Via Inside Higher Ed, a story with the nearly unbeatable headline: Feds Pounce on Student Dresses As a Ninja. Why was a student running around the Georgia campus dressed as a ninja? Ransom told The Red & Black student newspaper that he had left a Wesley Foundation pirate vs. ninja event when he was snared… Continue reading But Who Would Win?
Author: Chad Orzel
Call for Posts: Enough is Enough
Back when ScienceBlogs was all new and shiny, I did a couple of posts asking questions of the other bloggers. I got involved with other things after a while, and stopped posting those, so I’m not sure this will still work, but here’s a question for other ScienceBloggers, or science bloggers in general, that I… Continue reading Call for Posts: Enough is Enough
Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
The Kuiper Belt Controversy continues, with the lastest round showing up in the Times today: Planet Discovered Last Year, Thought to Be Larger Than Pluto, Proves Roughly the Same Size: The object — still unnamed more than a year after its discovery but tagged with the temporary designation 2003 UB313 and nicknamed Xena by the… Continue reading Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
CSI: Durham Follow-Up
Having previously mentioned the Duke lacrosse mess, I feel obliged to at least note the latest events: DNA tests failed to link any of the players to the crime, but the DA says the alleged victim has identified one of them. I don’t plan to make this a regularly recurring feature, because the whole thing… Continue reading CSI: Durham Follow-Up
Every Day I Write (in) the (Lab) Book
One of the features I always like in the print edition of Seed is the lab notebook pictorial. Every month (or, at least, all three of the months that I’ve looked at the print edition), they publish a reproduction of a page or two from the lab notebook of a working scientist. It’s sort of… Continue reading Every Day I Write (in) the (Lab) Book
Speaking of Science Education
On a note related to the previous entry, Inside Higher Ed had a longer story about Carl Wieman leaving Colorado for Canada (following in the footsteps of his post-docs?), another guy putting his money where his mouth is: First, he contributed $250,000 of his Nobel Prize award to the Physics Education Technology Fund supporting classroom… Continue reading Speaking of Science Education
Story Is a Force of Nature
There’s a nice profile of Randy Olson, the biologist-turned filmmaker behind A Flock of Dodos, which takes a hard look at both sides of the creationism wars: The biologist, Randy Olson, accepts that there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on… Continue reading Story Is a Force of Nature
Inspiration at Last
Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog, and an excellente planne for a worke of grete literarye merit, including: The dog-maysteres Tale: the dog-mayster (talle, curtel of greene), his dogge, and his companiounes do fynde an olde wool-quaye that semeth to be havnted by a foule spectre – one of them has those fancie new eye-lenses, the… Continue reading Inspiration at Last
Our Broken Health Care System, Aleph-Nought in a Series
One of the standard conservatarian responses to anyone suggesting government-funded universal health care is to start talking about how universal health care will inevitably lead to faceless, heartless bureaucrats denying or delaying treatment for stupid reasons. My response to these stories is “Who’s supplying your health insurance? And how do I get on that plan?”… Continue reading Our Broken Health Care System, Aleph-Nought in a Series
What Students Want
Inside Higher Ed takes a look today at a new survey about how students choose colleges. They make an effort to make the results sound surprising, but it’s really about what I’d expect: A survey of 600 students who scored over 1100 on the SAT, half of whom scored at least 1300, found that campus… Continue reading What Students Want