drorzel | February 9, 2009The Book-in-Progress is slowly but surely moving toward being the Book-in-Production. There isn't an officially official date yet, but I've gotten what should be the last round of edits, and been told that it should be out this fall, just in time for holiday gift-buying.
Between the book and my class, I don't have a great deal of spare mental energy for blogging. Here are a few notes from the ongoing book work, though:
I am amused to discover that the official way to enter a cross-reference is to put "Page XXX" in the text. Not the page number, mind, the exact string "Page XXX." I'm told…
drorzel | February 8, 2009
A physics history-mystery: magnetism from light? « Skulls in the Stars
"Iâve been looking into Faradayâs contribution to the understanding that light is an electromagnetic wave. That investigation led me to some early work by other researchers on the light/magnetism connection, and led me in turn to a puzzler: how significant and accurate is that earlier research? I donât have a good answer, so I will pose the questions to the physics/blog community in the post."
(tags: science physics blogs optics history E&M)
Adventures of the Learning Assistant (Part 3) « Morning Coffee Physics…
drorzel | February 8, 2009Back in the 25 things post, I alluded to a long-ago encounter with Jonathan Frakes in Williamstown. This has led to a number of requests for the full story, which I will put below the fold, for those who care:
I stayed on campus for the summers when I was in college, doing research and hanging out with friends. This involved some small amount of drinking, as you might imagine.
Anyway, one summer-- 1992, I think, but I'm not sure-- I was headed home from some sort of party (somebody's birthday, I think) with a couple other people rather late one night. We had been on Meadow Street for some…
drorzel | February 8, 2009I only started using FriendFeed a few months ago because other people at the Science in the 21st Century workshop were documenting the conference on it. I quickly became a fan of the service, which not only added an extra dimension to the meeting, but has also been a continuing source of interesting material from the feeds of others.
If you're not familiar with it, FriendFeed is a service that aggregates online content from other sources, and puts out a feed of all your online activity. my feed, for example, includes blog posts, del.icio.us links, YouTube videos, Flickr pictures, and…
drorzel | February 8, 2009Williams has long held a dominant position in a number of categories of blogging: Dan Drezner on economics and politics, Marc Lynch on the Middle East, Ethan Zuckerman on the developing world and really cool conferences, Derek Catsam on history and Red Sox fandom, yours truly on canine physics. And I'm sure I'm forgetting several people.
The number of blogging fields with prominent Eph contributions has increased this week, with the entire Williams math department making the jump into blogging. It's a bold move, but math blogging has always been more respectable than other types.
At this…
drorzel | February 7, 2009SteelyKid is six months old today! To celebrate, here's some video of her bouncing around in her jumper:
(That's spliced together from a bunch of shorter clips. You can here me babbling inanely in the background, because my brain turns to cheese whenever I'm within about five feet of her. I was tempted to mute all the audio and replace it with some song or another, but decided it would be too cheesey. Also, I like the happy baby squawk at the end.)
drorzel | February 7, 2009Since everybody I know on Facebook seems to have done this, it seems I'm obliged to post a list of twenty-five random facts. I wouldn't want to have my Internet License revoked, or anything.
I've always been tall-- I'm not one of those tall people who was 5'7" in the tenth grade, and then shot up a foot over the next two years. I was always one of the three or four tallest kids in my class in school.
I haven't been skiing in at least fifteen years, but every year at this time when the radio station I listen to in the car goes into the all-ski-area-ads format, I wonder about trying it again.…
drorzel | February 6, 2009
The Crowd-Sourced Reading List | The Loom | Discover Magazine
"Last week I blegged for examples of great science writing from over the years, and you did not disappoint. Rania Masri, who teaches writing to scientists in Lebanon, asked if I could share the list. Itâs the least I can do in exchange for everyoneâs generosity"
(tags: science blogs books writing)
drorzel | February 6, 2009Not long after I posted my comments about textbook prices, I went to a panel discussion on teaching, where a social scientist made an interesting observation about the ways different disciplines interact with books.
In the humanities, the whole point of the class is to discuss the books. Nothing useful can be done until and unless the students have had the chance to do the reading. This is why humanities classes tend to let out early on the first day of the term, and have a full class on the last day of the term: the important reading has to be done before class.
In the sciences, on the other…
drorzel | February 6, 2009There's a new paper from the PAMELA dark matter search out that's written up in Physics, including a link to a free version of the PDF. This paper is considerably less dramatic than one that appeared last year, leading Physics World to suggest that they're backing off the earlier claim.
What's the deal? Sean Carroll has you covered, with a detailed explanation of what's in both papers, and why the findings have been published and reported the way they have:
What happened is that the PAMELA collaboration submitted their second paper (anomalous positrons) to Nature, and their first paper (well-…
drorzel | February 6, 2009Tennessee women's basketball coach Pat Summitt got her 1000th win last night, a record that will probably stand for a good long while. Nobody else in college basketball really has much of a shot-- the record for men's basketball coaches is Bob Knight at 902, and the most wins by an active coach is Mike Krzyzewski of Duke, somewhere short of 800.
I'm not a big follower of women's college basketball-- it doesn't really have the competitive balance of the men's game, and I'm not a huge fan of watching 30-point blowouts-- but what little I do know suggests that Summitt is a class act. I haven't…
drorzel | February 5, 2009
Textbooks have jumped the shark | Dot Physics
"I have been afraid to really speak my mind on this issue because I donât want to completely enrage the textbook publishers. They do send me free books sometimes. Oh well, first what is the chance they will read this? Second, I already have tons of books and there is always wikipedia."
(tags: physics blogs education academia books dot-physics)
Biocurious: Drew Endy on group meetings
Excerpts from a presentation on how to give better group meeting presentations, and a link to the original slides in PDF format.
(tags: science blogs education…
drorzel | February 5, 2009This week's Baby Blogging is in honor of SteelyKid's continued growth: she had her six-month checkup on Wednesday, and has now officially exceeded the weight limit on the bassinet attachment to her porta-crib. We've had to lower her all the way down to the bottom of the crib, where she can look out at the world through a greenish mesh screen:
She's very happy about this. Emmy isn't quite sure what to make of it.
The other big development of the week is her new bouncy seat:
This was purchased last weekend, after seeing her in the jumperoo at day care, bouncing up and down with a huge smile…
drorzel | February 5, 2009Having mentioned this a few times in course reports, I thought I'd throw out a link to my lecture notes (PDF) on complex numbers. This is the one-class whirlwind review of complex numbers from defining i to Euler's theorem about complex exponentials.
To answer a slightly incredulous question from a commenter, this is necessary because the math department does not teach about complex numbers exponentials (edited to correct an inadvertent slur against the math department) in the calculus sequence, and the only math prerequisites for the sophomore modern physics class I'm teaching are calculus…
drorzel | February 5, 2009As you may or may not have heard, the evidence in the upcoming perjury trial of Barry Bonds was unsealed yesterday, and includes a number of positive drug tests. And, really, my main reaction was "Oh, thank God."
It's not that I'm enthusiastic about hearing steroids-in-baseball talk again, but the alternative was most likely another day of talk about Michael Phelps's unfortunate picture. Tedious as the steroids talk is, it doesn't usually make me want to punch somebody, which makes it a major improvement over the last three days of "OMG, Michael Phelps smokes the dope!!!!"
I linked Radley…
drorzel | February 4, 2009
NY Times article on force and physics and football | Dot Physics
"People say I am picky. Ok, sometimes I am. But somebody has to stand up for what is right and just. Maybe I am that person.
Please stop using the word force if you donât know what it is.
There. I said it. You can attack me now."
(tags: physics blogs stupid football sports journalism dot-physics)
Earth-friendly case file #130: On Deadly Ground | DVD | A.V. Club
"Mr. Wilkins promised that On Deadly Ground is just about the batshit-craziest bad movie in existence. He is not wrong. I have included an unprecedented number of…
drorzel | February 4, 2009The big news of the day from the world of politics is that President Obama plans to cap executive pay at banks that take bailout money in the next round of emergency cash payments. This is not popular with the executive class:
"That is pretty draconian -- $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus," said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. "And you know these companies that are in trouble are not going to pay much of an annual dividend."
Mr. Reda said only a handful of big companies pay chief…
drorzel | February 4, 2009I got the last round of line edits on the book-in-progress Monday night after work, but I haven't had a chance to do more than leaf through the pages. This is mostly because I had lab reports to grade-- the second written report is due Sunday, and I needed to get comments back to the students before they start on the next report.
(Yes, I know, as a practical matter, I could've waited until Saturday for that, but I hope for better.)
Grading labs is just about my least favorite part of the job (narrowly edging out committee meetings), and since this is turning into a blog primarily about…
drorzel | February 4, 2009In the last report from my modern physics course, we wrapped up Relativity, and started into quantum mechanics, talking about black-body radiation and Planck's quantum hypothesis. The next few classes continue the historical theme
Class 10: I make a point of noting that Planck himself never liked the idea of quantization of light, and in fact never applied the idea to light directly. His quantum model for black-body radiation was based on the idea of having "oscillators" in the object emitting the radiation. Einstein was the first to apply the idea of quantization to light directly, and take…
drorzel | February 3, 2009
Bruce Springsteen misreads the national mood in his halftime performance. - By Stephen Metcalf - Slate Magazine
A desperately stupid article about the Super Bowl halftime show
(tags: politics stupid society sports music)
PHD Comics: Not a good sign
"I should be done in a year..."
(tags: academia comics silly)
Doing Physics is a two level system « Shores of the Dirac Sea
Oscillatory solutions are the worst.
(tags: physics blogs academia silly quantum)
The Quantum Pontiff : Teleportation Between Separately Trapped Matter Qubits
Lots of news about the Chris Monroe's group teleporting…