Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance and Jennifer Ouellette of Cocktail Party Physics have gotten engaged. All together now: Awwwwww….You crazy kids with your falling in love over the Internet and all. Actually, we here at Chateaue Steelypips heartily approve of both the institution of marriage and the idea of meeting spouses through the Internet. Sincere… Continue reading True Love Travels on the Information Superhighway
Month: November 2006
Still in the Dark
The dark energy press conference mentioned a couple of days ago happened yesterday, and is written up in the Times. You can also get information straight from NASA. The basic result here is that astronomers have made a bunch of measurements of supernovae at extremely large distances, which amounts to looking at galaxies a very… Continue reading Still in the Dark
Bookstore Conundrum
If you go into any big-box bookstore these days, you’ll find a huge section of manga titles (that is, Japanese comic books), including dozens of different series, many of them running to a dozen or more volumes. This section is always impeccably organized, with all the series grouped neatly together, and the overall section alphabetical… Continue reading Bookstore Conundrum
Saturday Football Preview
I am already sick of Ohio State-Michigan, and the they haven’t even played yet. Can we at least get a final score before we declare this the Greatest Football Game of All Time? I can’t quite decide what I’m rooting for, here, but it’s either a 0-0 tie, or a 54-0 blowout. Whichever would make… Continue reading Saturday Football Preview
Early Basketball
The college basketball season is officially underway, and as is typical of the early season, there are already some wacky results, the most shocking being Kansas losing to Oral Roberts Wednesday night. Nobody is happier to see that score than Boston College coach Al Saunders– losing to Vermont is one thing (and makes Maryland’s win… Continue reading Early Basketball
Tom Petty Was Right
The last step in the tenure review process (from my end) is the approval of the Procedure section of the report. By rule, the ad hoc committee sends the candidate a copy of the section describing what they did in the course of the review (with the names removed), and the candidate gets a chance… Continue reading Tom Petty Was Right
Pimp Me Time Sinks
The fad of the moment among the physics majors is a shareware game called Pocket Tanks, in which players on opposite sides of the screen fire various weapons at one another, adjusting the launch angle and overall power in order to hit the target. Every time I walk into a room with two or more… Continue reading Pimp Me Time Sinks
NASA Updates
A bunch of links about recent happenings at everybody’s favorite space agency:/p> Steinn has links to dark energy proposals. Science and Reason on the “Beyond Einstein” program. Those little scamps are having another mysterious press conference tomorrow, to announce something about dark energy. Steinn suggests it has something to do with this guy’s research, but… Continue reading NASA Updates
Lubbock, Fallujah, What’s the Difference?
I wasn’t going to say anything about Bob Knight’s latest little incident, in which he smacked a player on the chin to get him to look up. If it were anyone else, this would be a non-issue, and even though it’s Knight, I don’t think this is worth the energy that sports media are expending… Continue reading Lubbock, Fallujah, What’s the Difference?
Love Does Not Delight in Evil, but Rejoices with the Truth
Fred Clark at Slacktivist is probably the best writer in blogdom, when it comes to matters of religion and the intersection between religion and politics. This might sound like damning with faint praise, given how screechingly awful most blogospheric writing about religion is, but it’s not intended that way. He’s a terrific writer by any… Continue reading Love Does Not Delight in Evil, but Rejoices with the Truth