June 1, 2010
Two noteworthy events related to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in the next month:
First, and most important, I'm going to be signing books at the Author's Alley portion of the World Science Festival Street Fair. The fair itself is in Washington Square Park in Manhattan, though the name of the…
June 1, 2010
OPERA Sees Tau Neutrino Appearance!!
"It is official: the OPERA experiment (above, in a sketch) has found its first tau lepton in one of its bricks (a picture of a brick is shown below). What gives, I am hearing some of you ask. It means that a muon neutrino launched from the CERN laboratories in…
May 31, 2010
Today is Memorial Day in the US, which is a holiday to honor the dead of our various wars. It's also the traditional start of summer-type activities, and most people spend it at cookouts and parades and that sort of thing. I say "most people," because our trimester calendar means that we're still…
May 31, 2010
slacktivist: Sex & Money, part 1
"For Nehemiah, charging 1 percent was shameful usury. The low-interest loans I was championing through our alternative investing still charged more than that.
And the Gospels weren't any help at all. Jesus did not merely reinforce the prohibition against usury…
May 30, 2010
Looking for something else, I was reminded of some pictures I took a week or two ago. This one came out pretty well:
This also reminds me that it's a really nice day here in Niskayuna, and I shouldn't be spending it all at the computer. So, enjoy the bird picture, and I'll post something more…
May 30, 2010
Some late nights and wireless problems conspired to keep me from posting anything Friday or Saturday, but I was still at the meeting, and saw some cool talks on coherent X-ray production with lasers, opto-mechanics, and ridiculously good atomic clocks, some of which I hope to talk about later. For…
May 27, 2010
Kate here with two pictures of SteelyKid at play. Here's one from last night in which she is beginning to realize the difficulties with her plan:
(Very shortly after this, she solved the problem by demanding that I put my sandals back on, and then leading me around by one hand while she pushed her…
May 27, 2010
Since I sort of implied a series in the previous post, and I have no better ideas, here's a look at Thursday's DAMOP program:
Thursday Morning, 8am (yes, they start having talks at 8am. It's a great trial.)
Session J1 Novel Probes of Ultracold Atom Gases
Chair: David Weiss, Pennsylvania State…
May 27, 2010
I was pretty sedentary on Wednesday, going to only two sessions, and staying for most of the talks in each. I spent most of the initial prize session getting my bearings in the conference areas, and talking to people I know from my NIST days.
In the 10:30 block, I went to the session on Alkaline…
May 27, 2010
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Thoughts on DIY U
"Eleemosynary institutions have real and serious flaws, but they exist to empower the weak. They are necessary to empower the weak. If you rend them asunder, you will expose the weak to the predations of the strong. This is so fundamental…
May 26, 2010
The conference I'm at this week is the annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society (which this year is joint with the Canadian version, the Division of Atomic and Molecular Physics and Photon Interactions, or "DAMPΦ." The Greek letter…
May 26, 2010
Student Tip: Asking for a better grade : Dot Physics
"If you are a student and you want a higher grade, you need to come in and show me that you understand the material at a level that was different than you showed on the exam. Most students don't come in with this attitude."
(tags: academia…
May 25, 2010
I'm going to be spending the bulk of today in transit between Albany and Houston, with a layover in Orlando (whee!), so here's a pair of related poll questions for you to consider:
The most enjoyable way to travel between two cities in the continental US is:customer surveys
The least enjoyable…
May 25, 2010
...My heart's in Accra » The Partisan Internet and the Wider World
"I think the comparison between ideological isolation in media and in face to face encounters is more like comparing apples and hedgehogs. They're thoroughly different types of interactions and we should have very different…
May 24, 2010
This is the presentation I gave to the International Baccalaureate class from Schenectady High School today. I tend to re-use talk titles a lot, but this is substantially different than the last talk with this title, as the previous group had read How to Teach Physics to Your Dog first. For this…
May 24, 2010
I'm leaving for DAMOP tomorrow, and did a presentation for local high-schoolers today, so everything is in chaos here. Thus, a poll to pass the time, inspired by my current activities:
The best part of going to a conference is:online survey
The word "best" naturally implies a single item, so…
May 24, 2010
Sunday Function : Built on Facts
How hash functions can keep you safe if you find yourself part of the French underground fighting the Nazis.
(tags: math science blogs built-on-facts)
"Heretical" Copernicus Reburied as a Hero - CBS News
""There is no indication that Copernicus was worried about…
May 23, 2010
As mentioned previously, I have an inexplicable fondness for the "Ancient Aliens" show on the History channel. It's such a bizarre mishmash of every crazy idea out there in the UFO community that it ends up being hilarious where it ought to be just reprehensible.
To give you an idea of the…
May 23, 2010
Every Hug, Every Fuss - Scientists Record Families' Daily Lives - NYTimes.com
"[T]he U.C.L.A. project was an attempt to capture a relatively new sociological species: the dual-earner, multiple-child, middle-class American household. The investigators have just finished working through the 1,540…
May 22, 2010
The problem is "What should Chad do/ see in the evenings while he's at DAMOP next week?"
This is the major physics conference in my field, so my days will be pretty well booked up with talks and posters, but there's not much after 6pm other than food and socializing. If there's some not-to-be-…
May 22, 2010
News: Questioning Endowment Losses - Inside Higher Ed
"High-risk, high-reward policies heavily influenced by Wall Street helped some college endowments grow to several times their original sizes, but they also did damage to employees, local communities and the global financial system, a new…
May 21, 2010
I didn't see it live, but thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can see Tom O'Brian of NIST talking about measurement on the Rachel Maddow show last night:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Tom used to have an office not far from the lab I worked in at…
May 21, 2010
Duke shut down its Usenet server yesterday, which is significant because Duke's server was the original home of Usenet. I think this means that Usenet is now available only to about a dozen people with panix accounts.
I note this here because Usenet was an important part of my life. I started…
May 21, 2010
PHD Comics: Grading Rubric
Sounds about right. Maybe a little too generous on the lower row.
(tags: comics piled-higher academia education silly)
Producing novel semiconductors en masse - physicsworld.com
"John Rogers, working with colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign…
May 20, 2010
How did my day of solo SteelyKid wrangling go, you ask? I can sum it up in one picture:
She's quite a handful...
(To be fair, this is part of a game that gets played even on days when I'm not about to fall over from exhaustion... But it seemed like a really appropriate picture to sum up the day.)
May 20, 2010
I'm home with SteelyKid today, because Shavuot is important enough to close the JCC for two days. This will mean essentially no Internet for me, as it's difficult to type when you're lying on the floor being jumped on by a toddler.
As a filler post, let me take a cue from Making Light and offer you…
May 20, 2010
The Virtuosi: Cell Phone Brain Damage: Part Deux
"I thought I'd take another look at cell phone damage, coming at it from a different direction than my colleague. Mostly I just want to consider the energy of the radiation that cell phones produce, and compare that with the other relevant energy…
May 19, 2010
I spent yesterday going over proposed copy edits to Anglicise How to Teach Physics to Your Dog for the forthcoming UK edition, which adds "Quantum" to the title, and will have all new cover art, etc. This means that clergy in the book are now permitted to marry, all book property belonging to the…
May 19, 2010
SteelyKid's day care is closed today and tomorrow for a Jewish holiday (happy (?) Shavuot to those who celebrate it), so she's home all day for the next two. Of course, Kate and I are both crazy busy, so my parents are coming up to watch SteelyKid today while we're off at work. We really had to…
May 19, 2010
Why just earn a degree when you can leave behind a legend? - CharlotteObserver.com
"If you've spent significant time on the Davidson College campus the past four years, chances are you've at least heard of "the Name Tag Guy."
Or, less likely, Stephen Pierce.
They are one. Both were among 427…
