Many apologies for posting this week's cute toddler picture twelve hours late, but we had a little bit of a meltdown last night, thwarting my plans to get a cute picture after SteelyKid had her bath. She's cutting some new molars (I swear, she's part shark, with all the teeth she's getting), and it's hard work being a toddler on the go. She woke up cheerful this morning, though: This is her taking a break from her new favorite pastime, watching old Sesame Street and Muppet Show videos on my computer, to mug for the camera. YouTube is a wonderful thing, by the way.

6 Baffling Flaws in Famous Sci-Fi Technology | Cracked.com "For instance, when the main reactor fails in Star Trek they call it a "warp core breech" and it happens so often there's an entire page listing times it has happened on the Star Trek wiki. Seriously, it was like every third episode. Their only safety measure against this was, hilariously, to "eject" the warp core out into space to allow it to explode (taking anyone nearby with it) and leave the ship utterly disabled. You know, like how when you have engine trouble on your car, your only option is to punch a button that makes your…

There's a minor scandal in fundamental physics that doesn't get talked about much, and it has to do with the very first fundamental force discovered, gravity. The scandal is the value of Newton's gravitational constant G, which is the least well known of the fundamental constants, with a value of 6.674 28(67) x 10-11 m3 kg-1 s-2. That may seem pretty precise, but the uncertainty (the two digits in parentheses) is scandalously large when compared to something like Planck's constant at 6.626 068 96(33) x 10-34 J s. (You can look up the official values of your favorite fundamental constants at…

Same deal as the last game: Each of the following pairs of words is taken from a pop song, where they are set up to rhyme (many of the phrases don't really rhyme, but they're treated as if they do). Your job is to guess the song based on the rhyming pair. 1) Lion sleeps/ soul to keep 2) bartender/ medical center 3) health department/ glove compartment 4) backup plan/ foreign land 5) in the crotch/ Scottish loch 6) insanity/ and misery 7) fidgety-fidge/ Waterloo Bridge 8) a coma/ aroma 9) burden/ curtains 10) gets mentioned/ detention 11) write exams/ give a damn 12) Edison/ medicine 13)…

"Mumble mumble shoulder something": R.E.M., Guided By Voices, Ghostface, and the pleasures of lyrical ambiguity | Music | The A.V. Club Blog | The A.V. Club "The Stipe of R.E.M.'s early recordings uses words to create abstract compositions. It's not the only way to approach lyric-writing in rock music, or even the best way. Some of my favorite lyricists favor strong statements and clear narratives. Bruce Springsteen's "Stolen Car," to choose just the first example to spring to mind, is an extraordinarily effective, deeply sad song that would lose much of its power if Springsteen were to…

New York Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie is getting mocked for a clip where he takes some time to name all his children (the clip isn't as bad as the description makes it sound-- he's slow, but he doesn't struggle all that badly). Cromartie claims that HBO manipulated the footage to make him look bad. Of course, there's an easy way to avoid this kind of mess: simply give all the kids the same name, thereby reducing it to a previously solved problem. In discussion on a mailing list where this came up, someone wondered about how many children Wilt Chamberlain would've fathered, given his…

This one's pretty self-explanatory: Classes for the new academic year start a week from Monday.survey software You only get to pick one because that's the way it is. If you need me, I'll be over here scrambling frantically.

The Joerg Heber post that provided one of the two papers for yesterday's Hanbury Brown Twiss-travaganza also included a write-up of a new paper in Nature on Mott insulators, which was also written up in Physics World. Most of the experimental details are quite similar to a paper by Markus Greiner's group I wrote up in June: They make a Bose-Einstein Condensate, load it into an optical lattice, and use a fancy lens system to detect individual atoms at sites of the lattice. This lattice can be prepared in a "Mott insulator" state, where each site is occupied by a definite number of atoms. As…

Streets of the optical scientists! | Skulls in the Stars "[While a post-doc in Amsterdam] I would take the bus to the rink from my apartment, and every day would travel down Maxwellstraat and past Lorentzlaan, but it didn't occur to me until near the end of my time in The Netherlands that these streets are named after the physicists James Clerk Maxwell and Hendrik Antoon Lorentz! In fact, all streets in the neighborhood of Watergraafsmeer are named after famous scientists and mathematicians, which is really a joy for a physicist like me. So after skating at the last day of the season at the…

I'm unaccountably sleepy today, and I have work to do, which is keeping me from deep, insightful blogging. So I'm going to punt, and throw this open to you all: Leave me a comment telling me something I don't already know. Well, OK, since I can't reasonably expect you to be mind-readers, that should be "tell me something that you think I won't be likely to know already," but you get the idea. It could be trivia, it could be an important fact about something or another, it could be a pointer to an entertaining book or web page. Hopefully it won't be anything that it's not legal or advisable…

Two papers in one post this time out. One of these was brought to my attention by Joerg Heber, the other I was reminded of when checking some information for last week's mathematical post on photons. They fit extremely well together though, and both relate to the photon correlation stuff I was talking about last week. OK, what's the deal with these? These are two papers, one recent Optics Express paper from a week or so ago, the other a Nature article from a few years back. The Nature paper includes the graph you see at right, which is a really nice dataset demonstrating the Hanbury Brown and…

The mismeasure of education « Confused at a higher level "Put simply, it makes just about as much sense to obsess over these numerical rankings as it does to try to numerically rank favorite restaurants, or jazz songs, or single malt scotches, or ... you get the point. It is a false quantitative-ness about unquantifiable qualities that I've seen people deploy in all sorts of situations and to which I am occasionally prey myself, to be honest. The unquantifiable nature of these things doesn't mean that there is no comparing these things. Of course there is. I've spent lovely evenings…

Derek Lowe's doing a lunch thing at the ACS meeting, and in passing mentions the age of his blog: As the longest-standing chemistry blogger (perhaps the longest standing science blogger, for all I know), I'm glad to have a chance to speak. I was just telling a reader by e-mail that when I started this site in 2002, that I wasn't sure how much I'd find to write about. But (for better or worse) the material just keeps on coming. . . Derek's blog pre-dates this one by a few months-- I specifically cite him in the very first Uncertain Principles post, so he's got me beat. I wonder, though, if…

I'm a big fan of review articles. For those not in academic science, "review article" means a long (tens of pages) paper collecting together the important results of some field of science, and presenting an overview of the whole thing. These vary somewhat in just how specific they are-- some deal with both experiment and theory, others just theoretical approaches-- and some are more readable than others, but typically, they're written in a way that somebody from outside the field can understand. These are a great boon to lazy authors, or authors facing tight page limits ("Ref. [1] and…

While I'm still trying not to think about the new academic term that starts in two weeks (yes, the first day of class is Labor Day, grumble mutter grump), it's beginning to impinge on my consciousness. Thus, this poll on a frequent and annoying phenomenon that recurs with every new academic term: Students who miss the first day of class in a new academic term should be:online survey You can choose one and only one answer in this poll. Attempts to submit multiple answers will be given a failing grade, and reported to the Dean as a violation of the Academic Honesty policy.

Washington, We Have a Problem | Politics | Vanity Fair "It's Obama's conviction--you hear this from the most senior White House aides again and again, because it reflects the thinking at the top--that by keeping his head down and doing his job he can also pursue a different strategy, one that doesn't aim to win the day or the week but that looks toward victory in the long run. "You can do your job well," as Axelrod puts it. "You can bring the troops home from Iraq, and you can move forward on things that will strengthen the economy, and you can hope that over time people say, 'He had a…

I was channel-surfing the other night, and stumbled across a History Channel program on paleoanthropology, talking about new-ish theories of how humans first populated the Americas. Coming off my recent read of 1491, this seemed like a good way to pass a little time. After a little bit, it started to talk about some guy's theory that the Younger Dryas cooling and the mass extinctions at around that time were caused by an asteroid impact on one of the ice sheets. Which, you know, is a theory, I guess. The problem with this was, part of the evidence they were citing for the impact hypothesis…

In honor of the people down the street who are trying to unload some excess personal belongings, a poll: When people take a bunch of stuff they no longer want, put it outside their house, and try to sell it to passersby, this is called:Market Research You can only choose one of these terms in this poll, but I'll throw in all four if you give me $5.

News: A Graphic Text - Inside Higher Ed A bunch of professors in MBA programs have written a textbook in graphic novel form. I'd make a joke here about what this says about our future captains of industry, but, really, do I need to? (tags: education comics business academia books) slacktivist: A bank run in reverse "The United States is flush with low-interest cash from the Giant Pool of Money. Yes, that cash will one day have to be repaid, but right now what it means is the government has the opportunity to invest it in ways that will help to generate future revenue, which is to say in…

Nobody who likes both SF and the graphing of odd things as much as I do could possibly fail to link to Orbit's charts of fantasy art. These include the frequency plot of various elements seen at right, a comparison of fashion trends for urban fantasy heroines, color trends in cover dragons, and a study of word and font frequencies in titles. If you're planning a fantasy series, Bloody Death Dragon of the Magic Shadow God would apparently be a good title choice.