drorzel | March 3, 2010It's been an absurdly good hoops week at Chateau Steelypips-- Syracuse won a big one to take over the (admittedly meaningless) #1 spot in the polls, and now Maryland beat Duke in a tough game to move into a tie for the top spot in the (admittedly down) ACC. If both Duke (home to UNC) and Maryland (at UVA) win this weekend, they'll split the regular-season not-a-title. Go Tar Heels!
Kind of a weird game. It was Senior Night for Greivis Vasquez, Eric Hayes, and Landon Milbourne, which is always a risky business-- especially for a player as volatile as Vasquez. They came out all fired up, with…
drorzel | March 3, 2010I've been buried in work, so I haven't had time to do any real blogging, but I do want to post a quick reminder of this week's signing:
-- This FRIDAY, March 5 (that is, the day after tomorrow), I will be signing books at the Vestal, NY Barnes and Noble at 7pm. I'm not entirely sure what they expect, but at the very least, I will be signing books and answering questions. If they want me to read stuff, I can do that, too, and will bring along the unpublished dialogue that I read at Boskone.
If you're in the Binghamton area, and are looking for a way to kick your Friday night off with some…
drorzel | March 1, 2010I've tried a couple of times to read China Mieville's highly praised Perdido Street Station, but found it so unpleasant that I stopped maybe a third of the way in. Some of the things he said about his theories of literature as the guest of honor at Readercon a few years ago also made me think that there was little chance of me liking his work.
Still, he is regarded as a Major Figure in the SF field at the moment, so when he came out with The City and the City and the premise didn't sound completely horrible, I figured I should give it a shot. Especially since I'm nominating for the Hugos this…
drorzel | February 28, 2010When I headed to work this morning, I made the turn onto Nott St., and all the error lights in my car lit up, and the speedometer and tachometer went dead. I know exactly what the cause is, because this has happened twice before: rodents of some sort are chewing on the wiring in my car, causing things to short out and throw error messages.
These furry little bastards have hit my last nerve. This has been a week from hell, and I can not afford to lose yet another day to having my car worked on to repair rodent damage, to say nothing of the $200-ish it will cost to have it fixed.
At a minimum,…
drorzel | February 27, 2010They pushed the curtain back a few feet at the Carrier Dome, opening up a few more seats so they could set a new record for largest on-campus crowd to see a college basketball game for Syracuse playing Villanova for a share of the Big East regular season title. This is the sort of atmosphere where I'm used to seeing Syracuse teams really tense up and play tight, something they really couldn't afford to do against the Wildcats, so I was kind of nervous about this one. When I came downstairs from putting SteelyKid to bed, and they were down six, that seemed totally justified.
I was very…
drorzel | February 26, 2010A couple of upcomign events related to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
-- Next FRIDAY, March 5, I will be signing books at the Vestal, NY Barnes and Noble at 7pm. This is the big-box chain store closest to my hometown, and my parents report already getting calls about it, which is weird but cool. If you're in the Broome County area, stop on by.
-- I will be at the APS March Meeting in Portland March 14-18 (getting in a little early, leaving a little early). I'm giving an invited talk, but haven't been able to line up anything more public, alas.
-- I'm giving a Physics colloquium at Williams…
drorzel | February 26, 2010Today is the Purim parade at the Schenectady JCC, so all the kids needed costumes to wear. This isn't that easy, especially for a little girl (Babysaurus had a couple of different sets of boys pajamas that were superhero uniforms, but nothing equivalent for girls), and was complicated by the fact that SteelyKid had yet another cold this week (which she was bothered by for just long enough to get sent home from day care with a fever Wednesday, meaning I stayed home with her yesterday, which is always an adventure).
One costume idea I had was to put her in fuzzy white pj's, and give her a set…
drorzel | February 25, 2010One of the weird-but-cool things about being C-list famous on the Internet is that some publishers now send me unsolicited review copies of forthcoming books about science. These aren't always the books I would really like to get free copies of, but, hey, free books.
Among the books I've received in the last year or so is Anil Ananthaswamy's The Edge of Physics, which I got as an ARC several months ago-- I read a bunch of it in Houston at the Sigma Xi meeting back in November-- but I just realized that it's due out next Tuesday, and I really ought to post a review of it.
As you can guess from…
drorzel | February 23, 2010What's the application? CD and DVD players use lasers to read (and in some cases write) digital information from convenient plastic disks.
What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "How do we store a large amount of digital information in a convenient and stable fashion?" 2) "How do we make everybody buy the White Album a second time?"
How does it work? The optics at the core of a CD player are very simple, and illustrated in this graphic that I lifted from the excellent explanation at HyperPhysics:
Light from a diode laser is collimated and then focused down onto the surface of the CD. The…
drorzel | February 23, 2010A couple of weeks ago, I announced a contest to determine the Most Amazing Laser Application. What with one thing and another, this didn't get posted last week, but I don't intend to drop it completely, and will be finishing the series up in the next week or so. Here's the list of finalists, with links to those already written up:
Cat toy/ dog toy/ laser light show
Laser cooling/ BEC
Lunar laser ranging
Optical tweezers
Optical storage media (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray)
LIGO
Telecommunications
Holography
Laser ignited fusion
Laser eye surgery
Laser frequency comb/ spectroscopy
Laser guide stars/…
drorzel | February 18, 2010Look out, it's a Giant Monster Baby!
OK, she's not really gigantic, but she does tower over Appa these days. And she's strong enough to lift Appa one-handed, while drinking juice with the other:
That's really just about the perfect Appa-for-scale shot. For comparison, here is the very first Appa picture we took:
Yikes.
Finally, as a bonus, here's a cute picture of SteelyKid with a newspaper ad featuring a Boston terrier. She recognizes it as just like Gammy's dog, Truman:
She does tend to refer to all dogs in pictures as "Booyyy," which is a better approximation of my parents' dog Bodie.…
drorzel | February 18, 2010While Adam Roberts was kind of an ass regarding last year's Hugo ballot, the summary of his latest, Yellow Blue Tibia, sounded pretty entertaining to me, and it was on the Locus Recommended Reading list, so I got it out of the library.
The book is presented as the memoir of Konstantin Skvorecky, a Soviet science fiction author who, along with several of his colleagues, was brought in by Stalin in the late 1940's to concoct a story of an alien invasion that could be used to provide a new enemy for the Soviet Union to rally together against. They concoct a story about aliens of pure radiation,…
drorzel | February 17, 2010A couple of reviews, an offer, and a mystery regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
The reviews:
A review at suite101 that went up a while ago, but I somehow missed in the vanity search. It's a nice, detailed review, and if I had to pick a pull quote it would probably be: "You can be prepared for a good scientific romp throughout Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Thinking like a dog is a big help."
Scott at a physics teaching blog has a more recent review: "I often pick up books and don't bother finishing them. This book kept pulling me back to discover what oddity was next. I…
drorzel | February 17, 2010Final Links Dump for forty days, give or take.
Physicists watch chemistry in slow motion - physicsworld.com
"Physicists in the US have observed chemical reactions taking place at such low temperatures that they are dominated by quantum effects, rather than thermal collisions. The researchers showed that diatomic molecules containing potassium and rubidium are much less likely to react with each other, when cooled to just 500 nK, if they are all prepared in the same quantum state. As well as providing important information about the quantum nature of chemical reactions, the technique could…
drorzel | February 16, 2010Boskone this past weekend was held at the Westin Waterfront in Boston, which has these funky double showerheads that they charmingly call the "Heavenly(R) Shower" (hype aside, they are very nice showers). The picture at right is courtesy of lannalee on Twitter, as I didn't bring a camera.
Why am I telling you this? Because there was a sign glued to the wall in the shower that read:
Refresh yourself, restore our world
One of your Heavenly(R) Shower heads has been turned off in an effort to minimize water usage and protect one of our most precious natural resources.
The smarmy enviroweenieness…
drorzel | February 16, 2010Penultimate Links Dump (for a while)
US LHC Blog » Let's draw Feynman diagams!
"There are few things more iconic of particle physics than Feynman diagrams. These little figures of squiggly show up prominently on particle physicists' chalkboards alongside scribbled equations.
The simplicity of these diagrams a a certain aesthetic appeal, though as one might imagine there are many layers of meaning behind them. The good news is that's it's really easy to understand the first few layers and today you will learn how to draw your own Feynman diagrams and interpret their physical meaning."
(…
drorzel | February 15, 2010I'm giving up reading blogs for Lent.
The proximate cause of this is Bora's latest blame-the-media post, which is just deja vu all over again, because I'm pretty sure this exact conversation has gone on ten times before (the fact that scientists find other scientists compelling speakers does not mean that scientists are good at communicating to the general public). But this is really part of a larger disillusionment with the medium as a whole that's been growing for the past several months. More and more, I'm finding that reading blogs is pissing me off to no good end.
This is a fairly…
drorzel | February 13, 2010Since I'm at Boskone, talking and listening to people talking about science fiction and fantasy literature, it seems appropriate to do a quickie post listing notworthy genre stuff I've read recently. There isn't that much of it, as I've been doing a lot of non-fiction reading, and also slightly preoccupied with book promotion. Still, I've been reading a few things while putting SteelyKid to bed, and might as well comment on them here:
The Alchemist's Apprentice, The Alchemist's Pursuit, and The Alchemist's Code by Dave Duncan. Duncan occupies a literary position similar to that of the late…
drorzel | February 13, 2010
WINTER OLYMPICS: Robert Teklemariam will raise Ethiopia's flag | Richmond Times-Dispatch
"On Monday in Vancouver, Robel Teklemariam will compete for Ethiopia in the 15-kilometer cross country skiing event.
This will be his second Olympics but the first with his mother in attendance. To qualify, he traveled the world on a shoestring budget, chasing down qualifying races as he lugged his skis across Europe on a train. His goal is to inspire a nation of citizens -- most of whom haven't seen snow.
"What he's proving is that when you put your heart to it, it doesn't matter where you were born,"…
drorzel | February 12, 2010What's the application? Optical tweezers use focused light beams to trap small particles in the focus of the beam, and drag them around by moving the beam.
What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "How do we move these tiny little things around without touching them?" 2) "How do we measure the forces exerted by biological molecules?" 3) "How do we tie knots in DNA strands?"
How does it work?The basic optical tweezer scheme uses a single beam of light focused down to a very small spot. If you take some small (mostly) transparent object and place it in the beam, it will feel a force pulling it…