OpenScience / Science



The Future of Higher Education

A number of people (including T. Daniel Crawford) have pointed me at an article by William Stuntz in The New Republic called What Summers’s fall says about the future of higher education. Stuntz makes some interesting points, although this statement: … Continue reading

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Posted in Policy, Science | 3 Comments

Reasonably good NYT article on ice

The New York times has a reasonably good article today on the mystery of ice skating, which is explained incorrectly in many (if not most) high school chemistry and physics textbooks. The canonical explanation is that pressure depresses the freezing … Continue reading

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Snow Rollers

Via Pharyngula, we found this wonderful page at NOAA about Snow Rollers, which is how nature stocks up for snowball fights. Seriously, when wind and snow conditions are just right (i.e. when the ground surface has an icy, crusty snow, … Continue reading

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Posted in Fun, Science | 1 Comment

State of the Union

Over at Chris Mooney’s blog there’s an interesting post about Bush embracing Science in the latest state of the union speech. Since part of our research is on nanotechnology, and we’re insatiable users of supercomputing facilities, I certainly noticed this … Continue reading

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OOPSE hits version 3

My research group’s main simulation program is called OOPSE, and we’ve just released a major rewrite of this code which includes all sorts of new molecular dynamics bells and whistles. Our code now includes lots of parts bolted on from … Continue reading

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URAPIV

This is cool: URAPIV is an open source Matlab Toolbox for Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) analysis. Particle Image Velocimetry is a planar, non-intrusive, optical imaging measurement technique that allows for two-dimensional, high-resolution velocity vector fields of laminar and turbulent flows. … Continue reading

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Posted in Science, Software | 2 Comments

Where have all the cool kids gone? To ScienceBlogs, I guess.

ScienceBlogs looks like a project of Seed Magazine, but a bunch of cool science blogs (including Pharyngula, Living The Scientific Life, Uncertain Principles, and Chris Mooney’s blog, The Intersection) have all moved there in the past few days. All the … Continue reading

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My God, it’s full of stars!

The Hubble telescope gives us an image worthy of Dave Bowman’s exclamation about the monolith. At HubbleSite.org, you can read about the panoramic view of the Orion Nebula. I particularly love the google-maps-style zoomable navigator of the 18000 x 18000 … Continue reading

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SimTK.org

I’m not really sure what SimTK.org is all about yet, but they do look like they have some interesting things in the works. Of particular interest to me is the Molecular Dynamics Language and the Simbody multibody dynamics toolset. Check … Continue reading

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Found over coffee: A great article on the Dover trial

It has been a slow week in South Bend, and this afternoon over lunch at Lula’s, I came across a fantastic article on the Dover School Board trial that was in the December 5th edition of the New Yorker. It … Continue reading

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