June 11, 2011
The National Oral History - Grantland
"The National Sports Daily, on the one hand, is a long-dead and short-lived newspaper that, for 18 months, between January of 1990 and June of 1991, attempted to cover sports in a way that no other American publication would, could, or had ever even imagined…
June 10, 2011
If you look at the schedule of events for DAMOP next week, you will see that there is a movie showing scheduled for Tuesday night: Real Genius. This seems like an excellent excuse to run a poll:
Real Genius is:survey software
While the meeting will largely involve quantum mechanics, this is a…
June 10, 2011
Chuck Klosterman: How an obscure junior college basketball game in North Dakota made history - Grantland
"[S]omething crazy happened in this particular game.
In this particular game, a team won with only three players on the floor. And this was not a "metaphorical" victory or a "moral" victory:…
June 9, 2011
SteelyKid is in an intermittently shy phase right at the moment. Sometimes, she's really outgoing and shamelessly mugs for the camera, other times, well...
Of course, two minutes after hiding behind Appa and insisting that I not take pictures of her, she marched over and demanded to see the…
June 9, 2011
While it is not yet officially summer, according to astronomers and horologists, it was approximately the temperature of the Sun here in Niskayuna yesterday, so de facto summer has begun. Accordingly, we have acquired a pool:
Of course, one of the main things you do with a pool is to sit next to…
June 9, 2011
One of the many things I've been occupied with the last few weeks has been arranging a reception at next week's Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (DAMOP) meeting. I was late in asking about the possibilities for this, so it won't make it to the printed program, which means I need…
June 8, 2011
Relevant data: Due date in early November, blood tests for Bad Things came back clear, and while we haven't gotten Official Word from the doctor, everything looked fine to the ultrasound tech yesterday. Gender is going to be a surprise, as it was with SteelyKid.
We told SteelyKid about it last…
June 8, 2011
A few years ago, we switched to the Matter & Interactions curriculum for our introductory classes. This has not been without its hiccups, among them the fact that there has been a small decline in the conceptual learning gains measured by the Force Concept Inventory, the oldest and most widely…
June 8, 2011
What is morally off-limits in pop culture? | Music | The Big Questions | The A.V. Club
"What I can't relate to as I read the defenses written by Powers and Barthel is the implicit denial that anything might offend them. This is where the argument that morality always should (or can) be kept…
June 7, 2011
I have to admit, I'm writing this one up partly because it lets me use the title reference. It's a cool little paper, though, demonstrating the lengths that physicists will go to in pursuit of precision measurements.
I'm just going to pretend I didn't see that dorky post title, and ask what this is…
June 7, 2011
Over at Dynamics of Cats, chief herding theorist Steinn has a post on what we know about how to teach physics:
To teach physics well, you provide an intensive, mathematically rigorous in-sequence series of classes.
You need at least two different parallel classes per term, each class a prerequisite…
June 7, 2011
Career Advice: Advice for Grad Students - Inside Higher Ed
"Some of the greatest catastrophes in graduate education could have been avoided by a little intelligent foresight. Be cynical. Assume that your proposed research might not work, and that one of your faculty advisers might become…
June 6, 2011
One of the tabs I opened last week and didn't have time to get to was this Clastic Detritus post about what it takes to get science stories in the media, which is (quoting Michael Lemonick):
I get it that a stories involving science need a little something extra to make it in a magazine like Time…
June 6, 2011
The voting phase of the 3 Quarks Daily Science Blogging Prize has begun, and will run through Wednesday this week. Obviously, I voted for myself, but you should feel free to vote for whatever you like. Or just spend a week reading the 87 nominated posts. It's all good.
June 6, 2011
Book Review: ESPN - WSJ.com
"The modest idea of Bill and Scott Rasmussen--a failed hockey broadcaster and his college-dropout son--ESPN is now, according to James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales, "the most important component of the Disney empire, worth more than the entire National Football League…
June 5, 2011
Why no blogging today? Among other reasons, because we went to the playground with SteelyKid. And this:
is a whole lot more fun than the Internet.
June 5, 2011
Bulb In, Bulb Out - NYTimes.com
"Over the past few years, in conditions of strict secrecy, a multinational team of scientists has been making a mighty effort to change the light bulb. The prototype they've developed is four inches tall, with a familiar tapered shape, and unlighted, it resembles a…
June 4, 2011
As I noted a while ago, I'm giving a talk at DAMOP a week from Tuesday with the title "What's So Interesting About AMO Physics?". This is intended as an introduction to the meeting as a whole, for new students or people coming in from other fields. The reason? I found a copy of the 2001 DAMOP…
June 4, 2011
In past years, I have griped at length about the awful, maudlin dreck that Mike Resnick keeps putting on the Hugo ballot-- see this 2009 post for example. I think Abigail Nussbaum put it very well back in 2009, when she wrote of Resnick's "Article of Faith" from that year's short story ballot that…
June 4, 2011
"Gone For Goode" | Homicide: Life On The Street | TV Club | TV | The A.V. Club
"Homicide is not The Wire. But, maybe because so many of the people who were central to its creative team had developed their skills somewhere else besides television, it was something that no one had ever quite seen…
June 3, 2011
It's been a long and brutally busy week here, so I really ought to just take a day off from blogging. But there's a new paper in Science on quantum physics that's just too good to pass up, so here's a ReasearchBlogging post to close out the week.
Aw, c'mon, dude, I'm tired. What's so cool about…
June 3, 2011
Practical Tips on Writing a Book from 23 Brilliant Authors | NeuroTribes
More or less what you would expect: idiosyncratic, largely contradictory, but with a few general patterns.
(tags: writing books business publishing blogs science)
June 2, 2011
I didn't post anything to acknowledge Memorial Day this past Monday, because Union doesn't take the day off, so it was just another Monday around here, albeit with fewer stores and restaurants open than usual. SteelyKid was at Grandma and Grandpa's for the weekend, though, and celebrated by going…
June 2, 2011
This is the alst week of the academic term here, so I've been crazy busy, which is my excuse for letting things slip. I did want to get back to something raised in the comments to the comments to the Born rule post. It's kind of gotten buried in a bunch of other stuff, so I'll promote it to a full…
June 2, 2011
(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of George Farrants, a freelance translator (and occasional marathon runner, as seen in the picture). The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their…
June 2, 2011
This morning's Links Dump included a post from Mad Mike and an entire blog on improving academic posters. For those not in the sciences, one of the traditional means of communicating research results is at a poster session where tens to hundreds of researcher each prepare a poster (usually 3'x5'…
June 2, 2011
Mpemba's baffling discovery: can hot water freeze before cold? (1969) | Skulls in the Stars
""My name is Erasto B Mpemba, and I am going to tell you about my discovery, which was due to misusing a refrigerator."
With those words, Tanzanian student Erasto Mpemba entered scientific history, and…
June 1, 2011
In just under two weeks, I'll be giving an invited talk at DAMOP (that is, the annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society) that is intended to serve as an introduction to the meeting for new students or physicists from other fields. My…
June 1, 2011
One of the interesting things about reading David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics was that it paints a very different picture of physics in the mid-1970's than what you usually see. Kaiser describes it as a very dark time for young physicists, career-wise. He doesn't go all that deeply into…
June 1, 2011
(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Jennifer Saam, who translates between different departments at a medical diagnostic laboratory. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture…
