September 7, 2006
The story about Bloch oscillation gravity measurements reminds me of a True Lab Story about a different sort of sensitive measurement made using cold atoms, made during my grad school days. Sadly, this one wasn't particularly useful...
The standard technique for accumulating large numbers of cold…
September 7, 2006
This is nearly a month old, now, because I keep saying "Oh, Idon't have time to do this justice-- I'll write about it tomorrow." I really need to stop doing that.
Anyway, Physics News Update has a story about a scheme to measure gravity using Bloch oscillations, based on a paper in Physical Review…
September 7, 2006
In email, David Rosenthal asks my opinion of a rant at globalresearch.ca about the stupidity of physicists:
Indeed, the modern professional physicist has usually subjected himself (less often herself) to extreme specialization, to be able to handle the technical side of the profession. This…
September 7, 2006
Clearing some more posts out of Bloglines, to mark the start of the new term. My first lecture is today, and as a bonus, there's a film crew coming to my class...
First, there's a very nice essay at Fighting for Science on the Equivalence Principle. Via See You at Enceladus.
Next up, Biocurious…
September 6, 2006
The Female Science Professor offers some thoughts on institutional hiring:
Only one graduate in the past 10 years from my research group is now a professor at a small liberal arts college, and that person attended a SLAC as an undergraduate. When I was in job-search mode, I got interviews at SLACs…
September 6, 2006
Fed up with the hotness contest results, Janet has decreed a nerd-off, asking for:
your geekiest jokes, your nerdiest life-lessons, your testimonial to your favorite programing language (or tissue culture medium), what have you.
We've already had a local thread of funny physics jokes, but for…
September 6, 2006
There was a fair bit of talk last week about Pope Giblets Benedict's weekend seminar on evolution. I haven't seen any post-seminar commentary yet, but I'm not sure I would expect much, given that no official statements are forthcoming.
I'm sort of puzzled as to why this is a story, though. As the…
September 6, 2006
There was a flurry of activity yesterday, while I was working to get ready for the start of classes, regarding a flawed contest to select the hottest science blogger. Clearly, when some pasty English dude wins, there's a problem with the methodology. Like, for instance, basing it off a blog…
September 5, 2006
In the previous clock tutorial post, I described the basic workings of a cesium atomic clock, which looks sort of like this:
It works by sending a beam of cesium atoms through two microwave cavities. The first cavity synchronizes the "clock" in the atoms with the microwaves, and the second cavity…
September 5, 2006
As we were driving around the other day, the iPod served up "Valerie" by the Crooked Fingers, which is a weirdly unclassifiable little song. It opens with a skiffle-ish acoustic guitar riff, adds a little steel guitar in the background, then thumping sort of jug band bass drum, with a the vocals…
September 5, 2006
The passing of Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin in a freak accident while diving with stingrays (and not while sticking his thumb of the butt of some exotic and venomous creature) has made a big splash in blogdom. I was never a fan of his shows, so I don't have anything specific to say about him,…
September 5, 2006
That's the number of books in our collection at the moment. Kate went nuts with a bar-code scanner, and entered them all into LibraryThing. Well, OK, that's just the stuff at home-- it doesn't include the textbooks I keep in my office, or the maybe twenty science-related books I keep in there for…
September 5, 2006
On Inside Higher Ed this morning:
The University of Florida has distributed several thousand T-shirts in which Roman numerals intended to indicate 2006 (MMVI) in fact indicate 26 (XXVI). After discovering the mistake, the university will have many thousands of other T-shirts redone, The Gainesville…
September 4, 2006
Speaking of "Iain M. Banks without the literary ambitions," some time back, I read Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon, but never got around to booklogging it. In many ways, it's similar to the Asher book, though, so I might as well take care of it today.
This is the first of a series of books…
September 4, 2006
Neal Asher is one of those authors who's big in the UK, but not so much in the US. He gets talked about a fair bit, but it's only fairly recently that I've started seeing his stuff in stores here. He's been on the list of authors I mean to check out for a while, and I finally got around to picking…
September 4, 2006
It's Labor Day today in the US, which means it's a day off from work for everybody who isn't in academia. Our fall classes start Wednesday, though, so I'm going to spend Labor Day, well, laboring. This is nothing new, but at least it's better than my first year, when classes started on Labor Day.…
September 3, 2006
Behold the undeniable dignity of the Queen of Niskayuna:
I've heard a bunch of different people give sort of pop-science explanations of what dogs are really doing in various circumstances-- sort of a canine version of evolutionary psychology. According to this theory, lots of the cute things that…
September 3, 2006
Today's New York Times has a story on the new SAT, particularly the writing test. The print version has images of the opening lines of three essays that received a perfect score, while the on-line version includes images of the full text of three perfect-score essays.
The essays themselves are kind…
September 2, 2006
Oh, c'mon, how could I pass that up?
So, if you didn't know, no sooner did I say nice things about Team USA than they turned around and reverted to NBA ball, playing a couple of closer-than-expected games, and getting bounced in the semifinals of the World Basketball Championships by basketball…
September 1, 2006
Behold, the Tenure Box:
Well, actually, it's an oversize milk crate, but that's nit-picking. The stuff in the box is all for my tenure review: the blue folders are copies of my research materials, the green folders are my teaching materials, the yellow folders are my CV and statements, and the…
September 1, 2006
Articles have been piling up in my Bloglines feeds as I keep saying "Oh, that'll make a good blog post..." and then not getting around to actually writing anything. In an effort to clean things up a bit (in much the same way that I clean my desk off every September, whether it needs it or not), I'm…
September 1, 2006
Lots of my fellow ScienceBloggers have been playing with the Official Seal Generator (Tara, Steinn, Bora, and Josh, and probably others by the time this posts). I'm just punchy enough to play along, but I can't decide which way to go with this. So, below the fold, I present the competing options…
September 1, 2006
Here are the answers to last week's list of quotes from seventeen books:
1) "The way to a man's heart is through his chest." Use of Weapons, Iain Banks. This one was a little sneaky, as it's in the poem on the opening page.
2) "...Highly Unpleasant Things It Is Sometimes Necessary to Know..." One…
September 1, 2006
August was the highest-traffic month since the move, with Google Analytics recording 51,752 "Unique Visits" (whatever that means-- it's not 50,000 different people, I don't think). I'm sort of boggled by that number, which is about an order of magnitude higher than what I was seeing at the old site…
August 31, 2006
A couple of guys goaded me into trying to dunk at the lunchtime basketball game today. "You've lost a lot of weight," they said, knowing I'm a sucker for flattery, "You've got to be close." So I tried, and much to my surprise, succeeded.
It wasn't what you'd call Jordanesque-- I barely got the ball…
August 31, 2006
Classes for the Fall term start next week, which means that things are starting to gear up on campus. We've been sent our class rosters, and lists of new freshman advisees, and have started to have meetings about team-taught courses and department policies and the like. And, of course, the new…
August 31, 2006
(A couple of regular commenters will recognize this one...)
Every working research lab has a sort of rhythm to it. There's always a collection of background sounds, in a particular pattern, that indicates that the lab is functioning properly. When I was a post-doc, the pattern was something like…
August 31, 2006
The American Institutes of Physics run an occasionally updated news feed, Physics News Updates, that I have in my RSS subscriptions. Yesterday, for some reason, it coughed up a squib about last week's Pluto news, which starts:
Just as in the Bible Adam achieved dominion over the objects of the…
August 30, 2006
In yesterday's post, I outlined the history of clocks starting from the essential feature of any clock, namely the "tick." I ended by saying that the best clock you can possibly make is one based off the basic laws of quantum physics, using the energy separation between two energy levels in an atom…
August 30, 2006
Chuck Klosterman is a dangerous author for me to read. Not just because it leads to me posting quotes that upset people, but because I like his writing in a way that tends to creep into my own writing. After he releases a new book, I have be be really careful when I blog about pop culture, or else…
