September 26, 2006
Quantum Diaries survivor Tommaso Dorigo offers an inside look at experimental particle physics, describing new results from combing through CDF data to look for rare events producing two leptons with the same charge:
Indeed, 44 events were found when 33.7 were expected, plus or minus 3.5. That…
September 26, 2006
Dave Bacon explains heating-induced decoherence:
One problem with ion traps qubits has been the heating of the motional degrees of the trapped ions, due mostly to fluctuating potentials on the trap electrodes. The electrode potential goes yee-yaw and the ion goes wee-wah, heating up and thus…
September 26, 2006
Since everybody else left of Limbaugh is linking it, I might as well throw in a pointer to the Fox interview with Bill Clinton, where he lights into Chris Wallace for asking him about Osama bin Laden:
CLINTON: What did I do? What did I do? I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding…
September 25, 2006
Kate's busy doing LiveJournal things downstairs in the living room, and I'm upstairs blogging in my office. What's a dog to do? Mope at the foot of the stairs, of course:
She's the most neglected dog in the entire world. Just ask her...
September 25, 2006
The Slush God offers all-too-typical news:
Today SCI FI Wire published a piece I wrote about Terry Brooks's latest novel, Armageddon's Children, which is the first in a series that will connect his Word and the Void trilogy with his Shannara series.
Is there any surer sign that an author has…
September 25, 2006
I've updated the sidebar links to reflect the fact that John Horgan has moved his blog, and to add Tales from the Learning Curve. I'm sure I'm missing something, though, so tell me what it is.
What are the best blogs out there that I'm not linking to? (Bearing in mind that I'm not enthusiastic…
September 25, 2006
We get the Sunday New York Times delivered every week (which accounts for the higher-than-usual number of stories from the Times that I link on Sundays...), and I read most of it, but I usually run out of steam before I get to the Magazine, unless the cover story really grabs me. This week was one…
September 25, 2006
Bummer news from Making Light this morning: one of my favorite authors, John M. Ford, has died. That's a shitty way to start the week.
The post title is from his poem Troy: The Movie, which does not involve Brad Pitt. Also well worth reading is his September 11th memorial poem 110 Stories, which I…
September 24, 2006
Emmy, Queen of Niskayuna, is not what you'd call a well-socialized dog. We got her from a shelter, where she was an owner turn-in due to allergy problems, so the only time she's been around other digs was in the shelter. I think the technical term for her reaction when confronted with another dog…
September 24, 2006
Following on the heels of my post on getting into graduate school, Jorge Chan offers some advice on how to stay in graduate school.
September 24, 2006
When Brandon Sanderson's debut novel, Elantris first appeared on store shelves, I was tempted to buy it. It had a lot of things going for it: good review quotes, a striking cover, an interesting description, and it's published by Tor, who are usually pretty reliable. I couldn't quite figure out,…
September 23, 2006
Over at The World's Fair, David Ng is sorting his records autobiographically, and encouraging others to do the same:
If you make a music mix that is a reflection of your informative years, what would those dozen or so songs be, and maybe more interesting, why? You don't have to be proud of the song…
September 22, 2006
I'm teaching our senior major seminar this term, which means that once a week, I'm giving hour-long talks on topics of interest to senior physics majors. This week's was "How to Pick and Apply to a Graduate School."
I've probably written this basic stuff up about three times already, but I'm too…
September 22, 2006
Through some quirk of the publishing industry, I find myself with two free copies of Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics, one from my Corporate Masters at Seed, and the other direct from the publisher. This seems a little excessive, even for a confirmed bibliophile like myself. (I know, I know,…
September 22, 2006
Via Jo Walton, Russ Allbery has a wonderful piece on the glory that was Usenet:
I've strongly disagreed with the idea that Usenet is dying. I still do, I think. I think things ebb and flow and shift around, but up until now I haven't really thought about how my interaction with Usenet has changed,…
September 22, 2006
It's that time of year when student groups try to get new members to sign up, leading to all manner of interesting signs around campus. One of my favorites:
September 21, 2006
Over at Inside Higher Ed, William Durden resorts to satire in response to the Spellings commission report:
In the nation's current zeal to account for all transfer of teaching and insight through quantitative, standardized testing, perhaps we should advance quantitative measurement into other areas…
September 21, 2006
So, the Blogger SAT Challenge has officially run its course, and Dave has posted the question to Cognitive Daily. I'll reproduce it below the fold, and make some general comments.
What were the results like? We had 500 people at least look at the survey question, and Dave gives the breakdown:
The…
September 21, 2006
Senior Middle East Correspondant Paul Schemm checks in with another email update from Baghdad, this time describing a visit to a tank graveyard.
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It was a graveyard. That was the only way to describe it. The place where old war machines came to die. Row upon row of massive…
September 21, 2006
One of the bloggers quoted in Simon Owens's demographics post states flat-out that "I basically don't give a crap about the non-political blogosphere." I found this interesting, because I used to read almost exclusively political blogs, but my opinion has shifted to be almost exactly the opposite…
September 21, 2006
Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor are currently facing execution in Libya, charged with deliberately infrecting some 400 children with AIDS. An independent scientific study of the matter found that most of the children were infected well before the "Tripoli Six" even entered the…
September 20, 2006
Back in May, the DAMOP keynote address was delivered by a DoE program officer who basically chided scientists for being politically active, in a "you have only yourselves to blame if your funding gets cut" sort of way. Obviously, she hasn't read The Republican War on Science, or she'd understand…
September 20, 2006
If you've had trouble accessing the site in the last couple of days, sorry about that. Scienceblogs.com has been under a cross-site script attack for a while, and we only recently figured out what was going on. Efforts are underway to deal with the problem. We're re-targeting the orbital mind…
September 20, 2006
Simon Owens of Bloggasm has conducted an unscientific survey of diversity in the blogosphere by emailing a bunch of bloggers to ask them demographic questions. He emailed 1,000 bloggers, and on that basis, has constructed a quick profile of the "blogosphere":
Male: 69%
Female: 31%
***
White/…
September 19, 2006
My pseudonymous colleague Orac makes it part of his mission to lampoon "alternative medicine" wherever he encounters it, so this may well piss him off: For the last several weeks, I've been taking a daily dose of pseudoscience. Why? I blame the medical establishment, but you're going to have to…
September 19, 2006
I'm vaguely relieved that I didn't make the Top Five in the Nerd-Off. Just to prove that I'm still plenty nerdy, though, here are a few links:
First, a new(ish) physics grad student blog, Tales from the Learning Curve, by Jen Fallis. I noticed her blog a while abck when she ran into everyone's…
September 19, 2006
Two quick academic links:
First, Eugene Wallingford on fundraising, which these days extends down to the departmental level. He has good thoughts on the raising of money, and the issues he talks about sound awfully familiar.
I'd add one thing to his advice-- if you're pursuing big gifts, make sure…
September 19, 2006
The "Genius Grants" for 2006 have been announced, and as usual, your humble correspondent is not among the winners. Damn.
You know, if I were a MacArthur trustee, I'd be sorely tempted to throw one grant a year to somebody completely bizarre-- $500,000 to Giblets for excellence in Fafbloggery--…
September 18, 2006
You know the song. It's instantly recognizable, even without the slightly daft religious lyrics. The fuzzed-out guitar, the chugging riff, the weird little noises in the background. But who recorded "Spirit in the Sky" (now playing in a Nike commercial near you...)?
The guy's name is Norman…
September 18, 2006
Alternate title: Imminent Death of High-Tc Superconductivity Predicted. Film at 11.
PhysicsWeb has a story about a study of condensed matter papers that has been posted to the arxiv, predicting the imminent death of high-temperature superconductivity:
The new study was carried out by Andreas Barth…
