Hold Steady rocks for the lucky few -- Page 1 -- Times Union - Albany NY "The Hold Steady's Tuesday night performance at Valentine's was sold-out weeks in advance of the show, which left a lot of mopers without a ticket or a hope of getting in. Those who'd jumped on the chance early on, though, were treated to a walloping dose of Craig Finn and crew, the likes of which a venue the size of Valentine's probably won't see until the band is making the reunion rounds 20 years from now." (tags: news music review) When are fake forces awesome? | Dot Physics "A fake force is one of those forces…

Because a book isn't a real book until it has a promotional website, I give you: http://dogphysics.com the official(ish) site for promoting How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, which will be published this December (and can be pre-ordered on Amazon). The site does, in fact, contain content you won't find on the blog, including "interviews" with me an Emmy, so go check it out. A note on the design: the site is cobbled together by me, using my cargo-cult CSS skills. It was more or less ready yesterday, until I discovered that it looked awful on Internet Exploder, because Microsoft chooses to…

Everything I've read about the Hold Steady says that they're a great bar band, which always seems a little improbable. I mean, the songs are complicated, with tons of words and odd subject matter ("I dig those awkward silences, 'cause I grew up in denial, and I went to school in Massachusetts"), and Craig Finn looks like a middle school teacher. It's hard to imagine him as a charismatic front man. Hard as it is to believe, though, it's true. He came on stage in a plaid button-down shirt, enhancing the middle-school teacher look, and he does the dorkiest lead-singer dance I've ever seen, but…

Setshot: Basketball for the Aging and Infirm: "Worse than he thinks": Self-image versus ability "To me, the worst players to run with (aside from the belligerent and insane) are those with drastically inflated self-images. You know these players. They're the ones who think that they're the best on the court, the ones who think they know how the game should be played and how you should be playing it." (tags: basketball sports society stupid) Moses is Departing Egypt: A Facebook Haggadah "Moses has taken the Which god are you? quiz. Moses is Osiris, God of the Dead. Dressed in white flannel…

This is the final report on my modern physics class from last term, covering the last week of classes, which generally deal with nuclear and particle physics. This was actually three-and-a-bit classes, because I lost one class to a nasty cold a few weeks earlier, and used part of the lab period to make up for it. Class 28 was actually taught by a colleague of mine (thanks, Rebecca!), because Kate and I were in Boston for her father's wake. She taught off my notes, though, so I'll still report it as if I did the class. This class opens with a brief return of the historical treatment of the…

In the last course report post, we dispensed of atomic and molecular physics in just three classes. The next three classes do the same for solid state physics. Class 25 picks up on the idea of basic molecular potentials from the end of the previous class, and uses that to introduce energy bands in a qualitative manner. Bringing two atoms together splits the electron levels into two states, adding a third adds more closely spaced levels, and so on. Every time you add more atoms, you add more closely spaced energy levels, and as you approach truly macroscopic systems, those states run together…

I got way behind on my reports from my Modern Physics class-- the last one was over month ago, and the class has since ended. There's enough material left to be really awkward as a single post, though, so I'm going to take my cue from Brandon Sanderson and split it into three parts. The remaining material is from the sprint-to-the-end "Applications of Quantum Mechanics" portion of the class, and breaks into three roughly equal chunks. The first of these is dealing with atomic and molecular physics. Class 22 presents the full quantum model of Hydrogen, starting from the Schrödinger equation…

Today is the first day of Spring term classes, which means there's one obvious question to ask: What am I forgetting? I've spent the last few days alternating baby duty with frantic class prep, and I think I've got everything ready. I'm bound to be forgetting something, though. So what is it? What's the thing I forgot to do that's going to lead to a mad scramble just before the class starts at 10:30?

Last week, the more annoying yelling heads on ESPN and its affiliates were all making a big show of brushing off the complaints of NCAA fans who felt the tournament was missing something due to the lack of a "Cinderella" team from a small conference making it to the round of 16. This was just foolishness from people who know nothing about basketball, they said. The chalk-y nature of the tournament was a Good Thing because it produced "compelling match-ups" in the second weekend. And ten of the twelve games just sucked. There were really only two games that had any drama at all, both involving…

The Washington Monthly "I wonder why people are so angry about bonuses. Do they hate the rich? Do they want to punish success?Are they eaten up inside with resentment? Do they just not want to admit that some people work harder and are more talented than they are? Or could it be one too many stories like this (h/t)?" (tags: politics economics stupid class-war business)

I'm putting the finishing touches on Monday's lecture notes when the dog comes into the library, looking concerned. "Shouldn't I be doing something to promote the book?" she asks. "Since it won't be out for another nine months, I don't think it's that urgent." "But aren't there more Internetty things I could be doing?" "Well, you make regular appearances on the blog, and you've got plenty of friends on Facebook. I suppose you could Twitter." She draws herself up very haughtily. "I am a dog. I do not twitter." "Beg pardon?" "I'm not some stupid bird, fluttering around twittering all the time…

I was rather surprised when Friday's quick post about Tolkien spawned a lengthy comment thread full of people arguing against the suggestion that The Lord of the Rings is affected by Tolkien's Catholic faith. I'm no Tolkien scholar, but my impression of the field is that this is simply not a controversial statement, that there is ample material in the reams of letters, early drafts, and other background material showing that this is the case. On reflection, it seems that there are two things going on here. One is that some people seem to think that a book cannot be said to contain Christian…

Optics basics: Youngâs double slit experiment « Skulls in the Stars "As Iâve so far been restricting my âoptics basicsâ posts to discussions of fundamental concepts related to optics, it might seem strange at first glance to dedicate a post to a single optical experiment. What will hopefully become clear, however, is that Youngâs double slit experiment is connected to so many basic concepts in optical physics (and still provides surprising new results to this day) that one post is hardly enough to describe all the interesting insights that can be gained by studying the experiment and its…

Twenty-five-ish years ago, my father and I went on a fishing trip in the Florida Keys with a very dear friend of the family, who had been going their for years. I've written about him before, because he had a severe case of polio shortly before Salk's vaccine was developed, and needed a good deal of medical equipment to survive. As you might imagine, flying with Martin required a lot of red tape, even in those idyllic pre-9/11 days-- he needed assistance in boarding, oxygen available on the plane, some medical supplies in the carry-on, and all of this stuff needed to be cleared with the…

SteelyKid has developed a bunch of new skills recently, which she shows off in this video of her sitting up like a big girl, and pulling toys out of her shape sorter box: (Thanks to Ewan and Jenny for the shape sorter box, by the way. It's pretty much the ultimate dog toy (a selection of small pieces that squeak, rattle, or crackle), so we have to be careful about when and where SteelyKid gets to play with it, but she loves it. As you can see.) And now, we're off to investigate big-girl strollers, as SteelyKid has outgrown her infant carrier.

The Washington Monthly "All of that's changing, slowly but surely. The GOP lock on evangelicals is loosening. Poverty and global warming are just as serious for many younger evangelicals as whether two consenting adults of the same gender can get married. And Pat Robertson's Regent University has an official student organization for Democrats." (tags: blogs politics society culture US religion) phinney / 27 / 03 / 2009 / Advice / Home - Inside Higher Ed "Tenure is an individual accomplishment that can be all consuming and absorbing twenty-four-seven for the first decade or two of an…

Arts & Letters Daily had a link to a City Journal article about religious symbolism in science fiction, which attempts to claim that there has been a recent swing toward Christian symbolism in the genre (at least, in movie and television SF-- the only books mentioned are forty-ish years old). There are a number of problems with it, but the most jarring has to be this paragraph: One reason that Disney finally made a movie out of C. S. Lewis's Christian allegory The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 2005 may be that popular fantasy has become increasingly religious at heart. Peter Jackson…

OK, "quiz" isn't really the right word, because I don't know the right answer. But here's something weird that I noticed a while ago, and since I needed an excuse to fool around with video a bit, I thought I'd shoot some pictures of it: Here's the deal: My cell phone is gently curved on one side. If I put the phone on a table with that side down, it will spin reasonably freely, with very little effort. If I try to spin it fast, though, it very quickly develops a pronounced wobble that damps out the spin very quickly. You can see it in the YouTube video above. So, the question is: Why does…

The Tuguska event of 1908 is one of the most frequently "explained" events in recent history, trailing only the Kennedy assassination. The arXiv blog reports on the latest explanation of what knocked down all those trees without making a giant crater: Now a new analysis by Edward Drobyshevski of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg Russia claims to have solved these problems. Drobyshevski concludes that the object that hit in 1908 was a comet (as have many scientists before him). But unlike the others, he has been able to calculate that this comet hit the Earth's atmosphere almost…

Jets Attempt To Trade Mannequin Dressed As Favre For Jay Cutler | The Onion - America's Finest News Source "The Jets refuse to drop their offer and have sweetened it with the addition of a dog in a Jerricho Cotchery jersey." (tags: silly football sports onion) Kung Fu Monkey: Ephemera 2009 (7) "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with…