Climate change driven movie pitch.

My better half and I have been catching up on movies (thanks to Netflix and our DVD player). Last week we watched 28 Days Later …. Last night we watched 28 Weeks Later. It is my better half’s view that the rage virus has burned itself out, so to speak, and that there won’t be another movie in the franchise.
But the drive to make sequels of sequels in inexorable, and I believe a recent news item from the UK holds the key to the next movie in the franchise.

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Obeying the sign(s).

Signs are not the boss of me (or of you), but they often convey useful information. For example, this sign reminds of us of responsibilities that come with being a dog owner (or dog guardian, depending on your jurisdiction):

You’ll notice that the sign advising you to clean up after your pet actually dispenses biodegradable gloves with which you can scoop the poop. This is a sign doing everything it can to help you follow its directions.
Other signs are more focused on our safety than on getting us to behave responsibly towards others in our shared public spaces. For instance, this sign:

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Friday Sprog Blogging: nighthawks.

We’ve arrived at the portion of the school year in which it is dark when I walk the Free-Ride offspring home. This means that a good bit of our observation during the walk depends on our ears instead of our eyes.
Elder offspring: (in response to the high-pitched screech-y song of a bird-like shadow swooping above us) I wonder if that was a nighthawk.
Dr. Free-Ride: I don’t know. I’m no kind of expert on bird songs. I’m not even sure how I’d tell a bird from a bat when it’s this dark.
Younger offspring: A bat is a mammal.
Dr. Free-Ride: I know that a bat is a mammal. But, in the dark, I’m not sure how I’d determine simply from how an animal sounds whether it’s a mammal or a bird.

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The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme.

Taking a very brief break in the dungeon of grading to partake of this meme, with which I have been hoping to be tagged for months. (Indeed, I wasn’t really officially tagged — Julie was, but she’s busy writing papers and stuff, so I’m helping her out by pinch-hitting for her on the meme.)
No mere time-waster, this meme was started by PZ Myers at Pharyngula as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace.
The rules:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.
Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

  • You can leave them exactly as is.
  • You can delete any one question.
  • You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question.
    For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.
  • You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”
  • You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions. Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.
My ancestry:

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Kids today!

If you’re “writing” a philosophy paper and you’re going to plagiarize, why would you plagiarize a sub-optimal source like Wikipedia? Why wouldn’t you at least rip off a top-notch source like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy?
It seems to me there was a time when cheaters took more pride in their craft.
Disclaimer: Regardless of the quality of your source material, plagiarism is wrong. Don’t plagiarize!

The line between chemistry and physics during the chemical revolution.

Following up on the earlier discussion here and at Chad’s about the “fundamental difference” between chemistry and physics, I wanted to have a look at a historical moment that might provide some insight into the mood along the border between the two fields. It strikes me that the boundaries between chemistry and physics, as between any two fields which train their tools on some of the same parts of the world, are not fixed for all time but may shift in either direction. But this means that there are sometimes boundary disputes.
One locus of the dispute about boundaries is the chemical revolution in France, in which Lavoisier mounted a shift from phlogiston theory to a new elemental theory.

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Brain-Friendly Giftables, 2007: the ‘Hanukkah starts tonight?!’ edition.

As I mentioned last year, the Free-Ride household celebrates both Hanukkah and Christmas. And reliable sources indicate that Hanukkah starts tonight.
That means I’m on the prowl for eight nights’ worth of gifts that will engage the Free-Ride offspring’s brains without breaking the bank. And, I suspect I’m not the only adult on such a mission today.
Thus, it seems to be a good time to add to the Brain-Friendly Giftables compiled last year. Here’s a round-up of smaller items that feel like more than mere “brain-snacks”:

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Advice for academic job seekers: do some homework on your prospective students.

A friend of mine in a philosophy department at an Ivy League school asked for my advice in helping students on the market for academic jobs prepare for their interviews:

One of the things our students asked us about was preparing for interviews at schools quite different than this one (e.g., state schools, liberal arts schools, satellite campus, etc.). In particular, they want to know what kinds of questions to be prepared for. The first question one student was asked last year, for example, was “Can you tell us what you think about the ideal teacher/student relationship?” This is not what he was expecting to hear!

As someone who had a whole passel of interviews with departments at schools very different from the university where I completed my graduate degree — and as someone who has interviewed job candidates for my current department — I have a few words of advice to the job candidate.

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Follow-up: why did the cheating poll for frosh engineering students have those answers?

In an earlier post, I shared the responses freshman engineering students had made (via electronic clickers) to a few questions I asked them during an ethics lecture I was giving them.
My commenters are pretty sure I left out options in the multiple choice that should have been included.
In this post, I consider some of those other options, and I try to explain my thinking in formulating the questions and the possible responses the way I did.
(Also, I’ll include the questions themselves, since the Quimble polls I used to present them in the original post seem not to be working at the moment.)

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