May 22, 2008

Ask the Internet

Category: Personal

Where is my cell phone?

Well?!? Where is it?

Posted by Chad Orzel at 11:11 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Publish or President?

Category: Academia • Politics • Science

The pinhead filling in for Colin Cowherd (himself a pinhead of epic proportions) yesterday on ESPN radio was unduly proud of himself for coming up with the following hypothetical (paraphrased from memory):

Suppose that you had a choice between having your favorite candidate win the presidential election, or having your favorite sports team win a championship. Which would you pick?

Even by the standards of hypotheticals on sports call-in shows, this is pretty stupid. After all, it's not really a fair comparison-- whatever psychological boost it may provide, your favorite sports team winning a title is not likely to affect you personally. A presidential election, on the other hand-- particularly this presidential election-- will have a significant effect on the status of the nation, and that will affect your daily life in a way that sports won't.

(This did not stop large numbers of Cubs fans from calling in to vote for sports titles over politics, of course...)

Of course, this got me wondering whether there's a better comparison, involving something with more concrete importance (though not too concrete-- "a billion dollars tax-free" is unfair in the other direction). For scientists, maybe something like:

Suppose that you had a choice between having your favorite candidate win the presidential election, or having a first-author paper in Science. Which would you pick?

For this particular election, I'm not even sure that would do it... What would need to be offered before you had to think seriously about this choice? A tenure-track job? Tenure? A secure source of funding?

Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:18 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Percentiles and Perspective

Category: FutureBaby!

Kate's doctor called back after the ultrasound Tuesday, and this time the news was all good-- FutureBaby appears very healthy, and everything is as it should be.

There was one interesting little quirk, though, having to do with the weight. Kate mentioned last night that FutureBaby's estimated weight is in the 70th percentile for babies at this stage of development.

My immediate reaction was "That's all? What's wrong?"

Needless to say, this is not what Kate was thinking...

Read on »

Posted by Chad Orzel at 7:20 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

links for 2008-05-22

Category: Links Dump

• Izzle! Izzle pfaff!
  "In the Name of the King is neither good nor bad, and yet it is both at once. In the Name of the King is the Schrodinger's Cat of garbage movies; until watched, it remains in a state of quantum superposition, and then when it is watched, the waveform coll
  (tags: movies review stupid)
• Your Review is Hereby Summarily Rejected « nOnoscience
  "It is with extreme poignancy I write to inform you that the authors, after sitting on your review for an year, have summarily rejected your review report for want of better content worthy of publishing consideration with us."
  (tags: academia journals publishing silly science)
• Taste Test: Asian Pringles | The A.V. Club
  "See, in Japan, junk food is classy."
  (tags: food Japan review silly)
• Looking for ET's neutrino beam - physicsworld.com
  This is a little far-fetched even by the standards of SF mcguffins...
  (tags: science physics space theory news)
• BEC bubble could measure tiny forces - physicsworld.com
  "[T]he level could measure gravitational acceleration to about one part in 10 billion. While this is on par with existing schemes to test gravity such as the torsion pendulum, the BEC level could reach this precision on length scales as small as a microme
  (tags: physics precision-measurement low-temperature science theory news)
• glumbert - The Science Of Ball To Groin
  Tackling the really important questions in science.
  (tags: science biology sports silly video)

Posted by Chad Orzel at 5:32 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

May 21, 2008

Dorky Poll: With or Without "t"?

Category: Math • Physics

It's a simple question:

Who do you prefer, Lorentz or Lorenz?

Chaos butterflies, or time dilation. Choose only one.

Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:48 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Thank You for Listening

Category: Academia

The Female Science Professor is musing about thank-yous at thesis defenses:

When I was in grad school, a prominent faculty member (who was department chair near the end of my grad years) made it known that he hated the "thank you" part of the thesis defense and strongly discouraged students from including any sort of personal thank you in their talk. If someone really wanted to, they could have a very brief and professional acknowledgment at the end of their talk (not the beginning). His reasoning was that the defense is an exam, and it is not the place for a long acknowledgment of the emotional and other support provided by significant others, relatives, pets, or faculty. Most students respected his wishes and confined their acknowledgments to the thesis document or to giving a speech at a party or other social occasion to celebrate a successful defense.

More typically, the thesis defenses I have seen involve acknowledgments -- some at the beginning, but more commonly at the end. I am not as extreme as my former professor, but I am glad when this part of the talk is short. It's always weird to listen to a long emotional thank you to the spouse and dog, and then go straight from that into exam mode.

I am completely baffled by the idea of having a long and emotional acknowledgment section in a thesis defense. In the thesis, sure-- mine runs two pages (space-and-a-half)-- but not in the talk. That'd just be freaky.

But then, I'm somewhat baffled by the idea of acknowledgments in talks generally. Not recognizing the contributions of co-authors and funding agencies-- that, you have to do-- but having a separate slide for noting all the people who helped out with the project at one time or another.

Read on »

Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:29 AM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Torture Is Wrong

Category: Politics • Religion • War

Fred Clark of Slacktivist points to the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, and specifically their Banners Across America project:

NRCAT is making June the month for Banners Across America! We are asking congregations of all sizes, from every state, and all faiths, to join in a public witness against torture by displaying a banner outside their place of worship during Torture Awareness Month (June 2008).

Our goal is to have banners displayed by NRCAT member congregations in all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico.

(Update: Note that the map is deceptive-- they have a list of 200-ish participating congregations linked from that page).

It's sad that anyone in this country, in this day and age, needs to launch this sort of project. But I applaud their efforts to remind people of basic human decency. As Fred says, though, why stop there?

"Torture is wrong" is a statement every religious congregation can agree to bear witness to, but it is not exclusively a religious testimony. Next to the banners on every church on Main Street I'd like to see other banners: "Little Anthony's Pizza says 'torture is wrong,'" "Prime Cuts Salon says 'torture is wrong,'" "John's Tavern says 'torture is wrong.'"

Can I get a witness?

Amen, brother.

Torture is wrong. Pass it on.

Posted by Chad Orzel at 7:22 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

links for 2008-05-21

Category: Links Dump

• FemaleScienceProfessor: The Five Stages of Proposal Writing
  Six, if you live in a trailer park.
  (tags: academia science economics)
• slacktivist: Bacchanal
  "I haven't seen Prince Caspian yet, but since it was the "No. 1 Movie" this weekend, let's revisit what that wonderful little book was about: Prince Caspian is about beer."
  (tags: books movies literature religion politics food)
• Phoenix Lander Is Ready for Risky Descent to Mars - New York Times
  "Although the Phoenix lander, a conglomeration of parts from two earlier failed missions, has been tested and rechecked to correct all known design flaws and potential errors, Dr. Weiler said, "there are always the unknown unknowns.""
  (tags: science astronomy planets space)
• Fit After Forty: Staying in the Game : The Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Blog : Los Angeles Times
  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar offers tips for extending your basketball career.
  (tags: basketball sports)

Posted by Chad Orzel at 5:35 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

May 20, 2008

Assume a Spherical FutureBaby...

Category: FutureBaby! • Life Science • Medicine • Science • Silliness

Welcome to today's exciting episode of "How Big a Dork Am I?" Today, we'll be discussing the making of unnecessary models:

In this graph, the blue points represent the average mass in grams of a fetus at a given week of gestation, while the red line is the mass predicted by a simple model treating the fetus as a sphere of uniform density with a linearly increasing radius.

Read on »

Posted by Chad Orzel at 2:20 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

If You Look Closely, You Can Make Out the Jet Pack

Category: FutureBaby!

I think it's the bright thing right in the middle of this ultrasound image. Because, of course, in the Future we'll all have personal jet packs, even the babies...

A somewhat more recognizable picture:

Read on »

Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:59 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Non-Dorky Poll: The Creepiest Song in the World

Category: Music

The new Death Cab for Cutie album was released last week, and I've been intermittently earwormed with the first single, "I Will Possess Your Heart." And, wow, is that one of the creepiest songs ever-- you get the sense that he's not entirely sure whether he needs to possess the rest of her, or if her heart in a jar in the basement would suffice.

You don't see many pop songs that are quite that unabashedly creepy. Which makes this seem like a good topic for a Non-Dorky Poll, in multiple-choice format:

The creepiest pop song ever is:
A) "Every Breath You Take" by the Police
B) "Creep" by Radiohead
C) "My Curse" by the Afghan Whigs(*)
D) "I Will Possess Your Heart" by Death Cab for Cutie
E) Some other song that I will name in the comments.

Leave your answer in the comments. Explaining your reasoning is a bonus, but not strictly necessary on a multiple-choice test.

Read on »

Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:48 AM • 104 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

McCain is Radioactive

Category: Politics

Matt Nisbet has a post up talking about McCain's environment ad, and linking to a Media Curves study tracking people's reactions to the spot.

What's interesting from the results, is that in the beginning of the ad, Democrats respond positively to the opening pandora's box frame focusing on hurricanes, all three partisan groups decline in reaction to the discussion of two gridlocked polar extremes on the issue, and then Republicans spike favorably to the frame focus on national security and moral duty respectively.

Actually, I thought that the most interesting part of the ad was that all three sets of responses-- Democrats, independents, and Republicans-- jumped sharply in a negative direction every time McCain spoke. Just the phrase "I'm John McCain, and I approved this ad" got a negative reaction, even from Republicans.

Other than that, I don't think there was really anything surprising there-- at the beginning, it looks like a Democratic ad, so the Democrats respond positively, but as soon as it becomes clear that it's a Republican spot, their support comes crashing down. It's a neat site, though, and I like the tracking gimmick.

Read on »

Posted by Chad Orzel at 7:54 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

links for 2008-05-20

Category: Links Dump

• New family of quaternary iron-based compounds superconducts at tens of kelvin - Physics Today May 2008
  "Last year it looked as though high-Tc superconductivity takes place only in CuO2 planes. Now that LaOFeAs has broken the cuprates' monopoly, what other superconductors wait to be discovered?"
  (tags: physics materials energy science news)
• The Twin Paradox
  A collection of explanations
  (tags: physics relativity science education)
• Wired Science . Education | PBS
  The semi-finalists in Wired's contest for student videos explaining science.
  (tags: science education internet video)
• Cocktail Party Physics: c is for carbon: part one
  "[A] two-part Q&A -- more like a conversation, really -- in which Eric [Roston] chats with hardcore bibliophile Jen-Luc Piquant about [The Carbon Age], the writing process, climate change, rising gas prices, and what carbon could possibly have in common w
  (tags: books science physics chemistry culture society television blogs)

Posted by Chad Orzel at 5:35 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

May 19, 2008

Religion, Happiness, and History

Category: Religion

Kevin Drum wades into a discussion over a claim that religion leads to happiness (started by Will Wilkinson and picked up by Ross Douthat), and offers an alternate theory for why religious people are happier in America by unhappier in Europe:

This is way outside my wheelhouse, but here's another possibility: Europe has suffered through centuries of devastating religious wars that didn't end until fairly recently. If you live in Western Europe, there's a pretty good chance that you associate strong religiosity with death, destruction, and massive societal grief, not with church bake sales. So whatever you think of religion itself, seeing the end of religious wars, religious terrorism, and massive state-sponsored religious bigotry is almost bound to make you happy. You'd have to be almost literally crazy not to be happier in today's secular Europe than in yesterday's religious Europe.

Enh. I really don't buy this at all.

I mean, what large-scale religious wars has Europe had within living memory? There were religious dimensions to both the troubles in Northern Ireland and the Balkans, but those were so bound up with nationalism that it's hard to call them fundamentally religious conflicts. Other than that, you've got a smattering of terrorism. The great conflicts of the last hundred years have been essentially secular-- the two World Wars had nothing whatsoever to do with religion, and neither did the Cold War.

You can trot out the argument that history runs deeper in Europe, and argue that the religious wars of the 17th century still resonate, but I don't buy that, either. I mean, look at Britain, France, and Germany.

Read on »

Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:15 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Time Dilates When You're Chasing Bunnies

Category: Physics with Emmy

We're just starting out on a walk, and no sooner do I open the gate from the back yard than the dog takes off at a run, hitting the end of the leash and nearly pulling my arm out of the socket.

"Whoa, there," I say. "Take it easy."

"Come on," she says, "We need to go fast! Let's go, let's go, letsgo!"

"What's the hurry? It's a nice day, there's no rush."

"We need to go fast. If we go fast, I'll be younger than that annoying dog out back."

"You know, I'm all in favor of exercise, but I think you're overstating the benefits."

"No, silly, it's not about exercise. It's physics. When I go fast, time slows down. It's Simple Relativity."

"The name is Special Relativity, actually."

"Whatever. The point is, light bounces around in triangles, so time slows down, and I get younger. So let's gooooo!!!"

Read on »

Posted by Chad Orzel at 11:10 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Compare and Contrast

Category: Japan • Pictures

Mike Hoye rides the Tokyo subway and takes a picture of it:

Here's my view of the same scene (from this Flickr set):

I really hope he was sitting down when he took that.

Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:49 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks