November 4, 2009
There are at least as many ways to write really interesting essays as there are people writing really interesting essays, but for the most part, they break down into two broad types. There are the ones that completely change the way you look at some subject you thought you knew about, forcing you…
November 4, 2009
Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Protecting aircraft from high-powered lasers
Sadly, this does not involve giant laser cannons trying to shoot down planes.
(tags: science physics lasers optics)
Essay - What to Write Next - Picking a Genre for Your Next Novel - NYTimes.com
"Thriller Nothing…
November 3, 2009
We're going to host the New York Section meeting of the American Physical Society next spring (joint with the New England Section, which will tax our resources), with the theme of the meeting being applications of nuclear physics. We've divided up the job of finding speakers for the meeting, and I'…
November 3, 2009
Over at the Mid-Majority, Kyle Whelliston (formerly of espn.com) has a great essay on the "Sportz" phenomenon:
Sports are great. Actual participation is awesome, but watching other people do sports can still be pretty good too. These days, people can watch sports anytime, anywhere and in whatever…
November 3, 2009
... until the release of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. The official release is set for December 22nd, though the books are set to start printing in about three weeks. Exciting, isn't it?
Are you excited about the upcoming release of _How to Teach Physics to Your Dog_?(survey)
If you're still…
November 3, 2009
Fafblog! the whole world's only source for Fafblog.
"I'm not real sure how I got here in the first place, and when you think about it you really have to go all the way back to school, and mom thought I should be a doctor and dad thought I should be an industrial wood lathe and I wanted to be the…
November 2, 2009
This year's DonorsChoose Challenge entry came up just short of $8,000, at $7,976. Many thanks to everyone who donated.
As promised during the challenge, I will be giving away one advance copy of the book (either a real copy when they start printing in a few weeks, or a galley proof if you want one…
November 2, 2009
One of my pet peeves about physics as perceived by the public and presented in the media is the way that everyone assumes that all physicists are theoretical particle physicists. Matt Springer points out another example of this, in this New Scientist article about the opening panel at the Quantum…
November 2, 2009
Boo! The optics behind "ghost" imaging « Skulls in the Stars
"Ghost imaging is in fact a fascinating and relatively new technique in which a detector can produce an image of an object that it cannot see! The physics behind this effect is somewhat subtle, and resulted in at least one minor…
November 1, 2009
Another dumb article on why spaceflight is bad for you -- KarlSchroeder.com
"But really, people, think! This doesn't mean that space flight is intrinsically dangerous. It means that badly shielded tin-can environments that aren't spun for gravity are a bad idea. And that is quite a different…
October 31, 2009
SteelyKid says "Daddy, I can help with your puppet show. Look at this awesome dragon puppet Grandma got me!"
In this, you can also see a bit of the Halloween outfit her great-grandmother gave her. There are a couple of pictures below the fold that show it more clearly:
Here's one of her obligingly…
October 31, 2009
A Plea for Peaceful Coexistence - The Pour Blog - NYTimes.com
"Beer and wine are not in competition. Yet people in the wine business, who I assure you drink an awful lot of beer, don't often take it seriously as a beverage. And people in the beer business, perhaps in reaction to not-so-imaginary…
October 30, 2009
No, this is not a reference to the National Academy of Sciences report from a few years ago. This has to do with the newest Wheel of Time book, because while I'm a long distance removed from my Usenet days, some habits die hard.
If you haven't read the previous eleven books, none of what follows…
October 30, 2009
Last week, I promised to do a puppet show if my DonorsChoose challenge entry claimed more than 1% of the $200,000 that Hewlett-Packard is donating to this year's Social Media Challenge. If you're quick with arithmetic, you'll see that the puppet-show threshold was $2,000.
The actual contribution…
October 30, 2009
It's fall, which means that the major American sports are all ramping up (baseball is in its brief period of being interesting, the NFL is nearing the middle of its season, the NBA has just gotten underway, which means that real basketball will start soon). This also means that the major…
October 30, 2009
Pimp My Novel: Tip O' the Week: Chasing Trends
"If you're currently penning a fantasy novel centering on a pious zombie vampire from an alternate 19th century in which science/alchemy/the Bible has predicted the earth's impending doom, uh, please send it to me, because that could be awesome. More…
October 29, 2009
SteelyKid is 1000000 weeks old (in binary). To celebrate, she engages in some Thursday Night Bison Wrasslin':
Atomic elbow drop! Boom!
Don't worry, it's a friendly bout. Appa's very cuddly, and a good place to relax with a drink:
And while I said we wouldn't engage in this sort of thing, below…
October 29, 2009
Via somebody on Twitter, Copyblogger has a post titled "7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School," which is, as you might guess, dedicated to provocatively contrarian advice about how to write, boldly challenging the received wisdom of English faculty:
What is good writing?
Ask an English teacher…
October 29, 2009
Sexist Beatdown: The Happy Hooker, Or Why Doesn't Steven Levitt Suck Dick For a Living? - The Sexist - Washington City Paper
"[E]ven though our two Steves are really brilliant economists, they just can't figure out why most of us women don't want to have sex for tons and tons of money. Why aren't…
October 28, 2009
Some time back, commenter HI won a guest post by predicting the Nobel laureates in Medicine. He sent me the text a little while ago, and I've finally gotten around to posting it (things have been crazy around here):
Since Chad gave me the right to guest blog as a prize for correctly predicting the…
October 28, 2009
Here's an extremely dorky Dorky Poll topic. I can't believe I haven't used this one before:
What sort of particles do you prefer?(poll)
Choose only one.
October 28, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor - Bring Back Basketball's Little Big Men - NYTimes.com
"[I]f the N.C.A.A. truly cared about improving colleges instead of settling for the extra year before eligibility that Stern is talking about, it should use its considerable influence to demand that both the N.B.A. and N.F.L…
October 27, 2009
There's a new release today that everyone's talking about. A perfect topic for a poll:
New Jordan book by Sanderson! Your reaction?(survey)
Your opinion is important to us, so please choose carefully.
You think I'm kidding about the ruptured disc thing? Look at the size of this thing:
Today's…
October 27, 2009
FriendFeed and Twitter are a terrific source of articles about how New Media technologies are Changing Everything. The latest example is Sebastian Paquet's The Fate of the Incompetent Teacher in the YouTube Era, in which he declares that the recorded lectures of Salman Khan are the beginning of the…
October 27, 2009
Elements I Have Yet to Use. In the Pipeline:
"I wrote about this topic a few years ago, and thought I'd update it. Many chemists find themselves looking at a periodic table and wondering "How many of these things have I personally handled?" My list is up to nearly 45 elements (there are a couple…
October 26, 2009
I'm kind of in a fog today, which I'm choosing to attribute to airport lag (it can't be jet lag, because I didn't change time zones, but you get some of the same disorientation from spending too much time in airports and on planes), because the other option is incipient flu (half a dozen students…
October 26, 2009
Historians Reassess Battle of Agincourt - NYTimes.com
"Agincourt's status as perhaps the greatest victory against overwhelming odds in military history -- and a keystone of the English self-image -- has been called into doubt by a group of historians in Britain and France who have painstakingly…
October 25, 2009
My panel on "Communicating Science in the 21st Century" was last night at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute. I haven't watched the video yet-- Canadian telecommunications technology hates me, and I'm lucky to get a wireless connection to stay up for more than ten minutes--…
October 25, 2009
Quantum Physics in 60 Minutes
Damian Pope's talk at the Quantum to Cosmos festival. I'm tempted to steal the grain of sand thing.
(tags: science physics video education quantum)
Atlas Sucked -- Crooked Timber
"[I]t does raise the question of whether there are any genuinely good, genuinely…
October 24, 2009
Deep Physics : Built on Facts
You can think of the earth's surface in New Mexico as subject to two superimposed sinusoidal periodic heat pulses. One has a period of 24 hours and corresponds to the heat rising and falling over the day/night cycle. The other has a period of 1 year and corresponds…
