October 2, 2009
Via His Holiness, there is an aggressively stupid paragraph in a New York Times movie review today:
Did you hear the one about the guy who lived in the land of Uz, who was perfect and upright and feared God? His name was Job. In the new movie version, "A Serious Man," some details have been changed…
October 2, 2009
I'm teaching my Quantum Optics class again this term, out of a completely different textbook than last time around-- I'm using Mark Fox's Quantum Optics from the Oxford Master Series in AMO Physics, which is more of a regular textbook. I've got six students-- four junior and senior physics majors,…
October 2, 2009
We're currently in the early stages of the annual DonorsChoose fundraiser, helping to raise money for educational projects. This is especially important in the current economic climate-- even before things went south, many schools and classrooms were strapped for cash, but now it's even worse.
But…
October 2, 2009
Physics Buzz: Space invaders: cosmic rays arrive for their 100th birthday
"Cosmic rays constantly bombard earth's atmosphere at a rate of about 100 per square meter per second, but they don't make it through intact. They collide with atmospheric molecules, setting of a cascading shower of…
October 1, 2009
SteelyKid says, "Baby Blogging time again? Can it wait? I'm in the middle of a book..."
She is her parents' daughter... And also a Great Big Baby, as you can see from this picture of her cuddling Appa:
To really appreciate the contrast, look at this shot from Week 2 of Baby Blogging:
She's grown…
October 1, 2009
"OK, thanks very much. I'll pick it up at six, or a little after." I hang up the phone. I can feel the dog's eyes on my back.
"So what was that about?" she asks.
"Oh, that was the Ford dealer," I say casually. "They're done with my car." The dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree a few days ago…
October 1, 2009
As you may have seen on some other ScienceBlogs blogs, it's time again for the annual DonorsChoose fundraiser:
If you haven't been here in past years, DonorsChoose is a charity dedicated to education. They take specific proposals from school teachers looking for items to help their classes--…
October 1, 2009
slacktivist: In the belly of the fish
"My fundie Bible teachers considered this the main, or even the only, point of this story worth considering. Their task, as they saw it, was to defend the story as being "literally" true, and so they'd share legends (see Bartley, James) of sailors swallowed…
September 30, 2009
I'm a little fried from yesterday's frantic running around, so while there are a couple of physics things I'd like to write about, I have neither the time nor the brainpower. So here's a silly little poll, prompted by the large amount of ice I go through at home (I'm trying to lose some weight, so…
September 30, 2009
I've gotten a couple of emails asking what I think of the fact that the new president of Williams College is a theoretical physicist. So, here are my (very brief) thoughts on the matter:
1) As a general matter, I'm happy to see scientists in administrative positions. They tend to have a better…
September 30, 2009
Over at SciFi Wire, the house magazine of the Polish syphilis channel, Wil McCarthy has a piece with the eye-catching headline "Is Mysticism Overtaking Science in Sci-Fi?"
What really excites me right now--and not in a good way!--is the recent spate of superficially sci-fi movies that are not…
September 30, 2009
Oscar-O-Meterâ¢: The A.V. Club's third annual guide to the fall prestige movies, part one | Film | A.V. Club
"Provided you take our word for it and don't go back into the archives, the A.V. Club's Oscar-O-Meter feature has quickly become the definitive tool for Oscar prognostication. Through a…
September 29, 2009
SteelyKid has a bit of flu, so we're all a little discombobulated in Chateau Steelypips. I'm going to be trying to get a full day's worth of work before noon, which won't leave room for much blogging.
But here's something for you to think about/ comment on: the day after tomorrow is October 1,…
September 29, 2009
I've grown thoroughly disgusted with most of the science-vs-religion stuff in blogdom, mostly because my views on the matter are kind of moderate, and don't fit well with the rather extreme positions taken by most of the bloggers and commenters who focus on this issue. This dooms me to either being…
September 29, 2009
YouTube - LittleDog Clips and Outtakes
Very cool walking robot footage.
(tags: robots video youtube technology gadgets science)
Essay - Why Good Writers Can Be Bad Conversationalists - NYTimes.com
"Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I'm…
September 28, 2009
This book is, in some ways, a complement to Unscientific America. Subtitled "Talking Substance in an Age of Style," this is a book talking about what scientists need to do to improve the communication of science to the general public. This is not likely to make as big a splash in blogdom as…
September 28, 2009
It's that time of year again, when the Nobel Prizes are announced-- the official announcements will be made starting next Monday. And, as usual, people are speculating about who will win, on both an amateur and professional basis.
Meanwhile, as we've done in the past, I will offer a valuable prize…
September 28, 2009
Smarter people go to college, so average university students less intelligent? : Gene Expression
"Remember that a substantial proportion of college graduates are less intelligent than a substantial proportion of those without college degrees. While the proportion of the population with college…
September 27, 2009
There has been a fair amount of discussion of Graham Farmelo's The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom-- Peter Woit reviewed it on his blog, the New York Times reviewed it a couple of Sundays ago, Barnes and Noble's online review did a piece on it, etc.. Nearly all of…
September 27, 2009
Fantastical Conceits and Turbulent Souls - The Barnes & Noble Review
"[O]ne of the field's premier independent publishers, NESFA Press, has just embarked on a six-volume set, The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, consolidating all of Zelazny's fiction shy of novel length, as well as all his…
September 26, 2009
Zoom-Whirl Orbits in Black Hole Binaries
Title of the week from PRL.
(tags: science physics articles theory gravity)
Phase-Slip Interferometry for Precision Force Measurements
"We demonstrate a novel atom interferometric force sensor based on phase slips in the dynamic evolution of a squeezed-…
September 25, 2009
So, who are the people in yesterday's poll about theoretical physicists, and why should you know them?
Three of the four shared a Nobel Prize for developing quantum electrodynamics. In reverse order of voting:
Julian Schwinger was an American physicist who came up with a very formal, mathematically…
September 25, 2009
We're working on moving SteelyKid from formula to milk (which isn't going all that well-- dairy seems to make her gassy). This has led me to switch over to cereal in the mornings, since we're buying milk anyway, which frees up the time otherwise spent waiting for the toaster.
Cereal-wise, I tend to…
September 25, 2009
The Microhistorical Unknown « Easily Distracted
"One thing that frustrates me at times about "big history", world history or large-scale historical sociology is the extent to which historians writing in those traditions tend to assume that it's turtles all the way down, that the insights of big…
September 24, 2009
SteelyKid says, "Daaaad! This is no time for Baby Blogging!"
"Appa and I are reading Dinosaur vs. Bedtime. Come back and take a picture later!"
SteelyKid has started to get interested in books, though as you can tell from the orientation of this one, she doesn't exactly have the reading thing down…
September 24, 2009
I'm nearly done with Graham Farmelo's biography of Dirac (honest), which discusses the major attempts to understand the behavior of electrons in quantum mechanics. this calls for a dorky poll:
Which theorist of the electron was the best?(poll)
Try not to base your selection on which of these…
September 24, 2009
One of the photo caption contest winners, Nick O'Neill, has finished his galley proof, and posted an early review of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
Casual physics intro books are quite possibly the hardest subgenre of physics books to write. Textbooks and further upper-level reading have…
September 24, 2009
$6/Kg to orbit -- KarlSchroeder.com
"The fact is, there is only one problem worth speaking about in space development, and that is the problem of cost-to-orbit. It currently costs around $10,000/kg to launch anything at all.
That price will never come down as long as chemical rockets are the…
September 23, 2009
I usually try to stay out of religious wars, but there's one that is affecting my teaching this term, and it struck me as a good topic for a blog poll:
Which do you prefer for low-tech presentations?(surveys)
So, what's your favorite low-tech presentation technology?
September 23, 2009
Infinite Summer » Blog Archive » Summer's End Roundtable, Part I
"How about that ending, huh? "
(tags: books literature blogs infinite-summer)
US LHC Blog » Relationships in Physics Graduate School
"Doing a quick poll of graduate students in our department showed the following:
* Atomic…
