drorzel | June 25, 2010Continuing with the uncomfortable questions, H asks a good one:
Union is one of the most expensive colleges in the country. What are students getting for their money? How does Union justify the increase in price over other schools with comparable academics and facilities?
See, now that's an uncomfortable question, especially on an institutional level.
Stripped down to the most basic level, and stated as bluntly as possible, students at an elite private liberal arts college are paying for three things: faculty/facilities, individual attention, and connections.
Faculty and facilities are the…
drorzel | June 25, 2010
Sci-Fi Airshow :: Home
"The SCI-FI AIR SHOW's purpose is to preserve and promote the rich and varied history of Sci-Fi/fantasy vehicles. Through display and education we seek to celebrate the classic design and beauty of these ships and the rich imaginations that created them. When the cameras stopped rolling, many of these proud old ships were lost and forgotten. Please join us in working to keep these rare and beautiful birds soaring! "
(tags: movies television culture nostalgia sf silly)
Dumb Astronomy Acronyms
"Dumb Or Overly Forced Astronomical Acronyms Site (or DOOFAAS)"
(tags:…
drorzel | June 24, 2010SteelyKid is spending a long weekend with Kate's mother, so we are baby-less. Which means no Appa-for-scale picture this week, alas.
Since I know some of you would freak out without the weekly cute-baby photo, though, here's another shot from the backyard playhouse:
As you can tell, Kate has an ever-so-slightly easier time fitting into Chateau SteelyKid than I do...
drorzel | June 24, 2010Next in line of questions from readers, we have tbell with:
Since science is a self-correcting process (maybe only at a statistical level, not necessarily an individual level), it would be cool if you would relate the last time you were seriously wrong about some aspect of science or research, and how you altered your thinking as a consequence.
This is kind of a tough one to answer, because I'm an experimentalist. Most of the mistakes I make in the process of research are problems of a technical nature, like "I totally thought that would work, but the impedance of the vacuum feed-throughs…
drorzel | June 24, 2010Starting at the beginning of the uncomfortable questions left by readers, we have Tex asking:
If physics is the basic science that underlies almost every other science, why do American high schools usually teach it in the 3rd or 4th year, after biology and chemistry? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Physics first, then chemistry, then biology?
Physics is the final course in the standard American high school curriculum for two reasons, as far as I can tell: history and math. History is the less convincing of the two, as it amounts to "the courses are in that order because they've been in…
drorzel | June 24, 2010I'm seriously lacking in bloggy inspiration at the moment. So we'll fall back on something that has worked a couple of times in the past:
Everyone has things they blog about.
Everyone has things they don't blog about.
Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it.
The usual disclaimers apply: questions that are pointlessly obnoxious or whose answers would get me in trouble of some sort ("What are three things you hate about the Deans to whom you report?") will be ignored or get blow-off answers. I'…
drorzel | June 24, 2010
On Writing and the Internet: Data Is the New Alcohol « Lev Grossman
"A lot of writers have been ruined by addictions in the past. Heroine, alcohol, etc. Me, I don't have big -- big -- problems with drugs and alcohol. (I have in fact, over the past 6 months, moderated my drinking, something I never thought I would do. In case you were, wondering, that's where the shortage of drunk-tweets is coming from.) Data will be the addiction that gets me if anything does."
(tags: writing blogs drugs internet computing culture)
What is quantum co-tunneling and why is it cool? « Physics and cake
A…
drorzel | June 23, 2010The US managed to survive yet another appalling lapse of officiating and beat Algeria 1-0 on a goal in stoppage time. Simultaneously (in some frame of reference), England beat Slovenia 1-0. With South Korea advancing yesterday, countries with current or forthcoming editions of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog are 3-0 when it comes to advancing past group play. Meanwhile, France, where rights have not yet sold, was eliminated.
I'm also happy to report that Spanish translation rights have been sold, and a translation is in progress, so Spain can go into their final group play game without…
drorzel | June 23, 2010I don't remember who pointed me at this transcript of Deepak Chopra interviewing Michio Kaku, but if I remember who it was, I fully intend to hate them.
DC: Is our conversation affecting something in another galaxy right now?
MK: In principle. What we're talking about right is affecting another galaxy far, far beyond the Milky Way Galaxy. Now when the Big Bang took place we think that most of the matter probably was vibrating in unison.
DC: So it was already correlated?
MK: It was already correlated. We call this coherence or correlation. As the universe expanded, we're still correlated, we'…
drorzel | June 23, 2010
Scanning Electron Microscope Submissions | SEM Image Galley by ASPEX
"Do you have a sample you'd like to send us to have scanned by one of our Scanning Electron Microscopes or our Tabletop SEM?
Just download the sample submission form below, fill it out, and mail it in along with your sample, and we'll post your images online for the world to see."
(tags: science atoms nano contests biology microscopy)
AAAS/Science Dancing Scientists? Announcing the 2010 "Dance Your Ph.D." Contest
"The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is proud to announce the third annual "Dance…
drorzel | June 22, 2010A press release from Harvard caught my eye last week, announcing results from Markus Greiner's group that were, according to the release, published in Science. The press release seems to have gotten the date wrong, though-- the article didn't appear in Science last week. It is, however, available on the arxiv, so you get the ResearchBlogging for the free version a few days before you can pay an exorbitant amount to read it in the journal.
The title of the paper is "Probing the Superfluid to Mott Insulator Transition at the Single Atom Level," which is kind of a lot of jargon. The key image is…
drorzel | June 22, 2010I hate to keep highlighting silly articles in Inside Higher Ed, but they keep publishing silly articles, like Jeffrey DiLeo's argument that humanities journals cannot be ranked because they're all unique and precious flowers too specialized:
Another reason for the roaring silence regarding the ranking of humanities journals regards the high level of sub-disciplinary specialization. In philosophy, there are journals devoted to general areas of philosophy (e.g., logic, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, etc.), to sub-areas of general areas of philosophy (e.g., medical ethics, business ethics,…
drorzel | June 22, 2010
slacktivist: Big shoes
"But what I think people meant about [Manute] Bol's "killer instinct" was that he never seemed to take the game of basketball quite seriously enough. He hadn't chosen this game, it had chosen him. It discovered him in that Sudanese village and plucked him out of it, whisking him halfway around the world. All for the sake of a game.
ManuteNancy Bol always seemed bewildered and slightly amused by that. Eugene McCarthy said that politics was like being a football coach, "You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important."
Manute…
drorzel | June 21, 2010Three European countries, France, Germany, and Spain have suffered embarrassing World Cup losses. The French team in particular has appeared to be in complete disarray. Their combined record to this point is just 2-3-1 (W-L-T).
What do these three countries have in common? None of them have purchased translation rights for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Meanwhile, the seven countries with current or forthcoming editions (the US, Brazil, Portugal, England, Italy, Japan, and South Korea) have a combined record of 5-2-7.
I think the lesson here is clear: translation rights for Spanish, French…
drorzel | June 21, 2010An experiment in Germany has generated a good deal of publicity by dropping their Bose-Einstein Cendensate (BEC) apparatus from a 146 meter tower. This wasn't an act of frustration by an enraged graduate student (anybody who has worked with BEC has probably fantasized about throwing at least part of their apparatus down a deep hole), but a deliberate act of science: They built a BEC apparatus that is entirely contained within a two-meter long capsule inside the evacuated drop tower at the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (which in German leads to the acronym ZARM, which…
drorzel | June 21, 2010The Virtuosi has quickly become a staple of the daily Links Dumps here, but the recent series of posts on experimental physics deserve greater prominence, so here they are:
Life as an Experimenter- Day One
Life as an Experimenter- Day Two
Life as an Experimenter- Day Three
Life as an Experimenter- Reflections
The individual day posts provide an inside look at what it's like to do experimental condensed matter physics, specifically using beam time on an accelerator to do diffraction studies of materials. It's got everything you would like to see in such a story-- equipment failures, sleep…
drorzel | June 21, 2010
Lost Myths
" Lostmyths.net is a website featuring myths uncovered by writer Claude Lalumière (Tesseracts 12, Witpunk, Objects of Worship) and illustrator Rupert Bottenberg. As cryptomythologists, they study imaginary myths, just like cryptozoologists study imaginary creatures. [...]
The site features gods and deities from pantheons unsuspected until now and stories about some heretofore unknown players of existing traditions. Knowing that myths are not just stories but can manifest everywhere in culture and society, Claude and Rupert have made Lostmyths "a playful medley of…
drorzel | June 20, 2010I've made a few oblique references to home improvement projects over the last week or so. These weren't for our house, but for SteelyKid's-- Kate's mom got her a playhouse for Christmas, which we finally got around to installing in the back yard. SteelyKid has taken right to home ownership:
Don't let her studied cool in that picture fool you, though. Getting the house was the highlight of the whole day:
(My parents were visiting for Father's Day/ my birthday, so they get a cameo in the video.)
Most of the rest of the afternoon was passed going in and out of the house, ringing the doorbell…
drorzel | June 20, 2010There's a blog post making the rounds of the science blogosphere titled If Sports Got Reported Like Science, which imagines the effect of applying the perceived restriction on scientific terminology to sports reporting:
HOST: In sports news, Chelsea manager Carlo Ancelotti today heavily criticised a controversial offside decision which denied Didier Drogba a late equaliser, leaving Chelsea with a 1-all draw against Sunderland.
INTERCOM: Wait. Hold it. What was all that sports jargon?
HOST: It's just what's in the script. All I did was read it - I've got no idea what it's really on about.…
drorzel | June 20, 2010Friday's games showcased everything that makes international soccer maddening for Americans to watch: dreadful officiating, lack of scoring, and annoyingly conservative strategy. The referee in the Germany-Serbia game handed out cards like it was a poker tournament, with the result that, in the second half, every time two players got within about a meter of each other, both fell down, figuring it was about 50-50 that he would call something.
The cavalcade of cards eventually got German striker Miroslav Klose thrown out (for a nothing little tackle), so Germany spent the last hour or so of the…