May 18, 2010
It's been a very long day, so I'm lying on the couch watching
"Pardon the Interruption" on ESPN. They're having a boring
conversation about baseball, and I'm just drifting off into a pleasant
doze when:
"Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake! Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake!"
I jolt awake. "What are you barking at?!?" I…
May 18, 2010
I have copy edits for an Anglicised edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog to review, lecture notes to write, and a faculty meeting to go to, so I'm going off-line for the rest of the day (with one possible exception). To keep you amused in my absence, here's some video of SteelyKid dancing to…
May 18, 2010
There's a Dennis Overbye article in the Times today with the Web headline "From Fermilab, a New Clue to Explain Human Existence?" which I like to think of as a back-handed tribute to the person who linked to an interview with Sean Carroll by calling him "The cosmologist, not the scientist." This is…
May 18, 2010
DLMF: NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions
An Abromowitz and Stegun for the Internet age.
(tags: math science software physics books internet)
Blog U.: Is TED Making Us Stupid? - Technology and Learning - Inside Higher Ed
"Pre-TED, I used to be able to sit through a boring lecture or…
May 17, 2010
Matt's Sunday Function this week is a weird one, a series that is only conditionally convergent:
So the sum of the infinite series, by inexorable logic, is both ln(2) and ln(2)/2. How is this possible?
Of course it isn't. The flaw in our logic is the assumption that the series has a definite sum…
May 17, 2010
SteelyKid's every-so-often bath was last night, and as always, she was fascinated by scooping up water in a hexagonal cup thing that's part of one of her bath toys, and watching it drain out. Which is completely understandable-- not just because she's a baby, but because there's a bunch of physics…
May 17, 2010
Art - Lapham's Quarterly
It takes seven steps to get from Kevin Bacon to Mark Twain
(tags: books literature history art music pictures movies culture silly)
Shocking: Michael Faraday does biology! (1839) « Skulls in the Stars
"These experiments are fascinating and paint an amusing picture:…
May 16, 2010
A few upcoming events related to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
The big one is that I'll be aprt of the "Author's Alley" portion of the World Science Festival Street Fair in New York City on Sunday, June 6th. The last couple of these have coincided with out-of-town trips for me, so I'm glad to…
May 16, 2010
james_nicoll: Please plug the holes in my ignorance
"China has its Four Great Classical Novels: Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber. My impression, gained from minutes and minutes of research, is these are influential and the sort of thing…
May 15, 2010
It's a beautiful day here in Niskayuna, and we have family visiting. So here's a bonus baby picture (also in use as my Facebook profile picture at the moment), in hopes that while you're distracted by the cute, I can sneak outside with SteelyKid and enjoy the nice weather.
Everybody say "Awwwwww…
May 15, 2010
News: Profs Turned Pols - Inside Higher Ed
"From local school board races to Congressional campaigns, an effort is under way to push scientists out of the lab and onto the stump.
Through a series of Web-based seminars and organizing efforts on university campuses, Scientists & Engineers for…
May 14, 2010
Blame Bryan O'Sullivan for this-- after his comment about misreading "Bohmian Mechanics" as "Bohemian Mechanics," I couldn't get this silly idea out of my head. And this is the result.
I like to think that this was Brian May's first draft (he does have a Ph.D. in astrophysics, after all), before…
May 14, 2010
Blue laser awesomeness : Dot Physics
"Yes, green laser pointers are cool. Especially when you use them to make stuff fluoresce. Ok, what about a blue laser pointer? They are getting surprisingly cheap (Amazon has a 10 mW for pretty cheap). Still not cheap enough for me. But, you know what? Some…
May 13, 2010
SteelyKid went through a phase recently where she didn't want to eat much of anything. This wasn't medically dangerous, just kind of nerve-wracking. As a result, when she declares out of the blue that she wants a bottle, well, she gets a bottle:
Actually, she got two bottles right after we got…
May 13, 2010
I get asked my opinion of Bohmian mechanics a fair bit, despite the fact that I know very little about it. This came up again recently, so I got some suggested reading from Matt Leifer, on the grounds that I ought to learn something about it if I'm going to keep being asked about it. One of his…
May 13, 2010
Spinning off a blog at Inside Higher Ed, the Dean Dad has a post on deciding what classes are essential:
My personal sense of it is that the distinction between core and periphery is largely a function of purpose. If your goal in life is to be an exhibited artist, then you might well decide that…
May 13, 2010
Cocktail Party Physics: oily hair is not a problem - its a solution for the gulf coast
"One of the more interesting solutions proposed (aside from dropping trash in the pipe to block the oil) also involves using fibers; however, the fibers in question are human hair. Chicken feathers, straw, and…
May 12, 2010
Via Jennifer Ouellette on Twitter, I ran across a Discovery News story touting a recent arxiv preprint claiming to see variation in the fine-structure constant. It's a basically OK story, but garbles a few details, so I thought it would be worth giving it the ResearchBlogging treatment, in the now-…
May 12, 2010
No Links Dump today because a combination of work and a nasty cold kept me off the Internet most of yesterday. Here's the moral equivalent, though: a poll question brought to you by the letters "U" and "K" and the song "Gimme Sympathy" by Metric:
Who would you rather be?online surveys
The song is…
May 11, 2010
I should note up front that I'm kind of jealous of Marcus Chown regarding this book. Subtitled "What Everyday Things Tell Us About the Universe," The Matchbox That Ate a Forty-Ton Truck is a book that uses trivial everyday observations-- the fact that you don't fall through the floor, the fact that…
May 11, 2010
The Science and Entertainment Exchange: The X-Change Files: Tony Stark's Science
"While the film naturally took some liberties with the details -- sci-fi has the luxury of not having to pass peer review -- Marvel Studios nonetheless cared enough about plausibility to ask the Science &…
May 10, 2010
I've written before about the problem of having in-between views on controversial subjects in blogdom. This is something that also comes up in Jessica's excellent entry on online culture, and has been scientifically demonstrated in political contexts.
I'm somewhat bemused, then, to see the same…
May 10, 2010
Against a Definition of Science Fiction -- Paul Kincaid
"When I called my collection of essays and reviews What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction, I was struggling toward something I could not fully articulate. I don't know what is involved in reading science fiction, because I don't know…
May 9, 2010
One of my many character weaknesses is a fondness for the kooky UFO programs run on the History Channel and other educational cable networks. The nuttier the better-- there's something about the credulity and self-delusion displayed by the "researchers" they trot out that I find really hilarious.
I…
May 9, 2010
When I was writing about the seemingly contradictory meanings of "adiabatic" the other day, I almost gave "theory" as an example of a word with nearly opposite meanings. After all, as anyone who has even glanced at the evolution-creation "debate" has heard, a "Theory" in science is something more…
May 9, 2010
Jason Sanford: Living in a world where most writers suck
I find bad writing to be cross-generational and not caused by someone loving video games or fanfic. If you turned Shakespeare loose on gaming or fanfic, he'd likely come up with some great stories.
He'd also come up with some horrible…
May 8, 2010
While it's not aprt of the official LaserFest package of stuff, Physics World is marking the 50th anniversary of the laser with a couple of really nice pieces on lasers in science and popular culture:
Where next for the laser interviews six laser experts-- Claire Max of UCSC, Bill Phillips of NIST…
May 8, 2010
YouTube - Walk on water
"Liquid Mountaineering is a new sport which is attempting to achieve what man has tried to do for centuries: walk on water. Or to be more precise: running on water. We are developing the sport from scratch. By accident we found out that with the right water repellent…
May 7, 2010
The Steinmetz Symposium is today at Union, as mentioned in yesterday's silly poll about fears (I love the fact that "Wavefunction Collapse" leads "Monsters from the Id" by one vote at the time of this writing-- my readers are awesome). As a more serious follow-up, there were two presentation…
May 7, 2010
Microsoft's PowerPoint isn't evil if you learn how to use it. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine
I've seen more terrible slide presentations in my life than good ones, but that stat isn't necessarily an indictment of the program--I've also encountered a lot more terrible books than terrific ones…
