September 22, 2009
The scheduled release of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is three months from today. This is, as you most likely know, a book based on the frequent conversations Emmy and I have about physics:
To mark the pre-anniversary, Emmy has decided to use social media to showcase her physics knowledge: She…
September 22, 2009
Buried in the weekend links dump at the arxiv blog was Scalable ion traps for quantum information processing:
We report on the design, fabrication, and preliminary testing of a 150 zone array built in a `surface-electrode' geometry microfabricated on a single substrate. We demonstrate transport of…
September 22, 2009
One of the errands I ran Sunday with SteelyKid was a run to the local Eddie Bauer outlet to pick up a couple more pairs of khakis for work (well, they're black, actually, but in style the same as the khaki ones). As is often the case, I ended up buying two different sizes-- not just because this…
September 22, 2009
blarg? » Can I Get A Witness
"Look, if you want to save journalism, if you want to be a journalist, you need to actually perform the act of journalism. The kind of writing that we desperately need, that we may be well-informed and responsible citizens, not these bullshit celebrity-noise puff…
September 21, 2009
I got email a couple of weeks ago asking if I'd be interested in appearing at the Empire State Book Festival in Albany next April. While I recognize intellectually that I will be an Actual Published Author by that time, this still feels sort of weird. Anyway, it's in Albany, so of course I said yes…
September 21, 2009
I'm halfway through Graham Farmelo's Dirac biography at the moment, and enjoying it quite a bit. Farmelo cites Dirac as one of the first physicists to evaluate theories on their mathematical beauty, rather than waiting for experiments. This is in stark contrast to his Cambridge colleague Rutherford…
September 21, 2009
Well, that kept me up way past bedtime-- my 9:15 lecture is going to be fantastic-- but at least my Giants pulled out the win at the end. I couldn't think of a better way to open the Cowboys' new stadium...
And really, there's no better metaphor for the Cowboys in the Jerry Jones era than that…
September 21, 2009
Thorium-fuelled exports coming from India
"The original design is fuelled by a mix of uranium-233 and plutonium bred from thorium using fast neutron power reactors earlier in a thorium fuel cycle. The LEU variant is suitable for export because it does away with the plutonium, replacing it with…
September 20, 2009
I'm working on a badly-neglected project this morning, so here are a couple of pictures of SteelyKid from yesterday's trip to the park. (You can see more in my Flickr sets, linked at left.) This one gets you the basic idea of what it's like taking a very active toddler to the playground:
Finish…
September 20, 2009
Friday, September 18, 2009 « Medium Large
Canadian Province and Territory Mottoes: Ontario: So Clean; So Quiet; So Polite, You Just Know That We're a Serial Killer.
(tags: comics silly world Canada)
Is String Theory an Unphysical Pile of Garbage? : Starts With A Bang
Ethan's not what you would…
September 19, 2009
Josh Rosenau is thinking from California about the role of analogy and metaphor in arguments. This follows from a series of posts arguing with Jerry Coyne et al. about the usual science vs. religion stuff. The analogy thing comes in because in the first post, he made reference to Slacktivist's…
September 19, 2009
Views: In Loco Parentis, Post-Juicy Campus - Inside Higher Ed
"With the digital age in full swing, colleges must reconceptualize what it means to act in loco parentis, and how, to the extent they can do anything, they can best serve their students. The answer is not to read into OCR…
September 18, 2009
Over at Jim Henley's place, Thoreau further justifies his status as an essential academic-physics blogger with a really good post about the problem of introductory labs:
In freshman labs, generally you’re trying to measure something (at least as it’s done at many schools). The measurement is never…
September 18, 2009
I'm teaching Quantum Optics again this term, talking about the interaction between light and matter in circumstances where you need to account for the quantum nature of one or both of those. We're starting on the actual interactions today, albeit with a semi-classical approach (Einstein…
September 18, 2009
slacktivist: Our trespasses
"But then there's this other phrase which, when we listen to ourselves saying it, is the scariest part of any given Sunday. "Forgive us our trespasses," we pray, "as we forgive those who trespass against us."**
That's disturbingly conditional. It's almost contractual.…
September 17, 2009
SteelyKid says "Yayyy! Baby Blogging on the stairs!"
(Not shown: Kate making a similar mouth-wide-open face for a very different reason...)
September 17, 2009
Theorem: The worthiness of a blog post on a political or social topic is inversely proportional to the number of times derisive nicknames are used to refer to the author's opponents.
September 17, 2009
They're discussing stupid playing-through-injury stories on Mike&Mike this morning-- Golic talked about injuring his shoulder badly enough that he couldn't lift his arm above shoulder level, and using a wall to push his hand up higher than that, so the trainer would let him go back in for the…
September 17, 2009
KFC's Double Down Sandwich | Update | A.V. Club
"God clearly did not mean for humans to eat chicken, bacon, and low-quality, gelatinous cheese at the same time. I was suddenly struck with a strange urge to keep kosher. Each bite became a grueling endurance test, as the cheese and grease began to…
September 16, 2009
Prompted by a discussion in another channel, a question for you all: What is your preferred type of calculator? That is, when you're doing some sort of problem involving math, and reach for a calculator, what do you reach for?
What Kind of Calculator Do You Use?(survey software)
I think I may…
September 16, 2009
Alternate title: Notes Toward a Taxonomy of Bad Meetings.
The Meta-Meeting: Your organization faces problems X, Y, and Z. Therefore, you are planning an all-day workshop on addressing X, Y, and Z. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: To have a meeting about how to organize the workshop to…
September 16, 2009
Infinite Summer » Blog Archive » Sincerely Yours, David Foster Wallace
"[F]rom where I now stand-9/10ths of the way through and surveying the path I have trod thus far-it now seems obvious to me what the book is "about". Infinite Jest is a novel about sincerity.107
The question now becomes: why…
September 15, 2009
In reading a theoretical paper on electric dipole moments (well, OK, skimming through it looking for numbers), I ran across several Feynman diagrams with an "X" on one of the particle arrows. The caption contains the presumably-intended-to-be-helpful note "The cross denotes a mass insertion."
I…
September 15, 2009
The ArXiV Blog and several other sources last week linked to a new paper titled Towards Quantum Superposition of Living Organisms:
The most striking feature of quantum mechanics is the existence of superposition states, where an object appears to be in different situations at the same time. Up to…
September 15, 2009
We'll keep up the chemical theme that we've been following lately with another Dorky Poll to pass the time while I'm in lab all morning. We're not going to do all of the columns of the periodic table (does anybody really have a favorite transition metal?), but a couple more demand opinions. So,…
September 15, 2009
Fafblog! the whole world's only source for Fafblog.
""Giblets is detached," says Giblets. "Where is the warmth of the heart of the fiery fires of the human experience? Giblets demands more feeling!"
"And though their love was deep and fierce and right and true it was doomed from the start," says…
September 14, 2009
Over at the Science and Entertainment Exchange, they have a nice post about the Darwin movie, which also appears in today's Links Dump, with John Scalzi addressing the putative controversy about the movie's distribution. John's suggestion for how to attract major US distribution-- Will Smith,…
September 14, 2009
Over in Twitter-land, Eric Weinstein is visiting the AMNH at the same time as a bunch of Orthodox Jews, and takes the opportunity for a little Q&A:
Me: Excuse me, but how is the phylogenetic tree reconciled with Torah.
Modern Orthodox Man: Lorentzian time dilation. It's a head hurter.
This is…
September 14, 2009
They Should Have Called It "Darwin: The Revengination" « Whatever
"Maybe if Charles Darwin were played by Will Smith, was a gun-toting robot sent back from the future to learn how to love, and to kill the crap out of the alien baby eaters cleverly disguised as Galapagos tortoises, and then some…
September 13, 2009
Dan Meyer, like most people, has long wondered whether there was a good way to predict which check-out line at the grocery store will be the fastest. Unlike most people, he used science to find an answer: "I spent ninety minutes last week just watching, counting, and timing groceries as they slid…
