October 19, 2006
I got word yesterday that the last leftover part of the work I did as a post-doc has been accepted for publication as a Rapid Communication in Physical Review A. It's not up on the web yet, but you can find an old draft on the ArXiV that will give you the basic idea.
"But wait," you say, "You haven…
October 19, 2006
Inside Higher Ed has a story about the recent student elections at Penn State, which ended up with the winning candidates being belatedly rejected after making inappropriate comments:
Jay Bundy won a plurality of votes in last week's campus election and was poised to take over leadership of the…
October 19, 2006
I have discovered a marvelous proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, which is too long to fit in the Excerpt box.
Which means that people reading this blog via RSS have no chance of seeing it, as the combined feed is currently showing only the excerpts. It's not clear whether this is a glitch or a poorly…
October 18, 2006
Well, at least, the physics of the new NBA basketball, at any rate...
For those who haven't heard the story already, the NBA is changing the style of the basketballs used in its games this season. They're moving away from the traditional leather basketballs to a new synthetic material, which is…
October 18, 2006
It's fraternity pledging season on campus, which means there are dozens of slightly addled sophomores wandering around being forced to do silly things by upperclassmen. This, combined with the passing mention of cable-making in the college advice post, got me thinking about scientific hazing-- the…
October 18, 2006
Over at Learning Curves, Rudbeckia Hirta takes a look at the myth of the "real world". A colleague tried to defend a zero-tolerance attendance policy by saying, "If she had a job and missed a meeting, she'd be fired." That's not really how it works, though:
We have people who don't show up to class…
October 18, 2006
It's fall, which means lots of good things: football on tv, college basketball just around the corner, apple cider donuts (mmm.... donuts...), and the leaves turning colors. One of the real highlights of living in New England is the spectacular foliage. Sadly, it tends to bring out the leaf-peepers…
October 17, 2006
Ben over at the World's Fair is looking for a house band for ScienceBlogs. He goes on for a while about Phish, which is kind of bizarre-- you can't be stoned enough to appreciate Phish while also retaining the ability to do math. He also suggests a few slightly more obvious nerd bands-- Devo, They…
October 17, 2006
This post dates from all the way back in July of 2002, and contains a bunch of thoughts on the preparation of different types of scientific presentations. I've re-covered some of this ground in the previous post, but there's enough different material to justify a separate Classic Edition post.…
October 17, 2006
For some reason, I was forwarded a link to an old article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about how to give a scholarly lecture. (It's a time-limited email link, so look quickly.)
As with roughly 90% of all Chronicle pieces, it's aimed squarely at the humanities types. The advice given thus…
October 17, 2006
Sean Carroll is offering more unsolicted advice (though it is in response to a comment, which makes it borderline solicited...), this time about choosing an undergraduate school. He breaks the options down into four categories, with two small errors that I'll correct in copying the list over here…
October 17, 2006
Both the AIP and the New York Times are reporting that elements 116 and 118 have been discovered by a collaboration between Russian and American scientists working at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna. This is the second time it's been announced that element 118 has been seen, as a…
October 16, 2006
The AIP Physics News service last week highlighted a new result from the Athena collaboration at CERN with the headline "First Antimatter Chemistry". That conjures images of sticking anti-carbon atoms together to make anti-buckballs, but that's not exactly what's going on...
The experiment in the…
October 16, 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 16, 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 16, 2006
Inside Higher Ed today features an opinion piece calling for more basic research funding:
For the first time since we won the Cold War, other nations are mounting an aggressive challenge to the United States' position as a world leader in science. China and India combined produce more than twice as…
October 15, 2006
Jim Henley proposes a "meme" about literature:
Adrienne Aldredge has a twist on Bookish Questions I'm herewith turning into a meme:
What authors have you given up on for good? And why?
I'm going to stick to authors who continue to produce work, and whom I used to follow eagerly, not authors I felt…
October 15, 2006
Symmetry magazine has an article on travel tips for physicists, from other physicists. There are two scary things about this:
1) The degree to which the picture that emerges from the different tips aligns with unflattering stereotypes of physicists. Some of the items are funny travel stories, but…
October 14, 2006
The preceding comments about my alumni oganization were brought on by a bunch of factors-- the arrival of a Maryland alumni publication this week, the update-your-information questionnaire from the Society of Alumni, a visiting speaker last week who was two years behind me at Williams. Probably the…
October 14, 2006
No, it's not another spoof religion like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and it's not a real religion for people to get outraged over. The title refers to my college alumni organization-- Williams uses a cow as the unofficial mascot, and the school colors are purple and gold, so little purple cows…
October 13, 2006
The previous post was written at about 9:30 last night, and ends on an optimistic note. Of course, any hint of optimism demands retribution from the Lords of Karma, so I got a phone call at 9:45 telling me the power had gone out on campus. The power was apaprently off for something like an hour and…
October 13, 2006
We've continued plugging away at the optical excitation experiment discussed in the Week in the Lab series last year, and have finally managed to get a decent metastable signal out of the thing. The signals are at pressures that are considerably higher than I would like (and quite a bit higher than…
October 13, 2006
The silliest graph I've ever seen presented in public looked something like this:
It was an after-dinner talk at a DAMOP meeting a few years back, and the speaker was somebody associated with the Hubble Space Telescope. I don't recall what was being plotted, but he talked for a while about ho…
October 13, 2006
"Imperialism"
"Colonialism"
I have a vague sense that these two terms are not interchangeable, but I can't for the life of me explain what the difference is. But there seems to be one, at least based on listening to colleagues from the other side of campus talk about their research.
So, what's the…
October 12, 2006
I'm inordinately amused by this Overheard in New York entry. Quite possibly because it reminds me of the Jesus Bread-Golem Project, or maybe just for the suggested headline "If Jesus Wanted Us to Eat Him with Salsa, He'd Be Appearing on Tortillas.... Oh... Wait."
I'm a Bad Person. Also, I miss…
October 12, 2006
There's an academic joke that says that the job of a university president is really pretty simple. To ensure happiness on campus, all he or she needs to do is make sure that there's sex for the undergraduates, food for the graduate students, and parking for the faculty.
It's certainly true that…
October 12, 2006
Kevin Drum and Mark Kleiman both pick up on the new book from Dennis Kuo saying that the "faith-based initiatives" program was a political scam.
The MSNBC piece contains a few colorful quotes about the shenanigans Kuo is reporting, which sound pretty bad. Kevin cites them, then asks:
Like I said a…
October 12, 2006
I'm pretty thoroughly disgusted with the string theory arguments at the moment, so I told myself I wasn't going to say more about the subject. And then, they post a detailed explanation of what strings have to do with RHIC over at Backreaction....
Given my preference for layman-level science…
October 11, 2006
Back in late July, I got email from a writer for Physics World magazine (which is sort of the UK equivalent of Physics Today), asking my opinion on a few questions relating to particle physics funding. The basis for asking me (as opposed to, you know, a particle physicist) was presumably a post…
October 11, 2006
Over at Crooked Timber, Daniel picks up the Harry Collins thing I talked about last week, and asks an interesting question about the role of math:
We don't want to make "understanding the subject" mean "being able to do calculations about the subject", unless we have some reason to believe that…
