October 11, 2006
I know I have said this before, but it obviously didn't take, so I'll do it again. Allow me to explain a basic principle of economics.
You make high-quality technical instruments. I am interested in getting my hands on some high-quality technical instruments. In fact, I am sufficiently interested…
October 11, 2006
So, last week's SAT Challenge rollout got picked up by Slashdot, which led to a great big spike in traffic. How big? Well, here's a graph:
"Big deal," you say, "It's not that big a spike."
Thing is, that's a semi-log plot. The top of the spike represents almost a factor of twenty more visits than…
October 11, 2006
Having just posted an extremely cranky comment, I should compensate with something happy. So, , um... here: Jo Walton posted a poem about General MacArthur in Faerie. Because, as she puts it, "If the American Right think they own Churchill, I can definitely write about MacArthur in Faerieland."
The…
October 10, 2006
We had a general faculty meeting today at work. As a general rule, I don't talk about the details of internal campus politics, and I am not going to discuss the substance of the meeting here. The new SAT was brought up, though, and a couple of people made comments of the general form "Nobody knows…
October 10, 2006
Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics is probably the hot physics book of the year. Granted, that's not saying very much, relative to whatever Oprah's reading this week, but it's led to no end of discussion among physics types. And also, frequently, the spectacle of people with Ph.D.'s squabbling…
October 10, 2006
In a weird example of synchronicity, Dr. Free-Ride posted about science journalism yesterday, and Inside Higher Ed offers a viewpoint piece by Michael Bugeja on the same topic this morning. You might almost think it was one of those "meme" things.
They both agree that there's a problem with science…
October 10, 2006
Henry Farrell thinks he sees a parallel between music critics and the Mafia:
I think that there's a similar problem in the relationship between music artists and music consumers, in which critics play a key brokerage role, just as the Mafia does in a rather different sphere of commercial relations…
October 9, 2006
It's college application season, and the New York Times style section ran a nice article Sunday about parents touring colleges with their children. It's mostly about the bonding that goes on on such trips, which is probably instantly recognizable if you're the sort of wealthy Northeasterner who is…
October 9, 2006
Thinking a little more about the soundtrack post from a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by the fact that I don't seem to have the same strong associations with more recent songs that I do with some older stuff. It's not that I'm buying less music, I don't think, but rather that iTunes and the…
October 9, 2006
So, I recently finished The Trouble With Physics (initial comment here, full review forthcoming) and I read Not Even Wrong a little while ago (review here). I suppose I could dig up Lawrence Krauss's book, and go for the String Theory Backlash trifecta, but I could also hit myself in the head with…
October 9, 2006
The Blogger SAT Challenge made the front page of Slashdot last week, making a huge spike in the traffic here, and bringin this blog to the attention to this blog-- I've had a half-dozen emails and comments from students and colleagues who hadn't seen the blog before.
Of course, after a blitz of…
October 8, 2006
About fifteen minutes from now, my Giants will take the field against the Redskins. The Giants are coming off a bye week (in which they somehow managed to trail by 10 going into the fourth quarter), so the big story leading up to the game has to do with the always-volatile Jeremy Shockey, who…
October 8, 2006
I finished Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics last night, and will write up a full review in the next couple of days. On the whole, I thought it was a well-done book, and he makes some good points. It's not without its problems, though, chief among them being the fact that the title is missing…
October 8, 2006
The new Hold Steady record, Boys and Girls in America was released on Tuesday, and I picked it up immediately at iTunes. I've listened to it straight through a bunch of times now, while doing onther things. So, how is it?
The short answer is "Not as good as Separation Sunday." At least, it doesn't…
October 7, 2006
While I'm being cranky about graphics in the mass media, a quick Bronx cheer for the New York Times and their Mars rover story this morning, which opens:
NASA's Opportunity Mars rover spent 22 months trekking almost six miles to a large scientifically promising crater. Like a tourist who asks a…
October 7, 2006
Sean Carroll comments on an item in the Atlantic Monthly on test scores compared across nations. There are two things that really bug me about this item, the most important of which is the deeply dishonest graphic the Atlantic did to illustrate the item.
Here's the honest version of the graph,…
October 6, 2006
Kate points me to a real head-scratcher from Slate, about Harry Collins posing as a physicist. Collins is a sociologist who studies expertise, and also has a very strong interest in gravitational wave detection experiments. Collins and co-workers collected a bunch of qualitative questions about…
October 6, 2006
Third and final post in a series about "teleportation" from July 2002. This one is mostly dedicated to voicing the same complaints I have about the more recent stories that kicked this whole repost business off.
The more things change, the more I keep repeating myself.
So, having discussed how to…
October 6, 2006
Part two of three of an explanation of "quantum teleportation" experiments, from July of 2002. This one goes through the basics how teleportation works. I might be able to do better now, having worked through it in more detail in order to teach about it in my Quantum Optics class, but it's been a…
October 6, 2006
As threatened in the previous post on new "quantum teleportation" results, here's the first of three old articles on teleportation. This one discusses EPR states and "entanglement." It's somewhat linkrotted-- in particular, the original news article is gone, but the explanation is still ok.
This…
October 6, 2006
The latest physics news is an experimental demonstration of "teleportation" involving both light and atoms, done at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and reported on by the Institutes of Physics and CNN, among others, and remarked on by Dave, among others.
I wrote up some stuff about…
October 6, 2006
Via Kevin Drum, a story about who's on the no-fly list:
Gary Smith, John Williams and Robert Johnson are some of those names. Kroft talked to 12 people with the name Robert Johnson, all of whom are detained almost every time they fly. The detentions can include strip searches and long delays in…
October 5, 2006
So, there's a new issue of Physics World magazine out, with a bunch of feature stories on the Large Hadron Collider. Three of these are available free online:
Life at the high-energy frontier, a sort of overview of the accelerator and the people involved.
Expedition to inner space, a discussion of…
October 5, 2006
Last week, Mike Dunford was struggling with some teaching issues, relating to what level of effort he should expect from his students. His original decision drew some harsh criticism, both in his comments and from Sandra Porter, leading Mike to reconsider matters.
I meant to comment at the time,…
October 5, 2006
For those who are new to the blog (which is a lot of people...), a good friend of mine (best man at my wedding) is a journalist based in Cairo, who does regular shifts as a wire service stringer in Baghdad. He sends occasional email updates about what's going on over there, and I repost some of…
October 5, 2006
The announcement of a distinctly bio-flavored Nobel Prize in Chemistry has a lot of science-blogging folks either gloating (see also here) or bemoaning the use of Chemistry as an overflow category for prizes awarded to work in other disciplines.
Of course, it must be noted that this is not a new…
October 4, 2006
The discussion of Lee Smolin's book just keeps on rolling. One of these days, I'll actually finish it, and make my own informed comments. (It's been a busy couple of weeks hereabouts.)
For the moment, I'll have to settle for pointing you to two new reviews. One is by Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance…
October 4, 2006
Another weird Nobel note: When we were talking about this yesterday at work, a colleague noted that this is one of several prizes awarded for observations based on radio astronomy (Penzias and Wilson, and a couple of things to do with pulsars), but we couldn't think of any given for optical…
October 4, 2006
The Paper of Record provides the Story of Record for yesterday's Nobel Prize in Physics for Mather and Smoot, including recent photographs of both. One of my favorite bits of the 1997 Nobel was seeing the media circus that went on around the Prize-- I'll put some amusing anecdotes into another post…
October 4, 2006
The Chemistry Nobel Prize was announced this morning, and goes to only one guy (which is somehwat unusual in this age of massively collaborative science): Roger D. Kornberg of Stanford University, "for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription".
I am very much not a chemist, so…
