drorzel | May 18, 2010It's been a very long day, so I'm lying on the couch watching
"Pardon the Interruption" on ESPN. They're having a boring
conversation about baseball, and I'm just drifting off into a pleasant
doze when:
"Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake! Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake!"
I jolt awake. "What are you barking at?!?" I yell at the dog, who
is standing in the middle of the living room, baying at nothing. She
stops.
"Scary things!"
The room is empty. "There's nothing here," I say, and then hear a
car door slam. I look outside, and see the mathematician next door
heading into his house. "Were you barking at Bill? He…
drorzel | May 18, 2010I have copy edits for an Anglicised edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog to review, lecture notes to write, and a faculty meeting to go to, so I'm going off-line for the rest of the day (with one possible exception). To keep you amused in my absence, here's some video of SteelyKid dancing to Bruce Springsteen:
Ain't no party like a SteelyKid party, because a SteelyKid party don't stop. Except during the sax solo.
Should you want to hold your own SteelyKid dance party, here's a list of songs that she has been directly observed dancing to:
"I'm Going Down," Bruce Springsteen
"The Lion…
drorzel | May 18, 2010There's a Dennis Overbye article in the Times today with the Web headline "From Fermilab, a New Clue to Explain Human Existence?" which I like to think of as a back-handed tribute to the person who linked to an interview with Sean Carroll by calling him "The cosmologist, not the scientist." This is the secret of human existence explained by science, not biology.
The physics issue in question is why we have more matter than antimatter in the universe, as symmetry would seem to demand they be created in equal amounts in the Big Bang. Had that happened, though, all of the matter should've…
drorzel | May 18, 2010
DLMF: NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions
An Abromowitz and Stegun for the Internet age.
(tags: math science software physics books internet)
Blog U.: Is TED Making Us Stupid? - Technology and Learning - Inside Higher Ed
"Pre-TED, I used to be able to sit through a boring lecture or presentation -- diligently taking notes while being sufficiently nourished by whatever small sliver of new insights or information the speaker could provide. I had patience, fortitude, and a long attention span for the bad presentation. TED has extinguished this valuable skill."
(tags: ted…
drorzel | May 17, 2010Matt's Sunday Function this week is a weird one, a series that is only conditionally convergent:
So the sum of the infinite series, by inexorable logic, is both ln(2) and ln(2)/2. How is this possible?
Of course it isn't. The flaw in our logic is the assumption that the series has a definite sum - in the mathematical parlance, that it's absolutely convergent. This series is not, it's only conditionally convergent. In fact you can show (the great G.F.B. Riemann was the first) that with judicious rearrangement, you can get this series to converge to anything at all. As such it's only…
drorzel | May 17, 2010SteelyKid's every-so-often bath was last night, and as always, she was fascinated by scooping up water in a hexagonal cup thing that's part of one of her bath toys, and watching it drain out. Which is completely understandable-- not just because she's a baby, but because there's a bunch of physics at work, here.
I realize this is trampling on Rhett's territory, but I made a little video showing the physics part (in the sink, not the tub, because I don't want to have the pay the therapy bills that would come from posting video of SteelyKid in the tub):
The explanation is laid out in the video…
drorzel | May 17, 2010
Art - Lapham's Quarterly
It takes seven steps to get from Kevin Bacon to Mark Twain
(tags: books literature history art music pictures movies culture silly)
Shocking: Michael Faraday does biology! (1839) « Skulls in the Stars
"These experiments are fascinating and paint an amusing picture: Faraday and up to three assistants sticking their hands in the water repeatedly, zapping themselves [on an electric eel]. (I can't help but visualize Faraday speaking like Christopher Guest in this classic video clip: "What did this do to you? Tell me. And remember, this is for posterity so be honest…
drorzel | May 16, 2010A few upcoming events related to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
The big one is that I'll be aprt of the "Author's Alley" portion of the World Science Festival Street Fair in New York City on Sunday, June 6th. The last couple of these have coincided with out-of-town trips for me, so I'm glad to get to go to this year's World Science Festival, which includes a whole bunch of cool-sounding stuff. The Street Fair is an eight-hour affair, while I'll only be signing books for an hour or so during that span; I'll post a more specific time when I get it.
On Sunday, June 19th, I'll be signing…
drorzel | May 16, 2010
james_nicoll: Please plug the holes in my ignorance
"China has its Four Great Classical Novels: Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber. My impression, gained from minutes and minutes of research, is these are influential and the sort of thing any given Chinese person would be aware of and somewhat familiar with.
I was thinking about what the analogous stories would be for the West and abandoned that as too broad a category. For Britain and Britain-derived nations, though, I think there are at least two stories that almost everyone knows…
drorzel | May 15, 2010It's a beautiful day here in Niskayuna, and we have family visiting. So here's a bonus baby picture (also in use as my Facebook profile picture at the moment), in hopes that while you're distracted by the cute, I can sneak outside with SteelyKid and enjoy the nice weather.
Everybody say "Awwwwww...."
drorzel | May 15, 2010
News: Profs Turned Pols - Inside Higher Ed
"From local school board races to Congressional campaigns, an effort is under way to push scientists out of the lab and onto the stump.
Through a series of Web-based seminars and organizing efforts on university campuses, Scientists & Engineers for America (SEA) has been luring professors and others with advanced degrees into political life. The nonprofit group's underlying premise is that public policy debates often lack the direct input of scientists and engineers, who would bring knowledge and problem-solving skills to topics as diverse as…
drorzel | May 14, 2010Blame Bryan O'Sullivan for this-- after his comment about misreading "Bohmian Mechanics" as "Bohemian Mechanics," I couldn't get this silly idea out of my head. And this is the result.
I like to think that this was Brian May's first draft (he does have a Ph.D. in astrophysics, after all), before Freddie Mercury got hold of it:
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Do objects have real states
Or just probabilities?
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see
Studying quantum (poor boy), I need no sympathy
Because I'm easy come, easy go
A little psi, little rho
No interpretation ever…
drorzel | May 14, 2010
Blue laser awesomeness : Dot Physics
"Yes, green laser pointers are cool. Especially when you use them to make stuff fluoresce. Ok, what about a blue laser pointer? They are getting surprisingly cheap (Amazon has a 10 mW for pretty cheap). Still not cheap enough for me. But, you know what? Some of the physics majors here at Southeastern Louisiana University purchased a couple of these. Physics major Daniel let me borrow his."
(tags: science physics blogs lasers atoms molecules dot-physics pictures video)
Physics Buzz: Obama Loves Lasers
"Just in time for the 50th anniversary of the laser…
drorzel | May 13, 2010SteelyKid went through a phase recently where she didn't want to eat much of anything. This wasn't medically dangerous, just kind of nerve-wracking. As a result, when she declares out of the blue that she wants a bottle, well, she gets a bottle:
Actually, she got two bottles right after we got home from day care. And another at bedtime. Go figure.
Just for fun, below the fold you'll see the comparison shot from Week 10 (this is Week 92):
She's changed just a tiny bit since then...
(For the record, her appetite is pretty much back to normal. Asking for bottles is anomalous, but she's been…
drorzel | May 13, 2010I get asked my opinion of Bohmian mechanics a fair bit, despite the fact that I know very little about it. This came up again recently, so I got some suggested reading from Matt Leifer, on the grounds that I ought to learn something about it if I'm going to keep being asked about it. One of his links led to the Bohmian Mechanics collaboration, where they helpfully provide a page of pre-prints that you can download. Among these was a link to the Bohmian Mechanics entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which seemed like a good place to start as it would be a) free, and b) aimed at a…
drorzel | May 13, 2010Spinning off a blog at Inside Higher Ed, the Dean Dad has a post on deciding what classes are essential:
My personal sense of it is that the distinction between core and periphery is largely a function of purpose. If your goal in life is to be an exhibited artist, then you might well decide that art is essential and history a frill. If your goal is to be an engineer, I could understand valuing a math class over a psych class. Since different students have different purposes, I wouldn't be surprised to discover that one student's frill is another student's priority.
But the questions go deeper…
drorzel | May 13, 2010
Cocktail Party Physics: oily hair is not a problem - its a solution for the gulf coast
"One of the more interesting solutions proposed (aside from dropping trash in the pipe to block the oil) also involves using fibers; however, the fibers in question are human hair. Chicken feathers, straw, and wool have all been used to collect oil in the past, but human hair seems to work particularly well. A big advantage is that the oil is adsorbed rather than absorbed. Adsorbed oil forms a very thin layer - a molecule or two thick - at the surface of the hair. Because the molecules are only weakly…
drorzel | May 12, 2010Via Jennifer Ouellette on Twitter, I ran across a Discovery News story touting a recent arxiv preprint claiming to see variation in the fine-structure constant. It's a basically OK story, but garbles a few details, so I thought it would be worth giving it the ResearchBlogging treatment, in the now-traditional Q&A format.
What did they do? The paper looks at some spectral lines in radio emission from a moderately distant galaxy with the poetic name "PKS1413+135." These lines are produced by OH molecules in interstellar gas clouds, and the frequencies they see suggest that there may have…
drorzel | May 12, 2010No Links Dump today because a combination of work and a nasty cold kept me off the Internet most of yesterday. Here's the moral equivalent, though: a poll question brought to you by the letters "U" and "K" and the song "Gimme Sympathy" by Metric:
Who would you rather be?online surveys
The song is unclear on exactly what criteria you should be using to judge whether you'd rather be the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, so feel free to invent whatever criteria you like. Feel free to explain them in the comments, as well.
And I suppose there's no way I can stop you from complaining that Elvis/…
drorzel | May 11, 2010I should note up front that I'm kind of jealous of Marcus Chown regarding this book. Subtitled "What Everyday Things Tell Us About the Universe," The Matchbox That Ate a Forty-Ton Truck is a book that uses trivial everyday observations-- the fact that you don't fall through the floor, the fact that the sky is dark at night-- as a jumping-off point for discussions about deep and fundamental scientific ideas like Pauli exclusion and inflationary cosmology. It's a fantastic idea for a pop-science book, and I wish I'd thought of it first.
The range of topics here is pretty big, covering most of…