There was some conversation in the department today about science funding trends, the discouragingly low success rates for grants, etc. Just to have a place to point to, I’ll post some graphs, with almost no commentary. Here’s science funding over the past few decades, in constant dollars, from Paula Stephan’s excellent How Economics Shapes … Continue reading Graphs of Science Funding
When I was an undergrad at Berkeley, aside from doing radio astronomy, I worked in Paul McEuen’s lab examining electronic transport in nanostructures, working especially with a great postdoc named David Cobden. Looking through the contents of last week’s Nature, it was a fun surprise to see pieces by both of these people: one paper, … Continue reading Books + Berkeley
Being on the academic, rather than the athletic, side of the University of Oregon, I’m not gifted with my own private hydrotherapy pool, hand-woven Nepali rugs in my office, or the use of a barbershop with imported Milanese utensils — all appallingly featured in the University’s new football center that has attracted lots of much-deserved … Continue reading It wasn’t a rock / It was a rock lobster!
UPDATE: The really amazing media coverage of this is: http://www.theonion.com/articles/scientists-create-microscopic-mona-lisa,33423/ The Onion! I’m very impressed. My friend Jennifer Curtis at Georgia Tech has a paper out featuring a clever nanolithography technique, in which heating an atomic force microscope tip generates a temperature gradient that guides chemical reactions at a surface. Controlling the position and temperature … Continue reading The Mini Lisa
A quiz question for local readers: Where on the University of Oregon campus did I take this photo? Like most people, I tend not to notice things above me. S. (age 4) pointed out these beautiful abstract bicycles as we were wandering through campus. Who knows what other ceiling-situated art there is? Continue reading Up!
A few people have asked what the title of this blog means. In a lull between activities during the camp for post-tenth graders that I’m working with this week, one of the students asked me to tell them a story. So I told them the Indian folktale of the eighteenth elephant, which goes like this: … Continue reading The Eighteenth Elephant
The Eighteenth Elephant 