1) This week’s Inforgraphic: Job and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. 2) Music reviews containing sentences like: “[The new Flaming Lips record] frequently sounds like Steely Dan as heard from the other end of a machine shop.” Which reminds me, I need to go down to the machine shop… (Yes, this is… Continue reading Why We Like the Onion
Author: Chad Orzel
CSI: Durham
As anybody who has read my comments on basketball knows, I have an intense dislike of the Duke men’s basketball team, mostly due to their fans, who combine the arrogance typical of fans of a dominant program with a sort of snobbery regarding their own class and cleverness. This is particularly aggravating given the institutional… Continue reading CSI: Durham
Thin Kills?
As someone who has derived a surprising amount of blog traffic from posting about weight loss, I feel like I really ought to say something about Alas, A Blog’s case against dieting (which I first noticed via a Dave Munger comment). It’s a comprehensive collection of data (with graphs, so it must be Science) used… Continue reading Thin Kills?
Wire Torture
With hoops season having wound down, we’re slipping into that time of the year when I don’t have anything to watch on tv. ESPN shows nothing but baseball, the NBA, and Mel Kiper, and there’s very little on regular tv that’s worth a damn. Happily, I have a pile of Netflix DVD’s from back before… Continue reading Wire Torture
The Street Finds Its Own Uses for Things
The post title is a famous William Gibson quote, referring to the tendency of high-tech gadgets to be put to uses the manufacturers never expected. By “the Street,” he meant people in general, with maybe a slant toward the sort of underclass element he focusses on in his books, but he might well have been… Continue reading The Street Finds Its Own Uses for Things
What I Do to Earn a Living
If you’re wondering about the slow posting hereabouts, it’s because I’m spending a lot of time on my classes. Having a day job sucks that way. I’ve mentioned before that I’m doing a senior-level elective class on Quantum Optics. This is very much an idiot experimentalist’s approach to the material, but if you’d like a… Continue reading What I Do to Earn a Living
Stop Marking Your Territory
While I managed to correctly re-set the clock yesterday, in the process, I turned my alarm off, so I’m running late. Which means no lengthy science blogging this morning. Even running late, though, I can’t pass over Fred Clark’s message to the evangelicals who organized an anti-pop-culture rally in San Francisco: Stop it. Just stop.… Continue reading Stop Marking Your Territory
Really Expensive Mothballs
There’s a little squib in the New York Times today about the return of the Dawn mission to visit a couple of asteroids, one of their little not-quite-a-full-story things in the “Week in Review” section of the print edition (we get the Sunday Times delivered, because I find it much more civilized to spend a… Continue reading Really Expensive Mothballs
Know Your Hoaxes
With silliness running riot at ScienceBlogs, it’s more important than ever to keep your fraud-detection skills sharp. Thankfully, the BBC is here to help, with a list of real news stories that sound like they might be hoaxes (via Making Light). Unfortunately, they’re mostly not very funny. A couple are just lame celebrity trivia. But… Continue reading Know Your Hoaxes
Final Four Preview
Because my bracket picks this year have been so uncannily accurate (tied for twelfth of 23 in the ScienceBlogs pool), I’m sure you’re all dying to know what my predictions are for the Final Four games, if only so you can bet the opposite. The short version is: Florida over LSU in the title game.… Continue reading Final Four Preview