Under the hat

Here's what it takes to wear the Ph.D. cap in yesterday's post.

Graduation daze, part 4

None of us can know what the future holds, but one possible scenario may look something like this:

"Hit's untelling," as my maternal grandmother always said. Werner Heisenberg would say it's uncertain. Erwin Schrodinger would say it's like a cat in a box, while Doris Day would say it in song: "Que sera sera." In any case, that's a Ph.D. cap she's trying on.

Graduation daze, part 3

Graduation daze, part 2

Missed the big event? You can still watch it here thanks to the The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. There are several webcasts on that page; look for the Wednesday, May 21, section and click on the word "archive." More photos tomorrow.

The graduate, and her Grandmom

Happy here

Today the Associated Press reports something many Garden State residents already knew: we like living here, even though New Jersey is so often the butt of comedians' jokes. In a report headlined: "New Jersey and Rodney Dangerfield: Perfect Together," the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, says a new survey found 72 percent of New Jersey residents are happy here, but only 38 percent of non-New-Jersians believe the state is a good place to live. Former Governor Brendan Byrne spoke for many of us when he said, "I hope we keep that negative image. The fewer people who know how good New Jersey is, the better."

Meanwhile, here it is, the long-awaited finale of Blogrolling week:

Blogrolling, Chapter 7: Daypop

When it's up and running (it wasn't over the weekend), Daypop is the best place we know of to find out what's going on in the blogosphere.

Strategic view

Most of the waterfront views you've seen here are at sea level; but walk a few blocks uphill and you get a new perspective (photo by Michael Dagley) from atop what was once the island of Hoboken, and what is now the Stevens Institute of Technology, a school that produced 1995 Nobel Laureate Frederick Reines. I once got to interview Reines, and I read more than a dozen books on particle physics beforehand so that I could ask intelligent questions. My first question was about the possibility of proton decay, and what that might mean to the future of the universe. Reines listened patiently while I reeled off the whole thing. "Yes, but that's only a theory," he replied when I'd finished. "I'm an experimental physicist, not a theoretician." A few minutes later, he threw me out of his office, not because of the question I'd just asked him about the mysterious emissions from the binary star Cygnus X-3, but because his phone rang before he got a chance to answer, and because the caller was another reporter from the same newspaper also asking about Cygnus X-3. "You people need to communicate with each other before you come in here wasting my time!" he said.

Blogrolling, Chapter 6: Blogdex

The exciting conclusion of Blogrolling week must wait another day, as the exciting concluding blog has been down all weekend. Meanwhile, check out Blogdex, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, another blog of blogs. You can look inside and see how it works, if you understand that stuff, which may be at least as mysterious as what's coming out of Cygnus X-3.