Uncertain Principles

Where Were You When...?

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:47:32 -0500

I failed to write something on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall yesterday, partly because I think the other six million blog posts on the subject had it pretty well covered. Another factor, though, was the fact that I don't have the sort of crystal-clear recollection of where I was and what I was doing on that night. I can reconstruct where I must've been-- I was a college freshman, so I would've watched it in the tv room on the second floor of Fayerweather-- but I don't clearly recall the event itself. It's all mixed together with the endless discussions of What It All Meant that came in the weeks that followed, to the point where I don't recall what was the event itself, and what was a later recap of the event.

This is a little embarrassing, as it is one of the Epochal Events of my lifetime. I'm kind of ashamed to admit that I have a clearer recollection of where I was when Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson that same (academic) year (we were in the same tv room, and George D. flipped the tv to HBO (which we didn't get), so we got the sound without the pictures). But memory's an odd wossname.

This does seem like a decent excuse for a reader poll, though. So here's a partial list of Important Events from my lifetime (at least the part that I can recall clearly-- I was around 3 when Nixon resigned, so that doesn't make the list). These are events that I've heard at least one person use in a "I remember where I was when ______" type essay or discussion. Which of them do you remember that way?

I'm sure I've left something big off the list, too-- probably several somethings, so you get an "Other" blank to add one of your choosing. If you have more than one event to add to the list, you know where the comments are.

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800

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:55:07 -0500

Syracuse head basketball coach Jim Boeheim won his 800th game last night. Fittingly, it was a thirty-point win over an overmatched New York school.

Since winning the NCAA tournament in 2003, Boeheim has finally started to get some respect in the college basketball world. Before that, he was regarded as a choker who couldn't win the big games. Which is a little unfair, but that's the coaching business for you. And, of course, everybody regards that 2-3 zone as a bit of a gimmick defense, despite the fact that they consistently win with it. With a title under his belt, though, all of a sudden his career numbers look that much more amazing, and he's getting some recognition as a really good coach.

The most remarkable thing about his 800 wins is that they've all come at the same school. In fact, since coming to Syracuse as a player, Boeheim has never left-- he was a graduate assistant, then an assistant coach, and became head coach in 1976. He's never had a losing season, and has averaged something like 24 wins a year over his 33 years as head coach (this is the start of his 34th season).

Congratulations to Jim Boeheim on a remarkable career, and best wishes for the future. For all the tournament disappointments, he's managed to put himself in a position where he has to be mentioned in the same sentence as Bob Knight, Dean Smith, and Mike Krzyzewski. You don't get much better than that.

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Links for 2009-11-10

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:50:39 -0500

A New Spacecraft to Explore on Waves of Light - NYTimes.com

"About a year from now, if all goes well, a box about the size of a loaf of bread will pop out of a rocket some 500 miles above the Earth. There in the vacuum it will unfurl four triangular sails as shiny as moonlight and only barely more substantial. Then it will slowly rise on a sunbeam and move across the stars."

(tags: science space technology overbye)
News: Engaged or Confused? - Inside Higher Ed

"[The National Survey of Student Engagement] "fails to meet basic standards for validity and reliability," writes Stephen R. Porter, an associate professor in Iowa State University's educational leadership and policy studies department. Porter's study -- presented in Vancouver at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education -- raises questions about most research based on surveys of students, and he stresses that he does not believe the problems are unique to NSSE. He even goes so far as to say that in the past he has done research based on student surveys that he now doubts has validity. "

(tags: education statistics social-science academia inside-higher-ed)
News: Fans and Fears of 'Lecture Capture' - Inside Higher Ed

"At Purdue University, which is attempting to put standard lecture capture technology in 280 classrooms by next semester, faculty members said they would not even be willing to press a button at the beginning of class to initiate the recording, according to David Eisert, the manager of emerging technologies there. "It was a six-month discovery process just to figure out what the faculty wanted," said Eisert, who spoke at a session focusing on Purdue as a use case for scaled lecture-capture deployment. "We said, 'If there's a start button on the Questron monitor as you walk into the classroom, will you hit Start for your lecture' -- 'No.' ""

(tags: technology education academia inside-higher-ed)
Debating The Health Care Bill | The New Republic

"Yes, the anti-abortion provision in the House bill is very bad (subjecting the poor, but not the rest of us, to the strictures of conservative Catholics and Southern Baptists), but it will at some point (one hopes) be removed. In fact, the bill that the House passed last Saturday is considerably more robust that the original Social Security bill."

(tags: politics health-care blogs US news)
Ecstatic Days » Blog Archive » A Day in the Life of a Literature Professor, or Why I Do What I Do

"Since graduate school, I have surrounded myself with writers, many of whom are now my dearest friends (and one of whom is my husband), and they are a boisterous, savvy, messed up, cuh-razy, brilliant, ignorant, frustrating, stupid, arrogant, elitist, humble, generous, kind, and downright weird group. I can't imagine feeling closer to or happier with any other type of people. But you know what else I can't imagine? Being a creative writer. Never. Nuh-uh. No frakkin' way. Going for a swim in an active volcano? Maybe. Writing a novel? Thank you, but . . . no."

(tags: writing books literature academia humanities blogs)
Notes from New Sodom: On Blood, Bad Boys and Bottoms by Hal Duncan » BSCreview

"It's not a theory that can really be summarised in a single sentence, because it's still really in the process of formation; but I'm going to chuck out a simple statement and then see if I can sketch out some lines of thought around it. It's really quite straightforward: Vampires are ex-gay."

(tags: sf books movies literature blogs gender sex)

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Academic Poll: All Greek to Me

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:58:26 -0500

I am curious as to what people at other institutions think about "Greek organizations," the slightly confusing catch-all term for fraternities and sororities (very few of whose members are ethnically Greek, and very few of whom know more Greek than a handful of the letters of the alphabet). Thus, a totally scientific poll on the subject:

I don't have any particular agenda, here, I'm just curious and it seemed like a reasonable subject for a post.

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Why Editors Matter

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:26:16 -0500

There's a nice post over at "The World in a Satin Bag" on the important things editors do. The emphasis is on fiction publishing, but most of it applies to non-fiction as well:

Editors make you into a better writer. Emphasis on better. They don't make you into the greatest writer ever, but they certainly teach you a few things. Ask anyone published by a major publisher or even a small press. Ask them if their editor taught them anything. They did, didn't they? I thought so.

This won't make any impact on the "Blogs Rule, Olde Media Drool" crowd, but it's always nice to see somebody else who feels the same way I do.

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Links for 2009-11-09

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:24:51 -0500

The Mid-Majority : The Old Ways

"Once the Union was preserved forever, the United States stopped worrying splitting into two. So with the late 1800's came the combat-in-context of professional and amateur sports. If you're looking for a reason why the South never rose again, it's probably because it was too busy learning how to play American-style football."

(tags: sports basketball journalism media history blogs mid-majority)
Cocktail Party Physics: batteries not included

"The explosion of portable computers (laptops, smart phones, etc) has brought the problem of battery power to the forefront of technological concerns for those in the business of selling such devices. Computers keep getting smaller thanks to continued shrinking of chips and other microcomponents, but batteries necessary to operate them remain pretty clunky in comparison, and thus they add considerable weight to any product -- the largest portion of my laptop's weight is due to the battery. It's just the latest chapter in mankind's quest for the perfect power source."

(tags: science electronics physics history blogs cocktail-party materials energy)
Oldest Preserved Spider Web Dates Back to Dinosaurs | Wired Science | Wired.com

"Scientists found the rare amber fossil in December, and have now confirmed that it contains remnants of spider silk spun roughly 140 million years ago by an ancestor of modern orb-weaving spiders. After slicing the amber into thin sections and examining each piece under a high-powered microscope, the researchers discovered that the ancient silk threads share several features common to modern spider webs, including droplets of sticky glue used to hold the web together and capture prey."

(tags: science dinosaurs biology)
Particle Fever

"Designed to smash trillions of protons together at nearly the speed of light, the LHC will recreate the extreme conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. The stakes are enormous. What the LHC reveals could change our understanding of everything. Failure could leave us in the dark for generations to come. The documentary feature, Particle Fever, captures this unfolding drama by focusing on the personal stories of several of its key figures - passionate, funny, brilliant spirits standing at the threshold of discovery. These modern adventurers have faced impossible technical challenges, risked careers, sacrificed personal relationships and continually struggled with government support in their single-minded quest to understand the nature of the universe."

(tags: science physics particles movies)
LOLDWELL.com » Archive » Advice for Art Majors

"This flowchart should help any potential artists to determine their place in the creative world without any unnecessary existential pondering."

(tags: art humanities silly comics)

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Three Cheers for Global Warming

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:51:53 -0500

OK, fine. Today's nice weather is well within the range of seasonal variation for New England. But after a chilly week or two, it was nice to get a chance to go to the park with SteelyKid, who definitely enjoyed it:

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The Internet Is a Weird and Wonderful Place

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 10:26:55 -0500

Via somebody on a mailing list, Eric Whiteacre's virtual choir:

The post I got this from doesn't contain any details, nor does it contain useful links to the making of this particular video, but looking around the top level of the blog it's fairly clear that this was put together from a large number of individual videos of people singing just one part of the song. He's got another piece underway, and you can see some of the individual parts.

This is one of those really cool and impossible-to-predict things you get with the modern Internet. And I think this stuff is ultimately a lot cooler than anything coming out of the blogging-as-journalism model.

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Links for 2009-11-08

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 09:11:50 -0500

On Denialism and the role of science in America. (1) - By Chris Mooney and Michael Specter - Slate Magazine

A fourpart discussion on science, the media, and American society, featuring the authors of _The Republican War on Science_ and _Denialism_.

(tags: science politics media journalism society culture medicine)
The Peril of Palatability - Reason Magazine

"Kessler fearlessly accuses major restaurant chains of a crime they brag about, relying on unnamed "insiders" to reveal that comestible pushers such as Cinnabon and The Cheesecake Factory deliberately make their food delicious--or, as he breathlessly puts it, "design food specifically to be highly hedonic." Kessler certainly has the goods on the corporate conspiracy to serve people food they like."

(tags: food books review stupid medicine)
Videos of exploding capacitors - Boing Boing

"This is every electronic repair tech I've ever dealt with. "

(tags: science electronics video blogs)
Reagan! Reagan! Reagan! - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

"Sorry: there's no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980. It may be something you've heard, it may be something you'd like to believe, but it just didn't happen."

(tags: economics history politics us)
Winner in Contest Involving Space Elevator - NYTimes.com

"In four years of the power-beaming competition, LaserMotive is the only competitor to qualify for a cash prize. Thomas Nugent and Jordin Kare, the company's principals, do not believe that a space elevator will be built any time soon, but they say the technology will find other commercial applications like powering small robotic aircraft. "This is a business for us," Mr. Nugent said. "We're trying to turn this into a commercial endeavor.""

(tags: science space technology news)
Being an Absentee President : Built on Facts

"[C]ontra the received opinion I'd like to argue that in fact it's easily possible to be an perfectly effective president while spending shockingly little time behind the Resolute desk. In fact for much of early American history presidents did just that - ie, very little. The presidency and the country have both changed, but in my opinion even today the president simply doesn't have to do much to do perform his job with great competence. Now I don't expect that any modern president will actually take as little time as I'm going to suggest; the very type of person who is attracted to the job and can campaign effectively is necessarily the kind of person who's willing, able, and eager to manage as much as possible. But he doesn't have to be."

(tags: politics blogs US built-on-facts)

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Great Moments in Targeted Advertising

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:21:56 -0500

We subscribe to Locus, the SF review and news magazine, and every month when it arrives, I flip through it quickly to look at the ads. This is a useful guide to what's coming out from various publishers, but it's also kind of fascinating to see how the different publishers market their stuff.

In particular, it's interesting to see how Baen pitches their books, because they are aimed with laser-like precision at people who aren't me. I'm sure their ads work very well for their target audience, but they make their forthcoming books sound absolutely horrifying to me. This month's ad may be the ultimate, featuring the following plug for a Tom Kratman book:

Undercover Infidels!

Europe 2123. Dhimmitude-- assigning second-class citizenship to non-Muslims-- has dug its claws into the continent. Now a West Point grad must rescue a young girl sold into sexual slavery after her family could not pay the Christian Tax. U. S. Army vertean Tom Kratman notches up another controversial thriller!

If that didn't scream "Run away!!!" loudly enough, there's a glowing quote from Mark Steyn. I'm not sure it would be possible to construct a more appalling book ad.

Oh, wait, I stand corrected: later in the same issue, there's a plug for The Science Behind the Secret, featuring a quote from noted ~~con man~~ tv psychic John Edward claiming that quantum mechanics is the basis for the "Law of Attraction." This is also a Baen book, coming in March. And it pretty much guarantees that even if they publish something I might like (hey, it could happen), I'll be getting it from the library, rather than giving them any of my beer money.

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Links for 2009-11-07

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:06:59 -0500

WIPP Exhibit: Message to 12,000 A.D.

"This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. This place is a message and part of a system of messages. Pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture."

(tags: science social-science nuclear energy culture)
Best Books of 2009: Science Top 10

"Welcome to our Best of 2009 top 10 lists for Science. We've put our editors' picks and our 2009 bestsellers for each category on the same page together, so you can easily compare. Click on "Editors' Picks" to see our editors' list of the best science books of 2009, including our top pick, The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes's delightfully masterful group biography of the adventurous scientists of Britain's Romantic age. And click on "Customer Favorites" to find the bestselling science books at Amazon.com during 2009"

(tags: science books writing culture internet)
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Transience

"We were talking about college preparation, and the various options and obstacles. In reference to a program that seems like it should work, but somehow doesn't, she mentioned that so many students move during the course of a year that it's not unusual for a majority of a class to turn over during the year. When students bounce from town to town -- it sounds like most of the moves are relatively local -- it's hard for any single program to gain serious traction, no matter how well-run it might be. That seemed hard to accept, so I asked around on campus for the last few days to see if others had heard or seen the same thing. They had. Apparently, one of the features of our local low-income community is extremely high transience. "

(tags: academia education class-war blogs dean-dad society culture economics)
Makers of Universes | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

"It can't be easy being the guy who has to introduce Albert Einstein. But it helps if you're George Bernard Shaw."

(tags: science history culture blogs cosmic-variance youtube)
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / So good your head explodes every time: Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others

"You know how some people are ideas writers, and their ideas are so amazingly brilliant that you don't care they can't really write character and plot? Ted Chiang is like that, except that his characters and plots are that good as well. His stories all arise out of astonishing SFnal ideas, they couldn't happen except in the contexts where they do happen, but they have characters with emotional trajectories that carry them along as well. He always gets the arc of story exactly right, so you know what you need to know when you need to know it and the end comes along in perfect timing and socks you in the jaw. "

(tags: sf books tor review)

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Poll: A Question of Character

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:26:40 -0500

"It's a question of character, of friendship. Hell, Leo, I ain't afraid to say it, it's a question of ethics." --Giovanni Gaspari

I'm back to lunchtime hoops after a two-week layoff due to teaching responsibilities. And this has reminded me of one of the great character tests that sports provide. Imagine that you're playing basketball, but are too tired to keep running with the fast break in both directions. You can't quit without pissing everybody off, though, and there's no-one you can have sub in for you. What do you do?

This question is a nearly infallible test of a person's character. Except for those annoying bastards who are in such good shape that they never get tired of running. You never can tell what those guys will do.

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Poll: The Computers of the Future

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:50:20 -0500

Today's Quantum Optics lecture is about quantum computing experiments, and how different types of systems stack up. Quantum computing, as you probably know if you're reading this blog, is based on building a computer whose "bits" can not only take on "0" and "1" states, but arbitrary superpositions of "0" and "1". Such a computer would be able to out-perform any classical computer on certain types of problems, and would open the exciting possibility of a windows installation that is both working and hung up at the same time.

There are roughly as many types of proposed quantum computers as there are people working on quantum computation. It's not clear which of them, if any, will eventually prove to be useful, meaning that this is the perfect subject for a blog poll:

While this is a poll about quantum computing, the machines running the poll are strictly classical, so you can only choose one option.

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Links for 2009-11-06

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:37:27 -0500

Philip K. Dick | Books | The A.V. Club

"Why it's daunting: Science fiction and fantasy get a lot of mileage out of taking their readers to new worlds, but most classic genre fiction is really about making new worlds seem like home. The Lord Of The Rings would lose a lot of its appeal if the hobbits had no Shire to return to, and Isaac Asimov's Foundation series wouldn't be nearly as effective if the heroes weren't bent on protecting a sane, prosperous status quo. Philip K. Dick doesn't play by the same rules. While his work has clear genre roots, using such familiar tropes as androids, time travel, precognition, and space travel, he operates by a surreal common sense that's simultaneously lucid and fever-dream absurd. In 36 novels and more than 120 stories, he used fiction to work out his own particular philosophy, and the results aren't always immediately accessible."

(tags: sf books movies literature avclub)
The Mid-Majority : That Teenage Feeling

"College basketball is about college, and it's about basketball. Our Game belongs to those who are still young enough to play it. College basketball is an experience that's only fully understood by actual students. There's a special bond between a student section and players (especially walk-ons) that's hardly ever captured in published words, much less "Coke Madness." As you watch from the bleachers, you know those players made the same choice as you did. You might not have been actively recruited like they were. But those are your friends and representatives, working on your behalf to validate a shared, life-altering decision about where to get educated. "

(tags: sports academia basketball blogs mid-majority)
The unanswered phone calls and misunderstood memos that helped bring down the Berlin Wall. - By Michael Meyer - Slate Magazine

"Inside his lighted, glassed-in command post, the captain of the East German border guard, a beefy guy with a square jaw and the dark bristly air of a Doberman, stood dialing and redialing his telephone. For hours he vainly sought instructions. Certainly he was confused. Most likely he was frightened. The crowds before him had broiled out of nowhere, grown so fast, unlike anything he had ever seen, and now they pushed so close that their breath, frosting in the night, mingled with that of his increasingly anxious men."

(tags: history slate politics essay)
A Common Nomenclature for Lego Families by Giles Turnbull - The Morning News

"This language of Lego isn't just something our family has invented; every Lego-building family must have its own vocabulary. And the words they use (mostly invented by the children, not the adults) are likely to be different every time. But how different? And what sort of words? Hence, a survey. I asked fellow parents to donate their children for a few minutes, and name a selection of Lego pieces culled from the Lego parts store."

(tags: language toys kid-stuff essay)
Anime film characters: Do we perceive the intended race, or our own? : Cognitive Daily

"Does everyone see a little bit of themselves in animated cartoon characters? Or do the artists actually draw the characters to look more generic, less racially distinctive? There have been few studies about the perceived race and ethnicity of animated cartoon characters, and none focusing on the unique Japanese anime style."

(tags: cartoons movies race diversity blogs cog-daily)
Pimp My Novel: NaNoWriMOhNo

"[I]t seems that a lot of people are missing the point of NaNoWriMo altogether. Despite Chris Baty's invitation to "write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together," a lot of folks are getting really amped up about having finally written a piece of fiction of substantial length and are more concerned about FINALLY BECOMING AUTHORS ZOMG than about having fun writing crap, which is what the contest is really about. If even one sentence of whatever you concoct in the spirit of NaNoWriMo leads you into a publishable novel somewhere down the road (with substantial editing and revision, of course), you should count yourself lucky."

(tags: books publishing business pimp-novel)
Spaceship Jesus Will Come Back and Whisk Us Away < Killing the Buddha

"The words left behind are ironically what the books are about, but not in the way their authors intended. The evangelical/fundamentalists, from their crudest egocentric celebrities to their "intellectuals" touring college campuses trying to make evangelicalism respectable, have been left behind by modernity. They won't change their literalistic anti-science, anti-education, anti-everything superstitions, so now they nurse a deep grievance against "the world." This has led to a profound fear of the "other.""

(tags: religion politics books society culture essay)
News: Technology Gap - Inside Higher Ed

"[W]hen students were asked whether their professors understand technology and have integrated it into their courses, only 38 percent said Yes. Further, when students were asked about the top impediment to using technology, the top answer was "lack of faculty technology knowledge," an answer that drew 45 percent of respondents, up from 25 percent only a year ago. And only 32 percent of students said that they believed their college was adequately preparing them to use technology in their careers."

(tags: academia education technology inside-higher-ed)

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Thursday Baby Blogging 110509

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:32:58 -0500

For this week's Baby Blogging, we have a shot of Kate helping SteelyKid with her new favorite game:

It's called "Take off my shoes, and put them back on." She can play this for hours. It would be even cuter if she could do the putting on and taking off herself, but alas, she's still kind of unclear on the solidity of objects, and doesn't really grasp that her feet can only get into the shoes from the open end. She'll get there, though.

SteelyKid officially moved out of the infant room at day care this week. She's now in the next age/ development group, termed "Waddlers" (an intermediate step between "Infants" and "Toddlers"). I very briefly considered going for the alliterative "Wednesday Waddler Blogging," but regained my senses in time. We're going to stick with "Thursday Baby Blogging" for a while yet.

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