I am a Tad Late to tHe Party, But I juSt finisHed watChing Breaking Bad This weeK. As a Former high School scieNce Teacher wHo maY or may Not Currently Work with meth deAlers, it Seemed apPropriate to make Use of this teAchable Moment. Below you’ll fInd a litTle tool I made for highlighTing elemental symbOls in a string of text. I fiNd it fun to pLay with Names. ImPortantly, it Respects the chemistry. Each element’s symbol links to the appropriAte wikipedia artiCle, and you Can cut and Paste an HTml verSion of the final product. Enjoy.

Your Text Here:

Before the breakdown by category (along with feed addresses), here’s my current podcasts list with linked cover art:

                                                      

“A hundred podcasts you say? I only count fifty eight.” You may have noticed that the above list only includes 58 titles. However, a number of them are dailies, and some even update multiple times a day, hence around a hundred podcasts a week.

I use the Stitcher Radio App which lets you build your own radio stations–collections of podcasts. The station plays back a queue of the most recent unplayed podcasts on my list. The above list is my current ordering on Stitcher. It starts off with short topical podcasts that update frequently and shifts into longer evergreen podcasts that update less frequently. This helps make sure that I don’t miss new content. Of course, I have bumped a few favorites up the list.

Now for the category breakdown and feed addresses. As above, a show’s cover art is linked to its webpage page.

Daily News

WBUR: Morning News Updates

NPR: Hourly News Summary

Best of Today

Science & Technology

Radio Lab

APM: Marketplace Tech Report

NPR: Science

KQED Science News

PRI: Science & Creativity from Studio 360

Nova | PBS

CNET Update (HQ)

NPR: Technology

NPR: TED Radio Hour

The Story Collider

Quirks & Quarks from CBC Radio

You’re The Expert

StarTalk by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Scientific American Podcast: 60-Second Science

Scientific American Podcast: 60-Second Space

Scientific American Podcast: 60-Second Mind

http://rss.sciam.com/sciam/60-second-tech

Politics & Law

Slate’s Political Gabfest

Supreme Court Watch | PBS NewsHour Podcast

Shields and Brooks | PBS NewsHour Podcast

Washington Week | PBS

The New Yorker: The Political Scene

NPR: Economy

Decode DC

Life of the Law

Economics

NPR: Planet Money

The Economist: The Week Ahead

The Economist: All Audio

APM: Marketplace Morning Report

The Economist: Editor’s Picks

Freakonomics

Education

NPR: Education

History

BackStory

My History Can Beat Up Your Politics

Culture & Current Events

NPR: Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!

Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4

Slate’s Double X Podcasts

Slate’s Culture Gabfest

This American Life

How to Do Everything

Studio 360 from PRI and WNCY

The Memory Palace

NPR: Ask Me Another

Start the Week

NPR: Intelligence Squared U.S. Debates

Design

99% Invisible

On The Grid

Design Matters

Giant Robots Smashing into other Giant Robots

Fiction & Writing

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Lightspeed Magazine

Escape Pod

Clarkesworld Magazine

Makeshift Stories

Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writting

^† I listen to my podcasts at 1.15x speed (labeled 2x). So my listening time is not equal to clock-time. The real-time change in my commute is left as an exercise for the reader. ;)

I’m not vert tidy. In college, I was once issued a warning regarding the condition of my dorm room. There was a fear that it might constitute a fire hazard. The picture above, of my desk earlier this year, will help you assess how far I’ve grown as a person since then. I now try to avoid stacks on the floor…

Anywho, this posting is about cleaning of the digital variety. A while back, I upgraded my blog’s database. In the transition, a few special characters got lost in translation. For example, instances of the pound sign (£) and curly-q quotes (“) found themselves transformed into � symbols. This prompted me to go back through and correct these errors. While there, I removed the “justified” alignment from many of my earlier post. I rescaled some images and videos to better fit the blog’s new layout, and I overhauled the blog’s categories. I didn’t reread every article, but I did occasionally correct typos. However, if I made any substantive changes to content, I used [bracketed text]. If you don’t trust me, check the Internet Archive.

If you’re curious what that awesome desktop art is on my Mac, it’s a wonderful distillation of geekyness created by Mike Mayhew and Rain Beredo. You can check it out over on deviantART. As for the book peaking out from my papers, it’s Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine.

Since 2007, I’ve run the Annual Phylm Prize. Pronounced “film,” a portmanteau of physics and film, the prize aimed to spur the creation of physics videos on the web. It’s a name I’ve given a number of physics/film projects–including a curricular unit for physics teachers. I presented the unit at the 2003 summer meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers. After moving to teach physics in Edinburgh and becoming a YouTube user, I launched the Phylm Prize to help the lesson’s spirit live on while I taught away from my home school.

This year, I’m sorry to say, I’m throwing in the towel. Last year’s prize didn’t attract a critical mass or entries, and I fear that without promotion beyond my means, the same would be true this year. That’s right, the Phylm Prize is on an indefinite hiatus. That being said, the goal of the prize was to foster the creation of quality educational content on the web, and I am happy to say that a few of the prize’s alumni have risen to the level of minor Internet celebrities. That being said, I thought I’d take this blog post as an opportunity to remember where we’ve been.

Fourth Annual Grand Prize Winners

Henry Reich and Derek Muller

For the first time, the prize was shared between the two top videos. Both Derek and Henry are producing more content, and it’s worth checking it out on their respective sites (i.e., Derek’s videos, Henery’s video). As a former physics teacher, I can’t help but appreciate the thought that Derek puts into his work. Henery too!

Henry Reich (MinutePhysics)

Derek Muller (Veritasium)

Third Annual Grand Prize Winner

Terio Ruiz

According to Terio’s physics teacher Sean Kepple, Terio a student of his in the LA public schools, just came in one day with this Relativity Rap. Mr. Kepple asked if he could enter it into consideration for the phylm prize, and the rest is history.

Yes, I know Terio left the units off of his numerical value of the speed of light. Terio’s response when confronted with this was something along the lines of “it didn’t fit,” and as a judge we decided to let it slide just this once. ;)

Second Annual Grand Prize Winner

Colin Stuart

This piece was made by Colin when he was still in University. Last I heard he now works as a science communicator and freelance astronomer. More of his early videos can be found on his YouTube channel Science Made Fun.

First Annual Grand Prize Winner

Jamie Nichols

Jamie was the winner of the first ever Phylm Prize, and he has continued to make science videos under the Slightly Mad Science moniker. You can find them here.

The Ad Altare Dei is one of many such awards earned by scouts, and I remember thinking at the time how inclusive the Scouts were. If I had been Jewish I could have studied and received the Ner Tamid, Hindu the Dharma, Islamic the Name of God, Baha’i the Unity of Mankind, Buddhist the Sangha, or Baptist the God and Church. In total, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) recognizes awards from a little over three dozen faiths and faith affiliations (such as the Protestant and Independent Christian Churches). Many of these faiths disagree over the nature of God, not to mention, the details of how best to live a moral life. Yet, their members proudly proclaim themselves scouts, alongside those they might otherwise condemn. Why, because they believe in something bigger, scouting’s mission to provide youth with the tools to realize their potential.

In a little over forty days, the BSA will convene its National Annual Meeting in Grapevine Texas, and delegates from across the nation will vote on whether or not to remove a national ban on homosexual members. Thanks to the BSA’s organizational structure, if you are involved in scouting, there is a good chance you know a delegate. You may have attended a local meeting on the subject or received a survey.

The vote will be close, and I suspect few minds are opened to change. However, I’d like to make a case for opposing the ban, a case that holds regardless of your views on homosexuality, a case based on the final point of the Scout Law. Since the BSA’s reaffirmation of the ban in July 2012, I’ve been talking with fellow Eagle Scouts, adult leaders, past scouts… Both sides see it as a struggle for the soul of scouting, and in the middle sit nearly three million youth members.

Proponents of the ban raise questions about youth safety and moral instruction, but in the shadow of the Supreme Court arguments for and against Gay Marriage, it seems clear the evidence fails to support the fear that exposure to homosexuality is a threat to children’s well-being, and those who fear homosexuals are more likely to abuse youth ignore the evidence. The true question seems to be one of morality. If you believe homosexuality is immoral, it is unlikely I can change your mind. However, opposing homosexual behavior and opposing the ban are not mutually exclusive.

On March 25th, two of the BSA’s faith-based chartering organizations, the United Church of Christ & Unitarian Universalists, endorsed the mission of Scouts for Equality, a group working to end the ban. In so doing, they reminded me that no one religion dictates the morals of the BSA. As a scout, I have taken an oath to God and country, a country in which the freedom to worship is among our most precious rights. A scout is reverent, but scouting is not a monolith. We welcome members from communities who disagree on the most fundamental questions of conscience–whether or not there is one or many gods, whether Christ was the Messiah, a prophet, or a man. These disagreements are larger than sexual orientation. If we can overcome them, surely we can avoid the use of scouting as a pawn in the culture wars.

I have often observed that aside from my family and the Church, scouting is most responsible for the man I am today. Because of scouting, words like duty and honor mean something to me. Because of scouting, a four-eyed 90lb kid with braces learned that perseverance pays off and helping other people is not something to compartmentalize. It is something to live. For those worried about the moral education of America’s youth, remember, a vote to end the ban is a vote to expand the reach and influence of scouting.

A scout is brave. So be honest, is someone’s sexual orientation more important than the nature of God, the role of good works, the divinity of Christ? If not, then why this line, why this ban? We live in a pluralistic society, and scouting is an important part of that society. We need not agree on all things. However, we can no longer ignore this issue. The era of Don’t Ask Don’t tell has passed. There are faiths that embrace homosexual members and perform homosexual weddings. The current printing of the Scout Handbook compels scouts to be honest in their dealing with others, honest about who they are and what they believe. Removal of the ban allows gay scouts to live up to that obligation, and it secures for them the opportunities only scouting can provide.

A scout is reverent, not only to God as known through his faith, but to the faith of others. If we take seriously the proposition that scouting is dedicated to the betterment of all youth regardless of creed, the ban must not stand. We must be brave.

So today, I am unveiling SadlyNotHavocDinosaur.com, my re-branded blog. Does this re-branding signal renewed interest on my part and perhaps more frequent postings… Only time will tell.