August 16, 2007
One final vacation picture: what with all the snorkeling and boat-chartering and hiking, I was starting to worry that I might seem too cool to be a physicist. There was a chance that I might meet somebody, and not have them realize immediately what I do for a living.
At the same time, my Northern…
August 15, 2007
Michael Nielsen, who's so smart it's like he's posting from tomorrow, offers a couple of provocative questions about the perception of a crisis in funding for basic science:
First, how much funding is enough for fundamental research? What criterion should be used to decide how much money is the…
August 15, 2007
The thirteenth edition of the physics-themed blog carnival Philosophia Naturalis has been posted at Cocktail Party Physics. There's a whole bunch of good stuff there, and also some links to the recent silliness about the term "God Particle."
If you're looking for good physics-related reading on the…
August 15, 2007
Legendary Yankee shortstop Phil "Scooter" Rizzuto died Tuesday at 89. I've never been a huge baseball fan, and Rizzuto's playing days ended well before I was born, but as an announcer and pitchman, he was an absolute fixture of my childhood.
(Obligatory Celebrity Dead Pool: If famous people's…
August 14, 2007
A simple but high-stakes fill-in-the-blank question:
The right and proper symbol to represent the square root of negative one is _______.
The incorrect answer will brand you as an engineer, and you will be cast into the outer darkness to spend eternity converting drill sizes into sensible units.…
August 14, 2007
In just a few days, Kate and I are leaving for Japan, for a couple of weeks of tourism before Worldcon. Most of the important things have been done-- we've got tickets, and hotel reservations, and JR Pass vouchers, and that sort of thing. Things remaining to be dealy with (a partial list):…
August 14, 2007
I don't know if it's official enough for Wikipedia, but the college has posted a nice obituary for Ralph Alpher:
Alpher taught at Union from 1986 to 2004 and was director of the Dudley Observatory. He also spent more than 30 years at the General Electric Research and Development Center in Niskayuna…
August 13, 2007
A simple question today:
Which do you prefer, e or π?
They're both irrational, they're both "about three," and of course they're related by Euler's formula, but they're very different. One is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, the other is the base for the exponential…
August 13, 2007
The New York Times Sunday book review section yesterday had on the cover a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. "Oh," I said, "That could be interesting."
Then, I noticed. It's by Christopher Hitchens. "Well," I said, "Maybe they just don't know all that many British people..."
It opens…
August 13, 2007
I am sorry to report the passing of Ralph Alpher, of the famous "Alpher-Bethe-Gamow" paper. I don't know many details, but he's been in poor health for some time, so this is sad but not surprising news.
Ralph Alpher was an astrophysicist and cosmologist whose thesis work with George Gamow on the…
August 12, 2007
Why is it that, in the universe of The Bourne Identity and sequels, Jason Bourne's girlfriends need to cut and dye their hair in order to go on the lam, but he makes no effort to disguise his appearance? He just wanders around looking like Matt Damon, and nobody notices him at all.
Is it double-…
August 12, 2007
I first encountered Matt Ruff on Usenet, as a poster on rec.arts.sf.written. When I found out he had books published, I picked up Sewer, Gas, and Electric, which was good enough to put him on the buy-immediately list. Of course, that hasn't cost me a great deal of money, as he's only written two…
August 11, 2007
"Baby Got Back," Gilbert and Sullivan style:
Via bassfingers.
August 11, 2007
Our vacation in the Virgin Islands was with family, so we spent most of our time in a group of six people, and there was no small element of cat-herding involved in getting things arranged. This tends to drive me up the wall, so I made a point of spending one morning doing something that didn't…
August 10, 2007
I'm working on something at the moment that involves talking a bit about the historical development of quantum theory, and specifically the demonstration of the wave nature of electrons. One of the famous proofs of this is the Davisson-Germer experiment, showing that electrons bouncing off a nickel…
August 10, 2007
The National Science Board has released a draft report for public comment titled "A National Action Plan for Addressing the Critical Needs of the U.S. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education System." You can dowload the PDF of the report from that page, and email any comments to…
August 10, 2007
This might be too abstract for a really good Dorky Poll, but I've got a bunch of stuff that I really need to do, and I've been thinking a bit about curricular issues, so this came to mind:
Which would you rather know more about, Classical Optics or Thermodynamics?
Imagine that you're being offered…
August 10, 2007
Via Inside Higher Ed, the Center for Responsive Politics has a new report on political contributions by academics
So far in the '08 election cycle, people who work for institutions of higher education have given more than $7 million to federal candidates, parties and committees, according to the…
August 9, 2007
Blogging will continue to be relatively light for the next few weeks, as I'm currently in a sort of Vacation Interregnum-- as you can tell from the picture posts, we just got back from the Virgin Islands, and at the end of next week, we're heading to Japan for three weeks of tourism and Worldcon.…
August 9, 2007
The American Express "Members Project" has selected a winner, though not without a whiff of controversy. Of course, given that the winning project is intended to provide safe drinking water for children, which is exactly the sort of unglamourous but necessary work that really needs more funding, it…
August 9, 2007
I should preface this with a note that I am one of the world's worst nature photographers. I don't have a very fancy camera, and I'm not terribly good at spotting critters at the best of times, so my best pictures are of relatively immobile creatures like the crab in yesterday's post. Still, I find…
August 8, 2007
South Carolina football coach Steve Spurrier is hopping mad over the decision to deny admission to two recruits who were above the NCAA minimum standard for eligibility, but did not meet the University's requirements. Said Spurrier:
"As long as I'm the coach here, we're going to take guys that…
August 8, 2007
The "Ankle-Breaker Crab" (Coenobita iversonii) is a species of carnivorous land crab found in the Caribbean Islands. It closely resembles the ordinary Caribbean hermit crab (Coenobita clypeatus), but is distinguished from its more common cousin by its habit of living in special titanium-reinforced…
August 8, 2007
While I was out of town, there was a nice article in the New York Times Education section about the Minerva House system that Union has set up recently.in an attempt to (among other things) reduce the dominance of fraternities over the campus social scene:
"You'd see that these were very prominent…
August 7, 2007
In case you can't pick up his direction from the subtitle of The Theory of Almost Everything ("The Standard Model, the Unsung Triumph of Modern Physics"), Robert Oerter lays it all out for you in the second paragraph of the Introduction:
the Standard Model has a surprisingly low profile for such a…
August 7, 2007
Here's the second in a series of vacation-picture posts, this one providing pretty much what you would expect of a vacation in the Caribbean: it's all about the beaches, baby:
Well, actually, our trip to the Virgin Islands was really mostly about the snorkeling:
but you don't get a lot of really…
August 6, 2007
This week has been declared International Blog Against Racism Week, so if you're looking for something serious and worthwhile to do with your blog, you might want to check out the many interesting things being posted, and even contribute something. Unless you post comments under the handle "Uncle…
August 6, 2007
While I was out, John Scalzi had an interesting post about the changing economics of short story writing. Back in the day, Robert Heinlein made a living selling stories at a penny a word:
As I was reading this again I was curious as to what at penny in 1939 would rate out to here in 2007, so I used…
August 6, 2007
I took a rather large number of pictures on the recent trip, and I'm very happy with at least some of them. I'm uploading the raw images to Flickr, but I'm also cropping and tweaking them in GIMP for posting here. Because, well, it's my blog, and if I want to try to make you all jealous of my…
August 5, 2007
So, after an Internet-less week in St. John, USVI, I come back to find over 1600 articles in the RSS feeds of blogs that I follow regularly. And if you think I'm going to wade through all of that, well, you need to work on your thinking skills a bit.
So what, if anything, do I need to read out of…
