October 27, 2006
I'm lecturing to our first-year seminar today about Bose-Einstein Condensation, using slides that haven't been updated since 2002. Given the pace of research in the field, that's a little crazy, so I spent a good while last night looking at pretty pictures on the Ketterle group web site, among…
October 27, 2006
Steinn reports a new metric for research productivity that some people are using: the "H-number":
The H-score, takes all your papers, ranked by citation count; then you take the largest "k" such that the kth ranked paper has at least k citations.
So, you start off with a H-score of zero.
If your…
October 27, 2006
It's mildly ironic that the recent Dawkins discussion has centered around whether he does or does not do an adequate job of addressing the logical arguments for the existence of God, because that's one of the few areas where I probably agree with him. I don't find any of those arguments…
October 26, 2006
If my thoughts on the upcoming Big East basketball season aren't good enough for you, the New York Times gets in on the act. Actually, that's a story about the pre-season coaches' poll, in which Pitt and Georgetown are picked to finish at the top, and Syracuse is picked third, with one first-place…
October 26, 2006
Lots of people are jumping on Gregg Easterbrook for his remarks on the Lancet study of deaths in Iraq. In particular, fellow ScienceBlogger Tim Lambert blasts him for saying:
The latest silly estimate comes from a new study in the British medical journal Lancet, which absurdly estimates that since…
October 26, 2006
Our DSL was down for a good chunk of the evening, which means I didn't get to pre-write any blog posts. It also means I haven't been able to keep up with the comments on recent posts, which is actually probably a good thing, because given how tired I was last night, I probably would've said…
October 25, 2006
The recent discussion of reviews of The God Delusion has been interesting and remarkably civil, and I am grateful to the participants for both of those facts. In thinking a bit more about this, I thought of a good and relatively non-controversial analogy to explain the point I've been trying to…
October 25, 2006
Eugene Wallingford had a post last week about blogging, and popular misconceptions:
When I first started writing this blog, several colleagues rolled their eyes. Another blog no one will read; another blogger wasting his time.
They probably equated all blogging with the confessional, "what I ate…
October 25, 2006
Every now and then, I start poking at the stats in Google Analytics, and I almost always find something interesting. For example, in the last week, this site has been visited twice by someone from Mauritius, four times by someone from Iran, and six times by someone from Kyrgyzstan. I'm being read…
October 25, 2006
The rant about "meme" being a stupid idea that I mentioned near the end of Monday's Dawkins post turns out to be from Mike the Mad Biologist, who reposted it yesterday. Executive summary:
The word doesn't add much, obscures important phenomena, is imprecise, and is vitalistic.
I'm sure you were…
October 24, 2006
Easterbrook on Tiki Barber:
At this point Tiki Barber, TTNY ("The Toast of New York"), should replace Brett Favre as the most admired player in the NFL, and as the one who exemplifies the best of football culture. This guy plays amazingly well -- last night when the Giants needed power running, he…
October 24, 2006
I upgraded to the latest version of Opera a little while ago, and since the upgrade, it has developed a really charming bug: every so often, it just decides not to have anything further to do with certain web sites. It happens most frequently with ScienceBlogs, because I usually have several SB…
October 24, 2006
I was up far too late last night watching football, and our DSL was down during the crucial hours between work and Monday Night Football, so I couldn't pre-write any blog posts. Which means you get sleep-deprived idle thoughts as blog posts this morning. I blame Verizon.
So here's a question about…
October 24, 2006
How 'bout those Giants? They keep it interesting right to the end, that's for sure...
Some links to worthwhile things elsewhere, because I don't have the time or energy for more:
The guys at the World's Fair are launching a new site that they hope will be a sort of BoingBoing for the science…
October 23, 2006
Some time back, I offered the right to pick a post topic to anyone who managed to name one of the Physics Nobel laureates for 2006. Tom Renbarger won, and picked his topic:
OK, with Midnight Madness on the horizon, I've decided to request a sort of season preview of two (trying to press my…
October 23, 2006
Here's another email from my friend Paul, who's working as a journalist covering Iraq's descent into civil war. In this message, he describes the hard life of a photographer in Iraq, and reports a downright Rumsefeldian analogy:
"We had our militia phase, maybe the rest of the Iraq will get over…
October 23, 2006
A little fall foliage from Saturday's bike ride:
The bike path runs along the old Erie Canal tow path, and in a few places, they have restored/ preserved bits of the old canal. This is one of those-- you can see some of the stone wall on the left, and the wooden decking on the right is part of a…
October 23, 2006
Inspired by a thread at Fark, John Lynch asks an interesting question:
If you could go back in time and tell your 12-year old self one thing, what would it be?
Janet has some thoughts as well.
Leaving aside obvious stuff like "Buy Microsoft stock," what I would say to my twelve-year-old self is…
October 23, 2006
This week's New York Times Book Review features a review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion that judges the book fairly harshly:
The least satisfying part of this book is Dawkins's treatment of the traditional arguments for the existence of God. The "ontological argument" says that God must…
October 22, 2006
We had some heavy rain on Friday, so when I went for a bike ride on Saturday, the Mohawk was pretty high. It was particularly impressive at Lock 8:
A closer view is below the fold:
OK, it's not exactly levee-breaking bad, but it was fairly impressive. I don't have any pictures of the normal…
October 22, 2006
The "How many people have your name?" thing has come across my RSS feed a dozen or so times already, most recently via the very common John Lynch. I was finally bored enough to put my name in, and here's what I get:
There are 0 people in the U.S. named Chad Orzel.
While both names you entered were…
October 22, 2006
The New York Times Magazine this week has a troubling story of scientific misconduct, involving the fraudulent research of Eric Poehlman:
Before his fall from grace, Poehlman oversaw a lab where nearly a dozen students and postdoctoral researchers carried out his projects. His research earned him…
October 21, 2006
We have a small ornamental pond in the back yard, with a little bubbler in it to keep it from turning into nothing but a stagnant mosquito ranch. Here we find the Queen of Niskayuna contemplating the pond:
(I'm not quite sure what she's looking for, but it was cute. Sometimes she drinks the water…
October 21, 2006
Inside Higher Ed, in their "Quick Takes" points to a new study of teaching evaluations that they summarize thusly:
Students care more about teaching quality than professorial rank when evaluating professors, and professors who receive good evaluations from one group of students typically continue…
October 21, 2006
It's not the sort of thing I usually follow, but Ethan Zuckerman is blogging about the talks at the Pop!Tech conference (Pop!Tech 2006 site). There's an impressive variety of topics, and Ethan gives good summaries of the talks (well, at least, the summaries themselves are pretty readable-- I can't…
October 21, 2006
Not a lot of love for the ACC Preview post from earlier this week, and I got buried in work, so I didn't get a chance to write up the Big East and A-10 previews. I'll try to do at least one this weekend, but until then, the three basketball fans among my readers may or may not be happy to know that…
October 20, 2006
After months and months of nothing, behold! Signal!
Explanation below the fold.
What you're looking at here is a graph showing the signal from our optically excited metastable krypton source prototype. The red dots are fluorescence detected by a photomultiplier tube (PMT) from metastable atoms…
October 20, 2006
Having made reference to the referee system in my post about a paper being accepted, this seems like a good point to dust off an old post about the peer review system in physics.
Like many of the other Classic Edition posts I've put up here, this one dates from July of 2002. Apparently, I wrote a…
October 20, 2006
The New York Times today has a story about Web-based classes offering virtual labs, and whether they should count for AP credit:
As part of a broader audit of the thousands of high school courses that display its Advanced Placement trademark, the [College Board] has recruited panels of university…
October 20, 2006
From Inside Higher Ed this morning, interesting new results on marriage and academic careers:
A year ago, a graduate student in economics at Cornell University released a study showing that men who are married are more likely to finish doctoral programs than are single men. When Inside Higher Ed…
