September 13, 2010
A fairly straightforward question: quantum physicists divide the world into two categories of things, fermions and bosons. What's your favorite object having integer spin?
What's your favorite boson?online survey
Superpositions of answers, while allowed in properly symmetrized wavefunctions, are…
September 13, 2010
I needed a band-aid this morning, and when I was getting it out, it occurred to me that there are some subtle details of packaging technology that pretty clearly mark this as the future, not the past. I'm not sure when the transition was, but if you're around my age or older, you can probably…
September 13, 2010
SteelyKid returns today from her weekend at Grandma and Grandpa's, and there's going to be a surprise waiting for her:
She hadn't exactly outgrown her crib yet, but she was getting kind of big for it, so we decided to move her to a big girl bed. It's a "captain's bed" with drawers underneath the…
September 12, 2010
Well? Are you?
Are you ready for some football?survey software
September 12, 2010
I do intend to keep reading and commenting on the stories for Torque Control's Short Story Club, but I missed last week's because I couldn't really think of anything to say about it. The story was nicely written, and all, but it's just kind of... there.
This week's post was delayed by my annual day…
September 12, 2010
R.W. Wood's lecture demonstrations (1897-1905) | Skulls in the Stars
In the early years of the 20th century, however, the most important physics journals published in English were the Philosophical Magazine and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Truly important results would…
September 10, 2010
A News of the Stupid story that's too good to pass up. I mean, how can you not click on a headline like "Men Accused of Wrestling Python Outside McDonald's":
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) -- Two men were arrested after bewildered diners at a McDonald's spotted them wrestling a 5-foot (1.5 meter) python…
September 10, 2010
A simple one, that I'm sure all the faculty in the audience will recognize. What is the proper approach to meeting with a professor outside of class:
You email a professor asking to meet, and he responds "My office hours are from X:00-Y:00, or I'm free at Z:00." You:online survey
Even if we're…
September 10, 2010
When Kate and I were walking Emmy last night, we were talking about the historical development of relativity. As one does, when walking the dog. I mentioned a couple of the pre-1905 attempts to explain things like the Michelson-Morley experiment, and how people like Lorentz and FitzGerald and…
September 10, 2010
NFL 2010: The biggest thing fans don't understand about life in pro football. (1) - By Stefan Fatsis, Nate Jackson, Josh Levin, and Tom Scocca - Slate Magazine
A great discussion of the modern NFL, including a couple of former players.
(tags: sports football slate culture)
I was wrong about…
September 9, 2010
SteelyKid goes to day care at the Jewish Community Center, which is closed today and tomorrow for Rosh Hashanah. Here we see her calling all her friends on the phone in her play house to wish them a happy new year, and let Appa offer his own greetings:
The two-day closing is, as you might imagine…
September 9, 2010
Over at EphBlog, Stephen O'Grady has a post giving advice to the entering class at Williams. A bunch of this stuff is school-specific stuff that will only make sense to another member of the Cult of the Purple Cow, but there's some good general advice in there as well.
I particularly liked his…
September 9, 2010
Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton is surprised that people skim over boring bits of novels. While she explicitly excludes non-fiction from her discussion, this immediately made me think of Timothy Burke's How to Read in College, which offers tips to prospective humanities and social science majors on how…
September 9, 2010
Swans on Tea » I'm Not Willing to Believe You
"I'm perfectly willing to believe that the data one uses for one's thesis is gathered in three months, and my experience is similar, but that's not the whole story. A Ph.D. is not just the dissertation -- you can't just write off the experience…
September 8, 2010
The theory of relativity takes its name from a very simple and appealing idea: that the laws of physics should look the same to moving observers as to stationary ones. "Laws of physics" here includes Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism, which necessarily means that moving observers…
September 8, 2010
The New York Times has an article about the opening of a teacher-run school in The City. It sounds like an interesting experiment:
Shortly after landing at Malcolm X Shabazz High School as a Teach for America recruit, Dominique D. Lee grew disgusted with a system that produced ninth graders who…
September 8, 2010
Ancient brew masters tapped antibiotic secrets
" A chemical analysis of the bones of ancient Nubians shows that they were regularly consuming tetracycline, most likely in their beer. The finding is the strongest evidence yet that the art of making antibiotics, which officially dates to the…
September 7, 2010
Not prompted by anything specific, but something I've occasionally wondered about: what's the threshold for "most"? Thus, a poll:
The minimum percentage of X doing Y that you would need to feel justified saying "Most X do Y" is:survey software
I know I tend to use "most" to mean something…
September 7, 2010
In chapter 2 of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, there's a footnote about the ubiquity of uncertainty principle analogies in the mass media:
To give you an idea of the breadth of subjects in which this shows up, in June 2008, Google turned up citations of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in (…
September 7, 2010
The Daily What
"I love xkcd wedding cakes / boom de yada boom de yada."
(tags: internet pictures xkcd comics food)
The physics.org web awards | Latest Features | physics.org
"The aim of physics.org has always been to help those interested in physics navigate this sea of information. Over the…
September 6, 2010
The AV Club offers a list of 28 gleeful breakup songs, a category that includes some great tunes. The comments contain some good additional suggestions, and they still missed one of my all-time favorites, "Bye, Bye" by the Subdudes (if that link won't play, you can get a cell-phone camera live…
September 6, 2010
Today is Labor Day in the US, which is the traditional end-of-summer holiday. The top link in today's Links Dump is a survey of the history via Slate, headlined "Why Do We Get Labor Day Off?"
Of course, my reaction to that is "What do you mean, 'we'?" Today is also the first day of classes of the…
September 6, 2010
Why do we get Labor Day off? - By Brendan I. Koerner - Slate Magazine
"Though President Grover Cleveland declared Labor Day a national holiday in 1894, the occasion was first observed on Sept. 5, 1882, in New York City. A parade was organized by the city's Central Labor Union, a branch of the…
September 5, 2010
The 2010 Hugo Award Winners were announced on Sunday night. Of course, this being a science fiction award, it's only appropriate that they be announced from THE FUTURE, so the results were available early this morning, US time.
It turns out that I voted for 1.5 of the fiction award winners: China…
September 5, 2010
We had a Barfy Toddler Incident yesterday, making a mess of Kate's spiffy new car seat, but that seems to have been a passing thing, perhaps caused by an excess of cranberry juice while on campus yesterday morning greeting new students. Thus, we went ahead with our plan to take SteelyKid to the zoo…
September 5, 2010
The short answer Yglesias's question is "Yes." - Acephalous
"[A]s it currently stands, the choice is between being a "serious" scholar who engages no one or an "unserious" scholar whose work is read by many but, because of that, counts for nothing. I'm obviously not endorsing this model, nor am I…
September 4, 2010
Speaking of teacher evaluation schemes, as we were, Doug Natelson draws my attention to a new proposal from Texas A&M:
[Frank] Ashley, the vice chancellor for academic affairs for the A&M System, has been put in charge of creating such a measure that he says would help administrators and…
September 4, 2010
News: Searching for STEM Success - Inside Higher Ed
"During the two-decade period from 1985-1986 to 2005-2006, rural community colleges increased the number of women and minority STEM graduates by more than 42 percent. By contrast, urban community colleges boosted these underrepresented groups by…
September 3, 2010
Over at Confused at a Higher Level, Melissa offers an alphabetical list of essential supplies for a condensed matter experimentalist at a small college. This is a fun idea for back-to-school time, so I'll steal it, and offer the following alphabetical list of essentials for Atomic, Molecular, and…
