May 6, 2010
This week, we offer a shot from the forthcoming "Casual Living with SteelyKid and Appa" catalogue:
If you look closely, you can see two things: 1) a small scrape by her right eye, from an accident at day care-- even SteelyKid is bound by the laws of physics, and gravity is a harsh one, and 2) her…
May 6, 2010
There's a minor kerfuffle at the moment over the XENON experiment's early data (arxiv paper) which did not detect any dark matter in 11 days of data acquisition. This conflicts with earlier claims by the DAMA experiment and recent maybe-kinda-sorta detections by the CoGeNT and CDMA experiments.
As…
May 6, 2010
Tomorrow is the annual Steinmetz Symposium at Union, where students who have done some sort of research present their results. Which means that today there are a lot of students fretting about having to give a public presentation tomorrow.
Just to remind them that there are worse things than giving…
May 6, 2010
My publisher would like to include a Teacher's Guide with the paperback edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. which means that, well, I need to put together a Teacher's Guide for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. The problem is, I'm not exactly sure what should go in that sort of thing.
So,…
May 6, 2010
Particle Detector Shows Promise, if Nothing Else - NYTimes.com
"A new widely anticipated experiment underneath a mountain in Italy designed to detect a sea of dark particles that allegedly constitute a quarter of creation did not see anything during a test run last fall, scientists reported…
May 5, 2010
Over at the Virtuosi, there's a nice discussion of the physics of letting air out of tires. Jesse opens the explanation with:
Have you ever noticed how when you let air out of a bike tire (or, I suppose, a car tire) it feels rather cold? Today we're going to explore why that is, and just how cold…
May 5, 2010
It's been a couple of weeks since I did an update on How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, but that's been as much laziness as a lack of news. Some developments, mostly relating to foreign lands:
The US paperback edition is slated for December release. I'm working on a Teacher's Guide to go with it…
May 5, 2010
Being Complementary About Uncertainty : Built on Facts
"Complementarity is a very general concept and not easy to define formally, though informally you might say it's the principle that the wave-like and particle-like aspects of an object can't be simultaneously observed. More formally you could…
May 4, 2010
As James Nicoll is fond of saying, context is for the weak. So here's a context-free poll regarding the reporting of election results:
Releasing a rank-ordered list of candidates with vote totals after a contested election is:online survey
If you'd like to explain what context you might imagine…
May 4, 2010
Online civility: between 10,000 cliques and 2 cultures, where's the neutral ground? : bioephemera
"Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the blogosphere abhors a neutral and nonpartisan blog. For whatever reasons, cultural or historical, participants expect partisanship. They want to know if you're…
May 3, 2010
While I missed the controversial episode with comments about aliens, I figured I should at least take a look at the Discovery Channel's Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, so I put it on last night after putting SteelyKid to bed. This was the big two-hour "Story of Everything" episode, starting…
May 3, 2010
Voting has closed on the Laser Smackdown poll, with 772 people recording their opinion on the most amazing of the many things that have been done with lasers in the fifty years since the invention of the first working laser (see the Laserfest web site for more on the history and applications of…
May 3, 2010
Clive Thompson on Why We Should Learn the Language of Data | Magazine
"Statistics is hard. But that's not just an issue of individual understanding; it's also becoming one of the nation's biggest political problems. We live in a world where the thorniest policy issues increasingly boil down to…
May 2, 2010
With over 700 votes cast in the Laser Smackdown poll in honor of the 50th anniversary of the laser, laser cooling has opened a commanding 20-vote lead in the race to be the Most Amazing Laser Application of All Time. If you prefer one of the other options, you have only six hours left to change the…
May 2, 2010
Over at the Book Publicity blog, Yen takes up the question of Internet publicity (via SF Signal):
Yesterday I spoke at an AAR / Association of Authors' Representatives panel together with Connor Raus (who runs digital advertising agency CRKWD) about understanding social media and how to use it…
May 2, 2010
tongodeon: Fun With Secret Questions & Answers
"My new bank, Ally Bank, configures a security question and answer for customer service calls. In addition to your SSN, date of birth, and mother's maiden name they also ask you the question you specify and wait for the answer you've provided.…
May 1, 2010
The APS now gives out an Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics, which gives you some idea of how influential his work was, in particular "Subtle Is the Lord..." The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, which won prizes and sits in a prominent position on the bookshelves of many physicists. Like…
May 1, 2010
A college classmate sent me this picture of a library display in the Boston area:
That's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog prominently displayed on the top shelf. Just below it, you can see Physics for Future Presidents, and to the right, you can just make out Richard Dawkins's book on evolution.…
May 1, 2010
slacktivist: Empathy and epistemic closure
"The stupidity of the tea partiers has nothing to do with innate intelligence or with acquired intelligence. It has nothing to do with smartness or brainpower or where anyone falls on the bell curve of Stanford-Binet test scores. It is, rather, a moral…
April 30, 2010
I'm off to Williamstown this afternoon, to talk about research and alsoHow to Teach Physics to Your Dog. If you need blog-based entertainment, though, here are some shiny new radio buttons for you to click:
You're a beam of light: quick, what's your polarization?online survey
I won't offer a…
April 30, 2010
We're just over 600 votes in the Laser Smackdown poll in honor of the 50th anniversary of the laser, as of early Friday morning. I notice that it has moved off the front page of the blog, though, so here's another signal-boosting repost, just so we have as many votes as possible, to establish…
April 30, 2010
The Science and Entertainment Exchange: The X-Change Files: Zap! Or, Where Would Science Fiction Movies be Without Lasers?
"Science fiction was right on top of this new development and even foresaw it. In 1898, H. G. Wells introduced an invisible but powerful heat ray as the weapon of choice for…
April 29, 2010
SteelyKid has a cold, again, so she's kind of unhappy tonight. There's a picture of a slightly bleary SteelyKid with Appa below the fold, but that's kind of a downer, so here's some video from the other night, showing her new favorite game:
(She'll do this for hours. Well, ten minutes, at least,…
April 29, 2010
Over in Twitter-land, S. C. Kavassalis notes a Googler who's not afraid to ask the big questions:
Weird Google search of the week: 'the "one" scientific idea that we need to believe'. Uh um, I'm sure my blog couldn't possibly answer that.
It's a good question, though, ad there are a couple of…
April 29, 2010
A sad and sordid story from the Times Higher Education following the rescinding of invitations to a conference on quantum foundations:
Details of the conference in August for experts in quantum mechanics sounded idyllic. Participants were due to discuss "de Broglie-Bohm theory and beyond" in the…
April 29, 2010
Skipping class? NAU high-tech system will know
"Students who are thinking about sleeping late and skipping that morning class may have a new incentive to roll out of bed at one Arizona university this fall.
Northern Arizona University will install an electronic system that detects when each…
April 28, 2010
I'm a little surprised at the vehemence of some of the negative reactions to Stephen Hawking's comments about aliens. Not so much in blogdom-- Ethan's response is pretty reasonable, for example-- but there was a flurry of Twitter traffic yesterday of the form "Where does Stephen Hawking get off…
April 28, 2010
I'm teaching Physics 350: Quantum Mechanics this term, which is a junior/senior level elective course using Townsend's book which deals with quantum mechanics in the state vector formalism. The room in which the class meets is the only one in the department that contains a whiteboard (using dry-…
April 28, 2010
Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War - PowerPoint - NYTimes.com
""PowerPoint makes us stupid," Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned…
April 27, 2010
Dennis Overbye has a piece on "The Big Bang Theory" in today's New York Times, taking the "Is this good or bad for science?" angle:
Three years later some scientists still say that although the series, "The Big Bang Theory" (Monday nights on CBS), is funny and scientifically accurate, they are put…
