Jeremy Lin and Landry Fields of the New York Knicks may comprise the most intelligent starting backcourt in NBA history. It's certainly hard to top a duo that boasts college degrees from Harvard (Lin) and Stanford (Fields). So it's not surprising when Lin and Fields unveiled what has to be the nerdiest pre-game handshake in league history. The choreographed skit features the two skimming through an imaginary book, taking off their glasses and then placing them inside pocket protectors.
A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to discuss a proposed and relatively dramatic policy change with someone fairly high in state government. I objected to the change with some vigor, and outlined several objections that I thought added up to a compelling case. She listened politely, and then gave an answer for which I hadn't prepared. "You're assuming we thought it through." Well, yes. At least I would have hoped so.
Prompted by a number of people using the phrase "vast majority" recently, I wonder where the line between "majority" and "vast majority" is. Thus, a poll:
Assume for the sake of argument that the issue in question is a simple yes-or-no question, with only a small "no response/ don't know" fraction.
If there are other classes of "majority" that you recognize, feel free to define them in the comments. The poll is just about the term "vast," though.
So there you have it: That's the best case that can be made against gay marriage. An appeals court dissent that rests on the premise that states needn't act rationally, or offer evidence of rationality, or even be rational in creating classifications, so long as someone publishes a study and someone else believes it. That's the best they've got, it seems. That is not legal argument or empirical evidence. It is the death rattle of a movement that has no legal argument or empirical evidence.
There are upstate die-hards who still curse Sleepy Floyd's name, go into conniptions when they see a white hand towel, and recall every errant jumper that ever spun off the rims in the Carrier Dome. What I remember most are the players. There were Syracuse stars such as Pearl Washington, Derrick Coleman, Billy Owens, and Lawrence Moten. Georgetown's pantheon of heroes boasts names like Ewing, Mourning, Mutombo, and Iverson. But supporting characters were just as memorable. We rooted for local Orange products like John Wallace and Ryan Blackwell. We sneered at foes like Robert Churchwell and Irvin Church, both of whom seemed to spend a decade in Hoya colors. With the impending collapse of the Big East, Wednesday's game could be the last time the two teams play in the Carrier Dome.
In a book that I read recently (either The Cloud Roads or The Serpent Sea-- I finished the first and immediately started the second), as some characters are traveling from one place to another, there's a passing mention that they weren't able to hunt at night because the moon wasn't out and it was too dark. Which sort of bugged me, and I was reminded of it tonight when I took Emmy out for our post-dinner walk-- it's very clear tonight, and a lot of stars were visible, even here in the light-polluted suburbs, but the moon wasn't up yet.
And the thing is, while it's darker when the moon isn't out, it's not really too dark to see, because there are a whole lot of stars. This isn't that obvious if you live in a built-up area, but one time we went on a fishing trip up in the mountains in New Mexico, and it was really amazing just how bright the stars can be, if you're in a place with no clouds and no light pollution. A couple of times, I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night (also, because the air mattress we were using had a leak, and would slowly deflate), and you really didn't need a flashlight-- just the stars provided plenty of light to see by.
Of course, if there's thick cloud cover and no moon, and you're out in the middle of nowhere, it really is alarmingly difficult to see anything. But that's a function of the overcast skies, not the absence of the moon per se.
I don't have a larger point to make here-- this is mostly to fill time while SteelyKid watches one more episode of Animaniacs before bedtime. But it's something that bugged me, and probably not all that many other people. This is the price of geekdom.
Co.Exist:What does the average environmentalist get wrong? Wagner: Environmentalists, all too often, think that the best way to go about solving the problem is to get everyone to do as they--we, I included--do. I don't eat meat. I don't drive. But individual do-gooderism won't solve global warming. And it may actually be counter-productive, for two reasons. First, there's a well-documented psychological phenomenon called "single-action bias." You do one thing, and you move on. You carry your groceries home by foot, in a cotton canvas bag, and you think that single act of environmental kindness makes up for other sins.
A physical phenomenon that is widely used to slow and store pulses of light in clouds of atoms has been seen for the first time in a system of nuclear-energy levels. The breakthrough has been made by a team of physicists in Germany that has seen evidence for the phenomenon, known as electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), as X-rays pass through nanometre-scale layers of iron. The researchers think their method, which is also the first to achieve EIT using just two energy levels rather than the usual three, could lead to the development of devices for controlling X-rays, which is currently very tricky to do.
Grantland editor Robert Mays loves going to the movies. January and February, or Dumpuary, as we've dubbed the post-holiday, pre-Oscar period when Hollywood disposes of its least promising fare, is a terrible time to see movies. And so, in an attempt to break him the way Kevin Spacey broke that fat guy who loved spaghetti in Se7en, we asked him to spend two consecutive days at the biggest multiplex we could find, seeing everything they had to offer, from the moment they opened to the minute they closed. This is his viewing journal.
President Obama looks on in amazement as 14-year-old Joey Hudy demonstrates his Extreme Marshmallow Cannon at today's White House Science Fair. UPDATE: Now with video goodness, courtesy of Barack Obama's Tumblr:
C. In the past five years, no team with an animal nickname has won the Super Bowl. The odds against this are astronomical. There's only a 3 percent chance it would happen, given a random sample. And that random sample wouldn't include men like Peyton Manning. D. In that same time period, only two animal teams even reached the Super Bowl. They both lost. One, the Arizona Cardinals, lost in mysterious last-minute fashion, and the Saints resorted to trickery to beat the Colts. Both results are more than a little suspicious. E. In the 32 playoff games pitting an animal team against a nonanimal team, the nonanimals are 20-12. Again, the success rate is unrealistic for a random sample. If you're looking at the real world, on the other hand, humans are typically far more successful than animals, a few shark attacks aside.
The only stories that might make [Asian-Americans] pause and reconsider the paradigm of endings are the ones that provide us with an alien set of destinations--the stand-up comedian, the police chief, the mass murderer, the potential first round pick in the NBA Draft. In other words, those stories that belong to other races. The lineage of Jeremy Lin isn't found in racial pie charts or in the history of unlikely minorities in big-time sports. Yao, Ichiro, Wat Misaka and Eugene Chung are not his context. Neither is Hines Ward. Instead, to understand Jeremy Lin, we must look to Jin, the diminutive Chinese emcee from Jackson Heights who, for seven weeks, dominated the Battle Stage on BET's 106th and Park.
Through a weird quirk of scheduling, I haven't actually taught the intro modern physics course since I started writing pop-science books about modern physics. So, this week has been the first chance I've really had to use material I generated for the books to introduce topics in class.
In the approximately chronological ordering of the course, we're now up to the late 1800's, and the next book we're talking about is Einstein's Clocks, Poincar$eacute;'s Maps, which talks about how Einstein and Henri Poincaré were (arguably) influenced by developments in timekeeping as they looked for the theory that became Special Relativity.
This is a much more academic book than the previous readings, and as such has really long chapters and sections. To space things out a little bit (giving them more time to read), and to give them a better idea of what relativity is about (which I think is helpful when reading Galison's discussion), I've spent the last two classes talking about relativity. Monday's lecture introduced Special Relativity and spacetime, and today's lecture introduced the Equivalence Principle and general relativity. Those slides are a little short on words because I was largely copying figures from the book, and because I'm trying to generate less wordy PowerPoints as a general matter. They should give you the right basic idea, though, and if you want more explanation, well, you can pre-order How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog (or enter our Photoshop contest)...
I have a Google alert set up to let me know whenever my name or the title of one of my books turns up in one of the sources they index. This is highly imperfect, sometimes missing interesting articles, and often blorting out 57 different pages on which my name appears in a sidebar link. It comes in handy from time to time, though, such as this morning, when it coughed up a whole bunch of pages linking to the Polish edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
Finally, dogs in the ancestral homeland of my father's family can learn all about quantum physics. I'm a little surprised to learn that the default dog in Poland is a miniature schnauzer ("Frickin' schnauzers..." Emmy grumbles), but it's always nice to see a new edition. I believe we've already sold Polish rights to How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog as well, so there's that to look forward to.
I don't have physical copies of this yet, but I'll presumably get at least one at some point. Which means I'll be all set for Christmas gifts for my aunts and uncles that year...
A quick reminder: How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog (cover in the left sidebar) will be released at the end of the month. If you'd like to win a signed copy early, though, you can enter our Photoshop contest. Just edit a picture of Emmy into another picture having something to do with physics. Like this:
For a while, I've been thinking about writing a piece on how NPR is more toxic than Fox News. Fox preaches to the choir. NPR, though, confuses and misinforms people who might otherwise know better. Its "liberal" reputation makes palatable a deeply orthodox message for a demographic that could be open to a more critical message. The full critique will take some time. But a nice warm-up opportunity has just presented itself: a truly wretched piece of apologetic hackery by Adam Davidson, co-founder of NPR's Planet Money economics reporting team, that appears in today's New York Times magazine.
The overpowering impression left by Harper's study, he and others say, is that while the achievers in his group worked hard and made their own way through significant personal effort and motivation, their path was fueled by what he calls "serendipitous" influences and factors that inspired them and connected them to their institutions. Why should their success be left to serendipity, they argue? "We know a heck of a lot more about why and how and where black men fail than we do about how and why they are successful," says James Minor, director of higher education programs at the Southern Education Foundation and a member of Harper's advisory panel. "Let's start with this group and figure out what it is about their experience, their environmental realities, that makes them successful, and advance institutional policies around assessment of outcomes that advance performance and the likelihood that more African-American males can do what these guys have done."
Before I was born, my dad ran for local office and got to speak at a 1960 rally where he introduced the speaker who introduced Republican presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon. Nixon was then vice president, but that's not the cool part of the story or why Dad is still rightly proud to have shared that podium. The cool part of the story is the guy he introduced: Jackie Robinson. In 1960, Jackie Robinson was a Republican. That was still possible in 1960, still conceivable. In 1960, President Eisenhower, like Teddy Roosevelt before him, still was able to make the claim that he was the leader of "the party of Abraham Lincoln." He was the last Republican president who could plausibly say that. And apart from empty platitudes ritually repeated, he was the last Republican president who seemed at all interested in saying that.
All science toys and projects: *are accessible (so cheap to make that nobody is excluded because of cost, and they don't require special skills, tools, materials, or work facilities beyond a kitchen). *have a "more about" page with explanations, historical context, related activities and high quality links for further research. *have clear step by step video directions or text instructions with lots of pictures. The science projects at the top are most developed; some of the farther-down science projects are works in progress. Most project instructions have been improved by helpful feedback from people like you, and some projects are entirely the work of guest authors.
So, my Giants edged out Kate's Patriots again in the Chateau Steelypips Bowl, in a game that was certainly not without its drama. I'm not going to gloat about it, because a couple of different bounces here or there easily could've changed the outcome. Also, I didn't see the third quarter at all, really, because it was SteelyKid's bedtime, and I was upstairs reading her stories.
But as good as the game was, we now have to turn toward the future, and specifically what wacky thing will go wrong to prevent the Giants from doing anything significant next year. "What do you mean?" you ask. Well, look at their history. They won the Super Bowl in 1987, and the next year, the NFL players went on strike, shortening the season and leading to some really disgraceful replacement games. The Giants had the worst replacement players in the world, and ended up missing the playoffs.
They won the Super Bowl in 1991, after which coach Bill Parcells retired for the first time. He waited long enough to make his decision that his defensive coordinator, Bill Belichick, had already taken the head coach job in Cleveland, so his successor was Ray Handley, who was awful. They missed the playoffs the next two years.
They won the Super Bowl in 2008, and got off to a great start, looking like one of the best teams in football. Then Brandon Jacobs got injured, and world-class knucklehead Plaxico Burress shot himself in the leg with an unregistered gun in his sweatpants, and they limped to an early exit.
So, history clearly tells us that something weird will happen next year to keep the Giants from repeating, or even winning a playoff game. The question is, what will that be?
As a famous man once said, it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future. But I'm sure that this totally scientific poll will give us a good chance of guessing which way to bet.
