Another weird Nobel note: When we were talking about this yesterday at work, a colleague noted that this is one of several prizes awarded for observations based on radio astronomy (Penzias and Wilson, and a couple of things to do with pulsars), but we couldn’t think of any given for optical astronomy. There’s even the… Continue reading No Love for Observers?
Month: October 2006
COBE Nobel Follow-Up
The Paper of Record provides the Story of Record for yesterday’s Nobel Prize in Physics for Mather and Smoot, including recent photographs of both. One of my favorite bits of the 1997 Nobel was seeing the media circus that went on around the Prize– I’ll put some amusing anecdotes into another post. All the usual… Continue reading COBE Nobel Follow-Up
Chemistry Nobel for Eukaryotic Transcription
The Chemistry Nobel Prize was announced this morning, and goes to only one guy (which is somehwat unusual in this age of massively collaborative science): Roger D. Kornberg of Stanford University, “for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription”. I am very much not a chemist, so all I can really do is… Continue reading Chemistry Nobel for Eukaryotic Transcription
Sing, Sing a Song
Over at his AOL gig, John Scalzi points to a list purporting to be the Top Ten All Time Pop Singalong Songs. Here’s the list: 1) Baha Men – Who Let the Dogs Out 2) Beatles – Hey Jude 3) Bee Gees – Stayin’ Alive 4) Whitney Houston – I Will Always Love You 5)… Continue reading Sing, Sing a Song
Evil Waiter Will Receive an Unholy Tip!
I’ve got a silly pop-culture post planned, but we’ll put that off for a moment, because this is the 666th post to this blog, according to the counter on Movable Type. That would appear to demand something evil, so here you go: Behold the Evil! Evil!
Congratulations to Tom Renbarger
A little while back, I offered a Nobel betting pool, and promised to allow anyone who successfully predicted the name of at least one of the winners of the Physics prize to pick a post topic here: If you correctly predict the name of at least one of the winning physicists, I’ll post an article… Continue reading Congratulations to Tom Renbarger
Dynamite Money for COBE
Hot off the presses: The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John C. Mather and George Smoot “for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.” This is recent enough that they don’t even have much on the Nobel site, but happily for me, it’s something I know a… Continue reading Dynamite Money for COBE
SAT Challenge: They Sound Like… Bloggers
Visit the Official Blogger SAT Challenge site. After the grading was finished, a few of our volunteer graders made general comments about the essays they read. One thing that really jumped out at me about this was the way that the problems they described sounded like exactly the sort of thing you would expect from… Continue reading SAT Challenge: They Sound Like… Bloggers
SAT Challenge: My Entry
So, how did I score in the Blogger SAT Challenge? (Because this is all about me, after all…) Here’s my entry. I’m not terribly proud of it, but it got a score of 4 from the graders. Looking more closely, one grader generously gave it a 5/6, while the other gave it a 3/6, presumably… Continue reading SAT Challenge: My Entry
SAT Challenge: Bloggers Dumber Than High-School Kids
Visit the Official Blogger SAT Challenge Site The graph shows a histogram of the scores for the essays entered into the Blogger SAT challenge. It’s really a pretty nice distribution, with an average score of 2.899, a standard deviation of 1.28, and a standard deviation of the mean of 0.123 (so I’d make my students… Continue reading SAT Challenge: Bloggers Dumber Than High-School Kids