Along with tacky an inescapable Christmas music, December brings lists, as every publication that deals with music at all puts out their own compilation of songs or albums of the year. The definitive Uncertain Principles Songs of 2006 list will be coming up, but if you’re just dying to see ordered lists of pop music,… Continue reading Season of the List
Month: December 2006
Grading Season
Colleges and universities working on a semester calaendar are just finishing up classes now, which means that most academics (unlike those of us in Trimester Land, who have been out of session for a few weeks) are currently buried in grading. This leads to some fun blog posts: Grading as a text adventure (via Making… Continue reading Grading Season
ScienceBlogs Showcase
The forthcoming issue of Seed will include a big spread on ScienceBlogs, and the online version is already up. They got pictures of all the bloggers (with stand-ins for the pseudonymous), and turned a caricature artist loose on us, leading to the motley mob scene at the top of that page. The cartoon will be… Continue reading ScienceBlogs Showcase
Science on the Tree 5
We might as well close out the week on a high note, so here’s tonight’s ornament. Actually, there are two of them:
The Christmas Tunes Experiment: Results
So, what are the results of the Christmas Tunes Experiment? I’ve had a playlist of the songs on the Jefitoblog Holidy Mix Tape (plus a few other things) locked into the iTunes Party Shuffle while I work on the computer at home. At work, I stuck with the usual four-and-five-star playlist in the lab, because,… Continue reading The Christmas Tunes Experiment: Results
The Band Is On the Field!
One of the requirements of the Nobel Prize is that the laureates give a public lecture at some point, and as a result, there is generally a seminar scheduled a little bit before the actual prize ceremony, at which the laureats give lectures about the work for which they’re being honored. These frequently involve props… Continue reading The Band Is On the Field!
Displacing Artie Shaw
A flurry of press releases hit EurekAlert yesterday (one, two, three), indicating the release of a bunch of data from NASA’s Stardust mission. This is the probe that was sent out to fly through the tail of a comet, and catch tiny dust particles in an aerogel matrix, and return them to Earth for analysis.… Continue reading Displacing Artie Shaw
Science on the Tree 4
Tonight’s Science on the Tree ornament is a little more obscure:
I Told You So
We’ve been having intermittent DSL problems here at Chateau Steelypips, which has led to much cursing of Verizon. The fact that their tech support department screwed up the first two service appointments, and repeatedly dropped calls after half an hour spent navigating their miserable phone tree and hold system didn’t help any. The repair guy… Continue reading I Told You So
Baghdad Update: Bad Cops, Good Cops
Here’s the latest of the intermittent updates (I actually skipped one, but I’ll come back to it on a slow day one of these days) from my friend Paul, who’s working as a journalist in Baghdad (and, thankfully, just about done with his tour there). This is one of the most opinionated of the occasional… Continue reading Baghdad Update: Bad Cops, Good Cops