"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.
"My older son, Gabe, turned 3 in May, and I knew this would be the season I would finally take him to his first basketball game. I wanted the experience to be fun, the start of what I hoped would be a lifetime of basketball fandom. "
"A well-entrenched narrative tells the story of the Einstein-Bohr debate as one in which Einstein's tries, from 1927 through 1930, to prove the quantum theory incorrect via thought experiments exhibiting in-principle violations of the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle, only to have Bohr find the flaw in each, after which Einstein shifts his direction of attack, faulting the quantum theory now not as incorrect, but incomplete. [...]
That something is seriously wrong with this triumphalist narrative has been remarked upon by various authors for more than twenty years."
"According to team sources, when teammate Tony Parker failed to call out the angle of a bank shot later in the game, Duncan glared at the point guard for the entire fourth quarter."
"What made Dr. K memorable was a gimmick he employed that began with his introduction at the beginning of his first class:
"Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures ... one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day."
And thus began our ten-week course."
The New York Times list of "Notable Books for 2009" has been released, which means it's time for my annualrant about how they've slighted science books. So, how did they do this year? Here are the science books on this year's list:
The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn By LOUISA GILDER
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science By RICHARD HOLMES
Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places By BILL STREEVER
The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America By STEVEN JOHNSON
The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom By GRAHAM FARMELO
That's five books that are definitely about science, the most since 2005, and does not include The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by Mary Beard, The Lost City Of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann, or The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox, all of which might contain some science content, depending on what you count as a science.
Honestly, I can't complain. Nice work, New York Times.
"Galaxy Zoo has developed an outstanding game where you can help astronomers by doing something that humans easily defeat computers at: visually matching galaxies to simulations!"
"The influence of Reality TV has been insidious, pervasive. It has ruined television, and by ruining television it has ruined America. Maybe America was already ruined, but if so, it's now even more ruined. Let us itemize the crop damage."
"While many would agree that "counting your blessings" is a worthwhile practice, there hasn't been much experimental research on whether gratitude really has a positive impact on our lives. Several studies have found that gratitude correlates with positive emotions such as happiness, pride, and hope, but experimental work -- showing that gratitude causes these things -- is scarcer.
Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough figured it would be worthwhile to explore this notion. Their method of study was both ingenious and simple: they would ask 201 students in a health psychology class to respond to a weekly questionnaire. Everyone rated their well-being, was tested on a measure of gratefulness, and reported on their physical health and level of exercise. "
"Here in Dane County, Wis., which includes Madison, the implausible has happened: the rate of infant deaths among blacks plummeted between the 1990s and the current decade, from an average of 19 deaths per thousand births to, in recent years, fewer than 5.
The steep decline, reaching parity with whites, is particularly intriguing, experts say, because obstetrical services for low-income women in the county have not changed that much. "
"Differences are often real and they can have significance for people trying to do things like recruit students or treat patients or get along with others, but seminar speakers pretending that generic statements are profound are not going to help us learn anything useful about differences."
Windows is pleading to be allowed to install updates, so I'm going through closing browser tabs that I opened foolishly thinking I might write about them. In that list is yet another blog post on how electronic books will kill traditional publishing. This one is fundamentally an economic argument, claiming that it will soon be more profitable for authors to self-publish on the Kindle than to go through a traditional publisher. I'm a little dubious about this, but it's at least an attempt at a quantitative foundation, rather than the usual boundless techno-optimism.
The first comment to the post has the essential rejoinder to this, which is that publishing is not just about making physical books, but also about selecting and improving books through the editing process. What elevates this to post-worthy is the author's response to this, which is generally pretty reasonable, but does include this:
I remain skeptical that the role of the publisher as a gatekeeper is essential. Personally, I've never looked at who the publisher is; I make my decisions purely by Amazon reviews and word-of-mouth.
This kind of misses the point. The claim isn't that there's a big difference in quality between books published by Simon and Schuster vs. books published by Penguin or Bantam or the imprint of your choice. The claim is that there's a big difference between books published by any established traditional publisher, and the millions of books that they choose not to publish. Saying "I go by Amazon reviews and word-of-mouth" is not an answer to this claim, because the books being reviewed at Amazon and discussed on blogs have already passed the publication test. Somebody has deemed them worthy of publication, so the gatekeeping function has already been performed.
While there is publisher-to-publisher variation-- in SF, for example, I'm significantly more likely to try a new author published by Tor than one published by Baen-- it's tiny compared to the variation between the stuff that gets published, and the vast mountains of crap that doesn't make it into print in the first place. If you haven't read slush-- the unpublished, unsolicited manuscripts that publishers get by the thousands-- it's hard to appreciate just how essential the gatekeeping function is.
The best example I've heard of this for the fiction side of things was that if you want to appreciate what editors and publishers do, you should go to fanfiction.net and pick ten works completely at random and read them, or as much of them as you can stand. Then do that every day for a month.
I'm not sure what the non-fiction equivalent of that is, though there ought to be one. "Choose ten blogspot blogs at random and read them" probably comes close. Suggestions are welcome in the comments.
A few other people got the same email I did, promoting a list of the 50 Best Physics Blogs put together by Accredited Online Colleges Dot Org. It's a fine list, with one glaring problem: They didn't include Matt Springer's Built On Facts. As you can probably tell from its frequent tagging for the daily links dump, I'm a big fan, and think Matt's got one of the best physics blogs going.
I could probably come up with a blog or two that I'd drop off the existing list, but that would be impolitic. So let's just add him as the 51st blog, leaving us one blog shy of a pack of cards. The comments of this post would be an excellent place to suggest who ought to be #52 (or maybe two additional blogs, so we could have a couple of jokers), or attempt to assign suits and values to the various blogs on the existing list.
Windows MovieMaker has inexplicably decided to work again, today. Maybe it can only produce useful output on odd-numbered Fridays. Whatever the reason, I was finally able to edit down and paste together a couple of really cute video clips of SteelyKid playing in her babypod:
We can (and do) watch this sort of thing for hours. She very clearly has something she's trying to do, even if we can't quite tell what it is. It's fascinating to see the wheels turning, though, and I can't wait until she can explain what she thinks is going on. whatever it is, she obviously thinks it's pretty cool.
Here's yesterday's turkey a la Good Eats, a little while after coming out of the oven:
As in past years, we brined it overnight. Unlike past years, we didn't have any of the plastic roasting bags, so instead we took advantage of the spiffy new roasting pan (a Christmas gift after the liquid turkey incident) and the convection roast setting on our oven. A 21-lb turkey cooked in 2hrs, and came out pretty darn tasty.
The rest of the menu: funeral potatoes (recipe here), steamed broccoli and green beans, and stuffing. The stuffing is probably my favorite part. How much do I like stuffing? I made a whole extra dish of it, that I didn't even put out, so I would be sure to have plenty of leftovers.
I'm still shaking off last night's food coma, and have to spend a whole bunch of time figuring out how to make the puppet show movie I owe you, because the computer software industry is stupid and evil. So here's a poll about Thanksgiving:
And now, I need to go wrestle with video editing software, which should help me work up an appetite for turkey sandwiches. Mmmmm.... turkey....
"Physicists in the Netherlands are the first to show that spin-polarized electrons can be injected into silicon at room temperature. The team injected the electrons into both p-type and n-type silicon and measured how long the polarization lasted. Although the lifetime was shorter than expected the physicists believe it is long enough to support the development of spintronics devices."
"[H]ere's hoping you find at least a few songs you've never heard before in this list of the 100 (okay, 103 -- we couldn't resist adding a few more) songs we loved the most over the last ten years. We're all rabid music collectors now, and no one's library is ever big enough -- and what's better for a real fan than the thrill of discovering something great? Happy listening!"
"Without question, the last decade has seen a massive shift in the way we collect music, with an emphasis on the collect - thanks to mp3s, music has become one big all-you-can-eat buffet, devaluing everything from bootlegs to boxed sets while changing the definition of "huge collection" from hundreds of CDs to tens of thousands of binary files. And it seems like we've all become aware of a lot more music, too -- this decade lacked a true superstar artist, but if you look back on the last ten years, chances are you'll remember a handful of songs you fell in love with by artists most people have never heard of. Top 40 is dead, and now you're the DJ.
Like our list of the decade's best singles, our albums list is a blend of the major and the obscure -- much like your own ever-expanding library, we imagine."
"Anyone looking for trends in our selection of the best books of the '00s might have a hard time finding them amid the wizards, 19th-century serial killers, dysfunctional families and such. Narrowing down our decisions was pretty tough, and the process required a number of back-and-forths about what was significant as well as beautifully executed, which book from a given author represented his or her best of the decade, and so on. So consider these alphabetically listed selections 30 of the many, many memorable books published this decade, and as always, let us know what we missed."
"This year we give thanks for one of the bedrock principles of classical mechanics: conservation of momentum. (We've previously given thanks for the Standard Model Lagrangian, Hubble's Law, and the Spin-Statistics Theorem.) There are analogous notions once we include relativity or quantum mechanics, but for our present purposes the version that Galileo and Newton would have recognized is good enough: in any interaction between bodies, the total momentum (mass times velocity of each body, added together vectorially) remains conserved.
Now, you might feel somewhat disappointed, thinking that conservation of momentum is important, sure, but not really cool and interesting enough to merit its own Thanksgiving post. How wrong you are!"
"A few years ago, Rolling Stone magazine added fuel to the music snobbery fire with its "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list. Anyone casually paging through the list would notice that the bulk of the list was comprised of songs from the 60's and 70's, just like the music snobs always say.
I, however, wasn't content with the casual analysis. So I punched the list into Excel, crunched some numbers, and found an interesting parallel between the decline of rock music quality and, of all things, the decline in US oil discovery and production"
We hosted Thanksgiving this year, and SteelyKid was the life of the party. When she saw Grandpa make the unwise decision to sit down on the couch with a glass of red wine, she came running, and spilled it all over him. To make up for it, she graciously decided to include him in this week's Baby Blogging:
(He borrowed dry clothes from me.)
We also took advantage of having everyone here to get a Baby Blogging picture with four generations in it:
