I'm standing in the kitchen, sipping tea and watching snow blowing across the back yard. It's cold enough that the digital thermometer has stopped working, which puts it in the single digits Fahrenheit. I'm not looking forward to walking the dog in this. "Pretty cold, dude," she says. "Yeah," I say. "It's cold, all right." "You better let me outside," she says, tail wagging. "I'm gonna catch a whole bunch of bunnies!" "A whole bunch? How do you figure?" "Well, it's so cold that they'll all be together. You know, like one of those Bozo Condensates." "Bozo Condensate?" It's too early in…

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Neutrino Telescope Measures Temperature of the Ozone Layer "The IceCube neutrino observatory is a kilometre-scale array of photon detectors buried under the ice at the South Pole. When neutrinos pass through the ice, they occasionally bump into atoms creating particles called muons. These muons then generate light as they pass through the ice which is then picked up by the detector allowing scientists to determine the direction of the incoming neutrino. The trouble is that most of the muons that IceCube sees are not generated by neutrinos at all but by…

Depending on what you read at ScienceBlogs other than this blog, you may have noticed a New Year's fitness theme. Blame Ethan. So, now, everybody's posting workout tips and the like. Which means, of course, that I'm obliged to post my Fitness Secrets here for free, when I could be charging money for them to build a college fund for SteelyKid. Curse you, Ethan! So, what's my secret infallible fitness program? Um, I don't have one. Sorry. I've never had much luck sticking to a workout routine, mostly because I am easily bored. Mike Dunford waxes rhapsodic about swimming, but after a few laps I…

The problem is, "What is Chad going to do in Austin, Texas on Thursday night?" I have recently been appointed to the APS Committee on Informing the Public, which is having a meeting in Austin this Thursday, January 14th. Of course, as neither Austin nor Albany is a major airport, the travel to and from Austin takes up pretty much an entire day on either end, so I'll be staying over Wednesday and Thursday nights, and leaving Friday afternoon. I've got dinner plans for Wednesday night, and I'm going to meet a former student for lunch on Friday, but I have no concrete plans for Thursday night.…

I was looking at some polling about science over the weekend, and discovered that they helpfully provide an online quiz consisting of the factual questions asked of the general public as part of the survey. Amusingly, one of them is actually more difficult to answer correctly if you know a lot about the field than if you only know a little. I'll reproduce it here first, if you would like to take a crack at it, and then I'll explain why it's tricky below the fold. The global positioning system, or GPS, relies on which of these to work?(answers) Choose only one answer-- this is being recorded…

I've made a few references to book-related things that were in the pipeline in recent Obsessive Updates. The first of those has just gone live, an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed on how the book came about and why more academic scientists should have blogs: When I started my blog in 2002, I had no idea it would lead me to talking to my dog about physics. Let alone to writing a book about explaining physics to my dog. I thought of the blog as a way to talk a bit about politics, pop culture, and academic science, and a place to let off a little steam as I went through the tenure process (I…

Cut This Story! - The Atlantic (January/February 2010) An essay about how newspaper articles are too long. In keeping with the Iron Laws of the Internet, it could probably stand to be cut down a little. (tags: journalism writing media internet politics) Writing About Writers: An article by Bob Thompson | The American Scholar "I spent four years on the book beat, and looking back -- I took early retirement from the Post last summer -- I'm still amazed and grateful for what it permitted me to do. An obsessive reader since childhood, I got paid to read mostly excellent books and have…

There's a Kenneth Chang article in the New York Times this morning on the ever popular topic of "If the globe is warming, why is it so darn cold?" It's a good explanation of the weather phenomenon that's making the morning dog walk at Chateau Steelypips so unpleasant. This reminded me of something I've wondered about the public perception of climate change. There was a good deal of hand-wringing on blogs over some recent polls showing depressingly low numbers of Americans believing in global warming (see this one, for example). This was mostly attributed to the successes of the right-wing…

Every year, John Brockman asks a big selection of smart people to answer some question or another, and posts it on the Internet to provoke discussion. This year's question is "How is the Internet changing the way you think?" This always seems like a better idea than it ends up being in practice, because the whole thing is presented using Brockman's mad circa-1997 web design skills (at least, I hope he's doing it himself. If he's paying someone to put this together, he's being ripped off). On my large-ish desktop monitor, I have to hit "Page Down" five times to get from the top of the page to…

Philip Guo - On Popularity "In sum, whether you are popular in middle and high school is largely out of your control, so it is unreasonable to aspire to become popular if you are not already popular. From my experience, the happiest teenagers are the ones who have accepted their status in the high school social hierarchy and made good friends with people of similar status." (tags: culture education kid-stuff society essay) Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 013602 (2010): Manipulation of Nonclassical Atomic Spin States "We report successful manipulation of nonclassical atomic spin states. We apply an…

One of the few sad things about the recent American domination of physics (says the American physicist) is that new physical phenomena are now mostly given boring, prosaic American English names. Don't get me wrong, I like being able to pronounce and interpret new phenomena, but when the pre-WWII era of European dominance faded away, we lost those awesome German names. Like, for example, zitterbewegung, a word that just demands an exclamation point: Zitterbewegung! The phenomenon it describes, ironically, comes out of work by the great English physicist and odd duck Paul Dirac. Dirac's…

The Atlantic Online | January/February 2010 | What Makes a Great Teacher? | Amanda Ripley "Until now, Teach for America has kept its investigation largely to itself. But for this story, the organization allowed me access to 20 years of experimentation, studded by trial and error. The results are specific and surprising. Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school--like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood--don't seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling--like a teacher's extracurricular accomplishments in college--tend to…

Picking on stupid things that sports commentators say is the ultimate "Fish. Barrel. BLAM!" sort of activity, but this morning on the way to drop SteelyKid at day care, Mike and Mike kept repeating one of the absolute dumbest things that football commentators say. They were talking about Larry Fitzgerald of the Arizona Cardinals, and praising his ability as a receiver. In particular, they heaped praise on his ability to "go up and get the ball at its highest point." That would be a pretty neat trick, if he could manage it. A football pass spends a second or two in the air-- let's call it two…

Two new links for today's Obsessive Update: The first is a nice article from Union's press office, with the headline "You can't teach an old dog new tricks, but what about physics?". I spent half an hour or so talking with one of the staff writers (who has a science background, which is a nice bonus) on Wednesday, so it's a fast turnaround, too. The second is a passing mention in a possibly skeevy Russian site's article about the golden retriever physics video that went around a couple of months ago. Amazing what the vanity search turns up... The sales rank, for those who care, continues to…

Strange Horizons Reviews: Avatar, reviewed by Roz Kaveney "As well as being the Great White Saviour, Jake is that most useful of plot devices, the protagonist who has to be told things; he is also the Man Who Learns Better, and discards earlier convictions; he is also someone who cheerfully signs up for complicity with what he comes to realize is atrocity, and has quite a lot of expiation to do. Yes, the story is about him, but all stories have to be about somebody--Jake is somebody who has been part of the most negative aspects of human society and who comes to understand that he has been…

SteelyKid is seventeen months old today, and how does she celebrate? By scrubbing the floors in the mud room: Honest to God, she does this all on here own. I think it's driven by the same impulse as the tissue relay-- she'll grab a tissue or a paper towel, run into the mud room, and energetically mop up the bits of slush that Emmy and I track in after our walks. She'll do this happily, for an astonishingly long time. God only knows where she gets this from. It's not from me or Kate, that's for sure-- neither of us has ever happily scrubbed a floor... The traditional Appa shot below the fold…

Not much news on the book front this morning-- various promotional things are in progress, including an on-campus thing tomorrow afternoon, but there's nothing new to link to. We do, however, have the first non-mammal added to the DogPhysics Pet Gallery: a lizard, sent in by Marcella McIntyre. It's not actually a pet, per se, but it's shown reading up on the Uncertainty Principle, so at least it has a healthy curiosity. If you've got a copy of the book, and you have pets, send a picture of your pet(s) with the book to queen_emmy@steelypips.org, and we'll add it to the Gallery. And if there's…

A number of people have commented on this LA Times op-ed by Steve Giddings about what physicists expect to come out of the Large Hadron Collider. It includes a nice list of possible particle physics discoveries plus a few things that will annoy Peter Woit, and also includes the obligatory note about spin-offs: All this may seem like impractical and esoteric knowledge. But modern society would be unrecognizable without discoveries in fundamental physics. Radio and TV, X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, PCs, iPhones, the GPS system, the Web and beyond -- much that we take for granted would not exist…

slacktivist: Genie in a bottle "Saudi Arabia's laws against sorcery, it seems to me, are incompatible with its laws against heresy. The heresy laws are based on the idea that there is one and only one true religion. The sorcery laws are based on the idea that other religious beliefs may be powerfully true, but yet forbidden. The state cannot condemn a person for sorcery without thereby taking the official position that sorcery is true and real and powerful. And thus the state cannot enforce its own anti-sorcery law without itself violating its own anti-heresy law." (tags: religion…

I forgot to include an option about this in the previous Dorky Poll, but this is one of the best ways I know to sort out righteous physicists from heathen mathematicians: How do you like your angular coordinates?(polls) Choose wisely.