April 16, 2007
The big physics news of the week last week came while I was in transit on Wednesday: The MiniBooNE (the odd capitalization is because it's sort of an acronym) neutrino experiment released their first results on the neutrino oscillation studies they've been doing, and found, well, nothing new. In…
April 16, 2007
After three glorious sixty-degree days in California, we returned to Schenectady just in time for a major winter storm. In mid-April. There's an inch or two of icy slush all over everything, and it's still raining. Whee!
It occurs to me again that what we're seeing locally from climate change feels…
April 15, 2007
Scott Aaronson is explaining "Physics for Doofuses," and has started with electricity. He's got a nice breakdown of the basic quantities that you need to keep track of to understand electricity, leading up to Ohm's Law. He asks for a little help on this point, though:
Well, as it turns out, the…
April 14, 2007
Physical Review Letters this week features a paper on a topic that might not seem to be in dispute: Newton's Second Law of Motion:
We have tested the proportionality of force and acceleration in Newton's second law, F=ma, in the limit of small forces and accelerations. Our tests reach well below…
April 14, 2007
The NCUR meeting and associated activities (including a minor little adventure into San Francisco) have kept me really busy over the last few days. We're headed out early this afternoon, which means that we finally have a morning without any obligations. And, of course, there's a cold, steady rain…
April 12, 2007
Greetings from pitch-dark Northern California, where I'm just ecstatically happy to be awake at 5am. Jet lag sucks.
Other things that suck? Weather delays. We were supposed to arrive at about 1:00 yesterday afternoon, but snow in Chicago screwed that up completely. We spent a good hour and a half…
April 10, 2007
I'm headed out to the West Coast at an ungodly hour tomorrow morning, as one of the faculty accompanying the students who are presenting at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research. I'm looking forward to the trip, other than the bit where I have to get up at 4am to go to the airport.…
April 10, 2007
Let me be the millionth person to link to the Washington Post article about the busking virtuoso. Let me also agree with Kevin Drum about the reasons nobody listened:
Plus, of course, IT WAS A METRO STATION. People needed to get to work on time so their bosses wouldn't yell at them. Weingarten…
April 10, 2007
I forgot to link to Sunday's New York Times article about D-Wave and their controversial claim to have made a working quantum computer, which prominently features quotes from the world's second funniest physics blogger:
Scott Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist at the Institute for Quantum…
April 10, 2007
An idle observation: One of the more ironic things about the whole framing argument (other than the sheer number of people talking past one another, as Mike notes in passing) is how quick a lot of the anti-framing people are to declare that Mooney and Nisbet are just completely and totally wrong.…
April 9, 2007
The Official Uncertain Principles Cosmic Jackpot Giveaway Contest was even more popular than I expected, with 122 comments (at the time of this writing) each trying to pick the "best" number.
As promised, the winner will be announced today, but this really comes down to deciding which number is the…
April 9, 2007
The Comics Curmudgeon and others note the death of Johnny Hart, arguably the best known religious wing nut from Broome County, New York, where I grew up. (Sadly, this is not a set of one, as the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue also traces its origins to the Binghamton area.) Hart was the…
April 8, 2007
Bill Hicks on Easter.
"At least a goldfish with a Lincoln Log on its back crawling across your floor to your sock drawer has a miraculous connotation to it."
April 8, 2007
I haven't been following the discussion of the Mooney/ Nisbet "framing" article in Science all that closely, because most of the commentary has tended to be uninteresting in predictable ways. You can find a fairly comprehensive list of links from Bora (who else?), and Matt and Chris respond to most…
April 8, 2007
For those few readers who are really fascinated by the workings of SF fandom, Kevin Standlee has posted a map of the Worldcon membership by country, and by state for the US and prefecture for Japan.
It's interesting not just for the distribution of the actual members, but for the gaps. Africa…
April 7, 2007
There's been a fair bit of discussion of this year's Hugo nominees around the Internets, most of it centering around the gender of the nominees (that link goes to a fairly civilized discussion, which includes links to a rather more heated argument). For those who haven't been following the…
April 7, 2007
I do it for the toys:
OK, it's not like they gave me a robot vacuum cleaner because of the blog, but I spent some of the money I got paid for blogging on this. It helped that there was a talk by Colin Angle of iRobot on campus a while back, talking about the history of the company, as part of the…
April 6, 2007
Yesterday, on my way in to work, I was listening to ESPN radio and Mike Greenberg made a bold assertion (paraphrased slightly):
Jackie Robinson is one of the ten most important Americans of the twentieth century. Not just sports figures, Americans.
Contrary sort that I am, my first thought was "I…
April 5, 2007
Inside Higher Ed today offers a column by Daniel Chambliss of Hamilton College, taking issue with the Spellings commission report on higher education, and its analogies comparinf education to manufacturing:
By the conclusion of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings' recently-convened Test of…
April 4, 2007
As you can see from the picture, my desk is a mess. Also, I've come into possession of a second free copy of Paul Davies's new book Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life (one is an advance reading copy in trade paper, the other a spiffy new hardback). You can read my lukewarm…
April 4, 2007
Eugene Wallingford talks about a great idea for a conference session:
At SIGCSE a couple of weeks ago, I attended an interesting pair of complementary panel sessions. I wrote about one, Ten Things I Wish They Would Have Told Me..., in near-real time. Its complement was a panel called "It Seemed…
April 3, 2007
Saturday's Georgetown- Ohio State game was hyped as featuring a clash of two seven-foot centers, but failed to live up to that billing, as Greg Oden picked up two quick fouls, and sat for most of the first half. Roy Hibbert of Georgetown didn't fare much better.
This has prompted a bunch of pinhead…
April 3, 2007
It's summed up nicely by the discussion at Cosmic Variance, and spelled out explicitly in comment #125 by Marty Tysanner:
Sean coaxingly requested,
Come on, string theorists! Make some effort to explain to everyone why this set of lofty speculations is as promising as you know it to be. It won't…
April 2, 2007
As mentioned in passing in the previous post, we've been having some DSL issues that prevent me from posting anything from home at the moment. Hopefully, Verizon will get this fixed (Kate spent a long time on the phone with them Sunday morning, and they think it's a software problem on their end).…
April 2, 2007
We've been having some problems with our DSL service at Chateau Steelypips again, which has gotten me thinking about the design of devices that are annoying to use. It occurs to me that you might use a sort of control to indicator ratio as a measure of how irritating a device is to use.
This is…
April 1, 2007
I stopped by to support my local independent bookseller yesterday, and was immediately confronted with a dilemma: A big display of signed copies of White Night by Jim Butcher, the new Dresden Files novel. The signed part has nothing to do with the dilemma-- I'm a reader, not a collector-- the…
April 1, 2007
Having watched UCLA set offensive basketball back about fifty years in the first half of last night's game (I didn't watch the second half, as the outcome wasn't in doubt, and really, I'd rather stab myself in the eye with a fork), it's worth taking a few minutes today to discuss one of the most…
April 1, 2007
As we look at science in general, and physics in particular, a clear pattern emerges: the scientific endeavours most worthy of praise and acclaim are the most abstract and mathematical sciences. Physics is of greater worth than biology, theoretical physics is more worthy than experimental physics…
March 31, 2007
There's a nice article about former Princeton coach Pete Carril and the motion offense popularly associated with his teams:
Carril has not been a college coach for 11 years. But he is wearing a Georgetown cap, and people keep calling to talk about the precise pass-and-cut offense that he supposedly…
March 31, 2007
As you undoubtedly already know, the Large Hadron Collider suffered a setback this week:
The start-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN could be delayed after three of the magnets used to focus and manipulate the accelerator's proton beams failed preliminary tests at CERN earlier this week…
