June 1, 2006
Back in the fall of 2000, I was a post-doc working at Yale, working on a fairly major paper (at least from the my persepctive), and starting to apply for academic jobs at small liberal arts colleges. Kate and I also got engaged that September, so we started doing a bit of wedding planning.
We…
June 1, 2006
Mark Trodden has a post endorsing the BEC videogames at the University of Colordao's Physics 2000 project. These are a bunch of Java applets demonstrating different aspects of the laser cooling and trapping process. I used to link them from my blog on Steelypips, but in the move to ScienceBlogs, I…
June 1, 2006
Via sennoma (I'm not sure that link will work, as the server appeared to be down this morning), Hunter S. Thompson's obituary for Nixon:
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just…
May 31, 2006
This week's question from our Corporate Masters has to do with the ever-popular issue of funding:
Since they're funded by taxpayer dollars (through the NIH, NSF, and so on), should scientists have to justify their research agendas to the public, rather than just grant-making bodies?
"Justify" is…
May 31, 2006
We had an interesting colloquium yesterday from Mark Walker, a colleague in the History department, on the subject of Peter Debye, a Dutch chemist and Nobel laureate. It seems that a book published last year on Einstein in the Netherlands included some material accusing Debye of being a Nazi…
May 30, 2006
Two news stories today relating to students' intake of various substances, and the people who want to control them:
First, an essay in the New York Times about misguided anti-obesity measures in the public schools. It's got the requisite list of dodgy medical statistics, and some shots at the BMI…
May 30, 2006
There's an interesting story in the Times this morning about efforts to make robotic space probes more autonomous. The idea is that it would be nice to be able to explore the Solar System without the big delays introduced by light-speed communications lags. In the absence of an ansible, autonomous…
May 30, 2006
While channel-surfing the other night, I caught a few minutes of a program claiming to present the "100 Funniest Movies of All Time," and was a little baffled at the choices I saw represented. As with most list shows, it was way too heavy on recent stuff (The 40-Year-Old Virgin might be really…
May 29, 2006
I gained about fifty pounds my freshman year in college (from ~190 lbs in high school to ~240 labs by the end of the year), owing to taking up rugby and a beer-heavy diet. Since then, people who meet me generally assume that I played football in high school-- in fact, that was probably the biggest…
May 29, 2006
One of my two classes this term (Quantum Optics) is a junior/senior level elective, and when I teach those sorts of classes, I like to invite the students over to the house for dinner (they're paying $40K/year for the Liberal Arts College Experience, after all...). The problem this year is that it'…
May 27, 2006
A couple of link-worthy posts dealing with the true nature of academia:
Over at the Little Professor, Miriam Burstein addresses the movie cliches of academia (spinning off a post at Michael Berube's blog).
Meanwhile, Dr. Free-Ride discusses the finer points of tailoring academic regalia, which is…
May 26, 2006
Gandalf or Magneto?
(Look, it's the ninth week of our ten-week Spring term, and including the Winter term, we've been in session since January with only a one-week break. I'm getting a little punchy, all right?)
May 26, 2006
Over in the right-hand sidebar, Seed is pushing a short piece on Laurie Pycroft, a 16-year-old Briton who founded Pro-Test, an organization supporting animal testing. This was all over the UK papers a couple of months ago, and a little Googling turns up a piece by Pycroft himself telling the story…
May 26, 2006
Today finds Kieran Healy counting words, and Hedwig the Grrlscientist tallying visits, so that must count as a blog statistics meme. Or something.
Out of curiosity, I checked the Google Analytics stats for this site, and was bemused to discover that as of sometime this morning, there have been 141,…
May 26, 2006
It's not really all that flame-tastic, but Janet has a nice post on the women in science thing, taking off from yesterday's post, and my comment that I don't really have the energy to wage a "women in science" flamewar at the moment. If you do have the energy, head over to Janet's blog. But read…
May 25, 2006
The science story of the day is probably the Department of Education Report on science test scores, cited in this morning's New York Times. They administered a test to fourth, eight, and twelfth-graders nationwide, aking basic science questions, and compared the scores to similar tests given in…
May 25, 2006
Scott Aaronson takes up the eternal question of why there are so few women in science. His contribution to the nature/ nurture side of the debate is particularly noteworthy:
To put the point differently: suppose (hypothetically) that what repelled women from computer science were all the vending-…
May 24, 2006
Dave Bacon asks, I answer. Well, OK, Dave was asking how one would go about teaching quantum computing to CS undergrads, while what I provide here is a set of lectures on presenting quantum computing ideas to undergrad physics majors in my Quantum Optics class. But, really, isn't that almost the…
May 24, 2006
This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question from On High arrived while I was out of town (see also last week's results), and I've held off answering because I had a huge stack of papers to grade. Of course, time for responding has almost run out, so I guess I ought to say something...
The question of…
May 23, 2006
So, in our last installment, I had purchased a bunch of classical music off iTunes, and pledged to listen to it while away at DAMOP last week. I was pretty good about it, too-- I kept the classical playlist going on the iPod all the way through the flights down there, and for listening during the…
May 22, 2006
A scientific conference like DAMOP almost always includes a conference banquet (to which people may or may not bring dates), usually the last night of the meeting, where everybody gets together to eat massive quantities of catered food and drink massive amounts of wine supplied by the conference.…
May 22, 2006
The problem with scheduling something like last week's Ask a ScienceBlogger for a time when I'm out of town is that any interesting discussions that turn up in comments are sort of artificially shortened because I can't hold up my end of the conversation from a remote site. I do want to respond (…
May 21, 2006
I'm back from DAMOP, having spent a lazy day in Knoxville yesterday, waiting around to go to the airport. That was a much-needed respite from the non-stop conferencing of the previous few days, but I would've preferred to be home, rather than in Knoxville. Air travel continues to suck, particularly…
May 17, 2006
The question for the week from the Seed overlords is:
"Will the 'human' race be around in 100 years?"
This is basically a Singularity question, and as such, I think it's kind of silly. But then, I think the whole Singularity thing is sort of silly-- as a literary device, it makes for some good SF…
May 16, 2006
Every year, or nearly every year, I go to the meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society (which revels in the acronym "DAMOP" (pronounced "day-mop"), but at least we're better off than our Canadian brethren, who are just the Division of Atomic…
May 16, 2006
For those who care, there's a list below the fold of what I bought from iTunes last night based on recommendations in the previous thread. For those who don't care so much about that, let me just note that trying to buy classical music on iTunes really is as annoying as everyone says-- as dozens of…
May 15, 2006
My lightly tossed-off shot at classical music snobs, and subsequent confession that classical music fails to make much of an impression has led to various people calling me an uncultured barbarian, but also to a surprisingly vibrant comment thread that has included some recommendations of music to…
May 15, 2006
On one of the occasions when I called the gastroenterologists to complain that my heartburn wasn't getting any better (there were a couple of rounds of such calls, before I went back to my regular doctor), the woman I spoke to asked "Are you experiencing stress at work?"
"Yes," I said, "and before…
May 14, 2006
Via Jim Henley, a handy guide to the key denominations, terms, and concepts in Christianity:
Catholics
Catholics are the New York Yankees of Christianity. They are the biggest and wealthiest team, and their owner is intensely controversial (this makes St. Francis of Assisi the Derek Jeter of…
May 14, 2006
So, after noting that yesterday morning was grey and dismal, I headed over to work to take care of some grading and other sutff, and the clouds lightened up a bit. I went out to run some errands, and the sun came out. so I headed home, and what did I do?
Yard work. Rather than, say, sitting out in…
