drorzel | June 4, 2010
slacktivist: Sex & Money, part 2
"I'm being too polite here. I need to state this more vigorously because I need to put it in a way that will make my accusers fruitfully angry. So let me try this:
The Bible is not a book about homosexuality and it will not allow itself to be treated as a book about homosexuality. Nor is the Bible a book about sex. But the Bible is, in fact, very much a book about wealth, possessions and the poor. That is not the central theme, but it is a massively important theme that pervades every portion of the book. If you don't agree with that then I don't know…
drorzel | June 3, 2010I sometimes get comments asking why so many of the baby blogging pictures are taken from above. The answer is twofold: 1) I'm rather tall, and thus it's hard for me to get down to baby level to take pictures straight on, and 2) when I do try to get down to baby level, most of the pictures come out like this:
SteelyKid, like Emmy, interprets "Daddy near ground level" as "time to play" and comes charging over to me. It's usually dumb luck if I manage to get the camera up before she pounces on me.
So, if you want Appa-for-scale images, you're generally stuck with shots from above:
Fortunately…
drorzel | June 3, 2010A number of SF-related sites have been talking about the "Periodic Table of Women in SF" put together by Sandra McDonald, presumably passed around at Wiscon. James Nicoll has a list of the authors, and SFSignal has a link to the table, which I will reproduce here to save you the annoyance of opening a PDF:
This is an area where my nerdiness gets the best of me, because while I appreciate the concept-- listing a whole bunch of really good female authors as a way to draw attention to them-- the execution is dreadful. It's particularly disappointing given that the whole project is in reference…
drorzel | June 3, 2010This may be a job for the MythBusters, but I'll throw this out as a puzzle for interested blog readers. I don't know the answer to this (though it wouldn't be all that hard to determine experimentally), I just think it's sort of interesting. There's a poll at the bottom of this post, but it requires some set-up first.
So, it's coming up on summer now, and I've been doing a bunch of errand-running this week, which means a lot of getting in and out of the car in sunny parking lots. Which raises the question: If you have an air-conditioned car, is it better to leave the car windows open a crack…
drorzel | June 3, 2010
Precautions and Paralysis « Easily Distracted
"The cautionary example that I think is most pertinent for academics is newspaper and magazine journalism. Fifteen years ago, some of the developments that have cast the future of print journalism as we have known it into doubt were already quite visible. But few people in the industry took those developments seriously as a threat, even if they were otherwise interested in online media and digital culture.
Would it have made any difference if print journalists in 1995 had sat down for an industry-wide summit, accurately forecast what online…
drorzel | June 2, 2010I mentioned in a previous post that one of the cool talks I saw at DAMOP had to do with generation of coherent X-Ray beams using ultra-fast lasers. What's particualrly cool about this work is that it doesn't require gigantic accelerators or nuclear explosions to produce a laser-like beam of x-rays-- it's all done with lasers that fit on a normal-size optical table in an ordinary lab room.
The specific talk I saw was by Margaret Murnane of JILA, who co-leads their ultra-fast laser group, and dealt with a new technique for producing soft-x-rays (~500 eV photons) with ultrafast lasers. We'll do…
drorzel | June 2, 2010Sean Carroll is miffed about a science-and-religion panel at the World Science Festival:
The panelists include two scientists who are Templeton Prize winners -- Francisco Ayala and Paul Davies -- as well as two scholars of religion -- Elaine Pagels and Thupten Jinpa. Nothing in principle wrong with any of those people, but there is a somewhat obvious omission of a certain viewpoint: those of us who think that science and religion are not compatible. And there are a lot of us! Also, we're right. A panel like this does a true disservice to people who are curious about these questions and could…
drorzel | June 2, 2010
BOOK EXPO AMERICA LUNCHEON TALK
"The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely...more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.
Please don't mistake this for one of those "after us, the deluge" moments on my part. I've always found those appalling, and most particularly when uttered by aging futurists, who of all people should know better. This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of…
drorzel | June 1, 2010Thinking from Kansas, Josh Rosenau notices a correlation in data from a Daily Kos poll question on the origin of the universe:
Saints be praised, 62% of the public accepts the Big Bang and a 13.7 billion year old universe. Democrats are the most positive, with 71% accepting that, while only 44% of Republicans agree (38 think it's more recent, the rest are undecided). I've said it before and I stand by it: conservative Republicanism is incompatible with science.
But looking at the finer details tells us a lot. The only group - gender, race, or region - with anything like the Republicans'…
drorzel | June 1, 2010While I mostly restricted myself to watching invited talks at DAMOP last week, I did check out a few ten-minute talks, one of which ended up being just about the coolest thing I saw at the meeting. Specifically, the Friday afternoon talk on observing relativity with atomic clocks by Chin-Wen Chou of the Time and Frequency Division at NIST in Boulder.
The real technical advance is in a recent paper in Physical Review Letters (available for free via the Time and Frequency Publications Database, because government research isn't subject to copyright): they have made improvements to their atomic…
drorzel | June 1, 2010Two noteworthy events related to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in the next month:
First, and most important, I'm going to be signing books at the Author's Alley portion of the World Science Festival Street Fair. The fair itself is in Washington Square Park in Manhattan, though the name of the signing program is a little misleading-- rather than being in an actual alley, the signings will be on the eighth floor of NYU's Kimmel Center, on the south side of the square. I'm signing at 1:30, and there are plenty of other books and presentations on offer, not to mention festive happenings…
drorzel | June 1, 2010
OPERA Sees Tau Neutrino Appearance!!
"It is official: the OPERA experiment (above, in a sketch) has found its first tau lepton in one of its bricks (a picture of a brick is shown below). What gives, I am hearing some of you ask. It means that a muon neutrino launched from the CERN laboratories in a 730 km course underground has oscillated into its brother, a tau neutrino, and that the latter has materialized into the charged partner, the tau lepton, inside the OPERA detector.
In other words, the observation spells the direct detection of muon neutrino oscillations into tau neutrinos! This…
drorzel | May 31, 2010Today is Memorial Day in the US, which is a holiday to honor the dead of our various wars. It's also the traditional start of summer-type activities, and most people spend it at cookouts and parades and that sort of thing. I say "most people," because our trimester calendar means that we're still in session, and today is a class day like any other, except most of the administrative staff are taking the day off.
In honor of this, a poll:
Which of the following holidays is most annoying to have to spend at work?online survey
The serious options in the poll are all official holidays that are…
drorzel | May 31, 2010
slacktivist: Sex & Money, part 1
"For Nehemiah, charging 1 percent was shameful usury. The low-interest loans I was championing through our alternative investing still charged more than that.
And the Gospels weren't any help at all. Jesus did not merely reinforce the prohibition against usury, he reached past it -- forbidding lending with the expectation of repayment.
I had studied myself into a bind. On the one hand, I earnestly believed, in that murky, visceral way we evangelicals have, that God had led me to this new job. And the job seemed like an exciting chance to learn a great…
drorzel | May 30, 2010Looking for something else, I was reminded of some pictures I took a week or two ago. This one came out pretty well:
This also reminds me that it's a really nice day here in Niskayuna, and I shouldn't be spending it all at the computer. So, enjoy the bird picture, and I'll post something more substantive tomorrow.
drorzel | May 30, 2010Some late nights and wireless problems conspired to keep me from posting anything Friday or Saturday, but I was still at the meeting, and saw some cool talks on coherent X-ray production with lasers, opto-mechanics, and ridiculously good atomic clocks, some of which I hope to talk about later. For the moment, I'm just enjoying being home with Kate and SteelyKid and Emmy, so a real wrap-up post with physics content will have to wait a bit.
I will put up a quick note that I'll be signing books one week from today as part of the Authors Alley program at the World Science Festival. More on that…
drorzel | May 27, 2010Kate here with two pictures of SteelyKid at play. Here's one from last night in which she is beginning to realize the difficulties with her plan:
(Very shortly after this, she solved the problem by demanding that I put my sandals back on, and then leading me around by one hand while she pushed her cart with the other.)
And here's one from tonight where she works on recreating the fun-with-towers experience:
With my steadying the bottom, she eventually built that single column to be taller than she could reach the top of while standing. She was so pleased with herself.
(No, Appa isn't in…
drorzel | May 27, 2010Since I sort of implied a series in the previous post, and I have no better ideas, here's a look at Thursday's DAMOP program:
Thursday Morning, 8am (yes, they start having talks at 8am. It's a great trial.)
Session J1 Novel Probes of Ultracold Atom Gases
Chair: David Weiss, Pennsylvania State University Room: Imperial East
Invited Speakers: Cheng Chin, Markus Greiner, Kaden Hazzard, Tin-Lun Ho
Session J2 Coherent Control with Optical Frequency Combs
Chair: Linda Young, Argonne National Laboratory Room: Imperial Center
Invited Speakers: J. Ye, Moshe Shapiro, W. Campbell, …
drorzel | May 27, 2010I was pretty sedentary on Wednesday, going to only two sessions, and staying for most of the talks in each. I spent most of the initial prize session getting my bearings in the conference areas, and talking to people I know from my NIST days.
In the 10:30 block, I went to the session on Alkaline Earth Quantum Fluids and Quantum Computation. Tom Killian of Rice opened with a nice talk on work his group has done on trapping and Bose condensing several isotopes of strontium; somebody near me pooh-poohed it as just a technical talk on evaporative cooling issues, but I thought Tom did a nice job…
drorzel | May 27, 2010
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Thoughts on DIY U
"Eleemosynary institutions have real and serious flaws, but they exist to empower the weak. They are necessary to empower the weak. If you rend them asunder, you will expose the weak to the predations of the strong. This is so fundamental that I'm surprised it even needs to be brought up. If it weren't scandalously unethical, I'd propose an experiment: take two sets of kids who barely got through a weak school district. Send one set to the local community college, and tell the other set it's free to educate itself under digital…