drorzel | January 22, 2009My graduate alma mater made some news this week, with a new quantum teleportation experiment in which they "teleport" the state of one ytterbium ion to another ytterbium ion about a meter away. That may not sound like much, but it's the first time anybody has done this with ions in two completely separate traps, in different vacuum systems. It's also written up in Physics World, though they spell Chris Monroe's name wrong throughout.
The paper is coming out in Science, and I may try to write it up for a ResearchBlogging post over the weekend. I may also need to add it to the quantum…
drorzel | January 22, 2009Here are the results of yesterday's poll, as of about 10pm Eastern. Blue bars are the fraction of respondents saying that a given behavior (wearing hats, eating in class, drinking in class, leaving class to go to the bathroom) was acceptable, red bars the fraction saying it was unacceptable:
You can also see the results broken down by whether the respondents were faculty or students (solid bars are student responses, striped bars faculty):
It's interesting to see how uniformly permissive my readers are, though that may simply reflect the science-y tilt of my readership. When the topic comes…
drorzel | January 22, 2009SteelyKid is now in day care five days a week. This is good for us, in that it lets Kate and I both go back to work full-time, and good for her, in that she gets to meet new people, and spend the whole day playing with interesting toys.
Of course, it has its bad sides, too. The norovirus that laid me and Kate out two weekends ago was something that is going around the day care center. And as I type this, I can hear SteelyKid upstairs coughing, with the cold virus that's also going around the day care center.
Whee!
drorzel | January 21, 2009
Legoland California's depiction of Barack Obama's inauguration | World news | guardian.co.uk
(tags: politics news silly pictures toys)
Let My Students Drink: College presidents say it's time to lower the drinking age - Reason Magazine
"Q: Why lower the drinking age?
A: Weâve had a law on the books for 24 years now. You donât need an advanced degree to see that the law has utterly failed. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors have consumed alcohol. Sixty-six percent of high school sophomores have. "
(tags: politics stupid academia society culture drugs booze)
The Little Unions That…
drorzel | January 21, 2009I went to a panel discussion yesterday about teaching issues, and was struck by both the strength and the range of opinions regarding classroom atmosphere. Some people are very laissez-faire about what students can do in class, while others have very strict codes of classroom behavior. One colleague even referred to a "code of professional conduct" that he lays down in class.
So, I thought I'd throw this out to the ScienceBlogs readership, to see what people think of various student behaviors. I'm too lazy to set up actual poll software, so we'll do this the low-tech way: leave your answers…
drorzel | January 21, 2009Lots of people are giving Obama props for the shout-out to atheists in his inaugural address, but I'm deeply concerned about what he said. Or, rather, what he didn't say:
We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and non-believers.
Where are the Buddhists? He left out a major world religion!
"Oh, well, what harm can it do?" you may be thinking. "There aren't that many Buddhists in the US, after all, and they're not really concerned with worldly things." This is a dangerously naive view of the world.
If pop culture teaches us anything, it's don't mess with the Buddhists.…
drorzel | January 21, 2009I'm listening to "Mike and Mike" on ESPN radio, as I usually do in the morning, and they just spent the better part of five minutes talking about the point spread for the upcoming Super Bowl. The opening betting line has Pittsburgh favored by seven points, but some Las Vegas organization or another told them that the Cardinals would be underdogs to ten different NFL teams, had they made it to the game, including the Patriots and Cowboys, who didn't even make the playoffs.
I have no idea who provided this information, or why they would even have betting lines for Super Bowls in alternate…
drorzel | January 20, 2009
Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 5 (2009): Lauren E. Kost, Steven J. Pollock, and Noah D. Finkelstein - Characterizing the gender gap...
"Binned by quintiles, we observe that males and females with similar pretest scores do not have significantly different post-test scores (p>0.2) . The post-test data are then modeled using two regression models (multiple regression and logistic regression) to estimate the gender gap in post-test scores after controlling for these important prior factors. These prior factors account for about 70% of the observed gender gap. The results indicate that the…
drorzel | January 20, 2009Joseph Lowery wins the Inauguration.
Obama's speech was no slouch, either, but anybody who gets a hundred thousand people to yell "Amen!" wins.
I'm wearing a T-shirt today that says "I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist." And I can't really express how happy I will be to retire it, at least as regards presidential politics, for the next several years. Much as I like the shirt, I hope it's gone for good.
Amen.
drorzel | January 20, 2009
A Sample Book Proposal: Newton and the Counterfeiter | ScienceOnline09
"I donât mean to suggest that this is a generalizable model, just an example of one approach that worked in the marketplace. As noted in the Wiki page for the session â to be moderated by David Munger and myselfâbesides the fact that this proposal worked, the other feature of note is that the book that evolved from this proposal differs from this ancestral form in key ways, while maintaining a clear connection to its origins."
(tags: science books writing history)
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts /…
drorzel | January 20, 2009This is flagged as a ResearchBlogging post, but it's a different sort of research than I usually write up here, as this is a paper from Physical Review Special Topics-- Physics Education Research. This is, however, a legitimate and growing area of research in physics departments, and some of the findings from the PER field are really interesting.
This particular paper, though, is mostly kind of depressing. The authors, including Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, gave students in three introductory physics classes a survey about their attitudes toward physics. They asked the students to indicate…
drorzel | January 20, 2009SteelyKid was delivered by Caesarean section (MacDuff won't stand a chance...). They let me in to the operating room just before the moment of delivery, and I stuck around while they cleaned her up and did the early tests that they do on newborns, before they brought her over for me and Kate to see.
While we were waiting (and quietly rejoicing), the surgeons were going about the business of closing things up. I have an unholy aversion to all things medical, so I tried not to pay too much attention to what they were doing, but I gradually became aware of a pattern: one of the nurses would…
drorzel | January 19, 2009Back in the "Uncomfortable Questions" thread, Thony C suggested that I should do running updates on the course I'm teaching now. I meant to get to this sooner, but last weekend's bout with norovirus kind of got in the way...
I like the idea, though, so below the fold are a bunch of comments on the classes I've had thus far this term:
Class 1: Introduction to Relativity. I do a quick recap of the two classical physics classes that are pre-requisites for my class, showing the various conservation laws, and Maxwell's equations. I then set up a version of the problem that led to relativity,…
drorzel | January 19, 2009I think I missed this the first time around, but this weekend, I watched the bloggingheads conversation about quantum mechanics between Sean Carroll and David Albert. In it, David makes an extended argument against the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics (starting about 40:00 into the conversation).
The problem is, I can't quite figure out what the problem is supposed to be.
The argument has something to do with a thought experiment in which you take a million particles, prepared in a state such that a measurement of their spin will give an equal probability of measuring "up" or…
drorzel | January 19, 2009Over at Biocurious, Philip is thinking about digital notebooks, and has found a system that works for him:
My computer algebra system of choice is Mathematica, and because of Mathematica's notebook system, it became extremely straightforward to include sufficient commentary among the analysis and calculations. The important "working" details of my day are recorded on paper that is heavy on scribbles, numbers, and comments on the minutiae of a particular instrument or measurement, followed by references to specific data files collected that day. The Mathematica notebooks where I visualize and…
drorzel | January 18, 2009
Information Processing: The Age of Computing
"Historians of science have seen fit to ignore the history of the great discoveries in applied physics, engineering and computer science, where real scientific progress is nowadays to be found. Computer science in particular has changed and continues to change the face of the world more thoroughly and more drastically than did any of the great discoveries in theoretical physics."
(tags: science physics computing history)
Mind Hacks: Joseph Weizenbaum has left the building
"Do you believe it is normal to be sad because you just found out that my…
drorzel | January 18, 2009Looking for a way to kill some time on a Sunday morning? You could do worse than yesterday's bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation between Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer:
It's a wide-ranging conversation, covering what to expect from the Obama administration, artifical life, the possibility of life on Mars, Sanjay Gupta, and the future of science in the media. It's like a Sunday-morning talk show, only with smart people.
drorzel | January 18, 2009Arts & Letters Daily has an item announcing the death of Andrew Wyeth (the link goes to the New York Times obit). This is noteworthy to me because he's one of a very few artists whose work (in poster form) has ever hung on my wall. Specifically, this painting, titled "Soaring":
I picked it up at a poster sale when I was in college, because I needed something to cover the institutional grey wallpaper in my dorm room, and I wanted something different from the standard-issue Dali posters. I liked the general look, but what sold me on it was realizing that the birds in the picture are…
drorzel | January 17, 2009
Explaining the curse of work - science-in-society - 14 January 2009 - New Scientist
"How many members can a committee have and still be effective? Parkinson's own guess was based on the 700-year history of England's highest council of state- in its modern incarnation, the UK cabinet. Five times in succession between 1257 and 1955, this council grew from small beginnings to a membership of just over 20. Each time it reached that point, it was replaced by a new, smaller body, which began growing again. This was no coincidence, Parkinson argued: beyond about 20 members, groups become…
drorzel | January 17, 2009I went to a meeting earlier this week with a bunch of other faculty members and students. Before the meeting proper got going, a few of the other faculty were discussing whether they should cancel their mid-day Tuesday classes because of the Inauguration.
This struck me as an obvious "No," but they seemed to be very fired up for it. Which I find kind of mystifying. I mean, yes, Obama is the first African-American to be elected President, but the exciting thing was the election, where there was actually some suspense about how things would turn out.
The Inauguration, on the other hand, is…