I was up until almost midnight grading labs, and I have forty-odd grant proposals to read today, so I'm going to be unplugging from the Internet and working on, well, work. For entertainment while I'm paying for my procrastination, here's another two-word lyrics quiz. These two-word phrases each uniquely identify a pop song (I hope). If you know the song from the phrase, leave the answer in the commnets, and add a two-word phrase of your own for other people to guess. The first three are left over from the last round: up drivel town predicts wicked strict unlovable hand NYPD choir stained-…

Myth Confirmed. : Built on Facts "[U]ntil relatively recently, no one had ever actually done the experiment. It's difficult, both in terms of dropping the bullets properly and making sure the gun fires exactly horizontally. Horizontal fire is critical, because if there is an initial vertical velocity for the fired bullet, the equation will be different from the dropped bullet and they won't hit the ground at the same time. Nonetheless there is a group of experimenters who are very good at this sort of thing, and not so long ago they actually did the experiment. They are of course the…

Via Michael Nielsen on Twitter, a Wired article and a research group website for the Stanford Study of Writing. As the Wired piece reports, the group has done a large study of student writing, and finds that modern college students write more and are better writers than students in the past. This is a little hard to square with my personal experience (he says, procrastinating from grading a depressingly large stack of student lab reports), and that of many of the commenters at Wired. There are enough caveats in the description of the study that these needn't be contradictory, though that's…

It's hard to say exactly why I found Edward Carr's article on polymaths so irritating, but I suspect it was this bit: The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty. In each new area that Posner picks--policy or science--the experts start to erect barricades. "Even in relatively soft fields, specialists tend to develop a specialised vocabulary which creates barriers to entry," Posner says with his economic hat pulled down over his head. "Specialists want to fend off the generalists. They may also want to convince themselves that what they are doing is really very…

Patrick Welsh -- To Explain the Achievement Gap, Examine the Parenting Gap - washingtonpost.com "My students knew intuitively that the reason they were lagging academically had nothing to do with race, which is the too-handy explanation for the achievement gap in Alexandria. And it wasn't because the school system had failed them. They knew that excuses about a lack of resources and access just didn't wash at the new, state-of-the-art, $100 million T.C. Williams, where every student is given a laptop and where there is open enrollment in Advanced Placement and honors courses. Rather, it was…

Analysis Of A Roulette Strategy "As Hank explains in a recent article, when he visits a Casino he plays the Roulette. His simple strategy consists in betting on a single colour, doubling the bet every time he loses; when he wins, he starts back with the minimum bet. Such a strategy is not going to make you rich, but no strategy does at the Roulette, especially the American one which has both a "0" and a "00" -two neutral numbers thrown in to enhance house odds. The idea of doubling every time is that eventually the colour you bet on is bound to appear, and you will win back all your fiches…

If you buy a loaf of bread, it comes in a plastic bag closed with either a metal twist-tie or a little plastic tab. Either of these may be re-used to close the bag again after you have used some of the bread. If you buy a bunch of carrots, they generally come in a plastic bag that is closed with a little piece of tape. The tape is generally stronger than the material of the bag, making it really hard to remove the tape without ripping the bag open. And even if you do get the tape undone, it can't be re-used. Why do they do that? I'm not any more likely to use the entire bag of carrots at once…

Career Advice: A Regular Writing Routine - Inside Higher Ed "In this article, I'm starting a four-part series on developing a regular writing routine. In this column, I'll discuss and debunk two popular myths about writing. In my next column, I'll review two of my favorite articles, one on expert performance and the other on writing research and apply it to developing a regular writing routine. Then I'll write a piece on what a regular writing routine looks like in real-time; that is, when you put your bum on the chair on your fingers on the keyboard, what really happens. To wrap up this…

This year's DonorsChoose challenge has brought in a respectable $1,929 thus far, helping reach almost 1000 school kids. Thanks to all those who have donated thus far. We've been stuck at that level for a little while now, though, so it doesn't look like we're going to match last year's total of more than $6,000. Of course, last year's gaudy number came about in large part because I agreed to dance like a monkey if the Challenge total broke $6,000. So, I suppose I really ought to sweeten the pot-- a chance at winning books isn't going to put us over the top. I asked for suggestions a while…

I've watched the first few episodes of "Flash Forward" more or less as they aired-- I've been DVR-ing them, but watching not long after they start, so I can fast-forward through the commercials, and still see it. I could just let them sit on the DVR, but at least for me, the DVR tends to be a sort of television graveyard-- I have a whole bunch of Nova episodes saved up that I never quite get around to watching. Watching them the same night helps me remember to watch them, rather than just piling them up. Anyway, I've been watching, and I have to say, I'm really not blown away at this point.…

slacktivist: Oh, and Tony Perkins? He lies. A lot. For money. "Please don't clutch your pearls and get the vapors that such an impolite thing is stated so honestly. That Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council lies a lot in order to scare people into sending him money is not surprising, or new, or unusual or controversial. Tony Perkins lies for money. Giraffes have long necks. Water is wet. " (tags: politics religion law crime society evil stupid gender race blogs slacktivist) The Digital Cuttlefish: Someone Is Wrong On The Internet "Someone Is Wrong/ ...On The Internet,/ And I won't…

SteelyKid has cast Appa aside in favor of bigger and better things: That's right. She's not allowed to have candy yet, but she's already gearing up for Halloween... The pumpkin bucket is actually a bribe-- I bought it for her to play with while we waited for her prescription to be filled yesterday. This is in fine family tradition-- my father used to buy presents for my sister and me when he had to take us shopping for my mother's birthday... While we're not going to try giving her candy any time soon, SteelyKid is making great progress in the area of eating, as can be seen in the video…

I gave a guest lecture this morning in a colleague's sophomore seminar class about time. She's having them look at time from a variety of perspectives, and they just finished reading Longitude, so she asked me to talk about the physics of clocks and the measurement of time. I've long considered using "A Brief History of Timekeeping" as the theme for a general education course-- there's a ton of interesting science in the notion of time and timekeeping. This was just a single class, though, so I didn't go into too much detail: A Brief History of Timekeeping View more presentations from Chad…

I was surprised to see Tom linking to a site claiming a superconductor at 254K. Not because the figure isn't newsworthy, but because somebody sent me this about a week ago, and I decided not to link to it. It's absolutely dripping with kook signifiers. The two biggest things tripping my kook alarm are: 1) I've clicked around a bit, and there don't seem to be any links on the site to any external page. They have a whole set of claims of dramatic breakthroughs in the transition temperature for their superconducting materials, a new one every couple of months, but no links to research papers, or…

Electrons flow forever in metal rings - physicsworld.com "[I]f a metal ring is very small - about 1 μm diameter or less - quantum mechanics says that its electrons should behave in much the same way as electrons orbiting an atomic nucleus. And in the same way that electrons in the lowest energy configuration of an atom maintain their orbits without the constant input of energy, electrons in such "mesoscopic" rings should flow forever. Indeed, a 1 μm diameter ring cooled to 1 K should support a current of about 1nA. " (tags: science physics quantum experiment news) The Brancatelli File…

In the time that I've been at Union, I have suffered a number of lab disasters. I've had lasers killed in freak power outages. I've had lasers die because of odd electrical issues. My lab has flooded not once, not twice, but three different times. I've had equipment damaged by idiot contractors, and I've had week-long setbacks because the temperature of the room slews by ten degrees or more when they switch the heat on in the fall and off in the spring. I had a diode laser system trashed because of a crack in the insulation on a water pipe, that exposed the pipe to moist room air, leading to…

Both Physics Buzz and the X-Change Files are noting the Imagine Science Film Festival starting tomorrow in New York City. As the Buzz notes: This is only the film festival's second year, but it's already attracted the attention of major sponsors. Last year the journal Nature co-sponsored the festival, and this year the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of rival journal Science, has taken the helm. Maybe it's because of the festival's unique approach to the genre of science film. Unlike what you can expect to see on PBS NOVA or the Discovery Channel, these films…

SteelyKid has a fever, and can't go to day care, so I'm staying home with her. This pretty much rules out significant serious blogging, so here's a poll to keep you amused: Which of these threats is most threatening?(survey) Choose only one.

AdLit.org: Adolescent Literacy - William Farish: The World's Most Famous Lazy Teacher "Thomas Jefferson was arguably one of the most well-educated Americans of his time. He was well-read, thoughtful, knowledgeable in a wide variety of topics from the arts to the sciences, and the founder of the University of Virginia. The same could probably be said of Ben Franklin, or James and Dolly Madison. On the larger world stage, we could credibly make such claims for René Descartes, William Shakespeare, Galileo, Michelangelo, and Plato. But there is one thing unique about the education of all these…

The abbreviation here has a double meaning-- both "Open Access" and "Operator Algebra." In my Quantum Optics class yesterday, I was talking about how to describe "coherent states" in the photon number state formalism. Coherent states are the best quantum description of a classical light field-- something like a laser, which behaves very much as if it were a smoothly oscillating electromagnetic field with a well-defined frequency and phase. Mathematically, one of the important features of a coherent state is that it is unchanged by the photon annihilation operator (in formal terms, it's an "…