Diffraction Spikes

On a Tropical Getaway

2008-12-16T21:06:00.002-05:00

I was thinking at one point that it is time to retire this blog. I still may do that, but here's one more post that postpones the end.

I wanted to share the details of my tropical getaway. Since it is December in Happy Valley and snow is accumulating outside, it is a great time of year to take some time off work, go away, and enjoy ourselves.

Well, Shannon and I are going to do just that, well, except for the tropical part.

Tomorrow I get on a plane to Omaha, NE, where the high temp the next few days is predicted to be in the mid 20s to high teens.

There aren't any palm trees, but there are two volleyball matches left this season. Penn State plays Nebraska Thursday in the Final Four, and the championship match is Sunday night. I may be going somewhere colder, but I have tickets to sit in the Penn State section and watch a really special team compete for a National Championship. There's no other place I'd rather be in the entire world.

On the Big 10 myth

2008-10-27T19:43:00.002-04:00

I made the mistake of reading comments attached to an SI college football article. Unfortunately, it is clear that the narrative that the Big 12 and the SEC are unbeatable has taken hold in the conscience of your average fan who has been watching college football for two seasons and thinks they now know everything there is to know. I've copied here selections from my post to the Big 12 and SEC fans claiming that PSU and the Big Ten should be banned from a National Championship game just to remind everyone of the "dominance" of the Big 12 and SEC over the Big Ten. Let me start by saying that the punchline is that Penn State is 7-2 against SEC and Big 12 teams in bowl games in the past 15 years.

Penn State is *not* Ohio State when it comes to bowl games. Let's look at PSU's bowl history in recent years:

2007 - beat Texas A&M (Big 12)
2006 - beat Tennessee (and the vaunted SEC speed that is too much for us Big Ten teams)
2005 - beat Florida State
2002 - lost to Auburn (SEC)
1999 - *shut out* Texas A&M (Big 12)
1998 - beat Kentucky (SEC)
1997 - lost to Florida (Joe benched Joe Jurevicius, and Curtis Enis was ineligible - his two best players)
1996 - beat Texas (Big 12)
1995 - beat Auburn (SEC)
1994 - beat Oregon
1993 - beat Tennessee (SEC)

so, PSU is 3-0 against the Big 12 in bowls in the past 15 years, and 4-2 against the SEC in bowls in the past 15 years (and I would put an asterisk by the loss to Florida). If you only want to talk about the last two years, PSU is 1-0 against the Big 12 and 1-0 against the SEC, and that was with Anthony Morelli at QB, not Daryl Clark. I think if you check, you will find that PSU was the underdog in most of those games. Most recently, Kirk Herbstreit pulled out the "SEC speed" argument to pick Tennessee to beat PSU in 2006, and if you go to YouTube, you'll see a highlight reel of PSU defensive backs pounding Tennessee receivers. It's hard to do that if the receivers are blowing by you (which they weren't).

So keep thinking that PSU is OSU and if matched up against the SEC or Big 12 it will be an automatic loss. I'll go into that game with history on my side, a coach with more bowl wins and more bowl appearances than anyone in history, and a .691 winning percentage in bowls. You all can keep thinking Joe Paterno is Jim Tressel and we'll see where that gets you.

Of course, I will be the first to admit that this is getting *way* ahead of ourselves -- I'm certain that one of the undefeated teams won't be undefeated by the end of the season. The reason for this rant is that the mob mentality is already beginning that says that OSU got embarrassed in bowls the last two years, so PSU shouldn't be allowed to play in the national championship even if they are undefeated. You can dismiss this as just talk by fans who don't know any better and it is harmless, but this is exactly the type of narrative that voted Nebraska national champion in 1994 because the fans "knew" that Penn State couldn't compete with Nebraska. I still say if they played head to head, the offense with three future Pro Bowlers would have won.

Do I need to even say anything?

2008-10-25T23:05:00.000-04:00

On Earmarks

2008-10-09T01:24:00.002-04:00

Never thought my specialty -- science outreach -- would come up in a presidential debate.

But apparently, John McCain thinks spending money to educate children about science is bad. Maybe that's why a huge fraction of his running mate's generation, including her, thinks dinosaurs walked with people.

So there you have it people -- don't vote for Obama, because he had the audacity to reach across the aisle and vote with his Republican colleagues to earmark funds for a renovation of the historic Adler Planetarium.

Is it November yet?

On St. Paul

2008-09-01T23:16:00.002-04:00

Wow. Blogs are reporting (I've only checked CNN, but it seems like this is going completely unreported in the MSM) that St. Paul has been turned into a military zone. There are YouTube videos of non violent protestors being pepper sprayed, stories about the FBI pre-emptively directing arrests of protestors (who are subsequently charged with fire code violations), and journalist Amy Goodman from Democracy Now was arrested for attempting to report on the violence.

Doesn't this seem like something Americans usually condemn when it happens in places like China?

When do the tanks roll into St. Paul?

On a warm heart

2008-08-27T21:57:00.002-04:00

One of my biggest pet peeves is the Moon landing conspiracies. I can't believe it when otherwise intelligent folks (including an M.D. I know!) believe in the crackpot idea that NASA faked the Moon landings.

Well tonight on Mythbusters, the guys ran a series of tests to debunk many of the ideas advanced by Moon conspiracy theorists. I'm sure they won't sway anyone who is a die hard, but hopefully the younger generation who might have otherwise bought into the myth will see the show and grow up realizing how ridiculous the conspiracy theories are.

Thank you mythbusters, you've warmed my heart.

On the post I meant to write today

2008-07-27T01:18:00.002-04:00

Just saw this linked to by someone else.

I hope Dr. D sees this post and clicks on the link. Very funny stuff.

My brother-in-law, who is an amazing guitarist, watched me beat Knights of Cydonia on the medium setting on Guitar Hero. He told me that it would be much easier to learn how to play the song on a real guitar. I didn't believe him, but watching Alex Lifeson fail to play Tom Sawyer on Rock Band makes me think Dave might be right.

Geddy sounded great, though -- I bet he did ok on his part.

On comments

2008-07-27T00:52:00.005-04:00

First off, let me note the blog is not dead. Summer just kicks my butt with an increased workload over fall & spring, and what time I have to blog goes away.

The reason I'm writing now is that I drank too much caffeine today, and even though I need to sleep, I'm writing this instead. Tomorrow, no iced coffee.

Anyway... I just moderated three comments -- two old ones from Mike, and one from Comcast! I had read today that Comcast has taken to responding to bloggers who trash them in order to try to improve their reputation. In my case, it looks like a Comcast rep responded to my criticism of them for their recent behavior in the ad campaign being waged against Dems that supported the new FISA legislation.

I didn't respond in the comments. Instead, I'll let Glenn Greenwald respond for me.

I'm glad that Comcast is using the dollars they get from me and the rest of us who are forced to use their service to pay people to respond to blogs. Now I know why I pay $60 a month for internet service. Before I just had to guess where the money was going. I can tell them how to fix their reputation a lot faster than writing comments on my blog -- lower your prices, improve your service, and stay out of politics. Since I see no chance of any of those three things happening, I'm still dropping them as soon as I have an alternative. I've even gone so far as to contact my township supervisors to ask them to help get our township more alternatives for internet service. The day I can stop giving one more dollar to the worst company in America will be a happy one for me.

On the Lesser of Two Evils

2008-06-21T21:54:00.002-04:00

I just got finished writing an email to the Obama campaign.

The issue that matters most to me in this election is the restoration of our civil liberties. I was originally planning to vote for Dodd in the primary, but he dropped out before my state voted. I've never donated a dime to a politician, but came closer than I ever have in my life to donating to Dodd. My reason for even considering it had to do with his very principled stand over retroactive immunity for the telecoms that broke the law and wiretapped American citizens without warrants. Dodd's fight was weakly supported by Obama and Clinton, and outright opposed by Harry Reid, and so that is a good way to rank those three -- Obama and Clinton are ok, and Reid needs to be stripped of his leadership role, and even better, outright voted out of office.

Over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald has been writing about this topic often, and has really done excellent work reporting on the issue and also motivating people to fight against the Congress whenever they take up this legislation. Unfortunately, it appears a lost cause now (as he predicted months ago), and part of the reason is that Obama has failed to lead and take a stand. Even worse, he appears to be simply covering his butt by issuing half-hearted statements to appease people like me, while knowing full well that he could take real action if he wanted to do so.

After realizing that Dodd wasn't going to be competitive, I reluctantly became an Obama supporter. I admit to being inspired by a lot of what he and his team have done, and I had gotten to the point where I thought that voting for Obama was actually going to be a vote for a candidate I genuinely supported, rather than the usual lesser of two evils vote.

With his failure on this issue, though, he squandered every ounce of my support and really has revealed himself to be yet another in a long line of lesser of two evils candidates. Maybe one of these days a real leader will actually run for office in this country, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

On begging for help

2008-06-09T23:03:00.003-04:00

Please someone, anyone, offer me alternative internet service. There is yet another reason to despise Comcast, and this one elevates them to an entirely new level of sleaze. It pains me that I pretty much have no choice but to continue giving them my money.

Glenn Greenwald has been writing extensively about the fight against granting the telecoms retroactive immunity. It's an issue that is important to me, and I was impressed with Chris Dodd for putting everything on the line to fight against retroactive immunity. He won my support with that position.

Greenwald and some other folks have decided to actively work on this issue, and they have been going after blue dog democrats that have been enabling Bush. They took a poll about which blue dog to go after first, and after raising something like $75k in a short amount of time, put together an ad campaign to alert the constituents of a PA democrat that he's been voting for the Bush policies, including granting immunity to telecoms. Well, this guy lives in the heart of Comcast country, and Comcast has been very generous in donating to him.

Radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers have been playing the ad, but anyone want to guess which fine, upstanding cable company came up with a bunch of bogus reasons to refuse to run it? Yes, our comcastic friends refused to run a political ad critical of a congressman for taking money from telecoms (including them) to grant them immunity from prosecution.

Read Greenwald's column for more details. I'm going to go fire off a note to Verizon *begging* them to bring FiOS to my neighborhood.

On more outrage

2008-05-28T22:58:00.003-04:00

I've been thinking about it, and although I never meant this blog to ever be about politics (which isn't cats, volleyball, or astronomy), it is getting that way because I keep getting more and more outraged. Every day when I think it can't get any worse, it gets worse.

There are plenty of much more serious things I can rail against, but this is the outrage of the day:

Rachael Ray.

She did an ad for Dunkin' Donuts wearing a scarf. Apparently, this means that she supports the terrorists and that she wants all Americans to die.

The same people who use racial slurs on TV or in their live speeches because that proves their bona fides as a "conservative" who does not bow to political correctness felt the need to force Dunkin' Donuts to pull a commercial because Rachael Ray was wearing a freaking scarf. This is the most important issue of our day, forget the war, the economy, or anything else -- we can't have our TV chefs wearing unapproved scarves on TV! Think about the anarchy that will result!

That's right. The "conservatives" have decided that this woman's attire so offended their delicate as a flower sensibilities as proud patriotic americans that no one should be allowed to see this heinous advertisement.

The 12 Republicans left in the US must be so proud -- they've finally won the all important battle to force companies to police the clothing choices of their paid endorsers.

Next time I'm going to wear a necktie, I'll be sure to call my Republican congressman to find out if it is on the approved list. I'm guessing I'll be in trouble, because I do have a lot of Jerry Garcia ties, after all.

On my favorite Dixie Chick

2008-05-21T22:29:00.003-04:00

I was happy to see Bush get called out for what was just the latest in a long, long line of outrageous actions -- comparing Democrats to Nazi appeasers.

One thing that no one mentioned, though, was the first thought that occurred to me:

Natalie Maines said in Europe that she was embarrassed by our president. She was vilified and even received death threats. The howling outrage from the usual suspects could probably have been predicted, but I was amazed how many people and what a variety of people felt necessary to pile on Natalie. Does anyone think what she said was so wrong anymore? If anything, I think 99% of people would be willing to shout from the rooftops that Dubya is an embarrassment.

Anyway, someone explain to me how what Maines said was even remotely as awful as what Bush said. Like I said, I'm glad for the outrage (especially Olbermann's -- he's singlehandedly doing what Air America failed to do), but how come it's not as widespread and deeply felt as that a random Dixie Chick provoked? I'm hoping it's because we're all desensitized to what Worst.President.Ever has to say and not because people think calling Obama an appeaser in Israel isn't as bad as saying Bush embarrasses you while touring Europe.

Just another aside on Olbermann -- it takes some serious nerve to go on TV and tell the sitting president to "Shut the hell up". I wonder if his audit has started yet, or if they're looking deeper for skeletons in his closet. I'm guessing he's now on the TSA's "terrorist" list, has his phone tapped, and Rove is working on some "witnesses" to accuse him of bribery. I hope he's got some friends to help him out.

On the best line since "untracked"

2008-05-02T00:13:00.002-04:00

I'm grading and watching the Pepperdine / Long Beach State NCAA men's vball semifinal.

Earlier tonight, PSU beat Ohio State to earn a spot in the championship.

This match is being called by the same team of Mowins & Kiraly that called the PSU / Stanford women's volleyball national championship match.

I've been known to make fun of this Mowins/Kiraly tandem. During the women's match, they must have said Foluke Akinradewo's name about a bazillion times, including telling us many, many, many times about her having to move out of her apartment to go train with the Olympic Team. It really seemed like it was the Foluke Akinradewo show, and oh, by the way, there is a match going on in the background.

Anyway... I found their commentary so annoying, I *have* to poke fun at Mowins for a slip she made during this match. I guess one of the Pepperdine guys attended commencement, and then went right to the gym to play in the conference championship match that got them into the tourney. While explaining this riveting human interest drama, Mowins said something along the lines of, "he took off the gown and the mortar & pestle and left for the gym."

I didn't know the regalia at Pepperdine was borrowed from the chemistry department.

On the Paterno Family Professor of English Literature

2008-04-29T23:18:00.004-04:00

So the AAUP released their annual report on faculty salaries. I don't want to be too critical, but I do want to call out one of their arguments as bogus.

They say,

"The salaries paid to head football coaches at Division I-A universities are ten times as high as the salaries of senior professors. What does this say about the priorities of these universities?"

If anyone who has been here more than once doesn't know I'm a football fan, let me state for the record my bias -- I'm a season ticket holder at PSU, which is both my employer and the institution that awarded my bachelor's degree. That being said, though, I have to say that I think including this argument in what is otherwise a pretty standard paper on salary statistics hurts their credibility.

I know that it is easy to pick on football and fashionable to do so, but I just don't buy the argument that it is bad for colleges to pay football coaches more than $1M. Let's look at their argument:

(paraphrased) Major football schools pay their football coaches ~10 times the average full professor salary.

Well, what about supply and demand? How many PhDs are there that can fill your average full prof's slot? How many coaches have the CV to coach Penn State? Isn't it also simple economics that you pay a salary that is competitive with the other options a candidate might have? The full profs in my department are a talented lot, and could go to most other universities, could go to NSF, NASA, a national lab, or other federally funded research institution. So, PSU has to offer a competitive package to what those places have to offer in order to keep its faculty. Your average top D1 football coach gets approached annually by an NFL team, so D1 schools have to pay of order what an NFL coach might make to keep them. Last time I checked, even the worst NFL franchise (Detroit?, Arizona?) pays its coaches of order 10 times what NASA pays their senior scientists. If I'm wrong about NASA's salary scale, please tell me where to apply.

The authors of the AAUP report disagree. They say,

"If the purpose of the institutions were to produce football entertainment for profit and serve as farm teams for the National Football League, then arguments about letting market forces determine college coaches’ salaries would make sense. Otherwise, they don’t."

Huh? What is special about colleges that market forces can just be ignored when someone decides it is convenient? Why is it ok for market forces to determine that business profs should earn more than liberal arts profs, but not ok for football coaches? I just don't understand that statement at all. Personally, I wish that market forces were such that the best teachers commanded top salaries and movie stars and athletes made middle class salaries, but that's just not the case. Penn State can buy this argument, take a stand for the AAUP, and offer its next coach $100k, and we'll see if market forces can be ignored.

You can say that Penn State should do this, because it will mean the end of its football program (or at least the end of a D1 quality program). There is precedent for such a decision. Do the senior faculty at Chicago get larger annual salary increases than the schools that remained in the Big Ten? I'm going to guess that there is no correlation -- I bet Chicago profs have been getting annual raises similar to PSU faculty. I imagine that whatever the difference is in salary scale between PSU and Chicago, it has more to do with public vs. private than D1 vs. D3 athletics.

Lastly, how many head football coaches do schools like Penn State have? If you're not sure, the answer is 1.

Anyone know how many full profs there are? I would guess here it's in the neighborhood of 1,000. So if you integrate the salaries for football coaches and do the same for full profs, I get $1M for football coaches (tough math there -- 1 x $1M), and $100M for full profs. Seems to me that the ratio of football:full prof salaries does not show a lack of proper prioritization on the part of the administration.

We can argue about how self sufficient athletic departments truly are and how much football teams help to generate donations for academics (and here, I have to plug that at PSU Joe donated millions for things such as endowing faculty positions), but I just don't understand the demonizing of coaches and athletics.

Personally, I find football to be something that adds value to the quality of life here in State College. Isn't one of the Penn State PR lines "making life better"? So pay our head coach > 10 times what I make -- you're making my life better, even if you're not pleasing the AAUP. I'm not saying I want a raise less than inflation in 2008, but personally I don't think that there is any relationship to Joe's salary, football revenue, and my salary increase.

On the PA primary

2008-04-20T14:53:00.002-04:00

It can't come soon enough.

I'm no fan of Hillary, but I have to say, any shred of hope she had of getting my vote has disappeared because of her incompetent PA staff.

We have been getting multiple calls a day from the Hillary campaign, and multiple sets of literature. In contrast, we've had one Obama call and one Obama pamphlet. That's all I need. Ten calls and ten pamphlets don't tell me anything different than the first one.

Still, though, today's bit of campaigning was the best of the bunch.

I got home at ~1pm, and found a Hillary pamphlet in my door jamb, *again*. However, I noticed this one had something on it, which I originally thought was ketchup. However, upon closer inspection, whoever dropped this pamphlet off must have been bleeding, and they got blood on the pamphlet and on my door.

So, here's the new slogan -- Hillary '08 - she's even willing to bleed for your vote.

I hope that she's planning to send a biohazard team to my neighborhood to clean up everyone's doors. Maybe I'll send her campaign a bill for disinfection services.

On the Bill of Rights

2008-04-06T23:19:00.002-04:00

I'm just wondering -- next January, do we get the fourth amendment back? How about habeus corpus?

If our current administration can just declare the fourth amendment does not apply in certain cases, are we expected to just trust they won't do the same to the rest of the Bill of Rights?

Why isn't anyone upset about this? Have we all just accepted that we live in a dictatorship and don't care that our constitution no longer applies?

I'd like my rights back.

on science as politics

2008-04-05T18:57:00.002-04:00

hello from my local NPR station. Shannon signed us up to answer phones during radio pledge. It's been slow, so I have time to post.

Anyway, I read, against my better judgement, an opinion piece by one of those obnoxious loudmouths about big oil, which turned into a diatribe about global warming. I won't identify the guy or link to him, because that only gives his opinions more visibility (not that he needs that). Once again, this idiot repeats the moronic position that some random think tank claims that the ratio of global warming "supporters" to the "other side" is 38:1 on CBS news.

I'm not the first to make this point, but it needs to be repeated as long as people keep making this claim on tv. Science is not politics. Unlike any political topic where you can balance the debate, scientific debates should not be "balanced". For example, let's say your average truthiness-spewing idiot has an astronomer on who claims that the sun will rise the next day in the east. In order to balance this, does he need to have someone on to claim the sun will rise in the west?

Maybe a more direct analogy -- if a cosmologist gets on tv because of the discovery of a redshift 8 object, is the show obligated to have Chip Arp on to dispute the cosmological origin of the redshift?

The Nobel prize winning scientists here tell us that human induced climate change is supported by evidence so strong that they felt comfortable using the word unequivocal in their report. To me, the cosmological origin of the redshift is unequivocal. By "balancing" debates on science it gives people the impression that we can legislate science. Congress can vote to deny global warming or evolution, but that doesn't make it so. So by finding and giving a platform to some random person with scientific credentials who claims that global warming is not human caused, it gives the false impression that the evidence isn't as strong as it is.

So as much as some folks would like to treat climate change as a political issue, it is not one and should not be treated as one. So a 38:1 ratio on the news "supporting" global warming is appropriate.

If you want to have a political debate, you can balance the folks on your show discussing how to address climate change.

On post-its, dog collars, and hula skirts

2008-03-31T19:41:00.002-04:00

Steinn beat me to it, but I was going to discuss the latest appearance of the post-it bandit.

So, to recap, someone covered my truck in post-it notes a few months ago. This was followed by a day at work where a number of office doors were similarly covered.

More recently, the bandit stuck again. Steinn found a hula skirt in his office, Mike found dog collars, Larry found a groundhog (stuffed, I assume), and Caryl found glow-in-the-dark glasses.

Today's pranks led to police being called.

I agree, the prankster did go too far, they probably should have stopped before putting stuff in very sensitive offices. Here's my working hypothesis: the prankster(s) don't really have access to the offices. I'm thinking they have some clever method for getting stuff in otherwise. I've heard several reports of stuff being knocked over (Steinn, Mike, Caryl), and I can't imagine someone who was so precise in their post-it application wouldn't be careful enough not to knock stuff off of everyone's desks. This suggests to me they don't have that much control over where stuff gets placed. Robin also got balloons, which you can place under the door and inflate from the other side. I'm not just saying this because someone called "Prankster" commented to Steinn that they can't get in -- even if that is a fake comment by an outside observer, I mentioned this same thought to Mike earlier today. Mike didn't believe me, but Mike's evidence was that opening the door blew papers off his desk. I think it was the method for placing the stuff in the office without opening the door that knocked stuff off the desk.

Anyway, I would like to know (just for curiosity's sake) who the bandit is, but I don't want the person to get in trouble -- even placing a groundhog in Larry's office seems harmless to me.

On apologies

2008-03-27T23:41:00.002-04:00

Sorry for the neglect of this blog -- it's been busy lately, and I have a tough time blogging when I'm on my computer working all the time. I need to escape the keyboard rather than spend more time in front of it.

I thought that since I'm in Boston for a meeting, I'd find some time to catch up, but I spent a lot of time today at the meeting corresponding with folks back home about some plans for some work obligations next week. So still didn't find any time to blog.

Now, I'm tired. Sorry to the few of you who have found checking here to be futile lately, but I'll be back to posting something random soon.

In the meantime, here's a few links I've found interesting lately:

more from Chris Dodd.

I'm going to miss this by about 2 hours. Interesting that Jay Paterno was at his campaign HQ.

It really seems like this is it for Joe, but many people are enjoying this far too much. Many people seem to have so many axes to grind with him that they are really seeming to savor watching this play out in a way that is not so flattering for Joe. Personally, I will always believe that the man deserves much more respect than he gets.

More at some time when I'm more motivated...

The Moon Hoax Hoax

2008-03-11T23:49:00.003-04:00

One of my pet peeves -- moon landing hoax theories.

One of my dreams come true: Mythbusters are going to be taking on the Moon landing hoax myths.

I can't wait.

On the Stillers again

2008-03-05T22:36:00.002-05:00

Most folks will probably deny this, but I've been on record for a few years saying that although I wish Joe Paterno will never retire, I do have an approved coach that has my all important permission to replace him.

That person is Bill Cowher. I know this is a complete pipe dream, and in fact, I'm only partly convinced myself this is a good idea. However, I can't think of anyone else I think should take over for Joe.

So, the rumors are that Cowher was here talking to PSU's AD. I had actually heard that rumor through the grapevine before it showed up on SI.com or in the Pittsburgh newspapers. I hope it's true.

Bill's got my vote, and as I mentioned, I have lots of pull around here.

On the Stillers

2008-03-04T23:49:00.002-05:00

This past week, Myron Cope passed away.

Peter King wrote a nice tribute to him in his column this week.

Everything that everyone says about Myron is true. I came late to the Steelers and won't claim to be a long time fan (or even necessarily the most loyal fan right now), but the reason I am a Steelers fan at all today is because of Myron Cope. Like everyone around here, I turn down the volume of the TV when Penn State football is on TV and when the Steelers are on TV, and turn up the volume on the radio and listen to our local announcers. The reason for listening to the Steelers was always Myron. The rest of the crew is great, too, but Myron really was a lot of fun to listen to because it was clear how much he loved the Steelers. After decades on the radio, he was still screeching "Touchdonn" (no, that's not a typo) every time they scored.

When I lived in Virginia, I loved visiting PA, because on the drive back to CVille on football Sundays, I could usually keep Cope on my radio for a good chunk of the trip.

If I have such fond memories of a guy I've listened to for a few years now, I can't even imagine what the guys who have been listening to Myron since the 70s feel. I imagine a lot of cans of Iron City were raised in his honor last week.

Sorry... no time to finish this, gotta go get a hot dog.

On Beer

2008-02-21T22:55:00.000-05:00

mmmmm... Otto's sumatra stout.

'nuff said.

On the cult of global warming deniers

2008-02-10T12:51:00.000-05:00

I've put down some of my thoughts here from time to time about global warming. Let me summarize my latest -- I've attended a few talks lately by some of the scientists at Penn State involved in energy research. This included a talk by Richard Alley, one of the most academically decorated faculty at Penn State, who is a co-author of the IPCC report and part of the team that shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore.

You can watch his talk here (although it's only in Windoze Media format, which is ridiculous).

The scientists have been delivering a universal message during their talks so far: that global warming is real, it is human induced, all of the scientific community is in consensus, and its effects are happening even faster than the most pessimistic predictions. Richard was asked if he would estimate how many scientists in the community fall on the other side of the argument, and his answer was zero. In his talk, he noted that scientists use words like "the evidence suggests", "it is likely that", "it is very likely that", etc., to give a feel for how strongly they believe the data. He used the phrase "it is unequivocal" about human-induced global warming. UNEQUIVOCAL. How many times have you seen that phrase used in the ApJ?

After hearing all of these talks, I find it embarrassing how the scientific community has failed our citizens. We have let this argument get lumped in with wiretapping, FISA, and "enhanced interrogation", so the decision about whether or not we need to do something about climate change is made by your voter registration card. I know that this is a problem, but it was driven home this morning. In our local paper, there was an article written by a local about how global warming is likely going to have a series of startling effects on the fish & game industry, which is so important to PA. Read the comments. It is a sampling of people who think that the author is an idiot for buying the global warming "myth". My favorite comment is the person who feels that (paraphrasing) us worrying about this is because of our culture's need for instantaneous gratification -- he thinks that "Nature" will solve this problem. He's right -- Nature is solving the problem, the question is if we will like the way Nature solves it.

I'm just as guilty as everyone else - I drive a light truck, I heat my house, I'm writing this post with my laptop plugged into the wall and my wireless base station connecting me to the internet. I've also reinsulated my attic, insulated my water heater, changed every bulb in my house to a CFL, and would install solar panels on my roof if I could only find a vendor to do it. You can laugh at me all you want, but I figure that if spending some of my disposable income on energy saving technology might help (even if it might only have a 1% chance of maintaining our planet's habitability) it's worth it.

If you watch Richard's talk and still think this is all some big conspiracy hatched by Al Gore, you should be ashamed of yourself. I understand that skepticism is the heart of science. I am not asking people to stop being skeptical of data with error bars and model predictions of future climate, what I am asking is that you apply the same level of rigor to your evaluation of this conclusion as you would to any result. You know, if Rush Limbaugh went on the radio and told me that Ursa Minor has a mass to light ratio of 100, I would evaluate his sources and decide how their arguments stack up to the rest of the published literature. It's not too hard to find folks who are stubbornly holding on to the early, very high M/L estimates of Ursa Minor, and I'm sure they'd be happy to be given a chance to go on radio and TV and scoff at the rest of community who refuses to acknowledge their vastly superior work that proves Ursa Minor must have an M/L of 100. Do you think if the cosmological redshift somehow became a political issue the non-cosmological redshift crowd wouldn't do everything they could to get on Rush's show?

Unfortunately, I know that there are folks who will read this, shake their head, and say "just another liberal academic who buys whatever Al Gore tells him". That's the problem we need to solve. Then we can start trying to reverse climate change.

On tidal disruption of satellite galaxies

2008-02-08T22:53:00.000-05:00

It's fun to be on APOD and Digg.

On quotes

2008-02-08T22:41:00.000-05:00

There's a lot going on in politics right now that absolutely disgusts me. Even though it is such a little thing, this quote from Romney made me downright angry.

...I'd forestall the launch of a national campaign and, frankly, I'd make it easier for Senator Clinton or Obama to win. Frankly, in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror...

It pains me to even print it.

What a jerk.

On kids today

2008-01-26T15:53:00.001-05:00

I'm the founding (and so far only) member of Astronomers for Side-Out Scoring (it's ASOS, thank you very much, I use the O in Out in my acronym).

When I started playing volleyball, the game was played with side-out scoring, which means that only the team with serve can score points. If the team without serve sides-out, then they don't get a point, they win serve, and then have the opportunity to score. I *think* it started with the '96 olympics, but one of the silly volleyball governing bodies decided that to make volleyball more TV friendly, they needed to switch to rally scoring, which means each team can score on every serve, regardless of who holds serve. This was a major change in the sport, it's akin to baseball deciding that the fielding team can score, not just the team at bat. As you can imagine, a change of this magnitude changed the game substantially. National Champion Coach Russ Rose talks all the time about how his recruiting philosophy completely changed in the "Rally Score Era" (his term). We could argue (and many have) that rally scoring actually makes the game less suspenseful, which actually isn't very TV friendly. But that's a post for another time (and probably another author, because my argument is more visceral than statistics based).

I hate rally scoring. I would like nothing more to abolish it. Thankfully, most of us old timers still play side-out scoring when we play pickup games, and in our local league, we play side-out scoring.

So, why is the title of this "kids today"? Well, just like vinyl LPs and owning landline phones tethered to the wall in your house, side-out scoring apparently dates you.

We were playing the other night during a very crowded time at IM Building's volleyball courts. We were playing winner stays, and as us old-timers got tired and the more talented PSU students showed up, most of the teams of 30 to 50 somethings lost their courts. My team was the last to get knocked off, and our court went to two teams of undergrads, who I overheard saying, "great -- can we play rally now?"

So apparently, side-out scoring = dinosaur-aged.

On the great towel controversy of '08

2008-01-11T00:18:00.000-05:00

So I tried one more time.

I hung my bathmat on the shower curtain rod, and I hung my bathtowel on the towel rod. I took the little sign that says "a towel on the rack means I'll reuse it" and hung it right next to my towel. I thought that surely when they saw this sign right next to my towel, they would know I was trying to convey some message.

I got back to my room and the sign is still there, but my towel is not. Instead, I have yet another freshly laundered towel back on the pile.

On Deja Vu all over again

2008-01-10T01:13:00.001-05:00

So there was a press release at the AAS meeting that has been blogged about by others who are posting the ongoing results from this meeting:

Blue blobs in the M81 group.

I don't want this to seem like sour grapes, but I am trying to point out in various places where I've seen this pop up that not only was this *exact same* result presented during the 2003 AAS meeting, but there was a press release then, too:

2003 AAS abstract on these same blue blobs

Press release issued prior to 2003 AAS meeting.

A quick comparison of the images suggests that the 2008 blue blobs are not the exact same ones as the 2003 blue blobs, but still it seems to be pretty bad form to announce this startling new discovery that does not seem to be startling nor new.

On My Professional Society, Part 2

2008-01-10T00:34:00.000-05:00

Part 1 is here.

Last year, like most years, I attended the January AAS meeting. Last year, the meeting ended with the famous Fiasco in Seattle. I suppose I should have learned my lesson, but instead, I paid $325 to register, $400 or so in airfare, and $160 or so a night at a hotel to attend this January's AAS. Today, while chatting with some folks in the main exhibit hall in the middle of the day in the middle of the week, the Austin Convention Center staff turned the lights out on us. A friendly woman walked over and told us we had to leave. Apparently, they had some "exhibitor appreciation" food set up somewhere, and didn't want the riff raff in the exhibit hall while the exhibitors were chowing down. They also gave us some excuse about needing to set up the afternoon coffee break. They were originally intending to lock us out of the hall for 2 hours, but I guess got enough grief from enough people that they let folks back in early. I decided that I was better off going back to the hotel and doing work on my laptop rather than standing around and reinforcing my annoyance by griping with everyone else.

So once again, a large convention center has decided that even though our meeting schedule tells us that the exhibit hall is open from 9:30am - 6:30pm, they can arbitrarily tell us to leave and too bad to everyone who spent all that money to come here to attend a meeting. After last year's fiasco, I expect nothing less of the AAS but for them to pretend this never happened. I do hope that next year when they see yet another dip in the attendance rate, they wonder why people stayed away. I think I've gone to something like 10 January AAS meetings in a row, and I can tell you now that unless someone comes up with an incredibly compelling reason for me to go in 2009, I will not be making it 11 in a row. It seems to me that I haven't renewed my membership for 2008, yet, either. I wonder if I'll be in any hurry to send them a check.

On Hotel promises

2008-01-09T01:53:00.000-05:00

The sign in my bathroom here in Austin tells me that if I want to reuse my towel and save humanity from excess water usage, that I should hang it up on a rack, but if I want my towel laundered, I should put it on the floor.

I put two washcloths on the floor, but hung up my handtowel and bathtowel, prepared to use them again. Tonight, I find that all my towels have been replaced with fresh ones, including the ones I tried to keep and use again.

So, why do hotels hang these signs up if they don't intend for their staff to actually follow those instructions? It reminds me of the infamous email forward (and probable urban legend) about the guy who wound up with 8245682741 mini-bars of soap instead of his 1 full-size bar.

I'll try again tomorrow, but don't expect to be able to keep any of my towels then, either.

Update: The next day (that is today, Wed), I hung my bathmat on the shower curtain rod and my bath towel on the towel rack. Once again, all towels were replaced with fresh ones. In the grand scheme of things, this is a pretty minor point, but it just seems so ridiculous to me when hotels put out these signs suggesting that they are environmentally conscious and want to save water and detergent and then don't follow through.

On those blazingly fast Wolverines

2008-01-01T22:02:00.000-05:00

Wow. The SEC just can't match Big Ten speed. Michigan 41 Florida 35.

I guess it's time for those stodgy, slow, plodding SEC teams to start trying to recruit some speed to matchup with the faster-than-humanly-possible Big Ten players.

Even though Tennessee won (which is only because they didn't play Penn State), I have to laud Phil Fulmer. His quote, according to the broadcasters, was, "We're still trying to catch Tony Hunt from last year." At least one SEC coach is willing to admit that the so-called SEC dominance over the Big Ten is a bunch of bunk (they had a stat line up that said the SEC / Big Ten head to head bowl record over the past N years is 11-11).

So, everyone, please repeat after me -- "I will not claim the Big Ten can't beat the SEC when all the evidence proves they can."

By the way, as long as I am on yet another college football rant, Joe Paterno is now 6-2 in Bowl games since 1997 and 3-0 since 2006. Of course, the trolls waited until 8am Sunday before posting their usual vitriol about firing all of our coaches. I suppose beating yet another favored team in a post season bowl is something that any guy off the street could do.

My tolerance for college football is at probably its lowest ebb ever, but it is nice to see Penn State ending yet another season with 9 wins and a bowl victory.

On nerdy body art

2007-12-21T00:06:00.000-05:00

From boing boing -- scientists with science tattoos.

I suppose I'll have to get out my camera and send him a picture.

On a straightforward message

2007-12-17T23:00:00.000-05:00

On a Christmas Wish Fulfilled

2007-12-16T00:14:00.000-05:00

I asked Santa for a Penn State National Championship this year.

Penn State beats Stanford in 5 -- 3 games to 2.

Congratulations to Coach Rose, Christa, Nicole, Megan, Arielle, Alisha, Blair, Roberta, Alyssa, Kate, Kara, Melissa, Jess, Ann, Kelsey, Caitlyn, and Michele.

Can anyone guess what my Christmas wish for 2008 will be? I'll give you a hint -- it rhymes with Verbeet Mashonal Thampeeons.

On the promised picture

2007-12-03T23:32:00.000-05:00

That would be my truck. Yes, it is covered in post-its. I drove home in ~50 mph winds, and some small fraction of them blew away. I guess this is a good advertisement for the quality of the adhesive in post-its.

On a (random?) prank

2007-12-02T22:06:00.000-05:00

Friday was busy. The first game in the NCAA volleyball tournament being held at Penn State started at 5pm, and I wanted to be there. So I left my office in kind of a hurry on Friday around 4:30 -- so fast, I didn't even say goodbye to Dr. D before he left (sorry 'bout that!).

So, my plan was to hike quickly to the parking deck, pick up my truck, and drive to Rec Hall. The reason for driving was that I was planning to come back to lab to help with the Friday night open house observing, and if I drove, I could stay five minutes later at the game.

However, my careful planning came to a screeching halt when I got to the parking deck. Someone or someones took the time to very carefully cover every exposed non-window non-tire surface of my truck with standard yellow post-it notes. The doors, hood, roof, bed, and even mudflaps were completely covered. I estimate it had to have taken at least an hour or two for one person to do this.

I think I've ruled out all of the suspects among my friends, so my current feeling is that this was a random prank. I don't know why anyone would want to cover a random truck in post-it notes, but they got me.

Pics to follow when I get a chance to download them from the camera...

On another retailer in the penalty box

2007-11-26T21:55:00.001-05:00

So, is there anywhere left to shop?

My Mom is an inveterate shopper at Sears. She tells me that she found out during a tirade with them (more on that in a bit) that she opened her Sears credit account in 1964. Pretty much every appliance she owns is a Kenmore, and a few years ago, she bought a Kenmore dishwasher. It has pretty much been a lemon ever since. It has broken four times, and has been repaired by Sears each time. Of course, they charge her roughly the price of the dishwasher each time they fix it, so I think all told she has paid about three times its original cost in repairs.

So it broke again. She called Sears to tell them what a lemon she bought and how annoyed she was that the thing needed yet another >$100 repair. The sympathetic person promised my Mom that they would waive some fees to make the bill a bit less. So, repair guy shows up, tells my father that he knows nothing of this waiver, and refuses to leave the house until my father gives him a check for the amount including fees.

My Mom called Sears to complain. They had a record of her call and a record of her being promised the fee waiver. However, they told her that they wouldn't refund her money. I'm sure my Mom was probably very obviously angry, but is it good customer service to refuse to honor a promised refund for a customer who has had your credit card for 40 years and owns one of each of your appliances? So she's done with Sears, and even though I've never been a fan, they're in my penalty box, too.

If you want to read more, check out the Consumerist's latest Sears horror story.

I haven't shopped in Wal-Mart, Sears, Best Buy, or Circuit City in ages. I've wandered in to a few of those places out of desperation, but I still have managed to escape without giving them any of my money. Looks like another Amazon Christmas!

On lost respect

2007-11-13T19:26:00.000-05:00

I used to think Ben Stein was a smart guy.

No longer.

On Crocodile Rock

2007-11-10T12:41:00.000-05:00

I went to see a show last night. Shan and I drove ~3 hours to Allentown, where we met my sister and her husband, and we went to the Chris Cornell show at Crocodile Rock.

I'm actually not a big fan of going to live shows, because even though I love live music, I hate dealing with obnoxious, drunk idiots that show up to concerts. For example, while we were waiting in line to be patted down (yes, really), a guy walked out of the bar, turned, vomited on the sidewalk right in front of about 40 of us, and then just kept walking down the street. I'll complain more in a bit, but first, a review of what was (crowd aside) another *amazing* show.

For those who aren't familiar (and shame on you if you don't run out to a store or go to iTunes right now to enlighten yourself), Chris Cornell is the former front man for Soundgarden and Audioslave, was part of the Temple of the Dog tribute to Andrew Wood, and he has put out a few solo albums and solo tracks on movie soundtracks. His height of popularity was in the early 90s, which is when I was an undergrad and investing most of my spare cash in CDs (and I don't mean certificates of deposit). I've been a big fan of his since then. What is amazing about his music is that he has an amazing vocal range (and he doesn't sing in falsetto). In fact, Wikipedia's article claims the note he hits in "Jesus Christ Pose"is G above high C, and that he's been known to hit A above high C. Now, when he's hitting those notes, he has his own unique style that is quite different than most folks that can hit them, but still, it's impressive.

During the show, he played something like 30 tracks. He had endless energy, going from one song right into another. He played something like 2 hours straight, and then an encore of about 30 more minutes. The set list was great, mixing Soundgarden (Outshined, Black Hole Sun, Ty Cobb, Rusty Cage...), Audioslave (Like a Stone, Getaway Car, Show Me How to Live, I am the Highway...), with his solo work. About halfway through the show he played the Temple of the Dog hit Hunger Strike, and the crowd loved it. I was just amazed to watch how effortlessly he makes hitting his highest and most powerful notes. I've always thought that Cornell was my generation's Robert Plant, and he threw in Zep's Thank You and Whole Lotta Love and they both sounded great.

I said going in that really the two songs I wanted to hear were "Burden in my Hand" (a likely pick, because it was a Soundgarden hit), and "Sunshower" (a really obscure song from the soundtrack of the movie "Great Expectations"). No luck with either. However, the first track during the encore was "Burden in my Hand", and then he went right into Sunshower. It was amazing. It was definitely worth the 2.5 hour drive there, the crappy crowd, and the 3am return home after the 3 hour drive home in a blustery wintery mix.

So, to end this gushing review, let me tell you why the crowd was so terrible. There were plenty of people there who just didn't care that they were at a show. During Chris' acoustic set in the middle, everyone was talking loudly over the music. A woman standing to my left was blathering on and on about a whole lot of nothing, and it was hard to hear the music over her voice. I just don't understand why people pay $40 to go to a concert and then don't even bother to pay attention. It was a general admission show with no seats, and plenty of people just pushed their way through all of us standing trying to watch. If I had the authority to revoke tickets and kick people out, I would have left only the fans, and we would have had a better show.

On my default topic

2007-11-06T00:24:00.000-05:00

It has been 15 days since my last post, I know this is not the way to build an audience.

My excuse is the same -- I spend most of my time on my laptop working on my on-line courses, and this past week I had a grant proposal due on top of the usual grading load.

Tonight was a night off from the usual grind -- we had a big game in the league. We've been playing the bottom teams of the league, and haven't been challenged since our game against my old team. We did blow one game against a team we should have beat 3-0, instead, we only went 2-1.

So going in to tonight's game, we were 25-2. Tonight, we were playing a team that has won the league most of the recent years, but is behind their usual first place pace because they don't have a ringer like in the past. This game was tough and was a *lot* of fun. We played better tonight than we have all season, and although we let them stay in games, we won 3-0. I didn't pay too close attention, but I think all three games may have been 15-13. Really, though, the new attitude of the new team made the difference. Even when we fell behind a few points, I always knew we would win. So now, we're 28-2 and are comfortably in first place. This is a good feeling.

One of the team husbands took video footage of all three games -- it will be interesting to see how we look.

On Shamma-lamma-ding-dong

2007-10-21T21:50:00.000-04:00

No official times yet, but Mrs. P finished her first olympic distance triathlon today (that's 1.5k swim in a lake, 40k bike ride, and 10k run). She was hoping to be done in 4 hours (*very* pessimistic is what I told her, but she was sure she was going to struggle to beat 4 hours), and she finished in roughly 2 hours 45 minutes.

Not bad for a rookie.

Oh yeah -- for you UVa'ers out there, Winfrey "You can call me Vicky" Johnson did the race, too, and finished about 10 minutes faster than Mrs. P.

On another on-line political petition

2007-10-18T20:02:00.000-04:00

If you would like to see at least the chance for some justice to be served for the loss of our civil liberties, go here and sign the petition.

On another politically active link

2007-10-17T23:49:00.000-04:00

Now here is a less controversial topic than the previous one, but a politically important one, nonetheless.

In today's Daily Collegian, there was an article about increasing co-ed housing on campus.

As you can see, change happens quickly at Penn State.

:)

On a politically active link

2007-10-17T23:15:00.000-04:00

I try to keep my politics mostly to myself, but every once in a while I can't help it.

This is another absurd appointment by Bush. He seems to enjoy appointing the least qualified, most controversial candidates for federal posts. Let's see -- let's find the doctor most opposed to the use of birth control, and put them in charge of the nation's family planning post. Let's appoint a law breaker to be the Attorney General. Let's select a Sith as Vice President.

Anyway, please go here and sign the petition if you agree that this is a boneheaded move by our bonehead-in-chief.

On Monday's match

2007-10-16T22:44:00.001-04:00

Grading, grant writing, and weekend visitors have kept me from writing lately.

Anyway... I have to comment on Monday's match. The new team (9-0) played the old team (9-0). I was expecting it to be weird. It actually wasn't too weird, because once the match started I didn't really pay attention to the other side of the net, I just played my game. But before I knew it, we were up 10-3 in game 1, and it was getting tense. Capt. of the old team called time out to do what he used to do to me -- complain at them.

I'll give them all the credit in the world -- they started playing lights out after that time out, and they were digging better than I'd ever seen. They chipped away at our lead, tied it up, and then won game 1 17-15. It was getting really tense, though -- they were acting a bit arrogant about things, but they earned that right.

I was still feeling weirdly detached. I honestly didn't care that we lost game 1. I was just having fun playing with my new team. I can't say that for everyone, though -- three of the others were fired up and wanted blood in game 2. Unfortunately, we started game 2 playing crappy, and they were still on fire, so soon we found ourselves down 10-3 and then down 14-7 (that's game point -- the games go to 15). Anyone want to predict what happened next? We chipped away at their lead, tied it up, and then won game 2 16-14. The tension was only higher after that.

I'll admit to getting drawn in to some of the drama. I felt (although I don't know for sure) that I was being picked on (as was the other new teammate who was on the old team with me, too), so I decided it was time to pick back. We played like we played at the beginning of game 1 and the end of game 2, so we took game 3 easily 15-6.

They definitely got us -- they took game 1 when we were up big and they played really well overall. I took a ball to the nose pretty hard (didn't draw blood) and they hit over my block and past my defense. I scored my points, though, hitting two balls right at two of them. After the game we shook hands and had a pleasant conversation, and oh yeah, we walked away 11-1 while they left 10-2.

On calling time out

2007-09-27T01:28:00.000-04:00

So we had our first match tonight and won 3-0.

It was fun. The new team is going to be a *lot* of fun, and I think we're already starting to gel.

Here's the thing that sticks out in my mind most, though. In games 2 & 3, we had big leads, then let the opponent catch up before pulling out a close win. In game 2, after we gave up six points in a row to the other team when we were previously up something like 13 - 6, our captain called a time out. At the time, I didn't realize it, but in retrospect, I think I was tense when she called time out. I'm just so used to timeouts being tense I think I'm conditioned to hang my head and expect all of my inadequacies to be pointed out in excruciating detail.

So, this is what she said after calling timeout, "I just wanted to take a break and remind everyone how awesome we are". That was it.

Then we laughed. Then we won.

On Comcast laughing last

2007-09-25T23:04:00.000-04:00

So I have DirecTV. I can watch the Big Ten network. I have temporarily lost HD versions of the local networks, which is something I suppose I knew, but didn't pay close enough attention to remember until after I realized they were missing.

I was very excited to go to the Comcast office and return their crappy HD/DVR set top box (the DirecTV one is about a million times better). Unfortunately, every avenue I've looked into for alternative internet service (Getwireless, Verizon DSL or Fios, D&E cable or DSL...) are unavailable in my neighborhood. So, I'm stuck with Comcast for internet. I was grandfathered in at $36.95 a month because I had some cable / cable modem package from years ago. I thought that most people were paying $42.95 or something like that a month. Well, surprise, surprise, my friendly, neighborhood Comcast person (I *never* call -- I go in person to the local office where there actually *are* friendly people) tells me that if I cancel my TV and keep my cable modem service only, the fee is $59.95 a month! Ridiculous. It is actually cheaper to get their cheapest TV package + modem than modem only.

I feel like they are getting the last laugh -- I really have no choice but to pay their absurd rate until another option magically appears.

*blecch*

On PSU / Michigan

2007-09-25T22:38:00.000-04:00

I am obligated to say something about this game.

I'll say a few things.

1. I can't believe the 8 year streak is now 9 years. The arrogance of maize & blue fans gets to fester for another year.

2. I can nitpick some calls, but the refs were not as bad as in previous years.

3. The day after the game there were dozens and dozens and dozens of pages of the usual "we are all smarter than every coach and can game plan better than all of them, Joe, Galen, and Jay all need to be fired, Penn State sucks, we're going to boycott the university, blah blah blah."

I couldn't stand it and wrote a snarky comment -- I want every single one of those idiots to have their tickets and rights to ever watch Penn State play football revoked permanently.

4. I will continue to defend our coaching staff, but I'm done defending Morelli and was never a fan of Austin Scott. Morelli and Scott need to be benched.

On just sayin...

2007-09-20T22:40:00.001-04:00

Stewart Mandel gives us the tired Big Ten is slow, SEC is too fast thing, again.

So you will now be treated to me telling you again -- Tennessee was supposed to be too fast for Penn State, and Arkansas was supposed to be too fast for Wisconsin. I'm not as much of a fan of Scirotto as I was before his arrest, but his football skills are not in question -- ask those blazing fast SEC receivers why they couldn't get beyond the plodding Big Ten DBs from Penn State and how it felt to get absolutely leveled by Scirotto.

You can even watch the highlights for yourself. They start with Corso & Herbstreit giving us the "SEC speed will lead Tennessee over PSU" line in the pregame. Then, what do we see? (Besides the final score, that is)

Well, Butler blowing by Tenn DBs, Williams blowing by Tenn DBs, Scirotto blowing up the Tenn receiver (see it repeated three times from three angles at the 1:22 mark), Tenn's QB getting sacked like 8 times by the slow as molasses Jay Alford and Poz, the Tenn back getting caught by Poz on a screen behind the line of scrimmage, not a single Tenn player catching up to the dead slow PSU DB returning the fumble, and just for good measure, Tony Hunt running over every defender that tried to tackle him.

Penn State is in the Big Ten. Tennessee is in the SEC. STOP SAYING THE SEC IS ACROSS THE BOARD MORE SKILLED THAN THE BIG TEN. When their winning percentage hits 1.000 I'll buy it. Until an SEC team beats Penn State, I can say with just as much justification that the Big Ten's speed is too much for the SEC. I can also say the Big Ten's toughness is too much for the SEC.

On stealing the Angry Prof's idea

2007-09-20T22:02:00.000-04:00

(AP's Original post)

Things I want:

A nice, fat raise

A sidekick

A Saturn that runs on grass clippings

New knees

The end of anything that is Windoze only

A geothermal system (stole that one directly)

The greatest chocolate milkshake ever

A grader

A fat endowment to fund all of my projects

A 40 foot planetarium to play with

An extra set of new knees, in case the first ones don't work out

To see in person a Penn State national championship

My friends to stop leaving State College

A job for Shan that she loves

KNEES!

On Enlightenment

2007-09-18T23:22:00.000-04:00

This post is going to be meaningless to 99.99999999% of the world. However, I found a link today that made me very happy.

I'm on a new volleyball team this season. We're going to be running a 5-1 offense (one player plays setter all game regardless of where they are in the rotation, and the other five of us play hitter), and two of our players haven't run this type of offense before. Games start next week, and we still haven't had all 6 of us together even once. So Thursday night, we are getting together to run through our rotations to make sure everyone is comfortable before our first game.

Well, I was on the lookout for information on the 5-1 to share with my teammates, and I found this site. If you page through, you will see that it has little icons to represent all six players, and uses animations to show how the players shift around during the game. It is actually quite complex, but once you play it a few times, it becomes second nature.

Now, the reason for this post. I have said about one million times, I would give just about anything to have someone teach me how to pass better. It is one of the most basic skills, and it is the one in which I'm most erratic. By far, the thing that happens to me most frequently is that I pass the ball off of my right arm only (you're supposed to take the ball equally on your right and left arms simultaneously), and I shank the ball out of bounds. Well, on this "how to pass" page, they had one tip that I think has changed my life. It says:

Hands Together: With your hands together, try to receive the ball towards your non-dominate side.

I'll excuse the typo, because I think this is what I've been missing my whole volleyball career. It seems so obvious! You tend to favor your dominant side, so if you concentrate on your non-dominant side, it will even out. I played pickup at the YMCA tonight (7 games where I was on a team of two -- me & Frank), and I concentrated on my non-dominant arm the entire time. I still shanked a few passes, but I easily noticed the difference.

This is the secret of enlightenment -- concentrate on receiving the ball towards your non-dominant side!

On being a fan these days

2007-09-13T01:38:00.000-04:00

It's very obvious that I'm a sports fan. Over the years, Shan has asked me why I do this to myself -- why do I watch sports when each loss by Penn State's football and volleyball teams causes me pain? I know that people who don't enjoy sports don't really understand this, and I have to admit that I don't quite understand it either -- but I have to admit that it really does have a strong effect on me. The highs are high (Penn State 17, Ohio State 10 anyone?), but the lows are low (Iowa 6, Penn State 4).

I have to admit, that as I'm getting older, I'm starting to enjoy it less. A recurring theme here has been cropping up again, and it is getting to me even worse than ever. This past week at the Penn State / Notre Dame game, there were many, many fans around me who weren't the usual suspects. Almost everyone sold their tickets for some ungodly sum, so the season ticket holders who are usually around me weren't there, and instead the drunk guy who bets on every game was there instead. Like always, the morons were harping on Morelli from the moment he stepped on the field. If he threw a textbook pass to a receiver, there was silence. If he missed an open receiver, though, the groans and comments about how he was personally responsible for the end of civilization started.

I can't stand it. Every QB that has ever played for Penn State has been universally vilified by our own fans. They beg for Joe to put in the backup, and as soon as that guy is in the game, he's the subject of ridicule within 15 minutes of being the new starter. It reached an all time low when one of our "fans" cheered when Zack Mills was on the turf obviously hurt.

I do my best to bite my tongue, but I cheer louder than normal whenever the QB does well hoping to be a role model. It doesn't work, but I won't give up.

This time, though, I snapped. Morelli threw about a 40 yard strike to a receiver that set up a TD, no one said anything, and I turned around and growled "That was Morelli!" One guy in particular looked at me like I'm insane, and for that minute I was. Of course, after that pass, Morelli was sacked on the very next play, and he underthrew a receiver on what was I think his only other pass attempt after that (by that time, the score was out of hand, and Joe chose to run the ball for the rest of the game). So all the idiots were laughing at me as they jeered Morelli's mistakes after I exploded trying to defend him.

So as much as I love football in general and PSU football in particular, the fun of attending a game in person is running out. I can't block the morons out anymore.

I guess it is the usual "kids these days" kind of thing, but it really feels like it is getting worse. There was just an article about a Texas fan walking into a bar in Oklahoma, and well, I can't even bring myself to type what happened. We had another case of a fan from the opposing school writing to our paper to complain about how horrible our fans were during the PSU / ND game, and I can't really be too critical. I'm starting to hate our fans, too.

Oh, one more thing

2007-09-01T23:42:00.000-04:00

I made the mistake of looking at the CNN/SI "React" message board about the UM game.

I'm *really* tired of listening to SEC fans talk about how they have no respect for the Big Ten. Yes, I saw the OSU loss to Florida. However, I will continue to point out that across the board the SEC is not as strong as they like to think. In particular, here are some bowl scores:

1992: PSU 42, Tenn 17
1994: PSU 31, Tenn 13
1996: PSU 43, Auburn 14
1998: Florida 21, PSU 6 (I'll make an excuse here -- Paterno suspended his two best players)
1999: PSU 26, Kentucky 14
2003: Auburn 13, PSU 9
2007: PSU 20, Tenn 10

Oh yeah, and 2007: Arkansas 14, Wisconsin 17

Everyone can buy into the myth that the SEC is the best conference in the land, but we'll see what happens when the games are actually played.

By the way, it is now Cal 45, Tenn 31, so the SEC can't even seem to beat a bunch of dirty hippies from Berkeley.

On a happy day!

2007-09-01T22:46:00.000-04:00

Ah, good old Appalachian State. My new friends -- gotta love that the first time a Div 1-AA team beats a ranked 1-A team it happened to Michigan. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving group of obnoxious Wolverines.

I actually got into an argument with a buddy after the PSU game (where tens of thousands of people stayed in the stadium after PSU's win to listen to the stadium announcer give minute by minute updates of the ASU win over UM) -- he was annoyed that I was happy that UM lost. His claim is that this is going to kill the Big Ten in the BCS standings, and if PSU has an identical record with a team from another conference in the BCS standings, PSU could lose out because of loss of strength of schedule points.

My feeling was then and is now, I don't care. UM and their fans are a bunch of arrogant underachievers, and they need to be knocked around. Yes, I know that PSU is currently 0-8 against them in their last 8, so by criticizing UM it is a knock on PSU. I wish I could say that our record against UM's was as good as ASU's, but I can't. Hopefully that will change this year. In the meantime, though, I'm going to continue to celebrate Appalachian State's win.

As long as it is officially college football season, I'm going to start one of my annual complaints. I know that sportswriters like to laugh at us poor, deluded college football fans. They are constantly accused by us of being biased, and they all laugh and say that no, they are never biased.

I will give them that the majority of them probably get accused of being more biased than they actually are. However, there are notable exceptions. One of them is Craig James, who never misses a chance to say something obnoxious about Penn State. Here is the first example of the season.

During the Ohio State / Youngstown State (that is, 1-AA YSU) highlights, James spoke highly of Ohio State's QB, and then said that since UM lost, maybe Ohio State would take the Big Ten. Thus, based on the OSU QB's performance against a 1-AA opponent, he was ready to anoint OSU Big Ten champs.

The highlight that immediately followed was the PSU / FIU (that is, 1-A FIU) highlight. I'll give you my impression of the game -- PSU looked like a team should look against an overmatched opponent. The final score was 59-0, and the starters were out by the 3rd quarter. The defense looked quick and strong, the running game wasn't great early in the game, but got better as FIU's defense got tired. One thing that impressed me was that Anthony Morelli looked sharp. He avoided defenders (something he didn't do much of last year), he was accurate and showed off the strength of his arm by throwing several deep balls. Several of his incompletions came because the receivers ran the wrong route or just dropped the ball. So I feel optimistic about the PSU season given how good Morelli looked.

Now, back to the TV highlights -- Doug Flutie said something like, "Morelli looked good and showed that he has improved from last year." Craig James then snorted in derision and said, "C'mon, it was just FIU.". Note the irony -- OSU's QB (whose name I don't even know yet) gets lauded for performing against a 1-AA opponent, but in Morelli's case the weakness of the 1-A opponent is good enough reason for discounting his quality performance.

Here is my second complaint of the night. I'm currently watching the Cal / UT game. Early on, they showed a highlight of the PSU win over UT from the bowl game last year. There was a pivotal play where the UT back fumbled, a PSU defender picked it up and ran it in for a TD. This was a critical play, but PSU had the game in hand for much of the second half. This is what Kirk Herbstreit said (and Kirk, despite his OSU roots, has spoken highly of PSU lately), "UT was going in for the win when the fumble won the game for PSU". That is *definitely* stretching the truth at least, but outright wrong at best.

Anyway, on a day when ASU beat UM, I can't complain too much, but I will continue to point out when announcers (especially that idiot James) are less than fair in their discussion of PSU.

On fulfilling requests

2007-08-29T01:16:00.000-04:00

Richard requested the following:

Please meet Louxcie -- the latest addition to our collection of tabs, torts, & torbs. In this case, I think she's a tortedo.

On keeping another promise

2007-08-28T01:03:00.001-04:00

I did it. I called DirecTV today and signed up.

Unfortunately, because of all of the publicity about the great Big Ten Network / Comcast war, it seems like I procrastinated too long. DirecTV appears to be stealing lots of Comcast customers in Centre County. My install appointment is on 9/25 -- almost one month from today.

It's going to be tough waiting until 9/25 for the joy of going to Comcast and happily returning their crappy HD / DVR box and telling them I don't want them or their 20% rate increases any more.

In the meantime, if anyone else wants to join me in the transition, I'm happy to give you my account number so we can each get the $50 referral bonus. Just plan on waiting at least a month for the install behind all of the other former Comcast customers.

On gas prices

2007-08-28T00:34:00.000-04:00

I have a complaint about gas prices in State College, not gas prices overall.

The fact that gas is exactly the same price at every gas station in this town (with the one outlier that is $0.01 a gallon cheaper than everyone else and the other outlier that is $0.04 - $0.10 more expensive than everyone else) suggests to me that the market in State College isn't as open as it should be.

It used to be that whenever I drove to NJ to visit my parents, I would always fuel up in PA, because gas was always cheaper in PA than NJ. Now, though, it is the case that gas is usually cheaper in NJ than PA. In PA, though, it seems that State College seems to stay higher longer than other places. My latest data point on this comes from this past Saturday. I drove to Harrisburg for an event at the Whitaker Center, and I always check the price at the big truck stop in Clarks Ferry (I only stop there if absolutely desperate). They are the only major station near a bunch of intersecting highways, so they always tend to be $0.05 or $0.10 more expensive than the other stations along the route. It is usually cheapest (among the easy to get to stations that I know about just off the highway) to stop in Mifflintown at the Sheetz there -- they are usually $0.05 - 0.15 cheaper or so than the Clarks Ferry truck stop, and usually a few cents cheaper than State College. Well, Clarks Ferry is at $2.69, and in State College we're still pegged at $2.75 where I think we've been since Memorial Day. I just checked on-line, and the Flying J in Mill Hall (the cheapest gas on the way to NJ along I-80) is at $2.61. I wouldn't be surprised if Mifflintown was around $2.65. A quick check of Pennsylvaniagasprices.com shows many parts of the state where gas is $2.51 - $2.59.

So, the cheap station in our area is $0.14 cheaper than all of the State College stations, and the overpriced station on 322 on the way to Harrisburg is even $0.06 cheaper than State College stations. And it looks like gas is $0.24 - $0.06 cheaper than us across the state.

Something is fishy.

On Black Dwarfs

2007-08-20T22:13:00.000-04:00

You know, this is probably one of maybe 5 posts having anything to do with astronomy, and yet astronomy is listed prominently in my tagline. So consider this a concession to keeping astronomy in my tagline. Oh, and it is something I find pretty interesting, too.

I really enjoy working with teachers -- I teach a workshop for science teachers every summer, and they have been (with a few individual exceptions) a great group to work with. They are very engaged in the course, they ask great questions, share interesting insight from different points of view, and in general are just a fun crowd.

Last year, though, I think I blew the mind of one of the teachers -- one incident in particular really caused her distress. It happened during a lesson on stellar evolution. We teach that Sun-like stars become red giants, then expel planetary nebulae, then become white dwarfs.

I grew up reading kids' astronomy books, though, and I remember vividly seeing illustrations of the lifecycle of a star, and it always ended with the white dwarf becoming a "black dwarf". The idea was that a white dwarf that has cooled to the point where it is no longer visible becomes too dark to see, hence "black dwarf".

Now that I've learned a bit of stellar evolution and a bit of observational astronomy, I taught the teachers two things -- (1) in the lifetime of the universe, no white dwarf has cooled beyond say 4000 K or so, and (2) the dividing line between white dwarf and black dwarf has to be some arbitrarily assigned value for "no longer visible". To me, this means that there is no star currently in the universe that you would call a "black dwarf".

When I taught this last year, the 5th grade teacher was aghast, because she has her students act out a stellar evolution play in her class, and the kid that gets the black dwarf part gets to do a melodramatic death scene, which is the highlight of the whole play. She was *very* disappointed, even after I told her that all she needed to do was decide that in her classroom the dividing line between white dwarf and black dwarf was at a relatively high luminosity. Since the line is arbitrary, who says it can't be arbitrarily high?

I taught this again this year, and because of my experience last year, I asked the teachers -- how common is it in middle school textbooks for the book to give the endpoint of stellar evolution as the black dwarf stage? They almost universally agreed that their books used this terminology, so they taught it that way. I pointed out that I *never* teach this in Penn State courses, and I guessed that almost no one else did, either. We took an informal survey of the ~5 other faculty that they saw during the workshop, and none of them teach black dwarfs, either.

In the end, I think that it really doesn't matter, but it does seem interesting that the concept of black dwarfs is so widespread at the K-12 level and so uncommon at the university level and in the refereed literature (my unscientific study shows that if you search for the exact phrase "black dwarf" in the abstracts of refereed articles in ADS, you get a few articles from the 80s that seem to use the term the way K-12 books due in the '00s).

Maybe we should start working on the K-12 textbook publishers so that in the '20s, they'll be up to date.

On missing Ray Gricar

2007-08-02T23:42:00.000-04:00

You know, I don't often think about the quality of the district attorney's office, but this article really makes it seem like they are not the sharpest knives in the silverware drawer.

They really seem completely incompetent.

I don't think I've read a single positive thing written about the office since Gricar disappeared. Hopefully someone with a clue will take over before every criminal in State College goes free.

On shock

2007-08-02T23:07:00.000-04:00

Here's a link.

NASA latest news

Anyone want to guess what I might be doing for the next five years?

It's funny how your life can change pretty dramatically after one email pointing you to a NASA press release.

On change being good

2007-07-26T22:40:00.000-04:00

I have been talking for *years* about switching teams in my vball league.

Today I did it. A few of us are planning for the Fall season -- and it looks like I'm going to be a founding member of Acme Roofing.

None of you should care, but this is a *big* change in my life. I feel like I just got traded to the San Diego Chargers from the Cincinnati Bengals.

On Keeping my promise to myself

2007-07-25T21:38:00.000-04:00

Part one of divesting myself from the worst company in the USA happens on Monday. I signed up for a different ISP and they show up on Monday for my install appointment. Monday afternoon I show up at Comcast and tell them where they can stick their cable modem service. :)

Part b will be switching to DirecTV. That one is less satisfying, since many years ago I swore I would never do business with them again. Just goes to show you where Comcast ranks among the pantheon of terrible companies.

On the least surprising scandal of 2007

2007-07-23T23:00:00.001-04:00

I know that my banner says that I'll try to write about astronomy, volleyball, and cats, but I have found a number of excuses to write about being a sports fan. So I suppose it is time to amend that text.

I spend my Fall weekends either attending or watching football games, but other than that, I'm not much of a fan of the other three big pro sports -- baseball, basketball, or hockey. I used to watch the NBA -- it started in 1993 with the Suns / Bulls finals. After that, I was hooked for a while. I still can remember vividly some of my favorite Suns playoff moments -- KJ dunking over Hakeem, Rex Chapman hitting the most ridiculous 3 point shot ever, and Charles running coast to coast and swatting away a dunk attempt (I think by Malone, but not 100% sure about this one). My interest in the NBA waned because my favorite team (the Suns) had a knack for trading or letting go my favorite players -- Chuck, Majerle, Kidd, Nash, Finley...

Still, when the NBA playoffs return, I usually get sucked in for a little while. This year was pretty much the nadir, though -- I watched a couple of games of the Suns / Spurs series, and once again I realized what a travesty the officiating in the NBA is -- it is horrendous. Once it became obvious the best team in the NBA wasn't even going to make the finals because of the horrid calls, I gave up, I didn't even turn on 1 minute of the finals.

So... anyone hear anything interesting in the news lately? Maybe you heard that an NBA referee is being investigated for fixing games? Have you also heard that he officiated one of the Suns / Spurs playoff games?

Raise your hand if you are surprised.

I'm not going to bother saying too much about the other recent sports scandal, about all I can muster is this -- Michael Vick is a loathsome human being. I can't say I will give up watching the NFL, but I can assure you I will *never* watch another game in which he is on the field.

On a sad month, and now a happy month

2007-07-05T22:57:00.000-04:00

Work has again interfered with blogging, but I also took a self imposed hiatus. June was a rough month to be a Palma, and I didn't feel much like putting down any thoughts here, since they would have mostly been sad news.

My father just got out of the hospital. He's doing pretty well, but he had a mild stroke so it was pretty serious. Although we were all pretty worried about him when it happened, he's doing so well that it is hard to feel anything but optimistic -- all of his therapists have been pretty impressed at how quickly he's regained his strength. He keeps promising that he'll be ready to go in September for the Penn State / Notre Dame game.

Our other sad news, though, is that a few weeks ago Chloe decided she would be happier with Roux and Arizona. She had some exploratory surgery, but our vet told us it was best if they just put her to sleep while she was under the anasthesia. It happened pretty quickly, she wasn't in any pain, and we got to spend one last weekend with her treating her like the empress that she was before we took her in to surgery.

It's been a rough year to be a cat in our household. Since Roux and Chloe are both gone, Mosby is now the elder stateswoman of the house. It was pretty lonely with just one cat, and so Shan and I decided to try to start July out on a happier note so we started the process to adopt a new cat.

I'd like to introduce everyone to Gracie.

Her name comes from "Amazing Grace", because that was Chloe's favorite song. It is another adjustment getting used to having a kitten in the house again. This morning she decided to play fetch and she was running over me to bring her mouse to Shannon. She is really sweet, incredibly talkative, and pretty mischievous. Missing Chloe has been tough, but it's hard not to smile when Gracie is around. By the way, she has already decided on a nickname -- "Cheeseball".

Hopefully Chloe is enjoying herself somewhere without steps and high beds and is enjoying looking down watching Mosby having to learn how to deal with a kitten.

On restaurant quality

2007-06-12T23:27:00.000-04:00

Two posts in one day! This is *serious* procrastination.

Anyway, I have to pile on a local "restaurant" -- the scare quotes are there because I think there is an expectation of quality when you use the word without quotes, and as I'm about to point out, this place doesn't qualify.

I've complained in the past about the local group that owns basically all of the non-chain places in this town and has apparently decided to rigidly enforce mediocrity throughout their kingdom. Well, a bunch of us went to one of these substandard locations tonight. It has probably been 5 years or so since the last time I went, and if I can help it, it will be more than 5 years before I'm back again.

Tonight was Mexican night, and out of 9 of us, 3 of us ordered enchiladas. The menu listed them at $10.99. One of the other folks ordered a combo plate for $12.99. My enchiladas were, as expected, completely mediocre. Had that been the end, no post would be here. However, when the bill came, they charged us $12.99 each for the 3 plates of mediocre enchiladas, and $10.99 for what I can only assume was a mediocre combo platter. So in the end we ended up on the losing end by $4. The majority of the group felt that $4 wasn't worth complaining about. So, we left out an extra $4.
Thus, the post.

In return for the $4 overcharging, I'll register my complaint here. I suggest that all of you consider skipping the Deli for your next meal in downtown State College.

On canine entrees

2007-06-12T20:31:00.000-04:00

At dinner tonight, I was chatting with two of the hundreds of thousands of readers of this blog, and I was mentioning that I really don't have 10 minutes anymore before bed to post -- my life in the summer is overscheduled, and I won't have a brief respite until the week of June 25. I'm in my office now because I'm scheduled to give a presentation at 10pm (seriously), so I figured I'd put off the mountain of work to mention an excellent email I received today.

As I said last time, I'm teaching this summer, and I have a crop of students that have not yet ceased to amaze me. Unfortunately, I do not mean because of their endless dedication to the subject of my course. No, I mean because of their creativity in coming up with excuses.

Student A is three weeks into my course, and needs to improve significantly to hope to sniff the D level. He did not turn in this week's work and his excuse boiled down to (and I'm *not* joking at all) -- the dog ate my computer. Seriously.

Maybe it's time that all students are required to switch to cats. They have much more refined palates.

On kids today

2007-05-30T23:08:00.000-04:00

A student recently told me that in my class, he has figured out that my homework assignments require students to consider the readings and apply what they have learned. I resisted the urge to write back and say, "Well, Duh."

However, he tells me that he is having trouble because all of his other classes simply require him to regurgitate the readings. He must not be used to this newfangled teaching I employ.

My question is, am I right that this can't be true, or do the vast majority of college classes today simply ask students to fill in the blanks with bold faced words from the textbook?

On light blogging

2007-05-24T00:57:00.000-04:00

Well, summer session has officially commenced at Penn State.

In the next few months, I will co-teach an Elderhostel, run a summer camp, help organize AstroFest, co-teach a teacher's workshop, co-teach another teacher's workshop, and continue teaching my *three* on-line courses.

So... the season of lighter than average blogging has begun.

There is one thing of substance I wanted to post. I've been commiserating with a colleague dealing with *serious* grade grubbing from our Spring semester course, dealing with students from *other* universities sending me their sob stories trying to get in to my summer full class, and getting pointed to articles at Rate Your Students by others. I'm just as prone to getting frustrated with these students as everyone else. However, I think it is at times like these that we should remember there *are* some fantastic students that we get to work with.

The student who worked with me on a research project and on outreach programs starting the summer after his freshman year just graduated. He was outstanding, and a pleasure to work with. He easily outweighed 10 grade grubbers.

On getting what you voted for

2007-05-15T23:43:00.000-04:00

Well, the results are in. The moro... err challengers beat the incumbents in the State College School board election. The gloaters are out in droves on the comment boards at the CDT.

To me something that was very curious -- the democratic votes were almost dead even between the challengers and incumbents. However, among Republicans, the challengers had a 5:1 lead. I'll bite my tongue instead of interpreting this discrepancy.

To everyone who is gloating -- I will say for the record now that this election is on your head, you get what you voted for. We will now likely have in January a school board of single issue novices who know basically nothing about running a school district. I predict that in the next election this group will be swept out, and hopefully we can restore some intelligence and talent to the board. Hopefully this crew won't be around long enough to cause too much harm.

On my turn as a grammar cop

2007-05-08T23:33:00.000-04:00

I've been wearing myself out through a combination of working and then doing yardwork (it is that time of year again, and yes the thought of pruning pine trees and spreading mulch makes me very happy), so I have not had much energy to write lately.

Until I get the energy to write something longer that is sure to keep everyone on the edge of their seat, I figured I'd post one of my pet peeves. The image above was snipped from CNNSI (new motto -- we take all the best parts of our site and make them worse or your money back!) as an example of one of the stupidest expressions in sports. At some point, some silly sports media person bastardized the phrase "get on track", and it has propagated. So now, all the time you hear about how an athlete needs to "get untracked". How can an editor let that show up in a headline?

I'm sure that somewhere SRM is laughing that I have the gall to criticize someone else's writing, but come on, I can't be the only one who realizes this is complete gibberish.

More Earth shattering revelations to come...

On flying through the universe

2007-04-30T22:35:00.000-04:00

Every once in a while, I scratch my head and wonder why people trust me with *really* expensive equipment.

Two weeks ago, I went to the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh for a PSU Alumni Association event showcasing Penn State astronomy. As part of the program, I was asked to set the stage by giving a tour of universe. At PSU, we do this (in 3D!) with our "AstroWall" system and the Digital Universe Atlas from the Hayden. It turns out that at the Buhl Planetarium, they also use the Digital Universe on their dome. It is a bit more sophisticated an interface, but is otherwise the same software that we use (and you can use on your computer). In the end, I had to do a show where I was running the show by manipulating the interface on two LCDs, speaking into a microphone, and using the mouse to control the flying motion. It didn't go as smoothly as it could have, but I got kudos from everyone, so I guess it was not a flaming disaster.

By the end, though, we all felt that we want one, that is, a 50' dome and a $1M projection system. So, if you've got $2M sitting around collecting dust, let me know and I can put it to good use.

On football optimism and pessimism

2007-04-27T22:00:00.000-04:00

(Image snipped from the Centre Daily Times website)

I participated last Saturday in what was one of the most positive experiences I've ever had at Penn State. At this year's "blue white game" (PSU football's intrasquad scrimmage), students got the word out that everyone should wear maroon and orange to show support for the Hokies. Stores that sell PSU gear got in the act selling maroon shirts with orange "Penn State" letters, with the proceeds going to a VT memorial fund. A local and Penn State alum was one of the victims at Virginia Tech, and those of us older than most of the current crop of undergrads remember when there was a shooting on our campus, and only a heroic action kept it from being worse. The tribute was amazing. We had the biggest crowd in the history of the Spring game -- about 71k, and a big crowd was wearing maroon and orange, the band played "Amazing Grace" following an extended moment of silence, and it really felt special to be a part of such a sincere tribute to the victims.

The game had its moments, and I feel optimistic about an improved season over last year's top 20 finish.

Today, though, the other shoe dropped. Weeks ago, a story broke that supposedly a number of football players had gotten into an argument, broke into an apartment party, and a melee broke out leaving a couple of guys in the party hurt and needing medical care. The details are sketchy, it is early, they are innocent until proven guilty, etc. etc. etc. However, I'm tired of this. If it is not obvious, I love Penn State football. I just spent $761 on my football tickets and parking pass. That is on top of the $150 I spent (which will be upped to $200 next year) just for the *privilege* of paying for football tickets. I go to games and do everything I can to support my team, be a good fan, and show respect for the opponents (even the Buckeyes). I take pride in our well earned reputation for fielding good teams filled with student-athletes who are also respectful of their opponents. Guys like Poz have been the rule rather than the exception. That's why this kind of thing gets to me so much. I hope that all six players are suspended, and if they are found guilty even of lesser charges, they should not play a down. I don't care if we don't win a game all season without them (which I don't think will happen), they deserve to suffer the consequences for their actions.

On another season

2007-04-19T23:32:00.000-04:00

I know more important things are going on in the world right now, but I don't think I have much to add to the dialogue.

So, on to my latest distraction. Volleyball season ended for us last night. We finished tied for first in the regular season. Guess what happened in the playoffs? The *same* thing that happens every season. We beat the first team we played, then lost to the next two. I think it's time to blow up the team. We're never going to progress any further, and I'm pretty tired of being third or fourth *every* season.

My CVille volleyball tournament t-shirts are getting ratty -- I need a new champion t-shirt!

On Local Politics

2007-04-10T23:42:00.000-04:00

At some point I wrote about the local high school controversy -- the board has voted to begin a ~$100M construction project, and a local organization is fighting it pretty fiercely. The level of the debate from an observer's point of view is low -- it seems like every article in the local paper details some shouting match, and the on-line comments are what you would expect to be written by UM or OSU fans about the UM / OSU football game.

I will say right here that I am *firmly* on the side of the board -- I think they should go ahead with the construction, even though it means my already high property taxes will increase. The opposition group is a who's who of State College bigwigs, and so my stance on this issue puts me at odds with the Paterno family. That doesn't concern me too much -- even if they are proxies for Joe (and I don't get the impression that they are), they aren't speaking on behalf of Joe's employer, Penn State. However, a number of the other folks identified in this article as funding the opposition group are business people, and their businesses are named. That bothers me a bit, because it implies that not only does the person endorse this particular side of a political argument, but their business does.

I've been a *big* advocate for the bank I use here in town, because I think they are great. I love the personal service. Now I find out that the chairman of the bank is part of "Citizens for Better Solutions". I have to say, this changes my opinion -- I get the sense that Nittany Bank holds political opinions, and isn't just a bank. For now, I think I'll stick with them, but if the name of the bank keeps getting linked with this particular issue, I think I'll consider switching to the credit union.

On some more sadness

2007-04-10T23:21:00.000-04:00

My posts lately all tend to be things that make me sad. Add this to the heap.

The other day, Angry Prof pointed out that a woman whose baby died garnered less support from her faculty colleagues than a man who had a problem with faulty lab equipment. I read that after reading Female Science Professor point out that the men on a committee in her department were meeting in secret without her.

Why do women go into academia? Why does anyone?

There was a male scientist I knew who, whether he knew it or not or did it deliberately or not, was responsible for driving several women out of the graduate program in which he was the graduate advisor. He was also well known for looking down on anyone who left academia to go into industry.

It's sad that folks like him still seem to be the exception rather than the rule.

On Planet Earth

2007-04-08T21:08:00.000-04:00

The new Planet Earth series on Discovery HD is amazing.

You must watch it. It can be gruesome (during "Shallow Seas", the fur seals tearing the necks of penguins was unexpected), but it is glorious to watch.

On Statistics

2007-03-31T20:58:00.000-04:00

The statistics in this article make me sad.

One-third of college graduates believe the Biblical account of creation is fact. Almost half of the citizens of our country reject the science of evolution.

If we can have a war on terror, can the next president please declare a war on ignorance? It is getting depressing around here.

On a Sad Day for the Class of 1938

2007-03-25T23:12:00.000-04:00

In the early days of this blog, I was interested in the old domes at Penn State. I was surprised that they were left standing in the middle of two tall buildings. At the time I said, "Presumably, one does not tear down class gifts."

Unfortunately, my assumption was incorrect. It appears that the old domes are gone. Torn down unceremoniously during the construction of the additional new building being built just south of the Career Services Building (formerly called the MBNA building, now the Bank of America building -- this building gets my vote for the building most likely to change names 10 more times in the next decade).

I was hoping to some day actually get inside them, but I guess that opportunity is now gone.

On a big sigh

2007-03-21T23:16:00.000-04:00

Courtney Brown got cut by the Broncos.

How long before he gets added to the "biggest busts" lists with Ki-Jana? I will always remember both of those guys as absolutely outstanding players for Penn State and I feel badly for both of them. Hopefully Courtney gets another shot somewhere.

On Abominations

2007-03-20T23:39:00.000-04:00

So Dennis pointed out that an intolerant idiot managed to get his condemnation of Meech printed in a local paper.

I hesitated to link to this, because it is giving this guy a platform, but at the same time, I suppose we should shine a light on his words so that we can point out how wrong he is.

I won't post a well reasoned, amazingly eloquent response (I'll leave that to Meech), but instead I'll point out that I hope this guy is also spreading the word about the abomination that is shrimp. Because remember everyone, the Bible says: God hates shrimp.

On the Free Market

2007-03-19T23:21:00.000-04:00

For everyone that believes that the free market is the best way to solve all of our society's ills, I give you a case study. It seems that Cory's experience after going from Adelphia to Time Warner is worse than mine going from Adelphia to Comcast.

Cable service costs have gone crazy and the last two cable companies in this part of the Galaxy both suck. Can't we have some insanely great startup company figure out how to deliver just the channels we want and just the internet we want for a reasonable price with decent customer service?

Why is that too much to ask?

On Pizza

2007-03-19T18:04:00.000-04:00

I'm from New Jersey. My whole family is of italian descent. A lot of families in the neighborhood I grew up in are of italian descent. I grew up eating the "gravy" (aka marinara sauce) my grandmother would make every Sunday. Within 30 miles of our house you could get any manner of italian specialty food.

Now that I'm a pennsylvanian, if there's anything I miss it is the easy availability of good italian food. I've found pizza that approximates what is found in NJ, but nothing in town is really like the pizza I grew up eating. I'm not saying that there isn't good pizza in town, but none of it is what I know as pizza.

Well, I have to give credit to the new CDT blog, "Lost and Found in State College", by Michele Marchetti. She just moved to State College from NYC, and has been writing about the transition. It's an interesting read, but more importantly, in the post above she did something in less than a month that I haven't been able to do in six years. She found good NYC / NJ pizza!

I went to Margarita's and got two slices for dinner tonight, and I was in pizza heaven. It is almost exactly like the Finelli's pizza I remember from Cedar Knolls, NJ. I'm done ordering from the impostors, I'm a loyal Margarita's guy from now on.

For anyone who is local, you have to help me -- we must give this place enough business that they stay forever. No more disappearing good restaurants. If you want their number, it is 235-3060.

On college basketball

2007-03-18T22:34:00.000-04:00

Just a quick note -- my bracket is mostly busted.

I picked a final four of Kansas, Oregon, Texas, and Virginia. For those of you not keeping score at home, Texas and Virginia both lost today, failing to reach the Sweet Sixteen.

Oops.

I did pick Kansas to win it all, though, so I suppose I technically still have a shot at winning our group.

On Mikey beating me to the punch

2007-03-18T22:19:00.000-04:00

It is getting downright scary.

Even though I doubt we will ever vote for the same candidate in any election ever, Mikey's keeps posting thoughts that are identical to mine. For example, on Plame. I intended to write essentially the same thing, but didn't get to it. What I will add (that he didn't mention) is that every story I read said the same thing -- she was even tempered and stated very matter of factly exactly what happened. I think her testimony will be held up for a long time as a milestone in the unraveling of the current administration. The thing that amazes me is that she was working covertly to gather intelligence on WMD when they blew her cover. I forget, wasn't that supposed to be important for some reason?

Of course, Mikey's thesis (that the pundits would not own up to the fact that they were wrong) has already been proven true, as this story about Hume accusing her of lying under oath makes plain.

*sigh*

I suppose as long as I am driving my 1-2 visitors to Mikey's blog, I should also point out that I agree with this, too. I wonder if anyone on the right is paying attention that this was not written by me, or by a HuffPo blogger or by Bill Maher or by any of the other people that they have already written off as potential voters for their candidates, but by someone who hopefully *used* to vote for their candidates.

;)

I can dream, right Mike?

On a Snow Day in Happy Land

2007-03-16T22:51:00.000-04:00

I got a lot of grief during my six year stint in CVille for my fondness of both Penn State and State College. For those of you who don't know, our town's nickname is "Happy Valley". Of course, the Big Enchilada would always (purposefully?) call University Park or State College by the name of one of those other school towns (College Park, College Station) or he would refer to it as "Happy Land". To this day, every time I try to think "Happy Valley" it always comes out "Happy Land". Oh well.

Anyway -- it is snowing here today, boys and girls. It is also the last day of Spring Break (anyone sense any irony there?). I had planned to take yesterday and today off from work, but wound up only taking today off. I have not left my pajamas all day (although I did shower). I didn't lounge around, though, my big plan was to get a bunch of chores done. I didn't get everything done (my office is still full of unpacked boxes that have moved from CVille to Pleasant Gap to State College), but I did make a major discovery today -- I can officially replace a light switch.

Many of the light switches in our house have dimmers on them, but dimmers and CF bulbs do not go together. One of the dimmers in the basement also was making a buzzing sound when it was on, which I took to be a sign of its impending failure. So on this pajama / snow day, I busted out my tools and two spare switches and replaced two dimmers, including the bad one. Here's the amazing thing -- they even work!

So in the past year or so, I've changed out a faucet, operated a wet saw without losing any appendages, and I have now successfully done some incredibly minor electrical work without electrocuting myself. This officially serves as me patting myself on the back.

On New Pearl Jam!

2007-03-16T22:43:00.000-04:00

Just found (and bought) the Love, Reign O'er Me cover by Pearl Jam.

For those keeping score at home, I can now listen to my 463 Pearl Jam tracks for 1.4 days straight in iTunes.

I think it is safe to assume that they are my favorite band.

On my professional society

2007-03-14T23:05:00.000-04:00

I'm a member of the American Astronomical Society. Today, I spent a few minutes reading our latest newsletter.

In just a few pages, the newsletter managed to shock me, surprise me, and annoy me.

First, the shock. The President of the AAS said that he directly asked the new NASA Administrator why he seemed to have a negative opinion of astronomers, and Griffin told him that he had been receiving rude and profane emails from astronomers. Now I will admit that over the years I have met some astronomers with little in the way of social skills, but really, who thinks that sending email to the NASA Administrator littered with profanity would do any good? Even if you didn't think it would do any good and just wanted to vent, still, why would you email a senior federal gov't employee an obnoxious email like that? Given that our country is slowly turning into a bad parody of the USSR, I would expect after such an email a visit from agents from some agency with a TLA and to wake up the next day somewhere in Eastern Europe in a solitary confinement cell.

Now on to my surprise and annoyance.

I'm in the vast minority - I actually *like* to attend AAS meetings (at least AAS *winter* meetings -- I've been to one summer meeting and was ready to gouge my own eyes out after a few days).

The last time the meeting was in Seattle I had a fantastic time. I was very happy to go back this year. I was really looking forward to the meeting and the visit to the Pacific Southwest (as Canadian Dr. D refers to Seattle). For the most part, I did have another very good time -- I went back to a little hole in the wall bakery Shan and I found four years ago, I ate at "Steak Disneyland", and saw some of my friends I always hope to see at AAS meetings. I can't believe I didn't write anything about this after the meeting, but one of the highlights was that I saw one of my classmates from my summer REU in 1994 -- we hadn't seen each other in 12.5 years!

Well, then, the last day of the meeting happened. The posters were supposed to stay up in the exhibit hall until 4pm. At about 11am, rumors started to go around that the convention center was going to close down the exhibit hall at noon. If this doesn't seem like a big deal, remember, many students spent a lot of effort to put together a poster of their work. A poster can be an opportunity to show off your research to faculty from a grad school you've applied to or someone with a postdoc position in your field, for example. So people (including the student that has worked with me) were being told to take their posters down. When people didn't move fast enough for the staff, they started *ripping* down posters and throwing people's stuff in the corner. I know someone that went into the exhibit hall to try and ask them to stop, and was told by a guy in a forklift that if she got run over it was too bad, because she was in the way. In the end, they moved the posterboards into the hall so that people could filter through and see what was left of the posters.

This *really* brought the meeting to a pretty unfortunate end. People were walking around wondering out loud what went wrong. The security folks were being very rude, and everyone was cranky. It really felt like we got tossed out on our ear from a meeting we paid $285 to attend (not counting airfare, lodging, and meals).

I've been hoping the AAS might, among one of their 3 dozen emails since then, decide to explain what happened, apologize to the members, and say it won't happen again. When I opened the newsletter, I thought there would be something in there. To my surprise, there was an article about the meeting, to my annoyance it mentioned *nothing* about the fiasco in Seattle.

I'm not saying I blame the AAS -- I blame the Seattle Convention Center. However, it seems to me that simple etiquette requires the AAS to acknowledge the problem and promise to make sure it doesn't happen again. Instead, they seem to be pretending it never happened.

On knees

2007-03-12T23:53:00.000-04:00

By gaining aches and pains, I have begun to learn about how the human body works. For example, I made a recent trip to my favorite physical therapist (again, let me say, if you *EVER* need a physical therapist, let me know and I will give you a recommendation), and I found that several apparently unrelated problems were related to one particular problem.

I had a pretty severely pulled groin, and when I went to the doctor and let him put me through the motions, I discovered that I had some hip pain, too. The night before I was supposed to visit the physical therapist, I tweaked my back and it was *so* sore that I had to stand in the shower with the hot water pounding on it just to loosen it up enough to walk without too much discomfort.

The therapist that I work with (and who did wonders for my shoulder tendonitis) uses a combination of stretching, strengthening exercises, and massage to treat an injury. I was amazed when he worked on my shoulder -- I would come in with something like 50% of the range of motion in my right shoulder compared to my left, and he would press on the muscles with a continuous pressure, and I could feel it loosen. Before I left, I would usually make significant gains in my range of motion.

He did the same for my hip and groin. He showed me some exercises, but when he started working on my left leg with some massage, I felt something that felt like a bungie cord running down the outside of my leg get pushed from the left to the right. He pointed out that the reason I could feel it like that was because of how tight it was. The part in question was my iliotibial band. He did the same massage on my right leg, and I didn't feel that same motion of my ITB at all. He convinced me to buy one of those foam rollers that get used in yoga / pilates classes, and I could do a good approximation of the massage myself.

My hip and groin pain are completely gone. Also, that tweaking of my back was also affected by the left ITB. My back hasn't hurt even a tiny bit since then.

Still, though, my knees are the source of most of my pain. In this case, though, I don't think that I have any particular condition that can be treated, instead, the cause is just overuse (in my completely untrained medical opinion). Volleyball is rough on the knees. Icing, NSAIDs, and glucosamine and chondroitin all help. However, I think I have learned something about my knees that has helped me avoid some of the pain. I always thought that all of the pain came from jumping and landing. However, I started to notice when I was on the ground that when I moved laterally and stopped short, my knees would hurt. Try the following experiment -- run to your left or right, stop short, and reverse directions. You should notice a lot of stress on your knees when you stop. I found that when I wore neoprene ankle wraps, that when I move laterally and stop, I'm able to change directions with less stress on my knees -- I assume that the wraps are absorbing some of the impact. I stopped wearing them when I bought new shoes, because the new shoes weren't broken in and my ankle wraps didn't fit well. I noticed my knees have been hurting more, and I thought I would give the ankle wraps another try. I wore them tonight, and my knees are doing pretty well. My feet are a bit sore from the tight wraps, but my knees are a lot better.

So -- all you folks with knee soreness from volleyball -- wrap your ankles!

On Seedy tea

2007-03-07T22:47:00.000-05:00

So our local paper had to admit in a front page article that the paper almost didn't happen one day because many of their computers were brought down by a virus.

Can someone explain to me again why Apple computers don't have more of a market share in corporate environments?

Anyone have their Mac brought down by a virus lately?

On Regatta de Blanc

2007-03-03T10:57:00.000-05:00

I have waited, I don't know -- 20 years or so to say the following words.

I'm going to see the Police in concert.

Sting, Stewart, and Andy.

Don't ask how much it cost.

On Mikey

2007-03-01T23:59:00.000-05:00

For those of you who come here hoping that I will answer your homework question about what the Earth would be like if it were tilted 35 degrees vs. 23.5 degrees, I think I need to add some history. I spent 4 years or so sitting about 18" away from Mikey. We both had the same advisor, worked on similar science, and like to watch sports. Our views on many things, though, are close to orthogonal.

However, I agree on this one. If you live in TX, you might want to check in on him and make sure he didn't just have a heart attack.

This story he links to, though, is pretty ridiculous. So let me get this straight -- we have now resorted to doing a calculation of which side of the political spectrum cusses more than the other? Well, I guess that means the conservative blogs must not have covered the story about Dick Cheney "expressing his dissatisfaction" with Patrick Leahy. Is the PMRC still around? Maybe Tipper Gore can get Arianna to put a sticker on HuffPo.

On a much better rebuttal of the anti-Apple iTunes crowd

2007-02-26T22:00:00.000-05:00

Just go here.

He even has an explanation for why they can't just allow DRM free tracks for the artists who want them. It would be nice if Apple would officially make this point.

On DRM and iTunes

2007-02-26T00:15:00.000-05:00

I was pretty happy to see Steve Jobs write his thoughts on DRM and post them publically on Apple's site.

I can't imagine that DRM is going to last. I'm sure that Jobs' article was a lot of spin related to the European lawsuits against the iTMS, but at the same time, I think he's trying to push things towards a DRM-free world. I hope it works.

Anti-DRM activists, like Cory Doctorow, have been criticizing Apple about their stance on DRM. I think perhaps the most logical point they make is that Apple has been asked not to apply DRM to tracks that don't require it (e.g., by indie artists that want their music to be in open formats), but they apparently have not been honoring those requests. I admit, I don't understand that in light of Jobs' comments.

The one thing that bugs me, though, is that if you read Slashdot or BoingBoing or any of Cory's anti-DRM articles here and there, they pile on Apple for locking us in to the iPod. Ok, I admit that iTunes will not allow you to simply copy music from your iPod to iTunes. But who doesn't know about PodWorks or Senuti or IPodRip or iPodCopy or iPod Access or iPod.iTunes or iPod Music Liberator or... It's not like these software packages are hard to find or seem in any way to be shady. The first time I found that I couldn't move my songs back to iTunes, I opened up a Terminal window, cd'ed to /Volumes, and found that using that ultra secret UNIX command "cp", I could copy my tracks onto my computer.

The other thing that annoys me is how the anti-Apple-DRM articles often try to make it seem like you have no choice but to listen to your iTMS tracks on your iPod. I have my tracks on a couple of computers, my iPod, my wife's iPod, and I've burned them to CD. Yes, I know the limitations of what you can and can't do when you burn, re-rip, etc., but the fact is, that you do have that capability. If you're going to criticize Jobs, Apple, and the iTMS, you can't just pretend that doesn't exist.

The other thing is, Jobs points out that for most people 97% of their music comes from their collection, and only 3% (on average) was bought at the iTMS. Cory points out that, for example, you may have spent $150 on iTMS tracks if you are a typical user. Between Shan and I, we've probably bought about that, although a fair amount of what we bought came from iTMS gift cards. Again, the criticism is that we are now "locked" to the iPod because of those 150 - 200 tracks. Ummm... I have >400 CDs. Multiply that by $10 - $15 each, and I think I have *far* more invested in CDs than in iTMS tracks, and I think that is common of iPod users. In the pre-DRM years, I agonized over the decisions to buy on CD music I had on LP or tape, but in some cases I did it, and in others I didn't. Now I'm occasionally buying iTMS copies of stuff I have on tape and LP and yes it does bug me. However, 10 years from now, if music is in yet another form, I think I will probably weigh the cost of format shifting vs. re-buying, and I may wind up re-buying yet again. I know that the music companies want us to keep re-buying the same music over and over again, but enterprising inventors seem to always come up with some way of format shifting. I could buy some hardware to convert my tapes to mp3s, I just think that spending say $100 at iTMS is better than spending my time, which I value more than that, doing the work.

I don't see what I've spent (or will spend over the years) at the iTMS being any impediment when the next music format comes along, I see my CD collection being the bigger issue. If I have to re-buy say 300 tracks, I'll be annoyed, but if I have to re-buy 8,000 tracks, I'll be downright pissed.

In the meantime, I'm going to keep using my iPod, I'll buy from the iTMS, and I'll continue to hope that DRM goes away. I'll probably read anti-DRM rants when they show up in the various media I read, but I will also roll my eyes every time someone yet again pretends that iTunes is some evil piece of software that should be avoided at all costs.

On the Fish Light

2007-02-20T23:44:00.000-05:00

So there is this commercial on TV pretty frequently. It's for the WIC program, but I don't know if it is being shown on a national, regional, or state basis, so maybe no one else has seen it.

The idea behind it is that your car has idiot lights in it, and they go off when your car needs something -- battery dies, idiot light shines, wiper fluid empty, idiot light shines, etc.

WIC provides funding for food for children, so they show babies, and they light up lights on their forehead to indicate what the kid is low on -- milk, bread, etc. Pretty good analogy, I guess, and everyone agrees that babies are cute, so this seems like a good, effective ad campaign.

One problem, though -- I'm guessing whoever made the ad didn't have much of a palette of icons to work with. The one baby's milk light goes off, another baby has his banana light go off, both things that babies actually do eat. Well, one baby has his fish light go off.

Now, I'm not a dad, but I know enough babies to have a pretty good idea of what they eat. I haven't seen a single one eating a jar of pureed salmon or strained cod.

I guess this isn't the most insightful observation I've ever made, but c'mon, a fish light?

On Equine Abuse

2007-02-20T23:24:00.000-05:00

Ok.

I realize I've become a one topic guy lately (and it hasn't been about science), but I have to beat this particular deceased horse one more time.

You see, I went to the PSU bookstore under the impression that surely, the Penn State bookstore would stock a book written by a former Penn State athlete that has been making the news almost daily. On Monday, I had no luck. My buddy tells me that even though Meech's book was advertised as being "in stores now", supposedly it wasn't showing up in some stores until today, 2/20. So, I went back today. No luck, again. This time I asked. The bookstore employee had no idea what I was talking about. "What's the title? Who is it by?" Ok, I know it's not the "Deathly Hallows", but it is #160 on Amazon. Surely a bookstore might want to have a copy on hand? Her response was "it's in the warehouse and it looks like we'll get some copies eventually".

Am I the only one that sees this as a bit funny? Shouldn't the bookstore manager be on top of the most popular books with a local angle? I guess I'm going to just order it from Amazon, but I really tried to give local stores my business, they just didn't want it.

I suppose I should check the truly local business (Webster's) before I give up on trying to buy this book in town.

Update (3/2) -- I did check Webster's the other day, and they didn't have it either. However, their new book stock is limited to one shelf, so maybe that's not as much of a surprise as Barnes & Frikkin' Noble not having it. I haven't gone back to B&N to check, I think I'm just going to borrow it from my buddy.

One more post on Meech with some history

2007-02-17T12:28:00.000-05:00

Mikey sent me a link, but before I post it, I want to give some background.

I went to Penn State, but from the time I was a sophomore in high school until I decided to go to Penn State, I was planning to go to the United States Naval Academy. I had my congressional appointment, passed my physical fitness test, and was accepted. I have to admit that a lot of the appeal to me was the opportunity to go to college for free, but in the end I turned down USNA and went to Penn State with *no* scholarship or grant funds. As I've mentioned, I'm still paying off my loans (even though my second NJCLASS loan is paid off!), so although I have no regrets about my choice, it definitely had a financial impact.

Ok, now some Penn State history. When I arrived in State College, I didn't know anyone that was openly gay. When I was a frosh, the Collegian had articles almost daily about the gay advocacy group (their acronym has since changed multiple times, but I think it was LGBSA then). They were pushing the administration to add sexual orientation to the University's non-discrimination clause. My memory may not be completely reliable here, but I remember at the time one of the sticking points was that other universities that were specifically adding sexual orientation to their non-discrimination policy were then having their ROTC programs challenged. I could be wrong, but I think at the time UPenn decided to remove ROTC from campus. Penn State wrote a policy with a specific exception for ROTC, and adopted the new text.

Well, something like two years later, a new group popped up on campus, and their stated goal was to get ROTC banished from campus. At the time I was a member of student government, and I was annoyed. My feeling was in their quest for rights, this new student group was, if they were successful, going to really hurt those students who, like me, saw military service as a way to get a free education. So, I went to my student government meeting, and I proposed the following: We send these students a letter which would point out that getting ROTC banished from campus would only serve to punish those students who had nothing to do with the military's policy on homosexuality. I suggested that instead, this new student group make their focus a national lobbying campaign.

Let me tell you, I had *no* idea what I had just stepped into. Something like 100 or 200 students showed up to tell me how I was an evil, vile homophobe. A fellow student who used to campaign with me for our seats voted against me (after telling me she supported my proposal), and after that we pretty much stopped talking. Mike, you're going to need to be careful you aren't drinking anything when you read this next sentence, but I was accused of being a horrible conservative monster that didn't understand the liberal cause of gay rights.

So, at that point, I was starting to get more serious about my research anyway, so that gave me the impetus to quit student government and devote my full attention to astronomy.

The story doesn't end there, though (although maybe anyone who has gotten this far hopes it will soon). Shannon was admitted to an honor society, and one of the guys from the group that wanted to ban ROTC was in it, too. When it came time to choose next year's class, Shan submitted my name, and the other guy submitted his boyfriend's name. Shan and I both knew his boyfriend, and we both got along with him well. So it is time to vote, and the vote on me was something like 14-1. Can you guess who voted against me? His reasoning was that he couldn't vote for an evil homophobe to be a classmate of his boyfriend. Shan pointed out that in fact I was on very good terms with this guy's boyfriend, and that he had no objection to being a classmate of mine. Not good enough! I opposed banning ROTC, so I must hate gay people, Q.E.D., the vote stood and I was kept out of this particular group.

I will admit to thinking that this particular gay man that I went to school with was an obnoxious moron. I didn't know him well enough to hate him, but you could say I disliked him strongly.

Ok. So back to the Meech story. Obviously, you've heard that Tim Hardaway hates gay people. However, I read one good response that quotes John's eloquent response. Mikey emailed me a link to a different take on the Hardaway comments, and the author makes the point that you don't have to like individual homosexuals, but that doesn't mean you need to oppose their civil rights. I agree. However, my experience is that the opposite is true, too. Gay people don't have to like all of us straight folks, either, but opposing poorly conceived proposals by gay advocates doesn't equal homophobia. I think I was pretty unfairly treated all those years ago -- believing that ROTC has a place on campus doesn't mean that I hate gays, but that's what I was told.

On the Man in the Middle

2007-02-16T23:06:00.000-05:00

I have more to say now that the Meech story continues to stay in the news, but for right now a quick comment.

The Barnes & Noble in State College doesn't have his book. How stupid are they?

On PSU basketball

2007-02-14T21:46:00.000-05:00

Just in case you're wondering about the flurry of posts, today was a snow day. PSU cancelled classes for as far as I know, the first time since I was a student in 1993.

Anyway... Shan and I had a fun evening. N8Ball called early this afternoon -- he had many extra tickets for the PSU/OSU basketball game. He bought them for friends & family who were planning to attend, but couldn't make the game because of the snow. So we braved the snow, went out for chinese food and went to the game. We proudly wore our "Amaechi Tea Company" t-shirts Nate made for Meech during his years at Penn State.

When Nate was on the team I used to go to the games frequently, and he turned me into a basketball fan. Over the years, my interest in basketball has waned, and with PSU 11th in the Big Ten, I haven't been to a game this year. In fact, I don't think I've been to a PSU men's basketball game since before the Jordan Center opened in 1995.

The team started things off pretty well against a top ten (top five?) opponent -- a few minutes into the game, and it was 10 - 6 Penn State. Well, it got ugly after that, and pretty soon it was 40 - 19 at the half, with OSU ahead by 21. The halftime show "Quick Change" was pretty amazing, so we thought regardless of the outcome of the game, we at least enjoyed that. Well, in the second half, Penn State woke up, and pretty soon it was 43 - 56, and we thought that maybe PSU could make it respectable. Then, suddenly it was 52 - 60, and then 60 - 64. Of course, with seconds left in the game, the refs blew a call (an OSU player ran over a PSU player, knocking him down on the inbounds pass). Amazingly, though, the OSU player missed the front end of a 1 and 1, and PSU got a shot off at the buzzer, only to clank off the rim, ending the game 62 - 64.

All in all, it was a fun night at the BJC, which *almost* ended in an amazing upset.

On silly creationists

2007-02-14T11:37:00.000-05:00

As I'm sure all three of you recall, I mentioned in the early days of this blog that much of the crank mail that comes to the department makes its way to my mailbox.

I got another good one the other day. Unfortunately, this one was written by a young Earth creationist (who also believes the geocentric model of the universe!), so I'm not going to go quite so easy on him as I did the person who felt the Earth had slipped by ~12 degrees overnight.

So, here is the thrust of the letter:

1) Scientists claim that Mars is X number of miles away, and on a particular date, this means its angular size was ~20 arcseconds.

2) Big fat optics textbook claims that the angular resolution of the human eye is 24", but in practice most people can't do better than one arcminute.

Conclusion -- anything under ~30" must be invisible, but since we can see Mars, that means that scientists are wrong! It can't be that far away! It must be closer!

My first reaction (and also, when I showed the letter to Richard, his first reaction) was "I guess we've just been lucky then landing all of those satellites on its surface."

My second reaction was that this would make a good homework question -- what does it mean that the angular resolution of the human eye is ~30"? Does that mean that every source of light that subtends an angle smaller than that should be invisible? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader, but I'll give you a hint.

If you ask, I'll point you to the link of this anti-science nut, but let me just say that his friendly letter took an obnoxious turn on the second page. There it said (paraphrasing), "now that I have proven that astronomers get simple things like the distance to Mars wrong, why should we believe the universe is old or that the Big Bang happened, etc. etc.".

I wonder if the guy knows that his website is being made available for the world to read using a system invented by a physicist from CERN?