That damn airplane-on-a-treadmill problem has come up again, thanks to the New York Times, aided and abetted by Boing Boing. For some reason, this problem inevitably produces very heated responses, such as this one. It doesn’t help that the problem is frequently mis-stated to explicitly have the airplane stading still relative to the ground. The… Continue reading Imagine a Rocket in a Football Stadium Full of Jello…
Month: December 2006
Science on the Tree 2
Here’s the second of a series of holiday photo-blog posts showing some of the ornaments we have, and providing explanations for how they’re really all about the science. It starts to get a little harder here: “Dude,” you say, “that’s a teapot. What does that have to do with science?”
Reducing the Application Pile
It’s job-hunting season in academia, so we’re not the only ones sifting through huge piles of applications looking for the One True Job Candidate. Clifford Johnson has his own pile of mail, and some suggestions for how to fix the process: Of the order of a decade ago I suggested (to nobody in particular, just… Continue reading Reducing the Application Pile
The Academic Scene
A few weeks ago, Ethan Zuckerman got wistful about collaboration: Dave Winer’s got a poignant thought over at Scripting News today: “Where is the Bronx Science for adults?” He explains that, as a kid, the best thing about attending the famous high school “was being in daily contact with really smart and creative people my… Continue reading The Academic Scene
Extended Shifts Lead to Medical Errors
Surprising approximately no-one outside the medical profession, Eurekalert today features a press release about a paper showing that doctors on long shifts make more mistakes: The study, published in PLoS Medicine, which was led by Charles Czeisler and Laura Barger from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, included 2737 medical residents, who completed… Continue reading Extended Shifts Lead to Medical Errors
Snarkin’ Across the Universe
Monte Davis, of “Thinking Clearly About Space” has another snarky look at overblown space enthusiasm, providing a helpful taxonomy of X-Treme Spacers: Alt.Tech Chemical rockets have let you down: after decades of gritty engineering they remain expensive and trouble-prone. It’s time to start over with a space elevator, deployed by laser launch and magnetic catapult.… Continue reading Snarkin’ Across the Universe
Happy Children Thank You
As you may or may not recall, some time back we did a fundraising challenge to raise money for the educational charity Donors Choose. Uncertain Principles readers donated a little over $1,200, and ScienceBlogs in general raised about $34,000. When I kicked in my money, I forgot to un-check the option to have thank-you notes… Continue reading Happy Children Thank You
Science on the Tree
I remarked to Kate the other night that it’s a shame we don’t have any science-themed ornaments for the Christmas tree. She responded that I just wasn’t thinking hard enough about what we do have, and she’s right– with a bit of effort, it’s not hard to come up with scientific symbolism for the ornaments… Continue reading Science on the Tree
Comment on Comments
Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean is pondering comment policies: So the question is: how can the comment sections be better? To decode this for our more innocent readers: how can we increase the signal-to-noise ratio? Increasing the signal is one obvious way, but that’s hard. The real question that I’ve been wondering about (haven’t consulted… Continue reading Comment on Comments
The MLA on Tenure
Inside Higher Ed had a story on Friday about a Modern Language Association study on tenure and promotion. The study group just released its final report (available for download here. Given that I’m waiting to hear the results of my own tenure case (a decision could come at any time, starting this week), there’s no… Continue reading The MLA on Tenure