August 1, 2010
Every couple of weeks, there's another bunch of stories about how e-books are transforming the world, and paper books will soon survive only as collectible fetish objects. It occurred to me this morning that I share a house with a reason why paper books will be around for a while yet, at least in…
August 1, 2010
The voting for the 2010 Hugo Awards closed last night. I sent in my ballot yesterday, but I'm trying to limit my computer time this weekend, so I didn't post about it until today.
The following lists are my votes, with miscellaneous commentary. The Hugos use a complicated vote-counting scheme,…
August 1, 2010
Kwiat Quantum Information Group
The quantum physics version of "24." Can Professor Paul Kwiat save his research group from striking grad students, visiting sponsors, broken lasers and a missing password without violating the University of Illinois ethics regulations?
(tags: physics academia silly…
July 31, 2010
A lot of Twitter energy was soaked up Friday afternoon by a half stupid article by Virginia Heffernan at the New York Times. Sparked by Sodamageddon, she takes a look at ScienceBlogs for the first time, and doesn't like what she sees:
Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for…
July 31, 2010
slacktivist: If you can make it there
"Newcomers are often insecure, and a debt of gratitude can make anyone feel a bit awkward, so I try my best to be patient with some of the sillier things often said by those from the American "heartland" about supposed "East Coast elites" in general and New…
July 30, 2010
Commenter miller asks:
It's often said that virtual particles can "borrow" energy, as long as it's for a short enough time to be compatible with the uncertainty principle. This never made sense to me, because the uncertainty principle says that product of uncertainty in energy and uncertainty in…
July 30, 2010
There's some good stuff in yesterday's post asking what physics you'd like to read more about. I'm nursing a sore neck and shoulder, so I'll only do one or two quick ones today, starting with James D. Miller in the first comment:
1) Is it true that our understanding of quantum physics comes from…
July 30, 2010
The New York Times today has a story with the provocative title Getting Into Med School Without Hard Sciences, about a program at Mount Sinai that allows students to go to med school without taking the three things most dreaded by pre-meds: physics, organic chemistry, and the MCAT:
[I]t came as a…
July 30, 2010
Getting young scientists into the science teacher pipeline: IU News Room: Indiana University
"Producing science teachers who can keep up with rapidly advancing fields and can also inspire students is not an easy task. With a grant from the National Science Foundation's Robert Noyce Scholarship…
July 29, 2010
I don't know if Dijon the giraffe has made a Toddler Blogging appearance yet, but in case she hasn't, here she is:
SteelyKid is in the process of explaining that Dijon is her giraffe ("My graph!"). Which she is, being a gift from Aunt Erin and Aunt 'Stasia. She's a rather heavy knit giraffe, and…
July 29, 2010
I was initially puzzled by the headline "Research-Assignment Handouts Give Students Meager Guidance, Survey Finds," and the opening sentences didn't help much:
Most research-assignment handouts given to undergraduates fail to guide the students toward a comprehensive strategy for completing the…
July 29, 2010
I had intended to write up a recent paper for ResearchBlogging today, but I cleverly forgot to bring either the hard copy of the PDF home last night, which wrecked that plan. And I've got real lab work to do today, so it's not happening at work.
This seems like a good opportunity, though, to ask if…
July 29, 2010
I'm going to be spending a good chunk of the rest of my day scrounging up adapters to connect two different classes of plumbing fittings. In honor of that, here's a poll question based on something that one research group used to do:
Sending a new graduate student to the lab down the hall to ask…
July 29, 2010
My initial reaction to the financial meltdown caused by the housing bubble was "Are our business leaders really that stupid?" Things like this news squib from Inside Higher Ed make me suspect the answer is "yes, they are that stupid":
Business schools -- including such prestigious ones as those of…
July 29, 2010
Meet the real victims of Bush-era lawlessness: his lawyers. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine
"Those who distorted and upended the legal rules during the Bush era have hermetically sealed themselves inside a legal tautology that provides that lawyers cannot be held accountable for merely…
July 28, 2010
Back at the start of the summer, I asked a question about automotive thermodynamics: On a hot day, is it better to open your car windows a crack when making a short stop, or leave them closed? For a long term-- say, leaving your car parked outside all day-- I hope everyone will agree that leaving…
July 28, 2010
On Twitter, I saw Graham Farmelo link to this Physics World blog post about Ed Witten's Newton lecture, describing it as "Edward Witten's clearest-ever overview of string theory for laypeople (i.e. most others)." Witten's a name to conjure with, so I thought "That might be worth a look."
So I went…
July 28, 2010
The Art of Sleeping in Seminars | Department of Physics at the U of I
"Through long years of experience, we have accumulated the following useful set of rules. These should be helpful to beginning research students. However, we have also observed seasoned veterans making some of these simple…
July 27, 2010
We have a summer student seminar series in the science and engineering departments here, running two days a week at lunchtime with three students each day giving 15 minute presentations on their summer research projects to other students and faculty.
The student talks are split almost 50/50 overall…
July 27, 2010
When one of the most recent issues of Physical Review Letters hit my inbox, I immediately flagged these two papers as something to write up for ResearchBlogging. This I looked at the accompanying viewpoint in Physics, and discovered that Chris Westbrook already did most of the work for me. And, as…
July 27, 2010
Via Inside Higher Ed this YouTube video is pretty much a distillation of faculty reaction nationwide to higher education's response to the world economic crisis:
The IHE link gives a little more context to the video, and some of the reaction to it. The arguments here are not all well-founded--…
July 27, 2010
slacktivist: To bigotry no sanction
"During Washington's presidency, of course, most Americans did not "possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship." The man who wrote "to bigotry no sanction" also imagined he had the right to own other humans and the authority to vote on…
July 26, 2010
A few years ago, we ended up trading some classroom space in the Physics part of the building to Psychology, which was renovated into lab space for two of their new(ish) hires. This turned out to be a huge boon not only for the department (the lab space we got in the swap is really very nice), but…
July 26, 2010
The subject of the "spin" of the electron comes up again and again, so as pointed out in a comment, I really ought to do a post explaining what it is and how it works. As a bonus, this gives me the opportunity to do the dorkiest thing anyone has ever done with a cute-toddler video, namely this one…
July 26, 2010
YouTube - I Will Derive!
Gloria Gaynor, meet Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton. Leibniz, Newton, Gloria Gaynor.
(tags: video math music youtube silly education)
Cocktail Party Physics: the nays have it
"[W]hile browsing the science section on Amazon this weekend, looking for new or overlooked…
July 25, 2010
The vanity search this morning turned up something I hadn't seen before:
That's the Japanese edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I knew one was in the works, but hadn't heard when it would be out.
Of course, I can't read any of it other than my own name (rightmost column of the cover text…
July 25, 2010
Why tenure won't disappear, just shrink § Unqualified Offerings
"1) Did you notice the part where I said I'd want a higher salary to compensate for having less security? Yeah. See, lots of people are willing to slave away in grad school and postdoc positions and adjunct positions in exchange…
July 24, 2010
It was miserably swampy for most of the day today-- when it wasn't actually raining, it was so humid that you expects water to condense out of the air at any moment-- so I spent a while sitting on the couch watching tv with SteelyKid. The best kid-friendly option seemed to be an episode of the new…
July 24, 2010
Climate change is a major crisis, don't get me wrong, and it's something that needs to be discussed extensively in both scientific and policy circles. We're pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at rather too high a rate, and getting something done about that is a key priority.
It's possible,…
July 24, 2010
Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 040504 (2010): Room-Temperature Implementation of the Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm with a Single Electronic Spin in Diamond
"The nitrogen-vacancy defect center (N-V center) is a promising candidate for quantum information processing due to the possibility of coherent manipulation…
