It’s a grey and rainy weekend morning, and I’m facing a day at work trying to put things in order before I leave for DAMOP on Tuesday, so I’m not in a big hurry to get moving. Of course, I’m not feeling all that inspired, blog-wise, either, so I’m going to fall back on one… Continue reading This Is Not the Blog You’re Looking For
Woo-Hoo!
The approval for the second year of my NSF grant just came through. This wasn’t really in doubt, but it’s nice to have confirmation that the thirty-odd thousand dollars I was counting on to run the next year of the experiment will actually, you know, be available when I start sending purchase orders out for… Continue reading Woo-Hoo!
New Music Random Ten
I keep meaning to write a substantial follow-up post talking about science funding, but it’s not a great Friday topic, so it’ll probably wait for Monday, even though I’ll be away for the latter part of next week. I’m moving a little too slowly this morning to really do it justice, so here are some… Continue reading New Music Random Ten
Credo
A very nice post from Rob Knop, exploring the the role of faith in science: You may then ask, am I not then taking many of the results of science as faith, since I didn’t check all of the experimental results and subsequent analysis myself? Answer: yes and no. It is a lowercase-f “faith”, in… Continue reading Credo
Thrown to the Wolves
Last night was the third annual faculty-student basketball game, held as a fund-raiser for charity by a local sorority. This year the threw us a team that included five players from the varsity, including the only 2,000-point scorer in school history. Needless to say, we didn’t win… It was sorta-kinda close for a while, until… Continue reading Thrown to the Wolves
Giant Booklog Backlog
Well before I was a footnote in a list of popular science blogs, I started out into the world of weblogging by starting a book log, which I still maintain, sort of. I haven’t posted anything to it in a few months because, well, this site takes up most of my blogging energy, and I… Continue reading Giant Booklog Backlog
Greatest Since When?
Via Arcane Gazebo, a pointer to the Blender list of “The 500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born.” At least, it was a pointer to that article last night– all Blender links seem to be 404ing this morning, which also means I can’t discuss the songs in detail. That’s fine, actually, as the list is… Continue reading Greatest Since When?
Skip to the End
Via a LiveJournal post on the dorkiest thing ever, a link that isn’t new, but new to me: The Lord of the Rings in quotes from The Princess Bride: PETER JACKSON: Frodo and Sam don’t get burned up by the lava. AUDIENCE: What? PETER JACKSON: Frodo and Sam don’t get burned up by the lava.… Continue reading Skip to the End
Two Cultures in Meetings
Prompted in part by Rob Knop’s post on meeting with humanists, an observation about the nature of academia attributed to our late Dean of the Faculty, a former Classics professor: The key difference between disciplines in terms of administrative business on campus is that scientists tend to do their research work (experiments, calculations, simulations) in… Continue reading Two Cultures in Meetings
Filter Feeding
As noted in passing in the previous post, I try to ride my bike to and from work when the weather is nice enough. In a good week, I might get three bike rides a week in, which is a little extra exercise, and that much more gas I don’t have to buy. The major… Continue reading Filter Feeding