature/ nurture side of the debate is particularly noteworthy: To put the point differently: suppose (hypothetically) that what repelled women from computer science were all the vending-machine-fueled all-nighters, empty pizza boxes stacked to the ceiling,… Continue reading Nerdify the World
Quantum Computing for Undergrads
Dave Bacon asks, I answer. Well, OK, Dave was asking how one would go about teaching quantum computing to CS undergrads, while what I provide here is a set of lectures on presenting quantum computing ideas to undergrad physics majors in my Quantum Optics class. But, really, isn’t that almost the same thing (don’t answer… Continue reading Quantum Computing for Undergrads
Ask a ScienceBlogger: Lies and Damned Lies
This week’s Ask a ScienceBlogger question from On High arrived while I was out of town (see also last week’s results), and I’ve held off answering because I had a huge stack of papers to grade. Of course, time for responding has almost run out, so I guess I ought to say something… The question… Continue reading Ask a ScienceBlogger: Lies and Damned Lies
The Old Tunes Experiment
So, in our last installment, I had purchased a bunch of classical music off iTunes, and pledged to listen to it while away at DAMOP last week. I was pretty good about it, too– I kept the classical playlist going on the iPod all the way through the flights down there, and for listening during… Continue reading The Old Tunes Experiment
Loose Lips Sink Research Grants
A scientific conference like DAMOP almost always includes a conference banquet (to which people may or may not bring dates), usually the last night of the meeting, where everybody gets together to eat massive quantities of catered food and drink massive amounts of wine supplied by the conference. The quality of these ranges from your… Continue reading Loose Lips Sink Research Grants