August 27, 2010
Many apologies for posting this week's cute toddler picture twelve hours late, but we had a little bit of a meltdown last night, thwarting my plans to get a cute picture after SteelyKid had her bath. She's cutting some new molars (I swear, she's part shark, with all the teeth she's getting), and it…
August 27, 2010
6 Baffling Flaws in Famous Sci-Fi Technology | Cracked.com
"For instance, when the main reactor fails in Star Trek they call it a "warp core breech" and it happens so often there's an entire page listing times it has happened on the Star Trek wiki. Seriously, it was like every third episode.…
August 26, 2010
There's a minor scandal in fundamental physics that doesn't get talked about much, and it has to do with the very first fundamental force discovered, gravity. The scandal is the value of Newton's gravitational constant G, which is the least well known of the fundamental constants, with a value of 6…
August 26, 2010
Same deal as the last game: Each of the following pairs of words is taken from a pop song, where they are set up to rhyme (many of the phrases don't really rhyme, but they're treated as if they do). Your job is to guess the song based on the rhyming pair.
1) Lion sleeps/ soul to keep
2) bartender…
August 26, 2010
"Mumble mumble shoulder something": R.E.M., Guided By Voices, Ghostface, and the pleasures of lyrical ambiguity | Music | The A.V. Club Blog | The A.V. Club
"The Stipe of R.E.M.'s early recordings uses words to create abstract compositions. It's not the only way to approach lyric-writing in rock…
August 25, 2010
New York Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie is getting mocked for a clip where he takes some time to name all his children (the clip isn't as bad as the description makes it sound-- he's slow, but he doesn't struggle all that badly). Cromartie claims that HBO manipulated the footage to make him look…
August 25, 2010
This one's pretty self-explanatory:
Classes for the new academic year start a week from Monday.survey software
You only get to pick one because that's the way it is. If you need me, I'll be over here scrambling frantically.
August 25, 2010
The Joerg Heber post that provided one of the two papers for yesterday's Hanbury Brown Twiss-travaganza also included a write-up of a new paper in Nature on Mott insulators, which was also written up in Physics World.
Most of the experimental details are quite similar to a paper by Markus Greiner's…
August 25, 2010
Streets of the optical scientists! | Skulls in the Stars
"[While a post-doc in Amsterdam] I would take the bus to the rink from my apartment, and every day would travel down Maxwellstraat and past Lorentzlaan, but it didn't occur to me until near the end of my time in The Netherlands that these…
August 24, 2010
I'm unaccountably sleepy today, and I have work to do, which is keeping me from deep, insightful blogging. So I'm going to punt, and throw this open to you all:
Leave me a comment telling me something I don't already know.
Well, OK, since I can't reasonably expect you to be mind-readers, that…
August 24, 2010
Two papers in one post this time out. One of these was brought to my attention by Joerg Heber, the other I was reminded of when checking some information for last week's mathematical post on photons. They fit extremely well together though, and both relate to the photon correlation stuff I was…
August 24, 2010
The mismeasure of education « Confused at a higher level
"Put simply, it makes just about as much sense to obsess over these numerical rankings as it does to try to numerically rank favorite restaurants, or jazz songs, or single malt scotches, or ... you get the point. It is a false quantitative…
August 23, 2010
Derek Lowe's doing a lunch thing at the ACS meeting, and in passing mentions the age of his blog:
As the longest-standing chemistry blogger (perhaps the longest standing science blogger, for all I know), I'm glad to have a chance to speak.
I was just telling a reader by e-mail that when I started…
August 23, 2010
I'm a big fan of review articles. For those not in academic science, "review article" means a long (tens of pages) paper collecting together the important results of some field of science, and presenting an overview of the whole thing. These vary somewhat in just how specific they are-- some deal…
August 23, 2010
While I'm still trying not to think about the new academic term that starts in two weeks (yes, the first day of class is Labor Day, grumble mutter grump), it's beginning to impinge on my consciousness. Thus, this poll on a frequent and annoying phenomenon that recurs with every new academic term:…
August 23, 2010
Washington, We Have a Problem | Politics | Vanity Fair
"It's Obama's conviction--you hear this from the most senior White House aides again and again, because it reflects the thinking at the top--that by keeping his head down and doing his job he can also pursue a different strategy, one that…
August 22, 2010
I was channel-surfing the other night, and stumbled across a History Channel program on paleoanthropology, talking about new-ish theories of how humans first populated the Americas. Coming off my recent read of 1491, this seemed like a good way to pass a little time.
After a little bit, it started…
August 22, 2010
In honor of the people down the street who are trying to unload some excess personal belongings, a poll:
When people take a bunch of stuff they no longer want, put it outside their house, and try to sell it to passersby, this is called:Market Research
You can only choose one of these terms in…
August 22, 2010
News: A Graphic Text - Inside Higher Ed
A bunch of professors in MBA programs have written a textbook in graphic novel form. I'd make a joke here about what this says about our future captains of industry, but, really, do I need to?
(tags: education comics business academia books)
slacktivist:…
August 21, 2010
Nobody who likes both SF and the graphing of odd things as much as I do could possibly fail to link to Orbit's charts of fantasy art. These include the frequency plot of various elements seen at right, a comparison of fashion trends for urban fantasy heroines, color trends in cover dragons, and a…
August 21, 2010
I'm probably about the last person with an interest in such things to get around to watching Phil Plait's (in)famous "Don't Be a Dick" speech, but I finally got around to it, and it's really excellent:
Phil Plait - Don't Be A Dick from JREF on Vimeo.
Phil has posted about the speech itself, online…
August 21, 2010
Swans on Tea » Politics and the Star Trek Effect
"There are a couple of episodes of Star Trek that I can recall having some fundamental physics failures, which would lead one to believe that in the Star Trek universe, one cannot do an integral over time. The episodes that come to mind (and it's…
August 20, 2010
Johan Larson emails a suggestion for a post topic:
How many profs would it take to offer a good, but not necessarily excellent, undergraduate physics degree?
I can give you an empirical answer to this: Six.
I say that because in the course of my undergraduate physics degree at Williams, I took…
August 20, 2010
It's nearly time for classes to resume, which means it's time for a zillion stories about Beloit College's annual Kids These Days List, listing off a bunch of things that this year's entering college class, who were mostly born in 1992, have always taken for granted. A sample:
1. Few in the class…
August 20, 2010
In my post about how we know photons exist, I make reference to the famous Kimble, Dagenais, and Mandel experiment showing "anti-bunching" of photons emitted from an excited atom. They observed that the probability of recording a second detector "click" a very short time after the first was small.…
August 20, 2010
An 18 Billion Mile Journey is almost complete! : Starts With A Bang
In honor of the upcoming completion of Neptune's first full orbit since its discovery, a discussion of how it was found.
(tags: science astronomy planets blogs starts-with-bang)
Fixing a Hole: The Beatles' Imaginary Post-1970…
August 19, 2010
Many of SteelyKid's first words have been transportation-related ("Truck! Vroom Vroom!"), which makes the four-level wooden parking garage she got from her Aunt Erin even more awesome. And it's pretty awesome:
As you can see, she grasped the idea almost immediately. That's from last night, after…
August 19, 2010
Everybody's favorite science-and-politics blogger has posted a video clip showing part of what's wrong in science communication. It's a clip from the BBC from last December, featuring one of those head-to-head quasi-debates about "Climategate" between Prof. Andrew Watson of the University of East…
August 19, 2010
At the tail end of Tuesday's post about wind and temperature, I asked a "vaguely related fun bonus question:"
If the air molecules that surround us are moving at 500 m/s anyway, why isn't the speed of sound more like 500 m/s than 300 m/s?
This is another one that people are sometimes surprised by…
August 19, 2010
Kevin Drum posts about the latest outrage from the airline industry:
To summarize, then: (1) Airlines spent years hassling customers about their carry-on bags and persuading them to check their luggage instead. (2) After that finally started to work, they suddenly began charging for checked luggage…
