May 13, 2006
A study in contrasting approaches:
Scott Spiegelberg says sensible things about introducing people to classical music.
A. C. Douglas makes me less likely to listen to classical music any time soon.
May 13, 2006
It's a grey and rainy weekend morning, and I'm facing a day at work trying to put things in order before I leave for DAMOP on Tuesday, so I'm not in a big hurry to get moving. Of course, I'm not feeling all that inspired, blog-wise, either, so I'm going to fall back on one of the staples of lazy…
May 12, 2006
The approval for the second year of my NSF grant just came through. This wasn't really in doubt, but it's nice to have confirmation that the thirty-odd thousand dollars I was counting on to run the next year of the experiment will actually, you know, be available when I start sending purchase…
May 12, 2006
I keep meaning to write a substantial follow-up post talking about science funding, but it's not a great Friday topic, so it'll probably wait for Monday, even though I'll be away for the latter part of next week. I'm moving a little too slowly this morning to really do it justice, so here are some…
May 12, 2006
A very nice post from Rob Knop, exploring the the role of faith in science:
You may then ask, am I not then taking many of the results of science as faith, since I didn't check all of the experimental results and subsequent analysis myself? Answer: yes and no. It is a lowercase-f "faith", in that I…
May 12, 2006
Last night was the third annual faculty-student basketball game, held as a fund-raiser for charity by a local sorority. This year the threw us a team that included five players from the varsity, including the only 2,000-point scorer in school history. Needless to say, we didn't win...
It was sorta…
May 11, 2006
Well before I was a footnote in a list of popular science blogs, I started out into the world of weblogging by starting a book log, which I still maintain, sort of. I haven't posted anything to it in a few months because, well, this site takes up most of my blogging energy, and I do have a day job…
May 11, 2006
Via Arcane Gazebo, a pointer to the Blender list of "The 500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born." At least, it was a pointer to that article last night-- all Blender links seem to be 404ing this morning, which also means I can't discuss the songs in detail.
That's fine, actually, as the list is…
May 11, 2006
Via a LiveJournal post on the dorkiest thing ever, a link that isn't new, but new to me: The Lord of the Rings in quotes from The Princess Bride:
PETER JACKSON: Frodo and Sam don't get burned up by the lava.
AUDIENCE: What?
PETER JACKSON: Frodo and Sam don't get burned up by the lava. I'm…
May 10, 2006
Prompted in part by Rob Knop's post on meeting with humanists, an observation about the nature of academia attributed to our late Dean of the Faculty, a former Classics professor:
The key difference between disciplines in terms of administrative business on campus is that scientists tend to do…
May 10, 2006
As noted in passing in the previous post, I try to ride my bike to and from work when the weather is nice enough. In a good week, I might get three bike rides a week in, which is a little extra exercise, and that much more gas I don't have to buy.
The major drawback of this plan, other than the…
May 9, 2006
Woke up, got out of bed
Ran a comb across my head...
8:40: Leave home, bike to work.
8:50: Arrive at work, stow bike in lab
8:55: Download electronically submitted papers to be graded. Determine which students haven't handed papers in yet.
9:15: Change into teaching clothes, review lecture notes…
May 9, 2006
One of the perks of my job is that sometimes people send me books for free. Granted, these are mostly introductory physics textbooks, which tend not to be page-turners, but I'm a big fan of books, and I'm a big fan of free stuff, so free books are great.
Thus, when I was contacted by someone from…
May 8, 2006
A low-key True Lab Story, in honor of the previous post on knowing more about your experiment than anybody else.
One of the first times I had to run my grad school experiment all by myself, I had trouble getting the discharge in the metastable atom source to light. I went through all the usual…
May 8, 2006
Derek Lowe offers another Law of the Lab, and it's a good one:
Today's law is: You are in real trouble if someone knows more about your project than you do. That's a realization that hits people at some point in their graduate school career - preferably not much past the midpoint. It marks the…
May 8, 2006
Timothy Burke, my go-to-guy for deep thoughts about academia, had a nice post about student evaluations last week. Not ecvaluations of students, evaluations by students-- those little forms that students fill out at many schools (not Swarthmore, though) giving their opinion of the class in a…
May 6, 2006
The Powers That Be at Seed/ ScienceBlogs are initiating a new feature, cleverly called "Ask a ScienceBlogger," in which they will pose one question a week to the group of us, and we'll answer (or not) as we choose. The inaugural question was posted last night:
If you could cause one invention from…
May 5, 2006
I'm going to be busy nearly all day today with our annual undergraduate research symposium on campus. I'm bribing some of my intro students to attend (five points on next week's exam), and chairing a session, and judging the annual student research award, so it's a full day.
As a distraction (the…
May 5, 2006
For the record: I am well aware that the tornado ad for the History Channel is incredibly annoying. You may or may not have noticed the additional charming feature that it breaks links that it passes over, at least in some browsers (Opera and Safari).
The dissatisfaction with the ad has been…
May 5, 2006
Well, OK, they're mostly not new, just new to me. I'm vaguely ashamed at having to rely on Sean Carroll to point out new blogs to me, especially since one of the authors comments here moderately regularly, but my defense is that unlike faculty at semester schools, who are winding things down, I'm…
May 4, 2006
Dr. What Now? has a nice and timely post about helping students prepare for oral presentations, something I'll be doing myself this morning, in preparation for the annual undergraduate research symposium on campus Friday. Of course, being a humanist, what she means by oral presentation is a…
May 4, 2006
Since people have asked about the outcome of the Mike and Mike "Mount Sportsmore" thing that kicked off yesterday's post about iconic scientists, I made it a point to catch their final list today:
Muhammed Ali
Babe Ruth
Michael Jordan
Wayne Gretzky
They specifically put Jackie Robinson off in a…
May 3, 2006
Another set of Quantum Optics notes, dealing with entanglement, superposition, EPR paradoxes, and quantum cryptography. A whole bunch of really weird stuff...
Lecture 11: Superposition and entanglement.
Lecture 12: EPR "paradox," introduction to Local Hidden Variables.
Lecture 13: Local Hidden…
May 3, 2006
On the way in to work, I was listening to ESPN radio's Mike & Mike show, and they were discussing "Mount Sportsmore," that is, the Mount Rushmore of sports. They had two of the four spots filled with Babe Ruth and Muhammed Ali, and were debating baseball players for the other two (which is…
May 2, 2006
A couple of good science stories in today's New York Times:
First, an article on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The current news hook, weirdly, appears to be a recent calculation of the expected magnitude of the signal resulting from the collision and merger of two…
May 2, 2006
I had a surreal moment in the airport on the way out Friday, when I got a call from a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor and spent half an hour talking about particle physics and physics funding and whatnot in the gate area. The guy sitting next to me was reading a magazine about NASCAR,…
May 1, 2006
I'm back from the Vegas trip, lighter by about $100 at the tables (thanks entirely to a bad run Sunday morning at the tables, one of those games where you get dealt a 19 with the dealer showing a 4, and the dealer draws four cards to a 20...), and heavier by well, quite a bit, probably, as I rather…
April 28, 2006
I'm going to Vegas, baby!
A good friend from college is getting married this summer, and there's a bachelor party for him this weekend at a casino in Las Vegas. It looks to be quite the affair, with thirty-odd guys, and reservations at a bunch of cool spots, because they're high-rolling financiers…
April 28, 2006
We had 45 responses to yesterday's poll/quiz question-- thank you to all who participated. The breakdown of answers was, by a quick count:
How do you report your answer in a lab report?
0 votes A) 4.371928645 +/- 0.0316479825 m/s
3 votes B) 4.372 +/- 0.03165 m/s
18 votes C) 4.372 +/- 0.032 m/s…
April 27, 2006
The big physics story of the day is bound to be this new report on American particle physics:
The United States should be prepared to spend up to half a billion dollars in the next five years to ensure that a giant particle accelerator now being designed by a worldwide consortium of scientists can…
