Sunday, November 26, 2006

Buildup


  • The CHE has a short piece up with links to humorous videos of professors behaving badly in class.

  • For those who love personality tests, you can find a link to one for autism over at Freakonomics. I got a 25, but I easily could have answered some of those questions differently. For those that click-thru, why would cousins have the same hyphenated last name? Oh yeah, and so that I get lots of crazy Google search-hits, I'll mention that Sasha Baron-Cohen shows up.

  • Doug discusses some not-very-nice behavior when it comes to two groups publishing about the same topic at about the same time. That's certainly happened to me. A certain group published at the same time as us without any reference...they were pissed off that we were even looking at the problem. We took the high road and referenced their work (not just in the paper but in talks and such), but this work led naturally to a similar problem. So we were somewhat confronted with the same issue again when both groups published. This time they were nicer. We've since met and bad feelings seem to be left in the past.

  • Nice story by Doug.

  • More powerpoint tips (via Pharyngula)

  • Big war brewing? No, not string theory again, but we've got Phil linking to a funny article tearing Microsoft's Zune apart while everyone's favorite pariah praises all things Microsoft.

  • Overbye (NYT; free sub. reqd.) has a book review of a curious book with Einstein.

  • Haven't had enough about the travels of physicists? Do you know what peregrinations means? Well head over to Andrew's blog.

  • Colbert junkies might get a laugh at what some conservatives think of it. Fox is apparently going to do a conservative skewed comedy/news show. I'm genuinely looking forward to see what they can do with it, but some might argue that some of the sincere conservative shows are already pretty funny.

2 comments:

Frank said...

Regarding the hyphenation, All it means is that their grandparents (or great-grandparents or whatever) on their father's side combined their names. While most hyphenated names in America are rather modern conglomerations, the English have been doing it a lot longer.

Anonymous said...

A few surname examples in physics: James Clerk Maxwell was the son of John Clerk, Maxwell is from James's mother's side. John Lennard-Jones was born John [Edward] Jones, and added his wife's surname, Lennard, to become John Lennard-Jones.