So, here’s a different sort of scenario for an audience-participation post: Imagine that you are in a weirdly well-stocked karaoke bar, and you have to sing a song. There’s no way out of it– if you don’t you’ll lose your job, rabid squid will eat your family, deranged America-hating terrorists will kill a puppy, whatever.… Continue reading Less Dorky Poll: Karaoke Supernova
Author: Chad Orzel
Wednesday Dog-Blogging
Greetings from Chateau Steelypips, home of the world’s saddest dog: Why is she pining away? Because I’ve gone down to New York for a ScienceBlogs get-together, and left her alone. .. (Bonus pathetic picture below the fold.)
New Dorky Poll: Favorite Particle?
Well, the extremely dorky poll on favorite fundamental constants seems to have petered out at 48 comments, two short of the threshold at which it would’ve become non-dorky. Still, that was a good effort. Since that worked pretty well, here’s another dorky poll question: What’s your favorite fundamental particle? And, for the sake of concreteness,… Continue reading New Dorky Poll: Favorite Particle?
Academic Anxiety Update
I’m beginning to put my tenure review materials together, which means lots of angst about academia generally. Happily, there’s the Internet, which can always make matters worse by providing more links: For example, a couple of my ScienceBlogs colleagues are blogging about family issues and academic careers: Janet Stemwedel has the first three posts (one… Continue reading Academic Anxiety Update
New NRC Report: AMO, Amas, Amat…
Via Inside Higher Ed, the National Research Council (a part of the National Academy of Sciences) has released a new report calling for a renewed federal committment to AMO science. AMO here meaning “Atomic, Molecular, and Optical,” namely the sort of physics I do. The federal government should reinforce its commitment to research in atomic,… Continue reading New NRC Report: AMO, Amas, Amat…
Useless Book Review
The New York Times offers a review of several books on science and religion today, including a new screed by Dawkins, Daniel Dennett’s book from a little while back, and several books attempting to find common ground between science and religion, by Francis Collins, Owen Gingerish, Joan Roughgarden, and E. O. Wilson. This is probably… Continue reading Useless Book Review
Top 25 Answers
Twelve of the Top 25 Most Played songs were correctly identified over the weekend. Given the obscurity of some of these, that’s pretty impressive. I think there’s only one that should’ve been obvious that didn’t get guessed. Full answers are below the fold. (Edited to add: If you enjoy this sort of thing, here’s another… Continue reading Top 25 Answers
Classic Edition: Do the Pigeon Dance
As promised in the previous post, some thoughts on superstition in science. This was originally posted in October 2004, and astute readers may note that my opening comments about sports went horribly awry not long after. I take this as proof of my point: talking about these things only screws them up.
Different Kinds of Common Sense
One of the drawbacks of having the sort of day job that I do is that it’s hard to blog about interesting things in a timely manner. For example, Janet’s post on improving communication between scientists and non-scientists is a week old, now. That’s positively neolithic in blog terms. It’s well worth a look, though,… Continue reading Different Kinds of Common Sense
How Do You Put That On Your CV?
Via a comment by Anton Sherwood: Have you ever seen an episode of Star Trek with a particularly bad bit of technobabble, and said to yourself “You know, I’d be willing to fact-check their scripts for a few hundred bucks…” Well, Dave Krieger did just that, and it wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be.… Continue reading How Do You Put That On Your CV?