A fairly straightforward question: quantum physicists divide the world into two categories of things, fermions and bosons. What's your favorite object having integer spin? What's your favorite boson?online survey Superpositions of answers, while allowed in properly symmetrized wavefunctions, are not valid responses to this poll.

I needed a band-aid this morning, and when I was getting it out, it occurred to me that there are some subtle details of packaging technology that pretty clearly mark this as the future, not the past. I'm not sure when the transition was, but if you're around my age or older, you can probably remember the useless little red strings that used to be an integral part of the band-aid packaging. In theory, you were supposed to pull on the string, and use it to tear the paper wrapper around the bandage, but in practice, the damn thing always just pulled straight out of the package, and you ended up…

SteelyKid returns today from her weekend at Grandma and Grandpa's, and there's going to be a surprise waiting for her: She hadn't exactly outgrown her crib yet, but she was getting kind of big for it, so we decided to move her to a big girl bed. It's a "captain's bed" with drawers underneath the mattress, bought from the local unfinished furniture place (and finished by them, because we're not that fond of the smell of varnish). A closer look at the bedspread Kate bought to go with it: Before you say "Why'd you buy her a bedspread from the boys section?" remember two things: 1) Kate and I…

Well? Are you? Are you ready for some football?survey software

I do intend to keep reading and commenting on the stories for Torque Control's Short Story Club, but I missed last week's because I couldn't really think of anything to say about it. The story was nicely written, and all, but it's just kind of... there. This week's post was delayed by my annual day of blog silence, so it will probably miss inclusion in the discussion post, but that's okay, as this is another one where my reaction will be dominated by my own idiosyncratic reactions. This is the type of story where the real point is just to introduce the richly detailed world in which it takes…

R.W. Wood's lecture demonstrations (1897-1905) | Skulls in the Stars In the early years of the 20th century, however, the most important physics journals published in English were the Philosophical Magazine and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Truly important results would appear in those journals first, and Physical Review was a second or third tier journal to which authors relegated their incremental and pedagogical discoveries. A number of authors contributed suggested lecture demonstrations, but none was as productive as Wood, who by my count published 5 demonstrates…

A News of the Stupid story that's too good to pass up. I mean, how can you not click on a headline like "Men Accused of Wrestling Python Outside McDonald's": MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) -- Two men were arrested after bewildered diners at a McDonald's spotted them wrestling a 5-foot (1.5 meter) python named Boris in the restaurant parking lot, police said Thursday. Victoria state police said the men stole the 8-year-old black-headed python and a lizard from a pet shop on Wednesday. They then brought the snake to the McDonald's parking lot, where they began wrestling with it in front of puzzled…

A simple one, that I'm sure all the faculty in the audience will recognize. What is the proper approach to meeting with a professor outside of class: You email a professor asking to meet, and he responds "My office hours are from X:00-Y:00, or I'm free at Z:00." You:online survey Even if we're talking about a quantum physics class, faculty are classical entities for all practical purposes, so you can only choose one answer.

When Kate and I were walking Emmy last night, we were talking about the historical development of relativity. As one does, when walking the dog. I mentioned a couple of the pre-1905 attempts to explain things like the Michelson-Morley experiment, and how people like Lorentz and FitzGerald and Poincare were on the right track, but didn't quite get it all together. Kate asked about what it would've been like to be a physicist working at that time, when both relativity and quantum mechanics were being born, trying out new approaches and not really knowing whether a given approach would turn out…

NFL 2010: The biggest thing fans don't understand about life in pro football. (1) - By Stefan Fatsis, Nate Jackson, Josh Levin, and Tom Scocca - Slate Magazine A great discussion of the modern NFL, including a couple of former players. (tags: sports football slate culture) I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat (but farm it right) | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian "This will not be an easy column to write. I am about to put down 1,200 words in support of a book that starts by attacking me and often returns to this sport. But it has persuaded me that I was wrong.…

SteelyKid goes to day care at the Jewish Community Center, which is closed today and tomorrow for Rosh Hashanah. Here we see her calling all her friends on the phone in her play house to wish them a happy new year, and let Appa offer his own greetings: The two-day closing is, as you might imagine, kind of inconvenient for us But it's all good, because SteelyKid is going to celebrate the holiday with a few days at Grandma and Grandpa camp, so here's a special Toddler Blogging shot, with bonus grandparents for scale: (Both of these were taken with my spiffy new telephoto lens, the Canon 55-…

Over at EphBlog, Stephen O'Grady has a post giving advice to the entering class at Williams. A bunch of this stuff is school-specific stuff that will only make sense to another member of the Cult of the Purple Cow, but there's some good general advice in there as well. I particularly liked his story about the professor who saved his college career: Looking back, it's borderline shocking that I recovered as much as I did academically, given how horrifying my grades were that first year. And, it must be said, my first semester as a sophomore. But while I accept full responsibility for getting…

Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton is surprised that people skim over boring bits of novels. While she explicitly excludes non-fiction from her discussion, this immediately made me think of Timothy Burke's How to Read in College, which offers tips to prospective humanities and social science majors on how to most effectively skim through huge reading assignments for the information that's really important. I've mentioned this before, but I don't think I've done a science version. I've been doing more reading of journal articles lately than I have in a while, though, and it occurs to me that similar…

Swans on Tea » I'm Not Willing to Believe You "I'm perfectly willing to believe that the data one uses for one's thesis is gathered in three months, and my experience is similar, but that's not the whole story. A Ph.D. is not just the dissertation -- you can't just write off the experience leading up to it. To claim that you could just walk into the lab and take data means that you had the requisite knowledge and lab experience, which you must have acquired as an undergraduate. And I don't believe it." (tags: academia education science physics biology experiment blogs swans-on-tea) The…

The theory of relativity takes its name from a very simple and appealing idea: that the laws of physics should look the same to moving observers as to stationary ones. "Laws of physics" here includes Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism, which necessarily means that moving observers must see the same speed of light as stationary observers (Einstein included the constancy of the speed of light as a second postulate in his original relativity paper, but it's redundant-- the constancy of the speed of light is a direct consequence of the principle of relativity). This leads directly…

The New York Times has an article about the opening of a teacher-run school in The City. It sounds like an interesting experiment: Shortly after landing at Malcolm X Shabazz High School as a Teach for America recruit, Dominique D. Lee grew disgusted with a system that produced ninth graders who could not name the seven continents or the governor of their state. He started wondering: What if I were in charge? Three years later, Mr. Lee, at just 25, is getting a chance to find out. Today, Mr. Lee and five other teachers -- all veterans of Teach for America, a corps of college graduates who…

Ancient brew masters tapped antibiotic secrets " A chemical analysis of the bones of ancient Nubians shows that they were regularly consuming tetracycline, most likely in their beer. The finding is the strongest evidence yet that the art of making antibiotics, which officially dates to the discovery of penicillin in 1928, was common practice nearly 2,000 years ago." (tags: science archaeology chemistry history news medicine) Physics Buzz: How not to: The Fire Tornado "In the last two weeks, both water and fire tornadoes have been widely covered by the media. First there was the dramatic…

Not prompted by anything specific, but something I've occasionally wondered about: what's the threshold for "most"? Thus, a poll: The minimum percentage of X doing Y that you would need to feel justified saying "Most X do Y" is:survey software I know I tend to use "most" to mean something considerably more than just 51%, but I'm not sure how widely that's shared. When you say that "most" of some category of things have some property, do you mean a simple majority, or some kind of supermajority?

In chapter 2 of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, there's a footnote about the ubiquity of uncertainty principle analogies in the mass media: To give you an idea of the breadth of subjects in which this shows up, in June 2008, Google turned up citations of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in (among others) an article from the Vermont Free Press about traffic cameras, a Toronto Star article citing the influence of YouTube on underground artists, and a blog article about the Phoenix Suns of the NBA. Incidentally, all of these articles also use the Uncertainty Principle incorrectly--by the…