September 3, 2008
We're taking SteelyKid on her first road trip today, down to Boston to visit Kate's parents for a few days. This ought to be interesting, as the drive is approximately as long as her longest naps.
The disruption in her normal routine may or may not lead to an increased need for baby-calming, so…
September 3, 2008
What's this graph?
The cosmic microwave background? Preliminary results from the LHC? No, it's SteelyKid's feeding schedule. The horizontal axis is in days since we brought her home, the vertical axis is time of day on a 24-hour scale (in half-hour bins), and the color scale indicates the duration…
September 2, 2008
Making Light: Why RMS Titanic Didn't Have Enough Lifeboats
"Sixteen hundred people died in the Titanic disaster because no one had worked out the implications of tuned circuits."
(tags: history science blogs gadgets)
The TNR Q&A: Charles Barkley
"People can always bring up stuff. When I get…
September 2, 2008
Comedy Central is re-playing Friday's episodes of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, which includes Stephen Colbert's interview with Lori Lippman Brown of the Secular Coalition for America. It's interesting to see that she doesn't really fare any better than any of the religious nutjobs he's…
September 2, 2008
This was the last of the experiments that I did for my thesis (it's not the last xenon paper I'm an author on, but the work for that one was done while I was writing up), so my memories of it are bound up with the thesis-writing process.
My favorite story about this stuff was when I gave a talk…
September 2, 2008
This is the last of the five papers that were part of my Ph.D. thesis, and at ten journal pages in length, it's the longest thing I wrote. It was also the longest-running experiment of any of the things I did, with the data being taken over a period of about three years, between and around other…
September 2, 2008
Everybody's favorite local troll left a comment in yesterday's links dump about the scandal surrounding Sarah Palin's daughter. It was remarkably coherent for an "Uncle Al" post, and actually bordered on funny.
If you look at it now, though, you'll find it's undergone lossy compression. I dithered…
September 1, 2008
Swans on Tea û How Does Calculus Compare?
Darth Vader explains the Pythagorean Theorem. Why? Why not?
(tags: youtube silly math education)
Roald Dahl's seductive work as a British spy - Telegraph
"I think he slept with everybody on the east and west coasts that [was worth] more than $50,000 a…
September 1, 2008
One week from today, barring anything catastrophic, I will be speaking at the Science in the 21st Century workshop at the Perimeter Institute. Sabine Hossenfelder has a nice run-down of the program at Backreaction, and it sounds really interesting.
I have my talk more or less ready-- I started…
August 31, 2008
Setshot: Basketball for the Aging and Infirm: Politics: McCain panders to aging ballers
"Apparently, "Sarah Barracuda" (her high school hoops nickname) played point guard on a state championship squad from Wasilla, Alaska, but there is scant evidence that she plays anymore."
(tags: US politics…
August 31, 2008
As you have no doubt seen by now, if you read any of the other blogs on ScienceBlogs, the Science Debate 2008 group has gotten Barack Obama to answer their 14 questions on science issues. John McCain has apparently promised answers at some point in the future.
The answers are, well, pretty much…
August 30, 2008
Philosoraptor
"John McCain has revealed that his apparent choice of Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running-mate was, as many observers predicted, a carefully-staged hoax."
(tags: US politics stupid blogs silly)
August 30, 2008
Over at Built om Facts, Matt is working toward a Tope Ten list of physicists. He says the top three are obvious, but he's soliciting nominations for the rest.
Back in the early days of this blog, I ran a poll for the greatest experiment in physics, and there are worse places to start. Newton and…
August 29, 2008
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Stories / Shade by Steven Gould
Teleporteurs sans frontieres.
(tags: SF stories)
Search Magazine - On God
P.J. O'Rourke does his best Gregg Easterbrook impression.
(tags: science religion stupid)
Built on Facts : Falling from Heaven
" If my opinion is…
August 29, 2008
Well, OK, there aren't any graphs, so it's not real Physics Style, but Physics Today has been blogging the Democratic National Convention, talking in detail about the science content. Start with this post, and move forward in time.
They apparently have somebody lined up to file reports from the…
August 29, 2008
As anybody who has studied Quantum Optics knows, correlation functions play a very large role in our understanding of the behavior of light. Roughly speaking, the correlation function tells you how likely you are to detect a second photon some short time after detecting one photon from some source…
August 29, 2008
No, not me. Not literally, anyway-- I'm quite happy with my current family.
Sigma Pi Sigma, the APS, and the AAPT are running a program called "Adopt-a-Physicist to help high school students learn more about what careers in physics are like:
Physicists and students interact through discussion…
August 29, 2008
I departed from my policy of getting convention news only via Daily Show reruns last night, and watched Obama's big acceptance speech. You can find substantive commentary elsewhere, and endless reams of wankery about whether he did what he "needed" to do, blah, blah, blah.
My main thought watching…
August 28, 2008
Shtetl-Optimized û Blog Archive û Can we?
"IâÂÂd like propose the following question: what non-obvious things can nerds who are so inclined do to help the Democrats win in November? "
(tags: politics US society culture computing internet)
I Watched This On Purpose: Bio-Dome | The A.V. Club…
August 28, 2008
I said in the previous post that the time-resolved collision paper was one of my favorite experiences in grad school, even the paper-writing process. It's not so much that the paper-writing process was all that exceptionally good-- it was the usual "paper torture," arguing over every single word in…
August 28, 2008
As I said in the introduction to the previous post, this was the first paper on which I was the lead author, and it may be my favorite paper of my career to date. I had a terrific time with it, and it led to enough good stories that I'm going to split the making-of part into two posts.
The…
August 28, 2008
This paper is the third of the articles I wrote when I was a grad student, and the first one where I was the lead author. It's also probably my favorite of the lot, not just because of the role it played in my career, but because it packs a lot of science into four pages.
The whole thing is…
August 28, 2008
Here's your scaled baby picture for the week:
OK, "scaled" isn't entirely appropriate, as I haven't bothered to keep Appa a constant size in these, but it is the weekly picture of SteelyKid with her standard reference bison.
She continues to grow at an impressive rate, thanks to inheriting her…
August 27, 2008
America Needs To Have A Superficial Conversation About Race | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
"The time for vagueness is now."
(tags: race politics silly internet US diversity society culture)
The Energy Challenge - Wind Energy Bumps Into Power GridâÂÂs Limits - Series - NYTimes.com
Ã…
August 27, 2008
Jennifer Ouellette was inspired by the recent book "meme," and is putting together a similar list of pop-science books.
It might surprise some people, but I haven't been a big reader of pop-science books over the years. In fact, I've read few enough of the books on her list that I'm only going to…
August 27, 2008
The New York Times, its finger squarely on the pulse of SF as always, has a very nice profile of Vernor Vinge. That last bit isn't sarcastic-- it's a good piece. The earlier snark is just because the focus is on a book that's a couple of years old already.
Of course, any Vinge piece will…
August 27, 2008
Over at Sciencewomen, they have a list of six things departments should do to make academic job interviews more comfortable. It's excellent and reasonable advice.
Of course, while it is an excellent post, it also contains more words than it really needs to. In the spirit of physics, which always…
August 26, 2008
Street Corner Science with Leon Lederman | ScienCentral
In which a Nobel laureate answers science questions on the streets of Manhattan.
(tags: science physics education video internet society culture)
'Physics for Future Presidents' :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News,…
August 26, 2008
NIST's Dave Wineland has been awarded the National Medal of Science. Wineland is one of the most impressive figures in modern AMO physics, with a long list of accomplishments. As the NIST release explains:
Wineland is internationally recognized for developing the technique of using lasers to cool…
August 26, 2008
It's four am, and your children are safe and asleep. But there's a phone in a white house, and it's ringing. Something is happening in the lab.
What do you want to answer that phone? Is it a physicist with the experience and knowledge to deal with the apparatus?
Even if he's only just gotten back…
