drorzel | November 16, 2010Fall term classes ended yesterday, officially-- my last class was Friday-- so I'm shifting over to spend more time working on the sequel to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, which involves talking to Emmy about relativity. Progress has been slower than last time, largely because the previous book was written while I was on sabbatical and before SteelyKid was born. But there's also a structural issue that's giving me some problems.
This is partly a matter of familiarity with the material-- I'm a low-energy physicist, so I've never needed to worry all that much about relativity. A bigger issue…
drorzel | November 16, 2010
An Open Letter to MFA Writing Programs (and Their Students) « Whatever
"So, MFA writing programs, allow me to make a suggestion. Sometime before you hand over that sheepskin with the words "Master of Fine Arts" on it, for which your students may have just paid tens of thousands of dollars (or more), offer them a class on the business of the publishing industry, including an intensive look at contracts. Why? Because, Holy God, they will need it."
(tags: writing publishing business ethics law whatever books academia education)
For Frequent Fliers, a Radiation Risk in the Skies - NYTimes.…
drorzel | November 15, 2010The other night at dinner, SteelyKid kept demanding that we sing. As there's only so many times you can sing the alphabet in a row, I decided to mix it up a little, and sang her the first verse and the chorus of "The Wild Rover" (these lyrics are close to the ones I know, and here's a YouTube version).
After I finished, she smiled and started babbling, and it quickly became clear that she thought it was about Grover the Muppet. We've got a bunch of old Sesame Street clips that we play for her on the computer, in which Grover waits on an angry blue Muppet.
Thanks to that, I got this idea stuck…
drorzel | November 15, 2010This is adapted from an answer to a question at the Physics Stack Exchange site. The questioner asked:
It seems that if the coherence length of a laser is big enough, it is possible to observe a (moving) interference picture by combining them. Is it true? How fast should photo-detectors be for observing of the interference of beams from two of the "best available" lasers?
This is a question about the itnerference of light waves, which is traditionally demonstrated via the famous "double slit" experiment, where a single laser is sent through a barrier with two narrow slits cut in it. The…
drorzel | November 15, 2010
The Shadow Scholar - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
"I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology,…
drorzel | November 14, 2010We had freakishly good weather today, so I went outside to get some raking done. SteelyKid came out with me to help:
We also got some video of the Dinosaur Leaf Attack game we were playing, but YouTube is struggling with the file for some reason or another, so I can't post that. The important bits are in this picture, anyway: leaves, SteelyKid, big smiles and laughing.
I'm going to focus on this, and try to pretend that football didn't happen today.
drorzel | November 14, 2010I just realized that I haven't posted anything about this week's Short Story Club entry, "Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory" by Paul M. Berger.This is largely because I don't have a great deal to say about it.
This is another "After the magic apocalypse" story, only this time the magic apocalypse takes the form of a return by conquering armies of Elves. The story is set a couple of generations after the human resistance was crushed at the Gray Fort, which was the final holdout of the human resistance, and recounts the visit to the fort by an Elf who fought in the war and…
drorzel | November 14, 2010
Baubles vs. Hard Truths | Mother Jones
"Here's the problem: most plans to reduce the long-term deficit consist of three things: shiny baubles, smoke and mirrors, and actual deficit reduction measures. You want to minimize the former and emphasize the latter, and on that score I don't think Simpson-Bowles does very well."
(tags: economics politics blogs us kevin-drum society health-care)
Data or Dust Speck? : Built on Facts
"Once lasers were invented however, high intensities became available. One of the more important discoveries was second harmonic generation, which happens when light of…
drorzel | November 13, 2010SteelyKid and I are currently on our second pass through the Winnie-the-Pooh book my parents got her (which is identical to the one I had as a kid). We read one story every time she goes to bed, so that's one every night, and one at weekend nap times. She only sort of pays attention to the details of the stories, but she likes pointing to the occasional pictures, and waving her stuffed Pooh and Piglet around.
I wouldn't mind some more variety, though I'm not entirely sure what the options are for read-aloud books at the appropriate level (she's two-and-a-quarter). But that's what the Internet…
drorzel | November 13, 2010
slacktivist: Fix the deficit: Cure diabetes
"My grand scheme for long-term debt-reduction would improve the lives of tens of millions of people while saving everyone else a ton of money. It's an attempt to solve problems, rather than to luxuriate in enduring them and savoring the suffering they produce. And that goes against everything the serious people stand for.
And but so anyway, here is my plan, my GS for LTDR -- are you ready? -- it's short:
Cure diabetes.
That's it. That's my plan. Cure diabetes. Eradicate it. Create a post-diabetes world in which people say, "Hey, remember when…
drorzel | November 12, 2010As mentioned in yesterday's post on ion trapping, a month or so back Dave Wineland's group at NIST published a paper in Science on using ultra-precise atomic clocks to measure relativistic effects. If you don't have a subscription to Science, you can get the paper for free from the Time and Frequency Division database, because you can't copyright work done for the US government.
This paper generated quite a bit of interest when it came out, because it demonstrates the time-slowing effects of relativity without any need for exotic objects like black holes or particle accelerators-- they deal…
drorzel | November 12, 2010There's a new physics Q&A site from the folks at Stack Exchange, this one on physics. If you're not familiar with the format, it's a bulletin-board style site where you can post questions to be answered by other users, and people vote the answers up and down, so you can get a decent feel for which answers are good, and which are less useful.
There's a pretty wide range of questions, covering everything from really basic concepts to fairly technical questions about current research. My own feeling about this is that if you're going to have it on the public web, you ought to expect and be…
drorzel | November 12, 2010
Why Making Dinner Is A Good Idea | Wired Science | Wired.com
"Why does the microwave and frozen dinner inexorably lead to obesity? According to the economists, the cheapness of calories (both in terms of price and time) has led us to dramatically boost consumption. Food stops being something we make and create -- it doesn't require very many lever presses, so to speak -- and becomes something we simply ingest. Eating just gets easier. And then we get fatter.
But maybe we're not just consuming more calories because they're available at such a low cost. Maybe we're also consuming more…
drorzel | November 11, 2010Here we see SteelyKid kicking back with Appa, among some of her many, many toys:
Navigating the living room is getting to be kind of difficult, what with all the blocks and cups and balls and other things strewn all over the place...
In other news, SteelyKid is in training to be a genius. Don't believe me? She's been practicing:
She still needs to work on the hair. And, you know, a comppletely revolutionary theory of space and time. But cut her some slack-- she's only two and a quarter...
(I couldn't resist...)
drorzel | November 11, 2010One of the many physics stories I haven't had time to blog about recently is the demonstration of relativistic time effects using atomic clocks. I did mention a DAMOP talk about the experiment, but the actual paper was published in Science (and is freely available from the NIST Time and Frequency Division (PDF file), because you can't copyright work done at government labs) a month and a half ago, and generated a bit of buzz at the time.
Given the delay between publication of the article and me blogging about it, I feel obliged to provide a little more detail than you'll get from the news…
drorzel | November 11, 2010I usually have ESPN on as background noise in the morning, but I turned it off today because their increasingly fulsome tributes to Veterans Day were getting on my nerves. I'm all in favor of honoring the sacrifices made by members of the military, but a little decorum would be nice at the same time.
It occurs to me, though, that what we really need is not yet more extravagant orations of thanks on Veterans Day, but rather a "Pre-Veterans Day." A day when we think about the men and women of the armed forces before they've had to make terrible sacrifices for the country. This would, ideally,…
drorzel | November 11, 2010
slacktivist: TF: Chairface Carpathia
"The villain Nicolae Carpathia probably reminds of more than any other is Chairface Chippendale, from one of my favorite episodes of The Tick -- a warped parody of superhero comics. Chairface, a supervillain, constructs a giant heat ray he plans to use to carve his name on the moon. Our heroes, of course, rush to stop him, but the Tick struggles to make sense of this grandly strange act of supervillainy, asking his sidekick, Arthur, if carving your name on the moon is even illegal.
"It's just wrong," Arthur says, and he's surely right about that.…
drorzel | November 10, 2010We've just recently completed pre-registration for Winter term classes, so I've been thinking a bit about why students do and do not sign up for things. Thus, a poll:
You are a college student considering an elective class in your major, and you see it has a lab. Your reaction is:survey software
Feel free to replace "English" with the non-lab-science major of your choice when answering.
drorzel | November 10, 2010Having posted not one but two snarky political entries in recent days, I feel like I owe the Internet a couple of ResearchBlogging posts to make up for it. It's the last week of classes here, though, which means I have a lot of frantic work to do. Thus, a frivolous poll inspired by the cinnamon rolls I had with breakfast:
The sugary white stuff on top of baked goods is:survey software
While this will almost certainly get more votes for "I will explain in a comment" than comments-- that seems to be an Internet tradition-- it's still a classical poll, and thus you must choose one and only one…
drorzel | November 10, 2010
Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds - CNN.com
"Twinkies. Nutty bars. Powdered donuts.
For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate one of these sugary cakelets every three hours, instead of meals. To add variety in his steady stream of Hostess and Little Debbie snacks, Haub munched on Doritos chips, sugary cereals and Oreos, too.
His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most -- not the nutritional value of the food.
The premise held up: On his "convenience store diet," he shed 27 pounds in two months…