April 1, 2006
With silliness running riot at ScienceBlogs, it's more important than ever to keep your fraud-detection skills sharp. Thankfully, the BBC is here to help, with a list of real news stories that sound like they might be hoaxes (via Making Light).
Unfortunately, they're mostly not very funny. A couple…
April 1, 2006
Because my bracket picks this year have been so uncannily accurate (tied for twelfth of 23 in the ScienceBlogs pool), I'm sure you're all dying to know what my predictions are for the Final Four games, if only so you can bet the opposite. The short version is: Florida over LSU in the title game.…
March 31, 2006
If you'd like some, you know, physics from your physics blogs, here you go: Andrew Jaffe points out new results on neutrino oscillations from the MINOS group, providing new limits on the differences between the masses of different neutrino flavors. You can also read the Fermilab press release,…
March 31, 2006
How big a dork am I? Well, you can see from the graph at left, roughly thirty pounds less of a dork than I was at the beginning of the year... Hey, man, it's not science without graphs.
So, as noted in passing in several other posts, I decided at the beginning of the year that I was going to make a…
March 30, 2006
I realize that I've been pretty bad about posting articles with explanatory physics content (even neglecting a couple of things that I promised to post a while back), but I have a good reason. All of my explanatory physics effort these days has been going into lecture writing, such as the two hours…
March 30, 2006
A couple of quick notes regarding physics stories that have caught my eye:
1) Like Doug Natelson, I'm surprised that there hasn't been more discussion about the PRL claiming to have seen vacuum birefringence. The idea here is that a group in Italy passed light through a huge rotating magnetic field…
March 29, 2006
Sean Carroll offers another installment of unsolicited advice about graduate school, this time on the topic of choosing what school to attend once you're accepted (the previous installment was on how to get into grad school). His advice is mostly very good, and I only want to amplify a few points…
March 29, 2006
Last Friday, before descending into fluff topics like a serious scholarly treatment of Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber posted about something really important: The Hugo Awards.
Weirdly, I find myself in the position of having read all of the Best Novel…
March 29, 2006
If you've ever read and been confused by computing theory books, you might appreciate the discussion of Turing machines at Good Math, Bad Math. Or, if you're already happy with the whole Turing machine thing, you might just like that post for the link to a Turing machine simulator applet. Either…
March 29, 2006
Two recurring issues regarding commenting:
1) There is some sort of a bug in the commenting software that occasionally causes comments to be rejected as lacking a valid email address, even when you have provided one. We think this is somehow related to the TypeKey registration required on some…
March 28, 2006
There was an interesting article on Inside Higher Ed yesterday about the idea of "Affirmative Action for Men." The piece was a response to an op-ed by Jennifer Delahunty Britz, an admissions officer at Kenyon College, where she talked about gender preferences in admissions, using the classic op-ed…
March 27, 2006
As the number of students taking physics who go on to major in physics is vanishingly small-- something like 3% of students in introductory physics take even one more class-- physics departments end up serving a number of different constituencies. There are students majoring in other sciences,…
March 27, 2006
For technical reasons, it turns out that alkali metal atoms are particularly good candidates for laser cooling. Rubidium is probably the most favorable of all of them-- some atomic physicists jokingly refer to it as "God's atom"-- but all of the alkalis, even Francium, have been cooled and trapped…
March 26, 2006
Classes start today for our Spring trimester, which is both the home stretch, and one of the most brutal academic death marches in the business-- we wind up running into June every year (last day of finals is June 7), well after most colleges are out of session. By the end of the term, the weather…
March 26, 2006
Orac beats me to commenting on today's depressing New York Times story about NCLB. It seems that, faced with strict "No Child Left Behind" requirements in reading and math, some schools are shifting things around so that their low-performing students take only reading and math:
Rubén Jimenez, a…
March 26, 2006
Since you asked. Uncertainty is due to the answer to #7.
March 26, 2006
Just a quick note: When I talked earlier about the aesthetic superiority of college basketball, I wasn't thinking of last night's Memphis-UCLA game. Ye gods, what an ugly display. That set basketball back so far they should've replaced the rims with peach baskets at halftime.
I think Memphis coach…
March 25, 2006
In the New York Times newsfeed this morning, we have:
First Rocket Is Lost by Space Company
A private venture hailed as the beginning of a new age of cheap and reliable access to space suffered a setback yesterday when its first rocket was lost over the Pacific Ocean about a minute after liftoff.…
March 24, 2006
Reading Dylan Stiles's blog yesterday reminded me of a post I wrote last summer about how to approach student talks about synthetic chemistry. Since evil spammers have forced us to turn off comments to the old site, I'll reproduce the original below the fold:
Summer days are here again, which means…
March 24, 2006
A reader emails to ask if I can make sense of this announcement from the European Space Agency:
Scientists funded by the European Space Agency have measured the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field for the first time in a laboratory. Under certain special conditions the effect is much…
March 24, 2006
My iPod apparently decided that I needed some slightly trippy stuff to go with the Flexeril and Darvocet I've been taking for my shoulder:
"Fight Test," the Flaming Lips
"Late in the Evening," Paul Simon
"Just Like Honey," the Jesus & Mary Chain
"Sunshine/ Nowhere to Run," Ride
"See a Little…
March 23, 2006
Matt Yglesias has a fairly silly article denouncing the NCAA as a "celebration of mediocrity." Jason Zengerle takes issue with this, and provides a nice explanation of why college basketball is superior to the NBA on emotional grounds (and let me just note how happy I am to see our leading…
March 23, 2006
(Series explanation here.)
The lab I worked in in grad school contained a bunch of miscellaneous objects whose purpose was a little hard to discern. One of the oddest was a big heavy acrylic lens. It was probably an inch thick, and two or three inches in diameter, and had four screw holes around…
March 23, 2006
I feel a little guilty for catering to the whims of Internet perverts in the previous entry, so here are a couple of new science-y blogs worth taking a look at:
First, via Derek Lowe, is the blog of chemistry grad student Dylan Stiles. There's lots of highly geeky material, with lots of little…
March 23, 2006
One of the nice things about the move to ScienceBlogs is that I gained access to a much better stats package than we had for Steelypips. In particular, I can now look at the keywords that bring people to my site (for steelypips, I could only get keywords for the domain as a whole, which meant that…
March 22, 2006
I'm not taking as much heat as the other two amateur taxonomists on ScienceBlogs, but I'll also throw the topic open for suggestions. So, if I left your favorite sub-field of physics out of my Geek Taxonomy, drop me a comment suggesting a field that I left out, and what I ought to say about it. (…
March 22, 2006
Writing the previous post about religion reminded me that I never did comment on the two student panels on religious matters that I went to a couple of weeks ago. The details aren't terribly important, but they provide some local anecdotal support for Sean's demographic point.
(Alternate post title…
March 22, 2006
Eszter at Crooked Timber points to some public speaking tips she wrote. Some of the advice is fairly specific to the academic conference setting, but it's all excellent.
In the Crooked Timber post, she emphasizes problems with people going over their allotted time, and mentions in passing session…
March 22, 2006
Via a mailing list, the Top 1000 Books in the US, ranked in order of library holdings. The Top 25 (after the cut):
Bible [various] Library holdings: 796,882
Census [various] United States Library holdings: 460,628
Mother Goose Library holdings: 67,663
Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri Library…
March 21, 2006
Kevin at No Se Nada has a post up about Nobel laureate Carl Wieman leaving Colorado, and how it relates to the role of college athletics at an educational institution. (Check his comments for a special bonus Carl Wieman anecdote.)
Probably coincidentally, Timothy Burke at Swarthmore also has a post…
