November 18, 2013
In comments to the Sagan post, Niall asked about how I spend my time. This is about to change, as today is the last day of my class for the fall term, then we have an extended break, but it's probably interesting in a life-in-academia way to put up my schedule at the moment:
Monday, Wednesday,…
November 13, 2013
I am crushingly busy right now-- massive book rewrites needed, papers to grade, etc.-- so I've actually been fairly happy with the general lack of topics that inspire a deep desire to blog. which of course, was promptly upset this morning, when a brief outburst of hating on Carl Sagan erupted on…
November 12, 2013
I'm teaching Quantum Optics this term, and one of my students picked "Atom Optics" off the list of suggested paper topics. When he asked for pointers, I said "You should check out the diffraction stuff Markus Arndt's group does." And just like that, a paper from the Arndt group turns up from the…
November 10, 2013
Because I know there are still a few people who come here for the cute-kid pictures, I give you the official SteelyKid portrait for the 2013-14 academic year. This is actually a photo of a photo, because that's the easiest way to convert the print they sent us to a digital format, and also because…
November 7, 2013
Two years ago, as of 4:35 this morning, The Pip was born. And now he's a great big toddler, obsessed with pirates and dinosaurs, running everywhere and talking a LOT...
He's had a bit of a rough week, with another flare-up of conjunctivitis in his right eye, requiring eye ointment and antibiotics,…
November 7, 2013
One of the interesting things about the pile of old theses we found in the basement is the opportunity to look at things that nobody believes any more. Past installments of the Old Thesis Club have shown people fumbling toward an understanding of quantum physics via electron scattering and…
November 5, 2013
In January of 1990, a friend and I designed the ultimate message to an alien civilization.
Okay, admittedly, this wan't a recognized scientific accomplishment. After all, in January of 1990, I was a freshman at Williams. The alien message we designed was part of a first-year Winter Study seminar…
November 3, 2013
October was a very heavy month, blog-wise, and I had planned to continue that labor. In working the word mines, though, I seem to have delved too deep, and unleashed a horde. And they have Halloween candy...
I'll try to fight my way clear by Monday, but not too hard, because, really, look at them.…
October 31, 2013
In 1967, a team of scientists hauled a big pile of gear-- electronics, particle detectors, a giant slab of iron-- into the burial chamber at the base of one of the pyramids at Giza. This sounds like a scene from a science fiction or fantasy novel-- throw in the fact that their first attempt was…
October 30, 2013
An article titled "Individualism: The legacy of great physicists," by Ricardo Heras. crossed my various social media feeds a half-dozen times on Tuesday, so I finally broke down and read it, and I'm puzzled. The argument is very straightforward-- single-author publications used to be common, now…
October 29, 2013
Two papers with a similar theme crossed my social media feeds in the last couple of days. You might think this is just a weird coincidence, but I'm choosing to take it as a sign to write about them for the blog.
So, what are these papers, and what's the theme? One is the final publication of some…
October 28, 2013
A couple of weeks back, DougT won this year's Nobel betting pool, and requested a post on the subject of funding of wacky ieas:
could you comment on this: http://www.space.com/22344-elon-musk-hyperloop-technology-revealed.html and the phenomenon of the uber-rich funding science in general. It seems…
October 26, 2013
[Scene: In the car on the way from soccer to lunch at Five Guys. SteelyKid is in her car seat, studying the Halloween-themed temporary tattoos all over her arms.]
SteelyKid: Do bats fly right-side-up, or upside-down?
Daddy: From the bat's point of view, it's right side up more or less by definition…
October 25, 2013
It's that time of year again when people start thinking about Halloween costumes-- SteelyKid is apparently planning to re-use her Peter Pan outfit from last year-- and the conceptual costumes post from a while back has proved enduringly popular at this time of year. If you're not into conceptual…
October 24, 2013
Via social media, John Novak cashes in a Nobel Betting Pool win from a while back, asking:
Please explain to me the relationship between energy, entropy, and free energy. Like you would explain it to a two year old child.
Why? There is a statistical algorithm called Expectation Maximization…
October 24, 2013
In the interest of household balance, I should note that while The Pip was home sick, SteelyKid had her first taekwondo class. She spent a week bugging us every day about wanting to go, and it falls entirely within the time of her after-school day care, so we said sure. Of course, on the actual day…
October 23, 2013
The Pip has pinkeye. Again. This means he can't go to day care for at least one day, which means I'm home with him for the morning, and Kate will tag in at lunchtime so I can go teach my class. This, in turn, means that you don't get any substantive blogging today, because the second I start typing…
October 22, 2013
When I posted congratulating the winner of this year's Nobel betting pool, I received a gentle reminder in email that I'm a Bad Person and still haven't done one of the posts I owe to the 2011 winners. Evan reminded me that he asked for something about the delayed-choice quantum eraser, so let's…
October 21, 2013
I was pleasantly surprised at how well the What does Science Online Want to Be? post was received-- I kind of expected that to cause more anger than it did. It did prompt a lot of discussion, most of it during the dinner hour in Chateau Steelypips, so it was really hard for me to keep up. Given the…
October 21, 2013
Having spent a bunch of time talking about heavy stuff in the science blogging community, let's unwind a bit and kick the week off with a look back at an old Master's thesis. This one is from 1932, and is almost certainly a draft copy, because it's extremely cheaply bound in cardboard with the…
October 20, 2013
The ongoing mess over Bora Zivkovic's harassment of women writers in connection with his editorial role at Scientific American and Science Online has moved into the "What is to be done now?" phase. The most prominent and linkable of these are from Maryn McKenna and Kelly Hills, though I've also…
October 19, 2013
It's been a rough week, so here's some cute-kid stuff. The "featured image" above is a giant picture from SteelyKid's after-school day care, where they're talking about bodies and bones. It's a tracing of her outline, filled in with her drawings of bones, joints, a grinning skull, a brain, blood…
October 18, 2013
Yes, that's another TED@NYC picture as the "featured image," but don't run away! It's a post about science, I swear!
The photo up above is from the Flickr set (which, by the way, has been edited significantly since yesterday...), and I like it a good deal. Mostly because, as the joking caption…
October 18, 2013
There's a sense in which the saddest true statement I've read about the unpleasant events of the past week is this: Blog editor at Scientific American is a position of great power, with the ability to make or break careers.
I'm not disputing the truth of this. It's absolutely true that the position…
October 17, 2013
Let me say these things, because they are important. Bora was wrong. Scientific American was wrong. Ofek was wrong, Wrong, WRONG.
If you follow science blogs beyond this one, you have no doubt run across the gigantic debacle that erupted this past weekend; if not the first few paragraphs of this…
October 17, 2013
As noted in a previous post on Monte Carlo simulation in 1960, we recently came into possession of a large box of old Master's theses. The bulk of these are from the 50's and 60's, but there are some going back much farther. As I pass these every day I'm in the office, I thought it might be amusing…
October 16, 2013
The Twitter conversation that prompted yesterday's post about composite objects was apparently prompted by a comment somebody made about how a virus left alone would see its quantum wavefunction spread out on a time scale of minutes. This led to wondering about whether a virus could really be…
October 16, 2013
Back in July, Physics Today ran an article on Reinventing physics for life-sciences majors (I couldn't find an un-paywalled version, but this arxiv preprint seems to be close to it). As I've had some bad experiences with that class, I flagged it as something to read, but only got around to it last…
October 16, 2013
The nice folks at TED have put up a giant Flickr set of pictures from last week's event. I'm not sure it's complete, but I happened to notice it this morning, and it already had several pictures of me in it, which is all I really care about. I particularly like the "featured image" above, which…
October 15, 2013
I'm doing a bit of work on an idea for physics outreach, which would involve tying a discussion of modern physics to science fiction stories. I have Opinions about this sort of thing, of course, but I also have readers who might think of things I don't. So, let me throw this out to you all:
What is…
