October 23, 2009
I'm heading to the airport right after my second class today (I'm doing two weeks of our first-year seminar class), to appear at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. This promises to be a good event-- I had a great time at the Science in the 21st Century workshop…
October 23, 2009
You sometimes hear people say that it's good to make a splash when embarking on a new media project. David Sloan Wilson has apparently taken this to heart, and tucks himself into a tight ball as he leaps off the high board into the ScienceBlogs pool:
Thinking of science as a religion that worships…
October 23, 2009
An Inside Look at the Physics GRE | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
"I am sworn to secrecy about a lot of the details, for good reason, but let me try to tell you from my perspective as an exam writer how to study for this dreaded event in your physics education."
(tags: science physics…
October 22, 2009
"Hey, SteelyKid, whatcha doin'?"
"Nothin'. You know, hangin' out."
"'S'cool."
Just 63 weeks old, and already she's got the exaggerated casual thing down...
Happily, she's not too cool to occasionally pose with her father:
She's a great big baby, but she's still small to me.
October 22, 2009
This year's DonorsChoose challenge is doing pretty well, with the total standing at a bit over $2,200. Thanks to all who have donated thus far.
There's a new development in this year's challenge, which is that Hewlett-Packard is going to donate $200,000 to DonorsChoose, which will be divided among…
October 22, 2009
I've been buried in lab grading for a lot of this week, but I'm finally down to the last few stragglers. The experience has me thinking a bit about what we're doing here, and talking to people in other departments, and it seems like a good question for my wise and worldly readers.
At the moment, we…
October 22, 2009
I've been up late all this week grading things, and I have lab all morning, so I'm not going to do any detailed blogging about subtle aspects of physics. So here's something from the pop culture side: I was listening to Bill Simmons's ESPN podcast with Chuck Klosterman yesterday, and at one point,…
October 22, 2009
McSweeney's Internet Tendency: What to Expect: The Third Decade.
"By thirty-years-old, your adult will probably be able to...
Feed and maintain a house pet,
Hold down a job,
Maintain eye contact while speaking,
Refrain from discussing high school,
Cook a meal (three-course),
Make small talk,…
October 21, 2009
As mentioned on Twitter, I spent much of yesterday reading and rating a huge number of grant proposals. As such, I've looked at a lot of CV's and resumes, and the contrast is striking. People who work in industry tend to use a resume format that is mostly just a list of jobs and degrees, while…
October 21, 2009
Chairs : The Quantum Pontiff
"Michael Green is the new Lucasian chair of Mathematics replacing the esteemed Stephen Hawking. Green helped sparked the great optimism in string theory by discovering with John Schwarz the Green-Schwarz anomaly cancellation mechanism.
Elsewhere, the Perimeter…
October 20, 2009
I was up until almost midnight grading labs, and I have forty-odd grant proposals to read today, so I'm going to be unplugging from the Internet and working on, well, work. For entertainment while I'm paying for my procrastination, here's another two-word lyrics quiz. These two-word phrases each…
October 20, 2009
Myth Confirmed. : Built on Facts
"[U]ntil relatively recently, no one had ever actually done the experiment. It's difficult, both in terms of dropping the bullets properly and making sure the gun fires exactly horizontally. Horizontal fire is critical, because if there is an initial vertical…
October 19, 2009
Via Michael Nielsen on Twitter, a Wired article and a research group website for the Stanford Study of Writing. As the Wired piece reports, the group has done a large study of student writing, and finds that modern college students write more and are better writers than students in the past.
This…
October 19, 2009
It's hard to say exactly why I found Edward Carr's article on polymaths so irritating, but I suspect it was this bit:
The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty. In each new area that Posner picks--policy or science--the experts start to erect barricades. "Even in…
October 19, 2009
Patrick Welsh -- To Explain the Achievement Gap, Examine the Parenting Gap - washingtonpost.com
"My students knew intuitively that the reason they were lagging academically had nothing to do with race, which is the too-handy explanation for the achievement gap in Alexandria. And it wasn't because…
October 18, 2009
Analysis Of A Roulette Strategy
"As Hank explains in a recent article, when he visits a Casino he plays the Roulette. His simple strategy consists in betting on a single colour, doubling the bet every time he loses; when he wins, he starts back with the minimum bet.
Such a strategy is not going…
October 17, 2009
If you buy a loaf of bread, it comes in a plastic bag closed with either a metal twist-tie or a little plastic tab. Either of these may be re-used to close the bag again after you have used some of the bread.
If you buy a bunch of carrots, they generally come in a plastic bag that is closed with a…
October 17, 2009
Career Advice: A Regular Writing Routine - Inside Higher Ed
"In this article, I'm starting a four-part series on developing a regular writing routine. In this column, I'll discuss and debunk two popular myths about writing. In my next column, I'll review two of my favorite articles, one on expert…
October 16, 2009
This year's DonorsChoose challenge has brought in a respectable $1,929 thus far, helping reach almost 1000 school kids. Thanks to all those who have donated thus far.
We've been stuck at that level for a little while now, though, so it doesn't look like we're going to match last year's total of…
October 16, 2009
I've watched the first few episodes of "Flash Forward" more or less as they aired-- I've been DVR-ing them, but watching not long after they start, so I can fast-forward through the commercials, and still see it. I could just let them sit on the DVR, but at least for me, the DVR tends to be a sort…
October 16, 2009
slacktivist: Oh, and Tony Perkins? He lies. A lot. For money.
"Please don't clutch your pearls and get the vapors that such an impolite thing is stated so honestly. That Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council lies a lot in order to scare people into sending him money is not surprising, or…
October 15, 2009
SteelyKid has cast Appa aside in favor of bigger and better things:
That's right. She's not allowed to have candy yet, but she's already gearing up for Halloween...
The pumpkin bucket is actually a bribe-- I bought it for her to play with while we waited for her prescription to be filled yesterday…
October 15, 2009
I gave a guest lecture this morning in a colleague's sophomore seminar class about time. She's having them look at time from a variety of perspectives, and they just finished reading Longitude, so she asked me to talk about the physics of clocks and the measurement of time.
I've long considered…
October 15, 2009
I was surprised to see Tom linking to a site claiming a superconductor at 254K. Not because the figure isn't newsworthy, but because somebody sent me this about a week ago, and I decided not to link to it. It's absolutely dripping with kook signifiers.
The two biggest things tripping my kook alarm…
October 15, 2009
Electrons flow forever in metal rings - physicsworld.com
"[I]f a metal ring is very small - about 1 μm diameter or less - quantum mechanics says that its electrons should behave in much the same way as electrons orbiting an atomic nucleus. And in the same way that electrons in the lowest energy…
October 14, 2009
In the time that I've been at Union, I have suffered a number of lab disasters. I've had lasers killed in freak power outages. I've had lasers die because of odd electrical issues. My lab has flooded not once, not twice, but three different times. I've had equipment damaged by idiot contractors,…
October 14, 2009
Both Physics Buzz and the X-Change Files are noting the Imagine Science Film Festival starting tomorrow in New York City. As the Buzz notes:
This is only the film festival's second year, but it's already attracted the attention of major sponsors. Last year the journal Nature co-sponsored the…
October 14, 2009
SteelyKid has a fever, and can't go to day care, so I'm staying home with her. This pretty much rules out significant serious blogging, so here's a poll to keep you amused:
Which of these threats is most threatening?(survey)
Choose only one.
October 14, 2009
AdLit.org: Adolescent Literacy - William Farish: The World's Most Famous Lazy Teacher
"Thomas Jefferson was arguably one of the most well-educated Americans of his time. He was well-read, thoughtful, knowledgeable in a wide variety of topics from the arts to the sciences, and the founder of the…
October 13, 2009
The abbreviation here has a double meaning-- both "Open Access" and "Operator Algebra." In my Quantum Optics class yesterday, I was talking about how to describe "coherent states" in the photon number state formalism. Coherent states are the best quantum description of a classical light field--…
