October 3, 2006
Over at his AOL gig, John Scalzi points to a list purporting to be the Top Ten All Time Pop Singalong Songs. Here's the list:
1) Baha Men - Who Let the Dogs Out
2) Beatles - Hey Jude
3) Bee Gees - Stayin' Alive
4) Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You
5) Tommy James and the Shondells - Mony…
October 3, 2006
I've got a silly pop-culture post planned, but we'll put that off for a moment, because this is the 666th post to this blog, according to the counter on Movable Type. That would appear to demand something evil, so here you go:
Behold the Evil! Evil!
October 3, 2006
A little while back, I offered a Nobel betting pool, and promised to allow anyone who successfully predicted the name of at least one of the winners of the Physics prize to pick a post topic here:
If you correctly predict the name of at least one of the winning physicists, I'll post an article on a…
October 3, 2006
Hot off the presses: The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John C. Mather and George Smoot "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." This is recent enough that they don't even have much on the Nobel site, but happily for me, it's something…
October 2, 2006
Visit the Official Blogger SAT Challenge site.
After the grading was finished, a few of our volunteer graders made general comments about the essays they read. One thing that really jumped out at me about this was the way that the problems they described sounded like exactly the sort of thing you…
October 2, 2006
So, how did I score in the Blogger SAT Challenge? (Because this is all about me, after all...)
Here's my entry. I'm not terribly proud of it, but it got a score of 4 from the graders. Looking more closely, one grader generously gave it a 5/6, while the other gave it a 3/6, presumably because it…
October 2, 2006
Visit the Official Blogger SAT Challenge Site
The graph shows a histogram of the scores for the essays entered into the Blogger SAT challenge. It's really a pretty nice distribution, with an average score of 2.899, a standard deviation of 1.28, and a standard deviation of the mean of 0.123 (so I'd…
October 2, 2006
We're very pleased to announce the unveiling of the official Blogger SAT Challenge web site. "We" in this case meaning "me and Dave Munger, plus some other people who know more about computers than we do."
The site, run on the ScienceBlogs framework, allows you to view each of the 109 entries…
October 2, 2006
The Editors, in a stunning revelation, provide the innocent explanation for the Mark Foley instant-message transcripts: Foley's lines were real, but he was actually IM'ing the Editors about non-sexual topics. Sample passage, with the real responses restored:
Maf54 (7:46:01 PM): well I better let…
October 1, 2006
I'm a huge fan of the last Hold Steady album, Separation Sunday, and I've spent about six months (not consecutively) earwormed with "Your Little Hoodrat Friend," so I'd be really remiss if I failed to note that there's a new Hold Steady album coming out Tuesday. There's also a nice article about…
October 1, 2006
That BaconCat guy has two interesting posts this weekend on the detailed workings of blogdom. The first is a closer look at the blogs on Technorati's Top 100, and the second is a look at Big Posts and how they affect traffic. I have a few responses to these, which probably aren't terribly…
October 1, 2006
I've been trying hard to resist commenting on the spectacular meltdown of Mark Foley over inappropriate contacts with a Congressional page. The Editors pretty well have the schadenfreude angle covered (including a link to the deeply creepy IM transcripts), so I don't have much to add there.
Much…
September 30, 2006
The Onion's AV Club review of Chuck Klosterman's Chuck Klosterman IV came across my RSS feeds the other day, and reminded me that I haven't actually booklogged it. That's a glaring omission, as a quote from it was the basis for the third most viewed post on this weblog to date.
The book is…
September 30, 2006
A week ago, I suggested a meta-contest for The Trouble With Physics, with a copy of the book going to the person with the best suggestion of an appropriate way to give away the book. The turnout wasn't exactly overwhelming (maybe a little too abstract to really draw people in, or maybe too…
September 29, 2006
Physics Web has a story about new discoveries in excitonic systems with the eye-catching headline BEC's confound at higher temepratures. The main idea is that two exotic systems have been found in which quasi-particles undergo Bose-Einstein Condensation at realtively high temperatures-- 19 Kelvin…
September 29, 2006
Inside Higher Ed had a story yesterday about the release of the new graduation rate data for college athletic programs. The data are summarized in the table at right.
The two columns in the table show the graduation rate under the federal standard, and the new "graduation success rate" which fixes…
September 29, 2006
John Scalzi saves me some typing:
I'm proud to be an American, but I'm tired of being ashamed of my government. I'm tired of having to count the seconds until this bilious waste of a president is shoved out the door in January of 2009. I'm tired of hoping that some members of the president's…
September 29, 2006
Over at Evolution Blog, Jason Rosenhouse looks at the String Theory argument through the New Yorker's article about Woit and Smolin, and draws a parallel with his own field:
As an outsider looking in, I would want to know how physicists respond to these charges. After all, creationists level…
September 28, 2006
I got yet another comment about how much weight I've lost today, from somebody who's only met me a half-dozen times. Apparently, I used to be quite the fat slob, or something.
Anyway, for those who care, the third-quarter weight-loss figures are below the fold, including a spiffy color graph.…
September 28, 2006
The fourth and final post in my 2003 series attempting to explain experimental particle physics to the lay reader. This one talks about the specifics of the "pentaquark" experiment that was announced that year, and provided the inspiration for the whole thing.
It should be noted that that discovery…
September 28, 2006
This is the third in a series of posts covering the basics of particle physics, originally posted back in 2003. In this installment, I talk about some of the hardware involved, specifically the CLAS detector at Jefferson Lab, because I've heard a good number of talks about that.
It should be noted…
September 28, 2006
Blogging will be light today, as I'm giving an exam and making another magnet coil. I've also been working on getting the Blogger SAT Challenge results ready to go-- big roll-out coming soon!-- so I haven't been able to pre-schedule posts.
All I have time for this morning is a quick follow-up to…
September 27, 2006
Well, not really. That wouldn't be legal.
But the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2006 is scheduled to be announced next Tuesday, and this clearly calls for some irresponsible speculation. Who do you think will win? How about a guess as to what field of physics will be honored this year?
If you think it…
September 27, 2006
This is the second of a set of old posts, dating back to 2003, discussing the business of experimental particle physics. In this installment, I talk about how you get exotic particles by slamming ordinary ones together at high speed.
In a previous post, I gave a quick outline of the Standard Model…
September 27, 2006
Since I found myself talking about particle physics yesterday, and since I find myself in the middle of a seasonal allergy flare-up that's sapping my bloggy motivation, I thought I would dust off and re-post some old articles about particle physics. These date back to 2003, but I think they still…
September 27, 2006
While checking out the official Nobel Prize web site to see when the prizes will be announced, I was surprised to discover that the Nobel Foundation offers little Flash games on their web site. In particular, I had to check out the Laser Challenge site.
Oh. My. God. Maybe it's just the cold talking…
September 27, 2006
The AIP news feed features a story about a paper suggesting that the universe is ellipsoidal. Or at least, that it was, back in the early days.
The work is based on the famous WMAP picture of the microwave background (and no, it's not because the picture is oblong):
As you know, Bob, the picture…
September 26, 2006
I'm in the middle of what is either a fall cold or a seasonal allergy flare-up-- I lean toward the latter, for various reasons that don't really matter. The important thing is, my head feels like it's stuffed with cotton balls and vacuum pump oil.
This isn't the real gripe of the moment, though.…
September 26, 2006
(Apologies to Lou Barlow...)
Earlier, I explained why it is that I bought parchment paper for the lab, as part of the process of making magnetic field coils for an atom trap. What's the actual coil-making process like? Details and pictures below the fold:
Here's the form again:
That's a brass pipe…
September 26, 2006
I end up buying a lot of weird things for my lab-- really expensive sand, for example-- but the latest purchase was a little strange even by my usual standards:
The other day, on my way into work, I stopped by the store and bought a roll of parchment paper, for use in the lab. It actually makes…
