Physical Sciences
clock | June 30, 2009
Chad wrote a neat history of (or should we say 'evolution of') clocks, as in "timekeeping instruments". He points out the biological clocks are "...sort of messy application, from the standpoint of physics..." and he is right - for us biologists, messier the better. We wallow in mess, cherish ambiguity and relish in complexity. Anyway, he is talking about real clocks - things made by people to keep time. And he starts with a simple definition of what a clock is:
In order to really discuss the physics of timekeeping, you need to strip the idea of a clock down to the absolute bare…
drorzel | June 30, 2009Firday's quick and sarcastic post came about because I thought the Dean Dad and his commenters had some interesting points in regard to high school math requirements, but we were spending the afternoon driving to Whitney Point so I could give a graduation speech. I didn't have time for a more detailed response.
Now that we're back in town... well, I still don't have time, because SteelyKid has picked up a bit of coxsackie virus, meaning that nobody in Chateau Steelypips is happy. But I did want to offer at least a partial response to some of the comments both here and elsewhere.
To start off…
drorzel | June 24, 2009Via a comment by Christina Pikas, there's a post at the Scholarly Kitchen about a new study quantifying the use of the arxiv:
Employing a summer intern, Ingoldsby conducted an arXiv search of nearly 5,000 journal articles published by the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society. Their methodology was painstakingly robust, looking for title variations and having all unsuccessful searches repeated by a trained physicist.
The percentage of articles found for each journal in their studied varied greatly. While fields such as elementary particle physics and astrophysics…
edyong | June 23, 2009Think of a scientist - not anyone in particular, just a random individual working in the field. Got one? Did you picture a man or a woman? If it's the former, you're probably not alone. There have been a few times when I've only ever known a scientist through their surname on a citation and automatically assumed that they were a man, only to learn, to my chagrin, that they're actually a woman. It's always a galling reminder of how pervasive the stereotype of science as a male endeavour can be, even at an unconscious level.
Now, Brian Nosek from the University of Virgina, together with…
drorzel | June 23, 2009A wag of my finger at the Corporate Masters, for their new article about traffic jams, with the subhead "For particle physicists who study phase transitions, a traffic jam is simply a solid made up of idling cars." In the body of the article, we find:
While the concept of critical density has been repeatedly demonstrated using computer simulations--drivers are surprisingly easy to model as a system of interacting particles--it wasn't until last year that this theory of traffic was experimentally confirmed. A team of physicists at Nagoya University wanted to see how many cars could maintain a…
oracknows | June 20, 2009Homeopathy Awareness Week is almost over, alas. I hope I've done a good job at making my readers even more "aware" of just how silly the principles of homeopathy are. To finish up, I thought I'd repost a bit of "classic insolence" from three years ago, because it's dedicated to one of the most amazing homeopathic woo-meisters I've ever seen: Lionel Milgrom. It was also the very first post I ever did for Your Friday Dose of Woo.
Enjoy!
While thinking about ways to make the blog better, I wondered if I should emulate some of my colleagues, many of whom have regular features every week, often on…
catdynamics | June 19, 2009NASA has announced the selection of the Small Explorer Missions for the current round of competition.
And the winners are...
The Small Explorer class missions are small (under $105 million including MODA but excluding launcher) fast science missions, there was a competition for two slots, with six concepts selected for further study last year. Final selection was just announced
IRIS: Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph
Solar physics mission - spectroscopy of the chromosphere
PI Alan Title from LockMart ATC in Palo Altoo
and
GEM: Gravity and Extreme Magnetism
the x-ray polarimetry mission…
drorzel | June 16, 2009
World Science Festivities | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
"Iâm back from the World Science Festival, which was a rousing success, leaving thousands of smiling attendees chattering excitedly about the mysteries of the universe as they dispersed through the streets of Manhattan. So naturally I want to talk about how it could be improved. Writing about oneâs travels can be one of the least compelling arrows in the bloggerâs quiver, but it would be great if the science-festival idea caught on more widely, so perhaps there is something to be learned from the experience."
(tags: science…
skookumchick | June 16, 2009Okay, so I have recovered from my visit to Washington, and my first JAM conference. Here are some highlights that are more edited than my lame live-blogging post is. ;-)
I didn't realize how big JAM is -- there were ~1200 people attending, and ADVANCE was only a very very small part. There were people from AGEP, TCUP, GSE, CREST, RDE, HBCU-UP, and LSAMP.
[Acronym dejargoner:
AGEP= Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate
HBCU=Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program
TCUP=Tribal Colleges and Universities Program
LSAMP= Louis Stokes Alliances for…
gregladen | June 15, 2009This is one of those science stories that is on one hand fairly simple, and on the other hand fairly complex, where the interface between simplicity and complexity causes little balls of misunderstanding to come flying out of the mix like pieces of raw pizza dough if the guy making the pizza was the Tasmanian Devil from the cartoons.
What is true: A scientist named Ryskin proposes that decadal or century scale minor wiggling in the measured Earth's magnetic field is influenced by changes in ocean currents. Plausible. Interesting. Could explain some things. Not earthshaking.
What is…
gregladen | June 14, 2009This just in from NASA:
PASADENA, Calif. -- Astronomers have at last uncovered newborn stars at the frenzied center of our Milky Way galaxy. The discovery was made using the infrared vision of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
The heart of our spiral galaxy is cluttered with stars, dust and gas, and at its very center, a supermassive black hole. Conditions there are harsh, with fierce stellar winds, powerful shock waves and other factors that make it difficult for stars to form. Astronomers have known that stars can form in this chaotic place, but they're baffled as to how this occurs.…
drorzel | June 12, 2009
slacktivist: TF: Skip verse 10
"Be sure to use the King James Version when you bring up Luke 17:34 -- "In that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left" -- and then argue that a literal interpretation suggests that precisely 50 percent of homosexuals will be raptured."
(tags: books stupid religion blogs slacktivist)
Colonial Africa: A List of Questions « Easily Distracted
"I think Iâve hit on a catchy structure for a modest reshuffling of my Honors seminar in Colonial Africa. Much of my reading list will remain the same, but this…
grrlscientist | June 9, 2009tags: book review, Plastic Fantastic, How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World, physics, ethics, fraud, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Jan Hendrik Schön, Eugenie Samuel Reich
Physicist Jan Hendrik Schön was too good to be true. After graduating from the University of Konstanz in 1997, he was hired by Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he quickly rose to scientific fame. By 2000, he had published eight papers in the world's most prestigious journals, Nature and Science. One year later at the height of his career, he was publishing one scientific paper every eight days --…
drorzel | June 9, 2009Every year around this time, references to that damn sunscreen speech pop up again, as people start thinking of graduations. It's in the air (Union's graduation is this Sunday, and I don't think I've ever been happier to see the end of an academic year).
And, of course, I have actually been asked to give a graduation speech. Which leads naturally to thinking about what one piece of advice I would give to a high school student who came up to me and said "I plan to study physics in college. What one thing should I study?"
(Hey, it could happen...)
My one-word piece of advice for students…
cpikas | June 7, 2009SLA is the Special Libraries Association - it's really my home
professional organization.
I often go to basically 3 conferences in my profession: SLA,
ASIS&T, and Computers In Libraries. You come back
from SLA and you want to buy
something. You come back from ASIS&T and you want to
style="font-style: italic;">study something or
just think about things. You come back from CIL and you want to
style="font-style: italic;">build something. So
they all have purposes. By far, though, SLA is the most
important to what I do for a living.
This year should be really exciting -…
cpikas | June 2, 2009Last set of comps readings, I talked about sense of community:
belonging, having influence, fulfillment of needs, and emotional
support. Now, let's talk about the physics version of
"community" - cohesive subgroups. In a graph, these are
groups of nodes in a graph that are more connected to each other than
to other parts of the graph. Clumpy spots. If you read old
href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/30594217">Wasserman and
Faust, you'll probably think of cliques, cores, and lambda
sets... some how these didn't do it for me - literally, when I was
trying to
href="http://terpconnect.…
tlambert | June 2, 2009
Remember when Tim Blair's commenters combined to take on a six year old boy? And lost. Now Blair and his commenters are taking on a Nobel Physics Prize winner. On physics.
US Energy Secretary Steven Chu, one of the world's greatest minds, believes painting roofs, roads and pavements white will help contain global warming. Reader Steve H. reviews the Chu plan:
According to a 2004 study by the U.S. Geophysical Union, all constructed so-called "impervious surfaces" (buildings, roads, parking lots, roofs, etc.) in the USA total a combined 112,610 km^2. Which is a bit less than the total area of…
cpikas | May 28, 2009Re-architecting Science:
A Vision for STM in the 21st Century
by Adam Bly
Opening Keynote, May 28, 2009 - this is live blogged, basically notes
on what he said... analysis to follow.
Where the world is today,
where science is, at a high level.. Need to solve problems using a
systems approach. Study of epidemics requires understanding
of climate change, need to study growth, need to study demographics and
the future of society, etc.
These are tough times, need science more than ever, but they are
optimistic times because what we know and what we can know.
Exciting things happening high…
pontiff | May 27, 2009One of the more interesting "problems" in Science 2.0 is the lack of commenting on online articles. In particular some journals now allow one to post comments about papers published in the journal. As this friendfeed conversation asks:
Why people do not comment online articles? What is wrong with the online commenting system[s]? I think this is one of the central issues in Science 2.0.
Or as Carl Zimmer commented on comments appearing at PLOS One a few years back:
What I find striking, however, is how quiet it is over at PLOS One. Check out a few for yourself. My search turned up a lot of…
pharyngula | May 26, 2009While I'm off at meetings, you could be voting to help me win Eric Hovind's iPod Touch. All you have to do is CLICK ON THIS LINK. Note that it has to be that link — it's got an imbedded code in it to let the tabulators know that the incoming click comes from me, PZ Myers, so that the Hovind crew will know that they owe me a new toy.
This is the fourth creation minute video, and I think it's the last one you should have to watch. Sometime after this they'll tally up all the page views, and somebody will win.
This one, by the way, has Hovind defining science — "knowledge derived from…