August 19, 2010
slacktivist: Please forgive me for the actions of extremists I have never met who commit acts of violence that I have never advocated
"As a white male Baptist, it is my duty today to denounce the violence perpetrated by Patrick Gray Sharp, 29, who yesterday attacked the police headquarters in…
August 18, 2010
Daniel Lemire has a new blog post arguing that working long hours is stupid. This collided with Bee's Backreaction post on what keeps physicists up at night, included in this morning's Links Dump.
This got me to thinking about academic work habits, which led to the following poll:
How long will…
August 18, 2010
We picked up a used copy of Charles Mann's pop-archeology book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus a while back. I didn't read it at the time, because I was a little afraid that it would be rather polemical in what I think of as the Neil Young mode-- wildly overstating the…
August 18, 2010
Most of the time, when we talk about seeing quantum effects from light, we talk about extremely weak beams-- looking at intensities where one photon more or less represents a significant change in the intensity of the light. Last week, though, Physics Buzz wrote up a paper that goes in the other…
August 18, 2010
The Should I Skip Class Today? Calculator
Here's a clue: If you need to use a web-based "calculator" to decide whether to go to class or not, it doesn't matter whether you go to class or not.
(tags: education academia stupid internet)
Backreaction: Worries
"At first sight, physicists seem like…
August 17, 2010
So, I blew off stuff I should've been doing, and went to see a matinee of the Scott Pilgrim movie this morning (it's very much not Kate's sort of thing, and I would feel guilty ditching her with SteelyKid to see it during the evening or on a weekend). Actually, first I went to Borders for half an…
August 17, 2010
I got forwarded a physics question last night asking about the connection between wind and temperature, which I'll paraphrase as:
Temperature is related to the motion of the atoms and molecules making a substance up, with faster motion corresponding to higher temperature. So why does it feel warmer…
August 17, 2010
At Inside Higher Ed this morning, they have a news squib about a new report blaming the high cost of college on "administrative bloat." Coincidentally, the Dean Dad has a post pre-emptively responding to this in the course of arguing with a different group:
In terms of administration, what would…
August 17, 2010
For Lean Budgets, a Plug-and-Play Solar System - Green Blog - NYTimes.com
You know you're a physical scientist when "Plug-and-Play Solar System" suggests something like "... then you put Jupiter here, and you're all set. See, they're orbiting already! And it's open-source, so it's free." Sadly,…
August 16, 2010
A couple of "kids these days are bad at math" stories crossed my feed reader last week, first a New York Times blog post about remedial math, then a Cocktail Party Physics post on confusion about equals signs. The first was brought to my attention via a locked LiveJournal post taking the obligatory…
August 16, 2010
Last week's series of posts on the hardware needed for laser cooling and trapping experiments dealt specifically with laser-cooling type experiments. It's possible, though, to make cold atoms without using laser cooling, using a number of techniques I described in two posts back in January. Those…
August 16, 2010
Sex between adolescents in romantic relationships is often harmless to their academics
"The context in which adolescent sexual activity occurs can substantially moderate the negative relationship between sexual intercourse and education, according to research to be presented at the 105th Annual…
August 15, 2010
A slightly different twist on the occasional guess-the-lyrics game. The following list gives pairs of rhyming words from a song that I think can be used to identify a specific song. So, for example, the pair:
diplomat/ Siamese cat
identifies "Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan, thanks to the lines…
August 15, 2010
A couple of new-to-me but good physics blogs to point out this week:
All That Matters by Joerg Heber. This looks like it will be updated weekly-ish, and has a couple of good entries, including a nice write-up of an ultrafast laser experiment that I had flagged to write about before I got distracted…
August 15, 2010
YouTube - Beat It + epic Crazy Chinese Omnipotent China red army
The Internet is a very silly place, but I'm glad we have it.
(tags: video music world silly internet youtube)
Why Does College Cost So Much? - Forbes.com
"Instead of holding up a magnifying glass to the industry, we take an aerial…
August 14, 2010
Tongues of Serpents is the nth book in the Temeraire series started with His Majesty's Dragon (in the US, anyway), and another "Meh" review from me. In this case, this is probably less to do with the book itself than with the fact that I am not really in the target demographic for this book.
The…
August 14, 2010
I don't believe the actual book is out yet, but you can get an electronic Advance Reading copy of the Nth Miles Vorkosigan book, Cryoburn already. Kate picked up a copy, and while she hasn't gotten around to it yet, I read it this week while putting SteelyKid to bed.
The book is another "Lord…
August 14, 2010
Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Eight Signs A Claimed Pâ NP Proof Is Wrong
"So, in the future, how can you decide whether a claimed Pâ NP proof is worth reading? I'll now let you in on my magic secrets (which turn out not to be magic or secret at all).
The thing not to do is to worry about…
August 13, 2010
Over at the Whatever, one of Scalzi's guest bloggers has posted a ginormous list of upcoming live music shows in the DC area. This makes me sad, because when I used to live in the DC area, I was a grad student, and couldn't afford to go to any of the dozens of great concerts that came through there…
August 13, 2010
The third category in our look at lab apparatus, after vacuum hardware and lasers and optics is the huge collection of electronic gear that we use to control the experiments. I'll borrow the sales term "test and measurement" as a catch-all description, though this is really broader than what you'll…
August 13, 2010
Some folks I used to work with at NIST have looked at cheap green laser pointers, and found a potential danger. Some of the dimmer-looking green lasers are not so dim in the infrared, and in one case emitted 10X the rated power in invisible light. This could be a potential eye hazard.
You can read…
August 13, 2010
Think Globally, Compromise Locally - Green Blog - NYTimes.com
"Bill McKibben, whose 1989 book, "The End of Nature," helped coalesce and spread worry about climate change, views the national environmental groups' strategy of winning support for energy and climate legislation by compromising with…
August 12, 2010
Now that she's officially two years old, SteelyKid gets to sit in the big chairs:
She also insisted on the forced-perspective thing to make her look even bigger compared to Appa. And the string cheese. She's all about the string cheese.
August 12, 2010
My parents are in the Caribbean at the moment, and threatened to send me cell-phone pictures of white beaches and blue water. They were thwarted in this by the fact that I still have a cheap LG flip phone with no camera. Our calls from home are exclusively made using a landline phone.
You can see…
August 12, 2010
The problem with writing about fake physics is that once you start, it's hard to stop. And there's always something new and disreputable to find, such as this hideous bit of scammery. As I said in How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, if quantum physics really allowed you to amass vast wealth just by…
August 12, 2010
Following on yesterday's discussion of the vacuum hardware needed for cooling atoms, let's talk about the other main component of the apparatus: the optical system. The primary technique used for making cold atoms is laser cooling, and I'm sure it will come as no surprise that this requires lasers…
August 12, 2010
If Physical Books Are Dead in Five Years, How Do the Poor Find Books? Whither (or Wither?) the Library? : Mike the Mad Biologist
"The great promise of our libraries is that, if you can physically get there (and for some services, even that isn't required), you have access to the materials, rich…
August 11, 2010
Over in the reader request thread, Richard asks for experimental details:
I'd be interested in (probably a series) of posts on how people practically actually do cold atoms experiments because I don't really know.
I needed to take some new publicity photos of the lab anyway, so this is a good…
August 11, 2010
First Matt Yglesias and then Kevin Drum nail the current source of my occasional spasms of liberal guilt, namely the unequal distribution of the current economic troubles. They both note that the unemployment rate for college graduates is less than half that for folks without college degrees (Matt…
August 11, 2010
A Japanese physicist who I worked with as a post-doc spotted the Japanese edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in the wild, and picked up a copy. He sent along a scan of a couple of pages of the text, one of which I reproduce here:
I had totally forgotten that Japanese books are often…
