"Uncertain Principles" features the miscellaneous ramblings of a physicist at a small liberal arts college. Physics, politics, pop culture, and occasional conversations with his dog.
"Prof. Orzel gives the impression of an everyday guy who just happens to have a vast but hidden knowledge of physics." (anonymous student evaluation comment)
Emmy is a German Shepherd mix, and the Queen of Niskayuna. She likes treats, walks, chasing bunnies, and quantum physics.
OK, fine. Today's nice weather is well within the range of seasonal variation for New England. But after a chilly week or two, it was nice to get a chance to go to the park with SteelyKid, who definitely enjoyed it:
Via somebody on a mailing list, Eric Whiteacre's virtual choir:
The post I got this from doesn't contain any details, nor does it contain useful links to the making of this particular video, but looking around the top level of the blog it's fairly clear that this was put together from a large number of individual videos of people singing just one part of the song. He's got another piece underway, and you can see some of the individual parts.
This is one of those really cool and impossible-to-predict things you get with the modern Internet. And I think this stuff is ultimately a lot cooler than anything coming out of the blogging-as-journalism model.
"Kessler fearlessly accuses major restaurant chains of a crime they brag about, relying on unnamed "insiders" to reveal that comestible pushers such as Cinnabon and The Cheesecake Factory deliberately make their food delicious--or, as he breathlessly puts it, "design food specifically to be highly hedonic." Kessler certainly has the goods on the corporate conspiracy to serve people food they like."
"Sorry: there's no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980. It may be something you've heard, it may be something you'd like to believe, but it just didn't happen."
"In four years of the power-beaming competition, LaserMotive is the only competitor to qualify for a cash prize.
Thomas Nugent and Jordin Kare, the company's principals, do not believe that a space elevator will be built any time soon, but they say the technology will find other commercial applications like powering small robotic aircraft. "This is a business for us," Mr. Nugent said. "We're trying to turn this into a commercial endeavor.""
"[C]ontra the received opinion I'd like to argue that in fact it's easily possible to be an perfectly effective president while spending shockingly little time behind the Resolute desk. In fact for much of early American history presidents did just that - ie, very little. The presidency and the country have both changed, but in my opinion even today the president simply doesn't have to do much to do perform his job with great competence. Now I don't expect that any modern president will actually take as little time as I'm going to suggest; the very type of person who is attracted to the job and can campaign effectively is necessarily the kind of person who's willing, able, and eager to manage as much as possible. But he doesn't have to be."
We subscribe to Locus, the SF review and news magazine, and every month when it arrives, I flip through it quickly to look at the ads. This is a useful guide to what's coming out from various publishers, but it's also kind of fascinating to see how the different publishers market their stuff.
In particular, it's interesting to see how Baen pitches their books, because they are aimed with laser-like precision at people who aren't me. I'm sure their ads work very well for their target audience, but they make their forthcoming books sound absolutely horrifying to me. This month's ad may be the ultimate, featuring the following plug for a Tom Kratman book:
Undercover Infidels!
Europe 2123. Dhimmitude-- assigning second-class citizenship to non-Muslims-- has dug its claws into the continent. Now a West Point grad must rescue a young girl sold into sexual slavery after her family could not pay the Christian Tax. U. S. Army vertean Tom Kratman notches up another controversial thriller!
If that didn't scream "Run away!!!" loudly enough, there's a glowing quote from Mark Steyn. I'm not sure it would be possible to construct a more appalling book ad.
Oh, wait, I stand corrected: later in the same issue, there's a plug for The Science Behind the Secret, featuring a quote from noted con man tv psychic John Edward claiming that quantum mechanics is the basis for the "Law of Attraction." This is also a Baen book, coming in March. And it pretty much guarantees that even if they publish something I might like (hey, it could happen), I'll be getting it from the library, rather than giving them any of my beer money.
"This place is not a place of honor.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Nothing valued is here.
This place is a message and part of a system of messages.
Pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us.
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture."
"Welcome to our Best of 2009 top 10 lists for Science. We've put our editors' picks and our 2009 bestsellers for each category on the same page together, so you can easily compare. Click on "Editors' Picks" to see our editors' list of the best science books of 2009, including our top pick, The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes's delightfully masterful group biography of the adventurous scientists of Britain's Romantic age. And click on "Customer Favorites" to find the bestselling science books at Amazon.com during 2009"
"We were talking about college preparation, and the various options and obstacles. In reference to a program that seems like it should work, but somehow doesn't, she mentioned that so many students move during the course of a year that it's not unusual for a majority of a class to turn over during the year. When students bounce from town to town -- it sounds like most of the moves are relatively local -- it's hard for any single program to gain serious traction, no matter how well-run it might be.
That seemed hard to accept, so I asked around on campus for the last few days to see if others had heard or seen the same thing. They had. Apparently, one of the features of our local low-income community is extremely high transience. "
"You know how some people are ideas writers, and their ideas are so amazingly brilliant that you don't care they can't really write character and plot? Ted Chiang is like that, except that his characters and plots are that good as well. His stories all arise out of astonishing SFnal ideas, they couldn't happen except in the contexts where they do happen, but they have characters with emotional trajectories that carry them along as well. He always gets the arc of story exactly right, so you know what you need to know when you need to know it and the end comes along in perfect timing and socks you in the jaw. "
"It's a question of character, of friendship. Hell, Leo, I ain't afraid to say it, it's a question of ethics." --Giovanni Gaspari
I'm back to lunchtime hoops after a two-week layoff due to teaching responsibilities. And this has reminded me of one of the great character tests that sports provide. Imagine that you're playing basketball, but are too tired to keep running with the fast break in both directions. You can't quit without pissing everybody off, though, and there's no-one you can have sub in for you. What do you do?
This question is a nearly infallible test of a person's character. Except for those annoying bastards who are in such good shape that they never get tired of running. You never can tell what those guys will do.
Today's Quantum Optics lecture is about quantum computing experiments, and how different types of systems stack up. Quantum computing, as you probably know if you're reading this blog, is based on building a computer whose "bits" can not only take on "0" and "1" states, but arbitrary superpositions of "0" and "1". Such a computer would be able to out-perform any classical computer on certain types of problems, and would open the exciting possibility of a windows installation that is both working and hung up at the same time.
There are roughly as many types of proposed quantum computers as there are people working on quantum computation. It's not clear which of them, if any, will eventually prove to be useful, meaning that this is the perfect subject for a blog poll:
While this is a poll about quantum computing, the machines running the poll are strictly classical, so you can only choose one option.
"Why it's daunting: Science fiction and fantasy get a lot of mileage out of taking their readers to new worlds, but most classic genre fiction is really about making new worlds seem like home. The Lord Of The Rings would lose a lot of its appeal if the hobbits had no Shire to return to, and Isaac Asimov's Foundation series wouldn't be nearly as effective if the heroes weren't bent on protecting a sane, prosperous status quo. Philip K. Dick doesn't play by the same rules. While his work has clear genre roots, using such familiar tropes as androids, time travel, precognition, and space travel, he operates by a surreal common sense that's simultaneously lucid and fever-dream absurd. In 36 novels and more than 120 stories, he used fiction to work out his own particular philosophy, and the results aren't always immediately accessible."
"College basketball is about college, and it's about basketball. Our Game belongs to those who are still young enough to play it.
College basketball is an experience that's only fully understood by actual students. There's a special bond between a student section and players (especially walk-ons) that's hardly ever captured in published words, much less "Coke Madness." As you watch from the bleachers, you know those players made the same choice as you did. You might not have been actively recruited like they were. But those are your friends and representatives, working on your behalf to validate a shared, life-altering decision about where to get educated. "
"Inside his lighted, glassed-in command post, the captain of the East German border guard, a beefy guy with a square jaw and the dark bristly air of a Doberman, stood dialing and redialing his telephone. For hours he vainly sought instructions. Certainly he was confused. Most likely he was frightened. The crowds before him had broiled out of nowhere, grown so fast, unlike anything he had ever seen, and now they pushed so close that their breath, frosting in the night, mingled with that of his increasingly anxious men."
"This language of Lego isn't just something our family has invented; every Lego-building family must have its own vocabulary. And the words they use (mostly invented by the children, not the adults) are likely to be different every time. But how different? And what sort of words?
Hence, a survey. I asked fellow parents to donate their children for a few minutes, and name a selection of Lego pieces culled from the Lego parts store."
"Does everyone see a little bit of themselves in animated cartoon characters? Or do the artists actually draw the characters to look more generic, less racially distinctive? There have been few studies about the perceived race and ethnicity of animated cartoon characters, and none focusing on the unique Japanese anime style."
"[I]t seems that a lot of people are missing the point of NaNoWriMo altogether. Despite Chris Baty's invitation to "write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together," a lot of folks are getting really amped up about having finally written a piece of fiction of substantial length and are more concerned about FINALLY BECOMING AUTHORS ZOMG than about having fun writing crap, which is what the contest is really about. If even one sentence of whatever you concoct in the spirit of NaNoWriMo leads you into a publishable novel somewhere down the road (with substantial editing and revision, of course), you should count yourself lucky."
"The words left behind are ironically what the books are about, but not in the way their authors intended. The evangelical/fundamentalists, from their crudest egocentric celebrities to their "intellectuals" touring college campuses trying to make evangelicalism respectable, have been left behind by modernity. They won't change their literalistic anti-science, anti-education, anti-everything superstitions, so now they nurse a deep grievance against "the world." This has led to a profound fear of the "other.""
"[W]hen students were asked whether their professors understand technology and have integrated it into their courses, only 38 percent said Yes. Further, when students were asked about the top impediment to using technology, the top answer was "lack of faculty technology knowledge," an answer that drew 45 percent of respondents, up from 25 percent only a year ago.
And only 32 percent of students said that they believed their college was adequately preparing them to use technology in their careers."
For this week's Baby Blogging, we have a shot of Kate helping SteelyKid with her new favorite game:
It's called "Take off my shoes, and put them back on." She can play this for hours. It would be even cuter if she could do the putting on and taking off herself, but alas, she's still kind of unclear on the solidity of objects, and doesn't really grasp that her feet can only get into the shoes from the open end. She'll get there, though.
SteelyKid officially moved out of the infant room at day care this week. She's now in the next age/ development group, termed "Waddlers" (an intermediate step between "Infants" and "Toddlers"). I very briefly considered going for the alliterative "Wednesday Waddler Blogging," but regained my senses in time. We're going to stick with "Thursday Baby Blogging" for a while yet.
"Prof. Orzel gives the impression of an everyday guy who just happens to have a vast but hidden knowledge of physics." (anonymous student evaluation comment)
Emmy is a German Shepherd mix, and the Queen of Niskayuna. She likes treats, walks, chasing bunnies, and quantum physics.
