The Science and Entertainment Exchange: The X-Change Files: Tony Stark's Science "While the film naturally took some liberties with the details -- sci-fi has the luxury of not having to pass peer review -- Marvel Studios nonetheless cared enough about plausibility to ask the Science & Entertainment Exchange for a suitable scientist with whom they could consult." (tags: movies science culture blogs x-change comics) Using Laser to Map Ancient Civilization in a Matter of Days - NYTimes.com "In only four days, a twin-engine aircraft equipped with an advanced version of lidar (light…

I've written before about the problem of having in-between views on controversial subjects in blogdom. This is something that also comes up in Jessica's excellent entry on online culture, and has been scientifically demonstrated in political contexts. I'm somewhat bemused, then, to see the same thing happen in a physics context. A while back, I got an email asking about quantum foundations that read in part: I'm very keen to understand why you and Andrew Thomas reject [the Many-Worlds Interpretation of QM]. I'd be very happy if you'd take a few minutes to try to describe why you think MWI is…

Against a Definition of Science Fiction -- Paul Kincaid "When I called my collection of essays and reviews What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction, I was struggling toward something I could not fully articulate. I don't know what is involved in reading science fiction, because I don't know what science fiction is. There was a time, not so long ago, when I was quite clear what science fiction is. I could pick up a book from the shelf and know, with no real doubt or confusion, that it was science fiction. That certainty is with me no more, not because science fiction has changed (it has…

One of my many character weaknesses is a fondness for the kooky UFO programs run on the History Channel and other educational cable networks. The nuttier the better-- there's something about the credulity and self-delusion displayed by the "researchers" they trot out that I find really hilarious. I have to say, though, that they've outdone themselves with this new Ancient Aliens series. To the point where it almost has to be a put-on-- last week, they had a pudgy guy with wild eyes stating that stone obelisks around the world were really receivers in a global energy distribution network based…

When I was writing about the seemingly contradictory meanings of "adiabatic" the other day, I almost gave "theory" as an example of a word with nearly opposite meanings. After all, as anyone who has even glanced at the evolution-creation "debate" has heard, a "Theory" in science is something more exalted than a mere guess-- it's a guess that has been confirmed by observations and experiments, and can thus be regarded as true with a high degree of confidence (and assigned a capital letter in this post, to set it apart). (Also, in physical science at least, it makes quantitative predictions.).…

Jason Sanford: Living in a world where most writers suck I find bad writing to be cross-generational and not caused by someone loving video games or fanfic. If you turned Shakespeare loose on gaming or fanfic, he'd likely come up with some great stories. He'd also come up with some horrible stories--don't forget that before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet he penned Titus Andronicus, a play so bad Harold Bloom claimed it could only be enjoyed if directed by Mel Brooks. Which is the other reason I'm not overly worried about the writing ability of new writers. A new writer who produces bad stories…

While it's not aprt of the official LaserFest package of stuff, Physics World is marking the 50th anniversary of the laser with a couple of really nice pieces on lasers in science and popular culture: Where next for the laser interviews six laser experts-- Claire Max of UCSC, Bill Phillips of NIST, Steven Block of Stanford, science writer Jeff Hecht, John Madey of Hawaii's FEL lab, and Eric Gustafson of Caltech and LIGO.-- about the current status of lasers in their areas of science, and the future prospects. From ray-gun to Blu-Ray is a very nice survey of lasers and laser-like devices in…

YouTube - Walk on water "Liquid Mountaineering is a new sport which is attempting to achieve what man has tried to do for centuries: walk on water. Or to be more precise: running on water. We are developing the sport from scratch. By accident we found out that with the right water repellent equipment you can run across bodies of water, just like a stone skimming the surface." (tags: sports video youtube) Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 183602 (2010): Observation of a Cooperative Radiation Force in the Presence of Disorder "Cooperative scattering of light by an extended object such as an atomic…

The Steinmetz Symposium is today at Union, as mentioned in yesterday's silly poll about fears (I love the fact that "Wavefunction Collapse" leads "Monsters from the Id" by one vote at the time of this writing-- my readers are awesome). As a more serious follow-up, there were two presentation options offered to the students, and this year's physics majors overwhelmingly chose one over the other. I'm curious as to how many people would make the same choice, so here's a poll: You have to give a presentation about a research project you have done. Which of these presentation types would you…

Microsoft's PowerPoint isn't evil if you learn how to use it. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine I've seen more terrible slide presentations in my life than good ones, but that stat isn't necessarily an indictment of the program--I've also encountered a lot more terrible books than terrific ones, and I've certainly seen more ugly Web sites than pretty ones. Yes, PowerPoint--and slide software in general, a category that includes Apple's Keynote--can be heroically misused. But if you use it correctly, slide software can help you captivate and inform an audience in a way that a speech alone…

This week, we offer a shot from the forthcoming "Casual Living with SteelyKid and Appa" catalogue: If you look closely, you can see two things: 1) a small scrape by her right eye, from an accident at day care-- even SteelyKid is bound by the laws of physics, and gravity is a harsh one, and 2) her new Williams shirt, picked up when I visited there last week. I'm not actually obligated to buy new college-logo clothing whenever I visit, but it amuses me when Kate rolls her eyes at me for buying baby clothes with purple cows. Another decent view of the shirt is here: When I gave it to her after…

There's a minor kerfuffle at the moment over the XENON experiment's early data (arxiv paper) which did not detect any dark matter in 11 days of data acquisition. This conflicts with earlier claims by the DAMA experiment and recent maybe-kinda-sorta detections by the CoGeNT and CDMA experiments. As a result, a couple of members of other collaborations have posted a response on the arxiv saying, basically, that they don't believe the sensitivity claimed for the XENON detector in the energy range in question, and that their result can't really be said to rule out the possibility of dark matter…

Tomorrow is the annual Steinmetz Symposium at Union, where students who have done some sort of research present their results. Which means that today there are a lot of students fretting about having to give a public presentation tomorrow. Just to remind them that there are worse things than giving a research talk to a fairly sympathetic audience, here's a poll about scary things: Which of these things frightens you the most?Market Research So, you see, it could be a lot worse...

My publisher would like to include a Teacher's Guide with the paperback edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. which means that, well, I need to put together a Teacher's Guide for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. The problem is, I'm not exactly sure what should go in that sort of thing. So, if you have any opinions on the subject of Teacher's Guides for pop-science books in general, or can point to examples of Teacher's Guides that you particularly like, or have suggestions for what ought to be in a Teacher's Guide for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. If you were a teacher planning to…

Particle Detector Shows Promise, if Nothing Else - NYTimes.com "A new widely anticipated experiment underneath a mountain in Italy designed to detect a sea of dark particles that allegedly constitute a quarter of creation did not see anything during a test run last fall, scientists reported Saturday. But, they said, the clarity with which they saw nothing spurred hopes that such experiments are approaching the rigor and sensitivity necessary to detect the elusive gravitational glue of the cosmos. The results also cast further doubt on some controversial claims that dark matter has already…

Over at the Virtuosi, there's a nice discussion of the physics of letting air out of tires. Jesse opens the explanation with: Have you ever noticed how when you let air out of a bike tire (or, I suppose, a car tire) it feels rather cold? Today we're going to explore why that is, and just how cold it is. Many people consider the air escaping from a tire as a classic example of an adiabatic process. What is an adiabatic process? It is a process that happens so quickly there is no time for heat flow to occur. For our air in the bike tire this means we're letting it out of the tire so…

It's been a couple of weeks since I did an update on How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, but that's been as much laziness as a lack of news. Some developments, mostly relating to foreign lands: The US paperback edition is slated for December release. I'm working on a Teacher's Guide to go with it-- suggestions on what ought to be in there are welcome, as I have no idea If you do the right search, you'll also find a forthcoming UK edition which will be out this fall with a slightly different title. There's a production schedule for this, and everything-- more information as things become…

Being Complementary About Uncertainty : Built on Facts "Complementarity is a very general concept and not easy to define formally, though informally you might say it's the principle that the wave-like and particle-like aspects of an object can't be simultaneously observed. More formally you could say that each degree of freedom of a system corresponds to a conjugate pair of observables, which means these pairs (say, position and momentum) can't both be measured precisely at the same time." (tags: physics quantum education blogs built-on-facts) Color Survey Results « xkcd Over five…

As James Nicoll is fond of saying, context is for the weak. So here's a context-free poll regarding the reporting of election results: Releasing a rank-ordered list of candidates with vote totals after a contested election is:online survey If you'd like to explain what context you might imagine this to have in the comments, that could be fun to see.

Online civility: between 10,000 cliques and 2 cultures, where's the neutral ground? : bioephemera "Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the blogosphere abhors a neutral and nonpartisan blog. For whatever reasons, cultural or historical, participants expect partisanship. They want to know if you're with them or against them; the dedicated communities at various blogs can be pretty defensive of their space, and sometimes stream like lemmings through the aether to attack a blogger that they perceive as threatening. It's human nature: when our friends get attacked, we get mad. The problem is, we're…