Dave Munger does Friday polls calling them “Casual Fridays,” but then, the usual run of posts at Cognitive Daily is a lot more serious than my usual standard. So I’ll call this a “semi-formal Friday” poll, sort of the khaki pants and blue blazer of the online research world. I’m also too lazy to set… Continue reading Semi-Formal Friday: Driving Habits
Month: September 2008
links for 2008-09-05
Torontoist: ROAWR…Pop! Best. Balloon Animal. EVER. (tags: dinosaurs animals art silly pictures) Built on Facts : Charging the Earth "Gravity couldn’t hold lint to your shirt in a million years." (tags: physics math gravity science blogs) Confessions of a Community College Dean: In Which I Realize That We’re Doing It Wrong "[T]he attitudes we convey,… Continue reading links for 2008-09-05
At the Kitchen Table: An Ad in One Act
Fade in on an Old, Balding White Man reading the paper at the breakfast table. OBWM: I don’t know. I’m really worried about the economy. Rising fuel prices, increasing costs of everything… Cut to his Younger Blond Wife, sipping tea YBW: I know. And the mortgage crisis, all these home foreclosures. It’s terrible. Cut to… Continue reading At the Kitchen Table: An Ad in One Act
If You Were a Republican…
We’re in Boston to visit Kate’s parents, and while we wait for SteelyKid to wake up and demand food, we’re watching “Mike and Mike” on ESPN2 (the live simulcast of the radio show). They’ve been talking about how tonight’s NFL kick-off (our long national nightmare is over…) was pushed up so as not to conflict… Continue reading If You Were a Republican…
links for 2008-09-04
The Quantum Pontiff : Wisely Using Your Advantage "In other words, what is your probability of ruin, given a starting bankroll of D dollars, an advantage of p, and a target of T dollars?" (tags: science math statistics blogs) Optics basics: Coherence ë Skulls in the Stars A very nice explanation of one of the… Continue reading links for 2008-09-04
Baby Soothing Open Thread
We’re taking SteelyKid on her first road trip today, down to Boston to visit Kate’s parents for a few days. This ought to be interesting, as the drive is approximately as long as her longest naps. The disruption in her normal routine may or may not lead to an increased need for baby-calming, so this… Continue reading Baby Soothing Open Thread
Find a Pattern
What’s this graph? The cosmic microwave background? Preliminary results from the LHC? No, it’s SteelyKid’s feeding schedule. The horizontal axis is in days since we brought her home, the vertical axis is time of day on a 24-hour scale (in half-hour bins), and the color scale indicates the duration of the feeding in minutes. If… Continue reading Find a Pattern
links for 2008-09-03
Making Light: Why RMS Titanic Didn’t Have Enough Lifeboats "Sixteen hundred people died in the Titanic disaster because no one had worked out the implications of tuned circuits." (tags: history science blogs gadgets) The TNR Q&A: Charles Barkley "People can always bring up stuff. When I get involved in politics, I am not even going… Continue reading links for 2008-09-03
Colbert, Atheists, and Hermaphrodites
Comedy Central is re-playing Friday’s episodes of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, which includes Stephen Colbert’s interview with Lori Lippman Brown of the Secular Coalition for America. It’s interesting to see that she doesn’t really fare any better than any of the religious nutjobs he’s had on in his various interview segments, in… Continue reading Colbert, Atheists, and Hermaphrodites
“Quantum Mechanics Is Magic”: The Making of “Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions”
This was the last of the experiments that I did for my thesis (it’s not the last xenon paper I’m an author on, but the work for that one was done while I was writing up), so my memories of it are bound up with the thesis-writing process. My favorite story about this stuff was… Continue reading “Quantum Mechanics Is Magic”: The Making of “Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions”