D-U-K-E!

Photo by Scott Cara
Photo by Scott Cara

As you all probably know from my posts on NCAA basketball, in which I use fawning examples of Coach K‘s tactical and strategic genius, I went to Duke. You also probably know that I played rugby, a lot of rugby.

Though I will try, words cannot express how proud I am that Duke was the runner-up for the National Small College Rugby Organization* national championship this year, losing in the final to St. John’s University 31-16.

My first season (1997-1998), I don’t think we won a single game. In my senior season, after transitioning to Division 3 to play against comparably sized schools, we went undefeated in our regular season league play. As a former team captain and club president, I’ve watched from a distance with great pride as the club has continued to build upon its successes, culminating in this year’s achievement.

If you live in Hartsville, SC and think you might be hearing slightly off-key rugby songs drifting on the wind from the direction of my house tonight, you are right.

*Duke may be an NCAA Division I school for major sports, but the actual undergraduate student body size is only about 6500. For non-scholarship/club sports, this makes Duke comparable to smaller colleges.

The Wadden Sea and Ecomare

The Netherlands gets a new king today. As a large part of his land is reclaimed sea or lakes, you will not be surprised to hear that one of his interests is water management. I previously wrote about the Cruquius Museum, set in a pumping station that emptied a lake in the west of the Netherlands. Centuries of fighting against the sea have made the Netherlands a world leader in land reclamation. Dutch engineers were responsible for draining the fens north of Cambridge in the UK, and improved the levee system in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

WaddeneilandenBut even in the Netherlands, the sea sometimes wins. While the West coast is a neat line of dunes and dikes holding back the water, the North coast is a fringe of islands. These islands are part of the Frisian Islands archipelago that extends along the entire North coast of the Netherlands, the North East coast of Germany, and the South East of Denmark.

They weren’t always islands. At the end of the last ice age, they were the coast line. Continue reading “The Wadden Sea and Ecomare”

Consumer Information in 1991

consumer-information-cover

A few months ago, Alexis Rudd sent my kids some of her science books from her childhood. They have greatly enjoyed the books. My wife and I, being 30-somethings, greatly enjoyed finding a 1991 Consumer Information Catalog produced by US General Services Administration.

A catalog of free and low-cost federal publications of consumer interest

It is a spectacular snapshot of what US Federal Government thought “consumer interest” was in the Autumn of 1991. Continue reading “Consumer Information in 1991”

Power Up!

Blackboard with mathematics sketches - vector illustrationStatistical Power! It sounds like something a math textbook superhero would exclaim while collecting data points. I’ll be honest, even though I have a PhD, my stats background is very weak. My college major required all sorts of delightful calculus and differential equations but I’ve never taken a statistics course. My graduate work required only the most basic of statistical analysis (which lucky for me, our software could handle without my input). It turns out that I am not alone, and this is a major problem. Continue reading “Power Up!”

Quanta Sutra

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has spent more than 42 seconds on the Internet that there is a small, but erudite niche of love/sex humor based on particle physics and quantum mechanics. I like to refer to this branch of comedy collectively as the Quanta Sutra. I’m telling you this, because I recently found the following effort, at the expense of physics students, by Zach Weiner of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.


Continue reading “Quanta Sutra”