June 5, 2007
I'm off to the 38th annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society this week, which will be in Calgary, Alberta. Another province on the list of North American place I've visited...
I'm taking the tablet PC with me, so there may be some…
June 5, 2007
Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study of RateMyProfessors showing that the ratings correlate well with "official" evaluations:
What if RateMyProfessors.com -- the site that professors love to hate -- is more accurate than they think? Or what if officially sanctioned student evaluations of faculty…
June 5, 2007
Blown Away is the sixth Frank Corso novel from G. M. Ford, featuring the exploits of an intrepid investigative reporter and true-crime author with a knack for getting involved in spectuacularly bloody crimes. As the sixth book in a mystery series, you pretty much know what you're going to get.
At…
June 4, 2007
Steinn links to a post by the "Incoherent Ponderer" that was pretty much guaranteed to raise my blood pressure. It's an analysis of "Ph.D. Pedigree", spinning off earlier arguments at Cosmic Variance and elsewhere in which the Ponderer argued that there's a hiring bias in favor of "big name" Ph.D.…
June 4, 2007
Once again, physics news stories are piling up in my RSS reader, so here's a collection of recent stuff:
My old group at NIST has done cool things with Bose-Eisntein condensates in an optical lattice. They load atoms into a regular array of sites, and then split each site into a double well, which…
June 4, 2007
Ethan Zuckerman is blogging from the TED Global conference on Technology, Enetertainment, and Design as they apply to Africa. He's live-blogging the talks by people ranging from Ethiopian paleontologist Zeray Alemseged to some mononymic Irish singer.
This is one of those things where reading Ethan…
June 4, 2007
The LOLcat phenomenon has reached the world of physics, with this Schrödinger cat picture, which is pretty good. I'm also amused by Serge's poem from Making Light:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
Is Schrödinger's Cat dead?
That remains up to you.
I may need to get out more.
June 4, 2007
So, as previously mentioned in this space, Kate and I will be spending a few weeks in Japan in August/ September. Out of a combination of politeness and self-interest, it would be good if we knew at least a smattering of Japanese before going there. Back in '98, I did the book-and-tape thing, and…
June 3, 2007
Via Charles Kuffner, a story about new footage of the Loch Ness Monster. It's a dinosaur from the Bible...
I tried to watch the video with the CNN story, but their annoying player took forever to load and the kept glitching up. So I fired up YouTube, and found this Scottish news broadcast. On the…
June 3, 2007
Whatever you may think of his own books (and, really, don't bother to tell me what you think of his books), this New York Review of Books article by Lee Smolin on a great whack of Einstein biographies is well worth a read. I don't really have anything to say other than that, so here's a long quote…
June 3, 2007
Matt Yglesias spent a while on Friday taking shots at Newt Gingrich, and made a dumb argument in the process:
I'm consistently baffled by the invocation of China and India in this context; I'd love for somebody to write up a model for me in which the optimal level of US investment in math and…
June 2, 2007
Just when I'm finally starting to get a bit of a handle on what's going on in particle physics (or at least map out the areas of my ignorance), along comes Howard Georgi with "Unparticle Physics":
I discuss some simple aspects of the low-energy physics of a nontrivial scale invariant sector of an…
June 2, 2007
Setshot lurches back to life to point out the only Democratic primary coverage I need to read: a New York Times piece on Barack Obama's love of pick-up basketball:
From John F. Kennedy's sailing to Bill Clinton's golf mulligans to John Kerry's windsurfing, sports has been used, correctly or…
June 1, 2007
Five years ago today:
It's working out ok so far. I think we'll stick with it a while longer.
June 1, 2007
As a sort of companion to the previous post:
What's the last book you read because it connected to your job in some way?
I'm being a little more restrictive in the phrasing of this one, because I don't want to get a whole bunch of journal articles and arxiv links in the comments, so let's keep…
June 1, 2007
I'm kind of fried this morning-- it's been a long week full of after-work events associated with the end of the year-- so I'm not up to doing weighty posts about physics, so here's a lighter discussion topic:
What's the last non-Internet thing you read for fun?
Blogging and work have cut into my…
May 31, 2007
Everybody's abuzz about the article by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg (the link goes to a reprint at Edge.org; you can find an illicit PDF of the Science article if you poke around a little) about research into why people don't automatically believe scientific explanations. From the article…
May 31, 2007
Over at evolgen, RPM is indignant about being rated by students, citing some pig-ignorant comments from RateMyProfessors. Interestingly, someone brought this up to the Dean Dad a little while ago, and he had an interesting response:
A reader wrote to ask a dean's-eye perspective on ratemyprofessors…
May 31, 2007
This picture is from yesterday, but the scene was more or less the same this morning:
A rabbit had hopped into our yard, to eat the spilled seed under the bird feeder (or something over there-- it's like a Disney movie sometimes, with all manner of happy little woodland creatures), so we let the…
May 31, 2007
Steinn points to that rarest of rarities, a Gregg Easterbrook column on scientific matters (in Wired no less!) that isn't completely idiotic. In this case, he takes on the misplaced priorities of NASA.
Of course, this being Easterbrook, it can't be entirely right, and I think he's too harsh in…
May 30, 2007
Why the Sky Is Blue, by Götz Hoeppe is subtitled "Discovering the Color of Life," so I was a little puzzled when Princeton University Press asked me if I wanted a review copy. But, hey, free books!
This is ultimately a physics book, but it's really in the category that I think of as "Smart People…
May 30, 2007
Seed is running an essay contest with a $2,500 prize, so if you like science, and think you write well, take a whack at this question:
What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st century?
How do we measure the scientific literacy of a society? How do we boost it? What is the value…
May 30, 2007
John Scalzi is asking for discussion of the Hugo Award nominees, noting that other than a brief controversy over the fact that only one nominated work in the fiction categories is by a woman, there hasn't been much discussion. This reminded me that it would be good to put in another plug for the…
May 29, 2007
A commenter in the "Bunnies Made of Cheese" thread points out a graphic that's too good not to put on the front page (click for the original large image):
Nobody tell the dog, ok?
May 29, 2007
A bit over a month ago, "framing" was the hot argument in these parts (see here, here, and here, and links therein), with zillions of comments about how difficult it was to understand what Mooney and Nisbet were advocating. Today, Matt Nisbet appears to endorse a suggestion made in a letter to…
May 29, 2007
Only four songs from the Memorial Day music post remain unguessed, so here are some additional hints:
1) "So, she said it's time she goes, but wanted to be sure I know she hopes we can be friends."
2) "And as we sort out the who said, you said, who said, I said, I only wish I came a little better…
May 29, 2007
There's a nice article in Inside Higher Ed today by a faculty member suddenly working in admissions:
Whole sections of the admissions and recruitment process might not even be part of the division of academic affairs, but part of an enrollment services division, staffed by people who are experts in…
May 29, 2007
Ethan Zuckerman offers a recap of the latest developments in sumo:
The May basho at Ryogoku Kokugikan ended yesterday with a clash between two profoundly talented rikishi. One was Asashoryu, who has been the sole Yokozuna - grand champion - of the sport since Takanohana retired in 2003. The other…
May 29, 2007
While poking around to double-check the lyrics for several of the songs in the previous post, I stumbled across SongMeanings.net, which turns out to be fairly entertaining.
As the name suggests, it's a site where you can find a pretty comprehensive list of song lyrics by different artists, with…
May 28, 2007
For most people in the US, this is a day off. For most academics in the US, this is already summer. Not so for us-- we're on trimesters, so we're still in session, and have classes scheduled. This tends to undercut the solemnity of the occasion.
There's also an Admissions event today, and then I'm…
