The Female Science Professor (whose pseudonym I find unwieldy, but I’m not going to make a TLA out of it…) raises an interesting question in describing a language class experience: By far the strangest experience was when we had to show and talk about photographs of our family and friends. Many of the other students… Continue reading Has Stephen Hawking Friended You?
Month: November 2006
Sunday Football Commentary
Today is the official last day of classes, though my final class meetings were yesterday. I’m also halfway through grading a big pile of lab reports, which I do electronically, so I’m trying to keep my extra-curricular typing to a minimum, lest I suffer another flare-up of muscle spasms in my neck and shoulder. I… Continue reading Sunday Football Commentary
The Judgement of Borat
Scott Aaronson renders a judgement on the Borat movie (scroll down into the comments), but I think my opinion is best summed up by Kevin Drum: [T]he lesson of the movie wasn’t some razor-sharp subversive point about how we’re all racists and xenophobes an inch under the surface, the lesson was that if you act… Continue reading The Judgement of Borat
The Prestige
Christopher Priest’s Victorian-magician novel The Prestige would appear to be unfilmable. The book is written as two entirely different texts, one a memoir and the other a diary, plus a framing narrative about descendants of the rival magicians Alfred Borden and Robert Angier trying to figure out the secrets behind their rivalry. It’s a very… Continue reading The Prestige
Saturday Football
While all right-thinking people know that the important games are played on Sundays, as God intended, there are some people who insist on watching football on Saturday. Yesterday was a particularly good day for it, with a bunch of highly rated teams losing . While there was, of course, only one actually important result yesterday,… Continue reading Saturday Football
New Car Shopping
(I bet this will get me all sorts of incredibly useful search engine traffic…) Some time back, I asked for car-buying advice, and got a wealth of it in comments. Yesterday, Kate and I did a little car shopping, and visited a handful of local dealers to look at various cars. As with the last… Continue reading New Car Shopping
The Never-Ending Saga of PowerPoint
Some of the discussion in my recent post giving example slides made me realize a problem with the way I posted them– converting the slides to PDF loses the transition effects, which are a significant part of the lecture. In an attempt to address this, here’s a crude simulation of the effect, done by making… Continue reading The Never-Ending Saga of PowerPoint
Pretty Pictures from Outer Space
Matt McIrvin reminds me to look at the nifty Saturn pictures on the Cassini-Huygens Mission page. The hot image of the moment is the big storm at the south pole, but there’s lots of good stuff, like this: (Explanation of the ring shot here.)
Academic Poetry
Via The Little Professor, a poem sure to touch most academics, Tom Wayman’s “Did I Miss Anything?”: Nothing. None of the content of this course has value or meaning Take as many days off as you like: any activities we undertake as a class I assure you will not matter either to you or me… Continue reading Academic Poetry
Subtle Battlerstar
I spent a while idly channel-surfing after we watched the final couple of episodes of Martian Successor Nadesico last night, and ran across the new Battlestar Galactica on the Sci-Fi Channel. Lots of smart people like the show, but I didn’t get into the premiere, and the occasional attempt to watch it in sub-optimal circumstances… Continue reading Subtle Battlerstar