drorzel | December 5, 2009
All Of You Industrial Scientists: Out Of the Room. In the Pipeline:
"It looks as if the accreditation groups decided that they were faced with a choice: commit themselves to judging what sorts of presentations should count for CE credit (which you might think was their job), or just toss out anything that has any connection with industry. That way you can look virtuous and save time, too. My apologies if I'm descending into ridicule here, but as an industrial scientist I find myself resenting the implication that my hands (and those of every single one of my colleagues) are automatically…
drorzel | December 3, 2009It's been a while since we had a sleeping-baby picture, so here's SteelyKid at bedtime last night:
I swear I wasn't going for the Catherine Wheel album cover effect, but what can you do?
SteelyKid and I are off to Boston today, where she'll be visiting her grandmother while I head up to Maine to give a colloquium talk at Bates. If you have any message for Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe, leave it in the comments, and I'll be sure to pass it along if I see them.
drorzel | December 3, 2009As a companion piece to Steve Albini's famous rant about how the pop music industry systematically screws its artist, theToo Much Joy blog provides a look at their royalty statement:
I got something in the mail last week I'd been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy royalty statement from Warner Brothers that finally included our digital earnings. Though our catalog has been out of print physically since the late-1990s, the three albums we released on Giant/WB have been available digitally for about five years. Yet the royalty statements I received every six months kept insisting we had zero…
drorzel | December 3, 2009I spent an inordinate amount of time yesterday reading an economics paper, specifically the one about academic salaries and reputations mentioned on the Freakonomics blog. There's a pdf available from that post, if you'd like to read it for yourself.
The basic idea is that they looked at the publication records of several hundred full professors of economics, and publicly available salary data for many of the same faculty, and tried to correlate those with the "reputation" of the professors in question. They used a couple of indirect means to assign each faculty member a "reputation," mostly…
drorzel | December 3, 2009
The Science and Entertainment Exchange: The X-Change Files: Holy Concussive Incident, Batman
"Batman takes a lot of blows to his head. These come from his fighting activities and from being routinely thrown--or leaping--onto or into hard objects like walls, floors, and moving vehicles. The issue of concussion in Batman's career is something I addressed in Becoming Batman. In examining the scientific possibility of a human training to achieve the pinnacle of physical skill of comic book icon Batman, I reckoned him having a pretty short career. The main thing to shorten Batman's career would…
drorzel | December 2, 2009I've made a couple of oblique references to this over the past couple of months, but I have an article in the new issue of Physics World, on experiments using molecules to search for an electric dipole moment of the electron:
When most of us think about searching for physics beyond the Standard Model - the dominant paradigm of particle physics - the first thing that springs to mind is probably a gigantic particle accelerator like CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Within the collider's 27-km loop, protons slam together at 99.9999991% of the speed of light. Office-building-sized detectors…
drorzel | December 2, 2009The big topic-of-the-moment is the hacked stash of emails from a major climate research group. The whole climate change discussion is one of those "no upside" topics that I try to stay out of, but I have some thoughts and comments about issues surrounding the email incident. These are largely based on reactions to yesterday's posts by Derek Lowe and Coby Beck, so if you're looking for something to read to understand what I'm talking about, those are the two.
The unifying thing in all of these is the intersection of science and politics. Most of what's described is normal scientific behavior…
drorzel | December 2, 2009
AMC - Blogs - SciFi Scanner - A Cinematic Voyage Through Hollywood's SciFi Solar System
Our solar system is a wondrous and frightful venue, and from the magmatic center of the sun to the ghost ships orbiting Neptune, Hollywood has explored it all. Join us for a cinematic voyage through the scifi solar system, which features if not the most well-known movies about our sister planets, then at least the ones that tell us something interesting about the way we think of other worlds.
(tags: sf movies blogs planets astronomy)
McSweeney's Internet Tendency: If the Manhattan Project Worked Like…
drorzel | December 1, 2009Back during the DonorsChoose fundraiser, I promised to do a re-enactment of the Bohr-Einstein debates using puppets if you contributed enough to claim $2,000 of the Hewlett-Packard contribution to the Social Media Challenge. I obviously aimed too low, because the final take was $4064.70, more than twice the threshold for a puppet show.
So, I put together a puppet show. It took a little while, because I couldn't find any Niels Bohr puppets (maybe in Denmark?). I found an acceptable alternative, though, and put together a video of the Bohr-Einstein debates, using puppets. Here's the whole thing…
drorzel | December 1, 2009The Royal Society has launched a spiffy new site that lets you browse highlights of the last 350 years of science as published in the Philosophical Transactions ("Giving Some Accompt of the Present Understanding, Studies, and Labours of the Ingenious in Many Considerable Parts of the World since 1665."). These include things like Ben Franklin's very matter-of-fact instructions for flying a kite in a thunderstorm, Thomas Young's introduction of the wave theory of light, and Maxwell's original treatise on electromagnetism. These are available as scanned PDF's, in all their oddly-typeset glory (…
drorzel | December 1, 2009Rhett Allain's Dot Physics has joined ScienceBlogs. Sweet.
Update your RSS readers accordingly. That is all.
drorzel | December 1, 2009
A Good Author Is Hard to Find - Books - The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper
"Mention the word "slush" to anyone who's worked in publishing for longer than five minutes, and you're likely to get an expression of sheer horror. Slush pile is a term used to refer to the collective mass of unsolicited manuscripts and query letters--novel or nonfiction synopses with a few sample pages attached--that daily deluges the offices of agents and editors throughout the industry. Occasional hits emerge from the morass: Twilight began as an unsolicited query. But far, far more often, the slush pile's…
drorzel | November 30, 2009
Via Chris Mooney, a Seth Borenstein article about Obama's love for science:
Out in public, Obama turns the Bunsen burner up a notch, playing a combination of high school science teacher and math team cheerleader.
Last week, for example, the president announced that the White House would hold an annual science fair as part of a $260 million private push to improve math and science education.
"We're going to show young people how cool science can be," Obama said. "Scientists and engineers ought to stand side by side with athletes and entertainers as role models."
It's nice to hear that the…
drorzel | November 30, 2009The official release date for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is three weeks from tomorrow, but a couple of new reviews have been posted, one linkable, the other not so much. The linkable one is from one of our contest winners, Eric Goebelbecker, at Dog Spelled Forward (an excellent name for a dog-related blog):
Quantum physics can be some heavy stuff, and this book teaches you the basics without dumbing it down or putting you to sleep. Professor Orzel has a gift for funny dialogue and straightforward explanation. In addition to the entertaining conversations with Emmy, there are fascinating…
drorzel | November 30, 2009It's always nice to be reminded that the US is not the only country in the world prone to acts of petty and childish xenophobia. The last eight years have been especially rough, but between the Obama administration acting like adults and now this silly minaret ban, we no longer look like the most infantile Western nation.
So, thanks, Switzerland. I'll be sure to pick you up some chocolate later.
drorzel | November 30, 2009
On false dichotomies : Thoughts from Kansas
"To the degree that I object to "New Atheism" (an ill-defined entity to which I am not entirely unsympathetic), my objection is to this precise aimlessness. By embracing Radical Honesty and railing against evidence-based communication strategy, they seem to be coming out against clearly stated goals, yet they complain when people refuse to treat them as a serious political movement. Sorry folks, but political movements have clearly stated political goals, and take actions with an eye (however skewed it may be) toward making those goals real. If…
drorzel | November 29, 2009
For a Budding Fan, Basketball The Way It Ought to Be - NYTimes.com
"My older son, Gabe, turned 3 in May, and I knew this would be the season I would finally take him to his first basketball game. I wanted the experience to be fun, the start of what I hoped would be a lifetime of basketball fandom. "
(tags: sports basketball essay)
Revisiting The Einstein-Bohr Dialogue (Part 1 of 3)
"A well-entrenched narrative tells the story of the Einstein-Bohr debate as one in which Einstein's tries, from 1927 through 1930, to prove the quantum theory incorrect via thought experiments exhibiting in-…
drorzel | November 28, 2009The New York Times list of "Notable Books for 2009" has been released, which means it's time for my annual rant about how they've slighted science books. So, how did they do this year? Here are the science books on this year's list:
The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn By LOUISA GILDER
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science By RICHARD HOLMES
Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places By BILL STREEVER
The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America By STEVEN JOHNSON
The Strangest…
drorzel | November 28, 2009
Colliding Galaxies For Fun and For Science! : Starts With A Bang
"Galaxy Zoo has developed an outstanding game where you can help astronomers by doing something that humans easily defeat computers at: visually matching galaxies to simulations!"
(tags: science astronomy computing internet blogs starts-with-bang)
Should You Get a Ph.D.? : Mike the Mad Biologist
"My very short answer: no."
(tags: academia science jobs biology education blogs mad-biologist)
December 2009: James Wolcott on Reality Television | vanityfair.com
"The influence of Reality TV has been insidious, pervasive. It has…
drorzel | November 27, 2009Windows is pleading to be allowed to install updates, so I'm going through closing browser tabs that I opened foolishly thinking I might write about them. In that list is yet another blog post on how electronic books will kill traditional publishing. This one is fundamentally an economic argument, claiming that it will soon be more profitable for authors to self-publish on the Kindle than to go through a traditional publisher. I'm a little dubious about this, but it's at least an attempt at a quantitative foundation, rather than the usual boundless techno-optimism.
The first comment to the…