drorzel | July 9, 2009Just in time to feed into the discussion surrounding Unscientific America, there's a new Pew Research Poll about public attitudes toward science. As is usually the case with social-science data, there's something in here to bolster every opinion.
The most striking of the summary findings, to me, is the second table down, in which the fraction of people saying that "Science/ medicine/ technology" is the greatest achievement of the last 50 years has dropped from 47% to 27% since 1999. About half of that shifted to "Civil rights/ equal rights," which is hard to begrudge, but the other half seems…
drorzel | July 9, 2009I'm sitting here finding new and inventive ways to not write the pedagogical paper I'm working on at the moment. This seems like a good excuse for a poll!
The hardest part of writing a paper is:(survey)
As you can tell from the list of elements, I have scientific papers in mind, here, but other sorts of scholarly work are also fair game. The question is really what you find to be the absolute worst part to write when you're working on some sort of scholarly publication.
I'm talking specifically about the writing of the text, here. There are a whole host of headaches associated with…
drorzel | July 9, 2009I got a weirdly hostile comment to my popularization post last night:
You have some chutzpah. You are being paid, probably quite well, to do research! Journalists are paid, not nearly so well, to popularize research. It takes some nerve to take an extra year's salary, and to take time away from your real job---and then to complain about not being well-enough rewarded. If you want something to complain about, become a science journalist and see how well you are rewarded then. I'm sure you think that is beneath you, and that you do so much better a job---but the general audience you aim to…
drorzel | July 8, 2009
Physics Buzz: Watch this!
"Forget the cheesy narrator and hokey graphics. Wobble the camera like you're Michel Gondry filming Eternal Sunshine. Ditch the pseudo-techno soundtrack that makes the kids shake their heads at you for trying to be hip, and go for something understated. Then you might have something as good as Colliding Particles.
The filmmakers behind this unusual web series have thrown pretty much every science documentary convention to the wind, and, in doing so, have hit on something great.(Face it, unless it's David Attenborough we can do without a disembodied voice booming…
drorzel | July 8, 2009I'm something like 100 pages ahead of the Infinite Summer spoiler line (page 283 as of last night), meaning that a lot of the stuff I'd like to discuss or see discussed isn't fair game yet. I'm still greatly enjoying the re-read of Infinite Jest, though.
As I've said before, this is a dangerous book for me, in that Wallace's style has a tendency to leak over into my own writing when I read too much of his stuff(*). It's also a dangerous book in that a large number of the sections are written in a headlong style with very few breaks, and thus no place to stop until you get to the end of the…
drorzel | July 8, 2009I've got a couple more things to say about Unscientific America, probably, but I opted for some more David Foster Wallace last night, and don't feel like typing them up now, so I'll give you all a break. Anyway, what you're really here for is the baby and dog stuff, so here's another poll question from Emmy:
Cats are(survey)
(I think you should be able to choose multiple answers to this one, but I'm not 100% sure I set it up right.)
drorzel | July 8, 2009There's a press release dated a week or two ago from Leiden University headlined "Physical reality of string theory demonstrated," in an apparent bid to make Peter Woit's head explode. The release itself is really pretty awful, with poorly explained and irrelevant pictures, and a really confusing description of what this is really about (in part because English was not the first language of the person writing it, I suspect). You have to go down to the third paragraph to find a sort-of explanation of what this is about:
Electrons can form a special kind of state, a so-called quantum critical…
drorzel | July 7, 2009
LIGO: the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory
A comprehensive review article on LIGO, free online for a limited time.
(tags: articles science gravity astronomy physics relativity precision-measurement)
Never build a relationship on books | Books | guardian.co.uk
"I don't know if Borders will actually be making recommendations for dates in the same way as they recommend books, but it would be priceless if members got regular email updates: "Did you enjoy, Mark, 34, of Swindon? Then you should try Gareth, 36, of Slough." Or: "After dating Sally of Birmingham, 86 per cent of…
drorzel | July 7, 2009A bunch of heavy stuff on the blog today-- quantum physics, insulting journalists, political activism. Here's a cute baby video to lighten the mood:
This is Steelyid demonstrating her climbing prowess, just in case anybody suspected that Saturday's filler picture was staged. She can actually go quite a bit faster than this, but she kept stopping to mug shamelessly for the camera.
drorzel | July 7, 2009One of the most interesting suggestions made by Chris and Sheril in Unscientific America is the idea that science needs to play political hardball (page 158, in the endnotes):
Why not form a nonpartisan science political action committee, or PAC, devoted to funding candidates who are either scientists themselves or who make science a strong priority and have good records on science issues? With adequate fundind, the PAC might select, say, five or ten members or candidates to support each election cycle. If there's a desire to be really aggressive (and we have mixed feelings about this…
drorzel | July 7, 2009No, this isn't another "How dare those journalists muddle the explanation of some scientific topic" post. The concept here is journalism itself, as seen in Ed Yong's discussion of different modes of science journalism. Writing about the recent World Conference of Science Journalists, he talks about some controversy over what "science journalism" actually means:
Certainly, the idea that journalism equated to talking or writing about science in any form was unpopular. In the opening plenary, Fiona Fox drew a fine line between science communication and journalism, the latter characterised…
drorzel | July 7, 2009It's been a while since we've had any good, solid physics content here, and I feel a little guilty about that. So here's some high-quality (I hope) physics blogging, dealing with two recent(ish) papers from Chris Monroe's group at the University of Maryland. The first is titled "Bell Inequality Violation with Two Remote Atomic Qubits" (and a free version can be found on the Arxiv); the second is "Quantum Teleportation Between Distant Matter Qubits" (and isn't available on the arxiv because it's in Science, but you can get it from their web site). Both of these deal with the physics of…
drorzel | July 7, 2009Matt Leifer had a good comment to yesterday's post about how the editing function, in my opinion, adds considerable value to a book that you don't get with a blog. I got distracted and didn't reply to it, and since a day in blog-time is like a week in the real world, I'll promote it to a post so it doesn't get buried and forgotten:
Yes, but starting a wiki in order to put together a more coherent version of the ideas from the blog may have been equally effective. Blogging is not the only web publishing tool.
Of course, I realize that you still wouldn't get the benefits of the editorial…
drorzel | July 6, 2009
Star Formation
"This blog is for the Physics and Astronomy Division of the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR, the sort of acronym that takes some real self esteem to embrace) to communicate with CUR members, the wider scientific community, and the general public."
(tags: science academia education blogs)
Salt Office Life » 10 Ways to Take a Bad Author Photo
Note to self: talk to Matt M. about getting a good author photo.
(tags: books writing pictures publishing)
Chart of the Day | Mother Jones
"I'd agree that Palin's appeal is essentially based on class resentment. She gets her…
drorzel | July 6, 2009Having repeatedly called for more popular-audience discussion of condensed matter physics (which is not my own field, but is the largest single division within the American Physical Society), I would be remiss if I failed to note a couple of really good efforts in this direction.
The first is last week's NOVA ScienceNOW segment on artificial diamonds and their technological potential. It's really cool to see time-lapse video of honkin' big diamonds being grown through chemical vapor deposition techniques.
The second is this New York Times piece on glass and the science of its use as a…
drorzel | July 6, 2009One of the major problems contributing to the dire situation described in Unscientific America is that the incentives of academia don't align very well with the public interest. Academic scientists are rewarded-- with tenure, promotion, and salary increases-- for producing technical, scholarly articles, and not for writing for a general audience. There is very little institutionalized reward within academia for science popularization.
An extreme example of this is the failure of Carl Sagan's nomination to the National Academy of Sciences:
According to sources within the academy, Sagan was…
drorzel | July 6, 2009There's another round of "science blogs will make traditional journalism obsolete!" going on in connection with last week's World Conference of Science Journalists-- see Mad Mike, for example. This wouldn't be interesting except that it happened to collide with my reading Unscientific America, and it struck me that the book is, in many ways, one of the best arguments you could construct for the superiority of the traditional publishing process to doing everything with blogs.
As I said in my review of the book, there's really nothing in Unscientific America that will come as a surprise to…
drorzel | July 6, 2009Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future is the new book by Chris and Sheril of The Intersection (formerly on ScienceBlogs, now at Discover), and they were kind enough to include me on the list of people getting review copies. It turned up on Friday (after I'd already started Newton and the Counterfeiter). I read it this afternoon, partly at lunch with SteelyKid (who, alas, was woken up by somebody else's ill-mannered child), but mostly in the back yard on a surprisingly pleasant afternoon. It's a quick read-- only 132 pages of text, plus 65 pages of (unmarked)…
drorzel | July 5, 2009
Field-sensitive addressing and control of field-insensitive neutral-atom qubits : Abstract : Nature Physics
"Here, we demonstrate the selection of individual qubits with external fields, while the qubits are in field-insensitive superpositions. We use a spatially inhomogeneous external field to map selected qubits to a different field-insensitive superposition, minimally perturbing unselected qubits, despite the fact that the addressing field is not spatially localized. We show robust single-qubit rotations on neutral-atom qubits located at selected lattice sites. This precise coherent…
drorzel | July 5, 2009A reading from the Book of Genesis:
1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make plastic cups that can stack atop one another. And let us make them of many colors, lo, for that would be cool.
4 And they said, Go to, let us stack our cups to make a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us put a duck upon the top, because ducks are pretty neat.
5 And SteelyKid came down to see the city and the…