drorzel | May 3, 2010While I missed the controversial episode with comments about aliens, I figured I should at least take a look at the Discovery Channel's Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, so I put it on last night after putting SteelyKid to bed. This was the big two-hour "Story of Everything" episode, starting with the Big Bang and describing the whole history of the universe.
I made it through about half an hour, before I gave up and went to bed. This was partly due to it being a really long day (I took SteelyKid shopping and to a playground, did some yard work, and went to a meeting on campus), so I…
drorzel | May 3, 2010Voting has closed on the Laser Smackdown poll, with 772 people recording their opinion on the most amazing of the many things that have been done with lasers in the fifty years since the invention of the first working laser (see the Laserfest web site for more on the history and applications of lasers). The candidates in the traditional suspense-building reverse order:
Lunar laser ranging 22 votes
Cat toy/ dog toy/ laser light show 41 votes
Laser guide stars/ adaptive optics 46 votes
Holography 47 votes
Laser eye surgery 53 votes
Optical storage media (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray) 60 votes
Laser…
drorzel | May 3, 2010
Clive Thompson on Why We Should Learn the Language of Data | Magazine
"Statistics is hard. But that's not just an issue of individual understanding; it's also becoming one of the nation's biggest political problems. We live in a world where the thorniest policy issues increasingly boil down to arguments over what the data mean. If you don't understand statistics, you don't know what's going on -- and you can't tell when you're being lied to. Statistics should now be a core part of general education. You shouldn't finish high school without understanding it reasonably well -- as well, say,…
drorzel | May 2, 2010With over 700 votes cast in the Laser Smackdown poll in honor of the 50th anniversary of the laser, laser cooling has opened a commanding 20-vote lead in the race to be the Most Amazing Laser Application of All Time. If you prefer one of the other options, you have only six hours left to change the final outcome:
Which of the following is the most amazing application of a laser?Market Research
Voting will remain open until midnight, with the ultimate winner announced on Monday, May 3rd. So get reading, and get voting. One vote per computer per user, please-- this is Serious Science.
drorzel | May 2, 2010Over at the Book Publicity blog, Yen takes up the question of Internet publicity (via SF Signal):
Yesterday I spoke at an AAR / Association of Authors' Representatives panel together with Connor Raus (who runs digital advertising agency CRKWD) about understanding social media and how to use it effectively -- as you know, a favorite topic of mine here on The Book Publicity Blog. I don't have time to summarize the entire panel here (and you don't have time to read a summary of the entire panel), but I did want to tackle the issue of timing, a common question among book publicists, authors,…
drorzel | May 2, 2010
tongodeon: Fun With Secret Questions & Answers
"My new bank, Ally Bank, configures a security question and answer for customer service calls. In addition to your SSN, date of birth, and mother's maiden name they also ask you the question you specify and wait for the answer you've provided. This is good, because many standard questions are guessable in a way that user-defined questions may not be.
A real live human operator always asks the question and waits for a real live answer. This measure has the potential to not just improve my account security but add entertainment value as well…
drorzel | May 1, 2010The APS now gives out an Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics, which gives you some idea of how influential his work was, in particular "Subtle Is the Lord..." The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, which won prizes and sits in a prominent position on the bookshelves of many physicists. Like a lot of influential works, though, it's kind of odd to read it much later than some of the works it has influenced.
The ordering of the subtitle is very deliberate, and accurate. This is first and foremost a book about Einstein's science, with a biographical structure and occasional biographical…
drorzel | May 1, 2010A college classmate sent me this picture of a library display in the Boston area:
That's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog prominently displayed on the top shelf. Just below it, you can see Physics for Future Presidents, and to the right, you can just make out Richard Dawkins's book on evolution. Pretty good company to be in, and even better to be on top of...
(Yes, I know, relative position in a library book display doesn't have anything to do with anything. It's fun to pretend, though...)
(Thanks for the picture, Andrew.)
drorzel | May 1, 2010
slacktivist: Empathy and epistemic closure
"The stupidity of the tea partiers has nothing to do with innate intelligence or with acquired intelligence. It has nothing to do with smartness or brainpower or where anyone falls on the bell curve of Stanford-Binet test scores. It is, rather, a moral stupidity, a moral imbecilism that produces simple imbecilism -- the inevitable intellectual consequence of a selfish refusal to listen to what empathy is shouting from all sides.
The correlation between bigotry and stupidity has been widely observed, leading to much speculation that there is likely…
drorzel | April 30, 2010I'm off to Williamstown this afternoon, to talk about research and alsoHow to Teach Physics to Your Dog. If you need blog-based entertainment, though, here are some shiny new radio buttons for you to click:
You're a beam of light: quick, what's your polarization?online survey
I won't offer a personality analysis based on these results, but after enough people vote, we will be able to determine the angle between this blog's readers and the horizontal. So that's something. Of course, it would require several more polls for full quantum state tomography...
(If you're new here, or ok with old…
drorzel | April 30, 2010We're just over 600 votes in the Laser Smackdown poll in honor of the 50th anniversary of the laser, as of early Friday morning. I notice that it has moved off the front page of the blog, though, so here's another signal-boosting repost, just so we have as many votes as possible, to establish maximum scientific validity when we declare the winner the Most Amazing Laser Application of All Time
Which of the following is the most amazing application of a laser?Market Research
Voting will remain open until next Sunday, May 2, just two days from now, with the ultimate winner announced on Monday…
drorzel | April 30, 2010
The Science and Entertainment Exchange: The X-Change Files: Zap! Or, Where Would Science Fiction Movies be Without Lasers?
"Science fiction was right on top of this new development and even foresaw it. In 1898, H. G. Wells introduced an invisible but powerful heat ray as the weapon of choice for invading Martians in his story The War of the Worlds. Today, that would be an infrared CO2 laser. In the 1930s, space swashbucklers Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon used hand-held ray weapons in their movie serials. In the 1950s, The Day the Earth Stood Still and the film version of The War of the…
drorzel | April 29, 2010SteelyKid has a cold, again, so she's kind of unhappy tonight. There's a picture of a slightly bleary SteelyKid with Appa below the fold, but that's kind of a downer, so here's some video from the other night, showing her new favorite game:
(She'll do this for hours. Well, ten minutes, at least, but it feels like hours when you're the one being ordered around and jumped on...)
Here's the Appa picture, for completeness:
Mommy and the Red Dog make things a little more bearable, but she hasn't been a happy camper today.
drorzel | April 29, 2010Over in Twitter-land, S. C. Kavassalis notes a Googler who's not afraid to ask the big questions:
Weird Google search of the week: 'the "one" scientific idea that we need to believe'. Uh um, I'm sure my blog couldn't possibly answer that.
It's a good question, though, ad there are a couple of different ways to take it. You could read it as "What one scientific idea is supported by the most experimental proof?" or you could read it as "What one idea is most central to science generally?"
"The Standard Model" was quickly suggested on Twitter, which could fit either. I think it might be…
drorzel | April 29, 2010A sad and sordid story from the Times Higher Education following the rescinding of invitations to a conference on quantum foundations:
Details of the conference in August for experts in quantum mechanics sounded idyllic. Participants were due to discuss "de Broglie-Bohm theory and beyond" in the Towler Institute, which is housed in a 16th-century monastery in the Tuscan Alps owned by Mike Towler, Royal Society research fellow at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory.
Last week, any veneer of serenity was shattered. Conference organiser Antony Valentini, research associate in the…
drorzel | April 29, 2010
Skipping class? NAU high-tech system will know
"Students who are thinking about sleeping late and skipping that morning class may have a new incentive to roll out of bed at one Arizona university this fall.
Northern Arizona University will install an electronic system that detects when each student with an ID card walks through the door to some large classrooms. The system will produce an attendance report for the instructor."
(tags: academia education technology gadgets privacy)
The Art of Onfim
"One of the most fascinating archeological finds in Russia has been the discovery of hundreds…
drorzel | April 28, 2010I'm a little surprised at the vehemence of some of the negative reactions to Stephen Hawking's comments about aliens. Not so much in blogdom-- Ethan's response is pretty reasonable, for example-- but there was a flurry of Twitter traffic yesterday of the form "Where does Stephen Hawking get off pontificating about aliens?" which strikes me as kind of silly.
As all the news stories point out, Hawking's comments were made in the context of a Discovery channel series based on filming Stephen Hawking pontificating about stuff. And, really, if the Discovery Channel called me up and offered to film…
drorzel | April 28, 2010I'm teaching Physics 350: Quantum Mechanics this term, which is a junior/senior level elective course using Townsend's book which deals with quantum mechanics in the state vector formalism. The room in which the class meets is the only one in the department that contains a whiteboard (using dry-erase markers) rather than a blackboard (using chalk).
In the first several weeks of the course, I have mostly been using blue markers, because that's what's been in the room. These fade into illegibility very quickly, so today I went into the stockroom to get more, and discovered a box of black…
drorzel | April 28, 2010
Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War - PowerPoint - NYTimes.com
""PowerPoint makes us stupid," Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
"It's dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control," General…
drorzel | April 27, 2010Dennis Overbye has a piece on "The Big Bang Theory" in today's New York Times, taking the "Is this good or bad for science?" angle:
Three years later some scientists still say that although the series, "The Big Bang Theory" (Monday nights on CBS), is funny and scientifically accurate, they are put off by it.
"Makes me cringe," said Bruce Margon, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, explaining, "The terrible stereotyping of the nerd plus the dumb blond are steps backwards for science literacy."
But other scientists are lining up for guest slots on the show, which has…