drorzel | November 23, 2010Kevin Drum posted an anti-rant about the TSA, which argues that the new scanners and pat-downs aren't an outrage because they really mean well:
I'm not trying to defend everything TSA has put in place. Some of the stuff they do, like the penknife and nail clipper bans, really is stupid. And maybe backscatter scanners don't work. I'm certainly open to the idea. But honestly, most of what they do is pretty easy to understand: they're trying to make it so hard to get weapons and explosives on board airplanes that no one bothers trying -- and the few who do can't pack a big enough punch to do any…
drorzel | November 23, 2010
Confessions of a Community College Dean: The Sick Kid Shuffle
"This weekend The Girl got hit by a nasty stomach bug, so nobody got much sleep and our Sunday plans were discombobulated. It brought back memories of those times when TW still worked outside the house, and we had to do the Sick Kid Shuffle.
When your kid normally goes to daycare, a sick kid is a major crisis. Suddenly your first line of defense is down, since you can't take a sick kid to daycare. (I've seen parents try it, though.) Most days, we had to choose among several imperfect options:"
(tags: kid-stuff academia education…
drorzel | November 22, 2010I don't think this one requires any explanation:
Hello:customer surveys
Staying up watching the Giants game last night was not conducive to getting anything useful done this morning.
drorzel | November 22, 2010I'm giving the final exam in my introductory E&M class this morning, which means spending a couple of hours sitting in a room full of students taking a test and doing my best not to fall asleep. As far as I'm concerned, getting rid of exam proctoring is the best argument for an honor code system-- I'm less worried about cheating than I am annoyed at wasting my time.
Anyway, here's a thematically appropriate poll to pass the time:
Which of the following activities are less fun than proctoring an exam (check all that apply)online survey
PollDaddy handles multiple-selection polls in a…
drorzel | November 22, 2010
Are you a highly skilled worker? (Blog) - physicsworld.com
"But what's this? Kostya's only got 75 "attribute points" (not counting the 10 each for speaking English and having £800), and he needs 80 to qualify as a highly skilled worker. Bad luck, Kostya! Better go do your Nobel-prize-winning research somewhere else!
Yes, as it turns out, "Kostya" isn't entirely hypothetical. In fact, he's based on Konstantin Noveselov, the Russian-born Nobel laureate who moved to the University of Manchester as a postdoc in 2001. The only thing I changed in going from Noveselov circa 2001 to "Kostya" in…
drorzel | November 21, 2010
Friday Night Videos!: The Hits of 1990 | Popdose
"Aerosmith - Janie's Got A Gun: With this video and Madonna's "Oh Father," director David Fincher was cornering the market on music videos about child abusers. Also note the prominent use of dudes in hats before backlighting, presaging Det. Somerset in Seven. Also note Steven Tyler's big mouth, presaging Steven Tyler's big mouth."
(tags: popdose music nostalgia video blogs)
Seth's Blog: Groping for a marketing solution: TSA and security theater
There's plenty of controversy about the new full body scanners that the TSA is installing at…
drorzel | November 20, 2010The final Short Story Club story is "Throwing Stones" by Mishell Baker. Once again, I find myself without a whole lot to say about it.
This is a gender-reversed Asian-flavored fantasy story. The nameless narrator lives in a city with canals and teahouses in an Empire with rigid class and gender roles, a writing system based on ideograms, and a system of temple examinations that offer the narrator a way out of low station. The big difference between this and other fantasy derived from Asian sources is that the gender roles are flipped: women hold all the positions of power, and a man's "only…
drorzel | November 20, 2010Here's the clip from my live-via-Skype appearance on tv in Sacramento this morning. Unfortunately, the Chateau Steelypips Internet connection slowed way down for some reason, and Skype froze up then dropped the call. But we did get a few minutes of me talking about Goodnight Moon and SteelyKid.
The field of view is oddly cropped, so I keep disappearing behind their chyron, but it was still fun to talk to them. And they did show the cover of the book after we got cut off, so that's all to the good...
drorzel | November 20, 2010
A presumption of guilt makes people angry : Thoughts from Kansas
"The virtual strip searches and actual pat-downs now performed by TSA are not selective. Everyone is treated like a terrorist. The pat-down is the same one given to a suspect being arrested, and the strip search is even more invasive. Every air passenger is presumed guilty. It's absurd. It's an inversion of core American principles. And it's finally got a conversation started that we should have been having 9 years ago."
(tags: travel politics war us law stupid blogs thoughts-from-kansas)
What are the chances of getting hit…
drorzel | November 19, 2010I keep forgetting to mention this here, but a while back I was contacted by a tv host in California about the Goodnight Moon post. Anyway, I will be appearing via Skype tomorrow morning at 9:20 my time on the Good Day Sacramento program, to talk about bedtime stories, dog physics, and such things. Internet fame continues weird.
So, if you're an insomniac in central California, looking for something to do at 6:20 in the morning, tune in. I believe it's also available via live streaming, if you're not in the Sacramento area and want to see it live.
I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to…
drorzel | November 19, 2010Miscellaneous pop-culture items from the last couple of weeks:
-- I'm apparently a sucker for half-finished music, as I bought Dylan's Witmark Demos album a week or so ago, and Springsteen's The Promise, a collection of stuff recorded between Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, last night. The Springsteen stuff is more polished, but I haven't listened to it as much (obviously).
-- Also in the recent-purchases shuffle play: Guster, Old 97's, the Thermals, Kings of Leon, and Cee Lo Green. This is, as you might imagine, not the most consistent listening experience.
-- I kind of hate…
drorzel | November 19, 2010Earlier this week, I talked about the technical requirements for taking a picture of an interference pattern from two independent lasers, and mentioned in passing that a 1967 experiment by Pfleegor and Mandel had already shown the interference effect. Their experiment was clever enough to deserve the ResearchBlogging Q&A treatment, though, so here we go:
OK, so why is this really old experiment worth talking about? What did they do? They demonstrated interference between two completely independent lasers, showing that when they overlapped the beams, the overlap region contained a pattern…
drorzel | November 19, 2010
Physics Buzz: It'll make you laugh; it'll make you cry. It's...Science!!!
A friend once told me that she never watches the Discovery Channel because she feels some sort of obligation to pay attention and retain the information being presented. I can see where she's coming from; science can be intimidating. But my message is simple: It's okay to watch scientific programming simply to be entertained. Just enjoy. I bet, without even knowing it, you'll learn something new without even trying.
(tags: science television blogs physics-buzz culture media)
Prince William Engaged | The Onion -…
drorzel | November 18, 2010Fashion's been on our minds this week, what with the whole Rock Stars of Science thing rolling out yesterday, so this week we have SteelyKid modeling the latest in toddler headgear:
This was the culmination of a game that started with her putting her napkin on her head, and declaring it a hat. We moved on to me having to wear a towel on my head, and then her getting the towel. I really like the way this one turned out.
Of course, it wouldn't be Toddler Blogging without Appa for scale:
Here, we have SteelyKid kicking back with Appa and, um, a can of tomato paste that she found in the kitchen…
drorzel | November 18, 2010I'm grading a big backlog of homeworks today, so I don't have time to do any really lengthy posts this morning. Thus, a poll question inspired by going through these homeworks:
You are doing a physics homework problem. How many significant figures do you report?survey software
While the class in question uses some quantum ideas, the poll is strictly classical, so no superpositions of multiple answers are allowed.
(Honestly, at some point, I would expect laziness alone to compel people to round their answers off before their hands cramp up from copying all these digits...)
drorzel | November 18, 2010
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Mini-Me
"Fans of cheesy-bad movies will remember Mini-me as Dr. Evil's sidekick/mascot in the Austin Powers movies. Dr. Evil had his share of great lines ("the Diet Coke of evil"), but his true awfulness shone forth in his creation of Mini-Me. Mini-me was exactly how he sounds -- a smaller, but recognizable, version of Dr. Evil himself.
I've seen managers hire Mini-me's to help them, and I really have to wonder what they're thinking. It's much smarter to hire your opposites.
We all have strengths and weaknesses. Mini-me's have the same strengths and…
drorzel | November 17, 2010The big physics-y news story of the moment is the trapping of antihydrogen by the ALPHA collaboration at CERN. The article itself is paywalled, because this is Nature, but one of the press offices at one of the institutions involved was kind enough to send me an advance version of the article. This seems like something that deserves the ResearchBlogging Q&A treatment, so here we go:
OK, what's the deal with this paper? Well, the ALPHA collaboration is announcing that they have created antihydrogen atoms-- that is, a single antiproton orbited by a single positron-- at low temperatures, and…
drorzel | November 17, 2010So, if you look at this picture:
You might be asking yourself "Why does Debbie Harry rate Secret Service protection?" But no, this isn't a photo from some alternate universe where the lead singer of Blondie went on to become leader of the free world, it's part of the Rock Stars of Science campaign by the Geoffrey Beene Foundation. They've just rolled out a new campaign in GQ magazine, putting seventeen prominent biomedical researchers in fancy photo spreads with eight different musicians. It's part of an initiative to raise the profile of science by portraying scientists in a more glamorous…
drorzel | November 17, 2010
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Business or Town?
"Tenured Radical's thoughtful post on elite presidential salaries got me thinking about the "run the college like a business" canard.
Most of the people who use that phrase, whether approvingly or damningly, haven't personally worked in a college that was actually a business. I have -- you've heard of it -- and I can report confidently that it's the wrong metaphor for the community colleges I know.
Having been in all three settings, I'm convinced that community college administration is much closer to town or municipal government…
drorzel | November 16, 2010(With apologies to Georg Cantor)
Theorem: There are an infinite number of stupid ways to park.
Definition: We define as stupid any parking method that places any fender of a car outside the legal lines bounding the space.
Proof:Consider a line L through the center of a legal parking space, parallel to the lines bounding the space. Consider a point P on L. There are an infinite number of lines passing diagonally through P at an angle greater than the smallest angle θ at which a car pulled into the space will intersect each of the bounding lines once. Any car parked parallel to one of these…