You might think that Monday's discourse on thermodynamics in the Goldilocks story was the only children's story in which physics plays a role, but that's not true. Physics is everywhere in fairy tales. Take, for example, the story of Rumpelstiltskin, in which a mysterious little man demands a terrible price for helping a miller's daughter spin straw into gold. This raises the obvious question of exactly how one would go about extracting gold from straw. The use of the term "spin" might suggest the use of rotational motion-- if the straw were ground up very fine, and mixed with water, it might…

I was surprised, a few days ago, to see a post from ZapperZ recommending a Wall Street Journal article on quantum entanglement. It was surprising not only because it's weird to see anything in the WSJ that doesn't have an immediate financial connection, but more than that, I was surprised because the article contains a lot of statements that are the sort of thing ZapperZ usually denounces as unforgivable ignorance by journalists who shouldn't be allowed to write about science. Happily, by sitting on the article for a couple of days, Tom said most of what I would've said, and I was saved…

'Columbine,' by Dave Cullen -- New York Magazine Book Review Most of what you think you know about the Columbine school shooting is wrong. (tags: society books review history media) The Laptop in the Classroom « Easily Distracted "I am sure there are students in my classes who have multitasked during a lecture or discussion. Iâll be honest with you. Iâve done the same on my laptop when Iâve been in the audience during conferences or lectures, usually email. Iâve done that in response to being bored, but Iâve also done it as a kind of thoughtful doodling while feeling quite engaged and…

I'm waiting for the toaster when the dog trots into the kitchen. "You should give me some bacon!" she says. "Why is that?" I ask. "To prevent swine flu!" "Look, there's no chance that I'm going to get swine flu from eating pork products. I know you saw some people on the Internet saying that they're not eating pork because of the flu, but those people are idiots." "Not you, silly," she says. "You should give me bacon so that I don't get swine flu." "What are you talking about?" It's much too early in the morning for this sort of thing. "It's like with the shots, at the Bad Place." She really…

The proprietor of Good Mom, Bad Mom emails to point out a post spinning off Monday's Goldilocks post. A good thing she did, as Technorati has collapsed into utter uselessness, at least for finding people who link to my posts. Her post quotes an unnamed correspondent, who writes: My two daughters are both compulsive readers, gobbling up everything in their path. As a result, they both have very large vocabularies are very well informed about a range of things. I love it--instead of watching TV and getting dumb, they're reading, and getting smart. Mostly they read novels, but it's amazing how…

Why Canât You? « Easily Distracted "I had a fun conversation with a student this week who had a number of challenging questions about issues to pose to me. The question Iâm still knocking around: if academic cultural critics understand expressive culture so expertly, why canât they create it? Wouldnât it be better to always have experience in creating the cultural forms that you study? I noted that this is an old and familiar (if legitimate) challenge. It popped up recently in Ratatouille, for example, but this is an old battle littered with bon mots and bitter denunciations. Thinking…

I'm never quite sure what to make of Malcolm Gladwell. Lots of smart people seem to be favorably impressed by his writing and ideas, but whenever I actually read anything by him, there doesn't seem to be much there. Take, for example, this New Yorker piece on basketball as a metaphor for innovation. As seems to be his general practice, Gladwell frames the whole thing around an engaging anecdote, about Vivek Ranadivé, a Silicon Valley businessman who coached his daughter's team of twelve-year-old girls in a National Junior Basketball competition: Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and…

As I understand it, the Physics ArXiv Blog is not affiliated with the people who actually run the Arxiv (Paul Ginsparg et al.). Which is probably good, as I'm never entirely sure how seriously to take the papers they highlight. Take yesterday's post, Diamond Challenges for Quantum-Computing Crown, which is about a paper that asks the question Could one make a diamond-based quantum computer?. It's an interesting idea, and something I wrote about last year, so it seems like a promising topic. The preprint in question, though, is a little dodgy. It's indifferently proofread, with all sorts of…

The 25 most important movies ever made about war and diplomacy. - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine "Last week, in the online edition of Slate's sister publication Foreign Policy, two of its regular bloggers, Stephen M. Walt and Daniel W. Drezner, drew up lists of what they regard as the best movies ever made about international relations. Both are eminent international-relations professors, Walt at Harvard, Drezner at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. It's no surprise that neither of them gives our own film critic, Dana Stevensâor, for that matter, Gene Shalitâthe slightest cause…

SteelyKid is not yet at the stage where I can usefully read to her-- she likes sitting on my lap while I read just fine, but she's more interested in trying to eat the pages than listening to the story. I was reminded this morning, though, that when she gets to bedtime-story age, I'm going to face some real dilemmas. Some of the classic stories teach dangerously wrong lessons about physics. Take, for example, the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears (referred to at the end of the previous post). In the usual telling, Goldilocks comes upon the Bears' house and finds three bowls of porridge…

I'm an experimentalists through and through, and have always known better than to attempt real theory. On two occasions, though, I've been forced to do a little bit of computer simulation work in order to interpret my results. One of these was for the time-resolved collisions experiment, and worked out well. The other was when I was a post-doc, and was... less useful. The situation we were dealing with in my post-doc work was a Bose-Einstein condensate of rubidium that we chopped into several pieces with an optical lattice. Whenever you do this, there is necessarily some uncertainty in the…

International Act Like A T-Rex Day "Our trademark application for "Act Like A T-Rex Day" has been OPPOSED by a very large company. In other words, we got served⦠The company opposing the trademark is a restaurant called "T-Rex Cafe, Inc.". They have trademarked the word "T-REX". Any merchandise with the word "T-REX" anywhere on it according to their Opposition, "is likely to cause confusion as to the source or origin" and "mislead consumers" doing damage to their business "T-Rex Cafe, Inc."" (tags: stupid law dinosaurs) The perils of analyzing test scores by race. - By William Saletan -…

I had a weird and disturbing shutdown incident on my tablet PC (a Lenovo X61) a week or two ago, which got me many screens of ominous looking text before it finally booted up properly again. Poking at it afterwards, it seemed to be running a bit hot, and it doesn't seem like there's a fan running. This turns out to be a non-trivial problem. It's my personal machine, and out of warranty, so the folks in ITS can't touch it. And the local computer repair place that was recommended says that 1) Lenovo uses several different types of fans, so they can't say what part they would need without…

Why is it that you can buy apple cider all year round, but apple cider donuts are treated as a seasonal item, and only in stores for a week and a half in October? Happily, these people make them year round, and they're available at the Schenectady Greenmarket. And they're awesome. Mmmmm.... cider donuts. If all "green" activities came with cider donuts, I'd be a lot more environmentally conscious. Somebody work on that.

The Washington Monthly "It's simple, really. If a private school wants to discriminate, fine. I don't like it, but it's a private religious entity. Don't, however, discriminate and then ask the government to use tax dollars to subsidize the institution." (tags: education politics US religion) Destroying the planet⦠with science! « Skulls in the Stars "When the Large Hadron Collider was fired up for the first time back in September, it caused much wailing and rending of clothes by people who were convinced that the device would create miniature black holes which would destroy the Earth,…

slacktivist: TF: Bruce's Big Plan "Bruce, like Tim LaHaye, has a way of running off the rails when he gets into the details of his prophecy scheme. One can, in fact, open the book of Revelation and find mentioned there seven "seals" of divine judgment. By mentioning that fact first, Bruce casts a kind of biblical halo over whatever non-sequitur nonsense he says next -- "Remember the seven Seal Judgments Revelation talks about? Well, then Godzilla, lamb chop, munchkin, glockenspiel gumdrop." And everyone nods along as though he was somehow citing chapter and verse with authority." (tags:…

Like Sauron creeping into Dol Guldur, Quantum Diaries has returned to darken the blogosphere once more, driving Tommaso Dorigo before it-- Oh, wait. More good science blogs is a good thing, not a creeping menace. Even if they are particle physicists. Anyway, in a move that is unrelated to the return of Quantum Diaries, and, in fact, happened two weeks ago, Tommaso Dorigo, a survivor of the original Quantum Diaries, has closed up shop and moved to ScientificBlogging.com. Had I known he was thinking of moving, I would've pushed the Corporate Masters to invite him to ScienceBlogs so we could…

Some time back, I was a little surprised to hear James Nicoll use Asimov as a touchstone for science popularizers. I only really knew his fiction, and can't recall hearing his pop-science books cited by anybody who wasn't also an SF fan. So, when I ran across one of his science books while we were sorting through a bunch of old books left in the department after we cleared out Ralph Alpher's old office and some other old book collections, I grabbed it figuring I should check out some of his science writing. The book in question is The Collapsing Universe: The Story of Black Holes. It has a…

I'm walking a little gingerly today, thanks to an injury to my left foot. Sadly, this was not the result of anything cool, like rescuing orphans from a burning building, or dunking a basketball in order to win a league championship. Instead, I bruised the bottom of my foot by landing on one of Emmy's bones while frog-hopping across the room to entertain SteelyKid. This is in a fine family tradition-- my father once blew out a knee trying to do the cossack dance for me-- but it's worth it. In the last week or two, she's started laughing just about every time she sees me-- evidently, I am the…

theweaselking: Never trust a marsupial. (tags: silly video animals) Do You Have Swine Flu? Because you need confirmation from the Internet. (tags: silly medicine internet) Jacks of Science » Blog Archive » Learning Science through Comic Books, A List "Reading textbooks gives me scary flashbacks of my days as an undergraduate (about 2 weeks ago). I did a little research on the internet and supposedly there are these things kids are calling "light reads" that make reading fun again. Comic books/Graphic novels are the pinnacle of fun, so I put together a quick list of illustrated reading…