drorzel | May 26, 2010The conference I'm at this week is the annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society (which this year is joint with the Canadian version, the Division of Atomic and Molecular Physics and Photon Interactions, or "DAMPΦ." The Greek letter is a recent addition-- as recently as 2001, they were just DAMP.). As the name suggests, this is a meeting covering a wide range of topics, and in some ways is like two or three meetings running in parallel in the same space.
You can see the different threads very clearly if you look at the different…
drorzel | May 26, 2010
Student Tip: Asking for a better grade : Dot Physics
"If you are a student and you want a higher grade, you need to come in and show me that you understand the material at a level that was different than you showed on the exam. Most students don't come in with this attitude."
(tags: academia education physics blogs dot-physics science)
News: The Aging of Science - Inside Higher Ed
"What if key elements of science policy are based on patterns of discovery that no longer exist?
That's the question behind a paper (abstract available here) released Monday by the National Bureau of Economic…
drorzel | May 25, 2010I'm going to be spending the bulk of today in transit between Albany and Houston, with a layover in Orlando (whee!), so here's a pair of related poll questions for you to consider:
The most enjoyable way to travel between two cities in the continental US is:customer surveys
The least enjoyable way to travel between two cities in the continental US is:Market Research
I think the answers are pretty clear, but I'm interested to see what other people think about the subject.
drorzel | May 25, 2010
...My heart's in Accra » The Partisan Internet and the Wider World
"I think the comparison between ideological isolation in media and in face to face encounters is more like comparing apples and hedgehogs. They're thoroughly different types of interactions and we should have very different expectations for diversity and ideological isolation in each set. The media I consume damn well better be more diverse than the community I live in. That's what media is supposed to do - give me a broader view than I'm able to get from friends, family and coworkers. It's okay that there aren't any Thai…
drorzel | May 24, 2010This is the presentation I gave to the International Baccalaureate class from Schenectady High School today. I tend to re-use talk titles a lot, but this is substantially different than the last talk with this title, as the previous group had read How to Teach Physics to Your Dog first. For this group, I spent more time on applications, and took out a few details.
What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics
View more presentations from Chad Orzel.
We were pressed for time, so I ended up not being able to show the video embedded in the next-to-last slide (this one), which is a shame.…
drorzel | May 24, 2010I'm leaving for DAMOP tomorrow, and did a presentation for local high-schoolers today, so everything is in chaos here. Thus, a poll to pass the time, inspired by my current activities:
The best part of going to a conference is:online survey
The word "best" naturally implies a single item, so choose only one.
drorzel | May 24, 2010
Sunday Function : Built on Facts
How hash functions can keep you safe if you find yourself part of the French underground fighting the Nazis.
(tags: math science blogs built-on-facts)
"Heretical" Copernicus Reburied as a Hero - CBS News
""There is no indication that Copernicus was worried about being declared a heretic and being kicked out of the church for his astronomical views," [Copernicus scholar Jack] Repcheck said.
"Why was he just buried along with everyone else, like every other canon in Frombork? Because at the time of his death he was just any other canon in Frombork. He was…
drorzel | May 23, 2010As mentioned previously, I have an inexplicable fondness for the "Ancient Aliens" show on the History channel. It's such a bizarre mishmash of every crazy idea out there in the UFO community that it ends up being hilarious where it ought to be just reprehensible.
To give you an idea of the wackiness, the episode they re-ran last night featured a guy whose job title was "Biblical archaeologist," which is usually incredibly dodgy-- most of the people appearing on the History channel with that job title are trying to use archeology to demonstrate the literal truth of some Old Testament story. On…
drorzel | May 23, 2010
Every Hug, Every Fuss - Scientists Record Families' Daily Lives - NYTimes.com
"[T]he U.C.L.A. project was an attempt to capture a relatively new sociological species: the dual-earner, multiple-child, middle-class American household. The investigators have just finished working through the 1,540 hours of videotape, coding and categorizing every hug, every tantrum, every soul-draining search for a missing soccer cleat.
"This is the richest, most detailed, most complete database of middle-class family living in the world," said Thomas S. Weisner, a professor of anthropology at U.C.L.A. who was…
drorzel | May 22, 2010The problem is "What should Chad do/ see in the evenings while he's at DAMOP next week?"
This is the major physics conference in my field, so my days will be pretty well booked up with talks and posters, but there's not much after 6pm other than food and socializing. If there's some not-to-be-missed Houston thing to do (a bar, restaurant, live music venue, etc.) in the evening, I'm open to suggestions.
The boundary values constraining this particular problem are: 1) I'll be staying in the Hyatt Regency downtown, and 2) I will not have a car.
I don't promise I'll be able to follow any and all…
drorzel | May 22, 2010
News: Questioning Endowment Losses - Inside Higher Ed
"High-risk, high-reward policies heavily influenced by Wall Street helped some college endowments grow to several times their original sizes, but they also did damage to employees, local communities and the global financial system, a new assessment of investment practices at Harvard University and five other New England institutions suggests.
The development since the 1970s of the "endowment model of investing" may have paid off for many years, but in a report released Thursday, the Center for Social Philanthropy at Boston's Tellus…
drorzel | May 21, 2010I didn't see it live, but thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can see Tom O'Brian of NIST talking about measurement on the Rachel Maddow show last night:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Tom used to have an office not far from the lab I worked in at NIST, and has a background in laser stuff, so he's got to be a good guy for this. This was in honor of World Metrology Day, celebrating the hundred-and-mumbleth anniversary of the signing of the Convention on the Meter yesterday. Ironically, all the numbers Tom cites are given in English units.
So,…
drorzel | May 21, 2010Duke shut down its Usenet server yesterday, which is significant because Duke's server was the original home of Usenet. I think this means that Usenet is now available only to about a dozen people with panix accounts.
I note this here because Usenet was an important part of my life. I started reading the rec.arts.sf.* hierarchy in 1993, was involved in the creation of rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan, and spent a lot of time there and on rec.sport.basketball.college as a graduate student and post-doc. It was my introduction to text-based interaction on the Internet, and led directly to…
drorzel | May 21, 2010
PHD Comics: Grading Rubric
Sounds about right. Maybe a little too generous on the lower row.
(tags: comics piled-higher academia education silly)
Producing novel semiconductors en masse - physicsworld.com
"John Rogers, working with colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a related company, offer a production method by adapting a transfer-printing technique that they have been developing for the past few years. They begin by growing stacks consisting of multiple layers of gallium arsenide and aluminium gallium arsenide, which they then "peel" off one-by-one using a…
drorzel | May 20, 2010How did my day of solo SteelyKid wrangling go, you ask? I can sum it up in one picture:
She's quite a handful...
(To be fair, this is part of a game that gets played even on days when I'm not about to fall over from exhaustion... But it seemed like a really appropriate picture to sum up the day.)
drorzel | May 20, 2010I'm home with SteelyKid today, because Shavuot is important enough to close the JCC for two days. This will mean essentially no Internet for me, as it's difficult to type when you're lying on the floor being jumped on by a toddler.
As a filler post, let me take a cue from Making Light and offer you some analogies:
Quantum Mechaincs is to Newtonian Mechanics as:survey software
Choose only one, and be prepared to defend your choice in an essay of no more than 500 words, using examples drawn from the reading.
drorzel | May 20, 2010
The Virtuosi: Cell Phone Brain Damage: Part Deux
"I thought I'd take another look at cell phone damage, coming at it from a different direction than my colleague. Mostly I just want to consider the energy of the radiation that cell phones produce, and compare that with the other relevant energy scales for molecules."
(tags: science physics medicine biology quantum optics thermo atoms molecules blogs virtusoi)
Can we please stop talking about Supreme Court nominees like they are real people? - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine
"What I see in the national obsession over Kagan's unmarried…
drorzel | May 19, 2010I spent yesterday going over proposed copy edits to Anglicise How to Teach Physics to Your Dog for the forthcoming UK edition, which adds "Quantum" to the title, and will have all new cover art, etc. This means that clergy in the book are now permitted to marry, all book property belonging to the Catholic Church has been seized by the Crown, and an "s" has been added to "math" every time it appears (weirdly, it doesn't seem to actually pluralize the word, leading to the jarring construction "maths is" in several places). My favorite parts of the changes:
The evil squirrel in Chapter 10 gets…
drorzel | May 19, 2010SteelyKid's day care is closed today and tomorrow for a Jewish holiday (happy (?) Shavuot to those who celebrate it), so she's home all day for the next two. Of course, Kate and I are both crazy busy, so my parents are coming up to watch SteelyKid today while we're off at work. We really had to twist their arms to get them to agree to spend a whole day with the cutest baby in the universe...
Anyway, in honor of that, here's some bonus baby video of SteelyKid playing one of her favorite games with Grandpa:
It's less elaborate than a lot of her favorite games, but really, anything where she…
drorzel | May 19, 2010
Why just earn a degree when you can leave behind a legend? - CharlotteObserver.com
"If you've spent significant time on the Davidson College campus the past four years, chances are you've at least heard of "the Name Tag Guy."
Or, less likely, Stephen Pierce.
They are one. Both were among 427 seniors who graduated during the college's 173rd commencement Sunday - Pierce pinning to his gown the same paper name tag he was given on his first day of freshman orientation in 2006."
(tags: academia silly culture education)
XENON100 is certain about its uncertainty (Blog) - physicsworld.com
"Now,…