February 2012
2 posts
30 years ago today, physicists saw a striking... →
Physics: The waiting game
Geoff Brumfiel
May 6, 2004
Blas Cabrera still remembers Valentine’s Day 1982. Entering his lab on a Sunday afternoon the young physicist made a heart-stopping discovery. His custom-built detector had just sensed something nobody had seen before — a particle called a magnetic monopole. For three years, Cabrera had been fine-tuning his experiment at Stanford...
“When I was in high school, I went to a dance alone because I was kind of an...”
– Reddit.
January 2012
3 posts
“On foreign policy, the right-wing critiques have been the most unhinged. Romney...”
– Andrew Sullivan, How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics (via evangotlib)
A great read. I’ve always thought that Obama was playing chess while his opponents were all playing checkers, though I now realize just how long we’re going to have to wait until we see definitive proof...
December 2011
4 posts
New favorite Wikipedia article. →
“The ignoramus wing of the Republican Party has for some time now been purveying...”
– Stephen Budiansky (via Andrew Sullivan)
November 2011
7 posts
0.5%
Wikipedia:
A 1997 poll reported that Americans had an average estimate of 20% for NASA’s share of the federal budget, far higher than the actual 0.5% to under 1% that has been maintained throughout the late 90’s and first decade of the 2000s.
Here’s the real funny bit: Americans think we spend on NASA what we spend on Social Security and they think we spend on NPR what we spend on NASA.
October 2011
11 posts
“Democracy is like a tambourine; not everybody can be trusted with it.”
– John Oliver, tonight at MIT
“The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN,...”
– Oh, WSJ, just stop trying. You obviously don’t understand the neutrino results.
Or, in the words of Bill Maher:
There is no debate here, just scientists and non-scientists. And since the subject is science, the non-scientists don’t get a vote.
1 tag
September 2011
9 posts
6 tags
“The resulting polemics cleared some murky air but now have little use except to...”
– An excellent summation of my dissatisfaction with Dawkins and other so-called “New Atheists” in today’s The Stone from the NYT.
Time: All languages convey the same amount of... →
This is a very cool study. Languages with information-packed syllables speak those syllables more slowly than languages with information-light syllables. It seems like there’s a rough linguistic processing speed that’s similar for everyone, although I’m sure the way the brain actually works is way more complicated than that.
1 tag
Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP... →
motherjones:
Worth your time.
And here’s your scary thought for the day:
Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have...
August 2011
3 posts
1 tag
6.0 Earthquake in Virginia
And I felt in it Cambridge…
July 2011
15 posts
Unbelievable Sexism in the Name of Promoting Women...
It’s been three days since Nique posted this article on making science “girl friendly” and I’m still upset by it. The study in question reports that girls are more interested in “scientific” questions when they are more “girl friendly.” I’m fine with the idea of searching for scientific topics that discourage underrepresented groups—not...
Enhancing girls' interest in science and... →
nique:
A recent study was done on how couching scientific topics in “stereotypically female applications” can boost 8-9th grade girls’ reported interest in science. Some of their survey questions: 1) PHYSICS
For boys: “How does a laser read a CD?”
For girls: “How is a laser used in cosmetic surgery?”
2)BIOLOGY
For boys: “Watch blood coagulate from a small wound”
For girls: “Reflect on how...
Former top McCain economist: We must raise the... →
If raising the debt ceiling is in the clear national interest, aren’t congressional republicans being disingenuous in their give-me-the-money-or-I’ll-blow-us-all-to-hell sorts of demands?
Frank Rich: Obama's Original Sin -- New York... →
This article, among others, in combination with the movie Inside Job, is making me, for the first time, doubt the leadership of academics in politics. As happy as I was that Obama appointed so many experts to top administration positions, I wonder if perhaps the rot in academia goes beyond just the few economists we saw in the film and their rosy predictions for Iceland just before the crash.
