drorzel | January 9, 2009SteelyKid says, "Yay, Movable Type Upgrade!"
ScienceBlogs as a whole is having some work done under the hood, upgrading the back end that we use to manage all the blogs. The system is highly customized, so it's going to take a while-- the site will be static (in the sense of "not changing," not "the color of a television tuned to a dead channel") starting around noon today, and ending mid-day Saturday if all goes well.
Of course, these things never go as smoothly as you would like, and any software upgrade inevitably winds up breaking stuff that was working perfectly well. For that reason,…
drorzel | January 8, 2009
Lin leads Harvard to 82-70 upset over No. 17 BC - College Basketball - Rivals.com
Score one for the smart kids. Don't talk to me about Maryland.
(tags: sports basketball)
Michael Nielsen » Three myths about scientific peer review
"The myth that scientists adopted peer review broadly and early in the history of science is surprisingly widely believed, despite being false. It's true that peer review has been used for a long time - a process recognizably similar to the modern system was in use as early as 1731, in the Royal Society of Edinburgh's Medical Essays and Observations. But in most…
drorzel | January 8, 2009A couple years ago, we revised the General Education requirements at the college to require all students to take a "Sophomore Research Seminar" in their second year. These classes are supposed to be writing-intensive, and introduce students to the basics of academic research. The specified course components are pretty heavily slanted toward the humanities-- library searches, primary vs. secondary sources, and so on-- and don't really map that well onto research practices in the sciences.
A colleague in engineering managed to do a really interesting project-based class, though, and since…
drorzel | January 8, 2009Over at the theoretical physics beach party, Moshe is talking about teaching quantum mechanics, specifically an elective course for upper-level undergraduates. He's looking for some suggestions of special topics:
The course it titled "Applications of quantum mechanics", and is covering the second half of the text by David Griffiths, whose textbooks I find to be uniformly excellent. A more accurate description of the material would be approximation methods for solving the Schrodinger equation. Not uncommonly in the physics curriculum, when the math becomes more demanding the physics tends to…
drorzel | January 8, 2009In the "uncomfortable questions" comment thread, Thony C. suggests:
You say you're teaching "modern physics" so how about a running commentary on the stuff your teaching?
That's a good suggestion, and I'll start posting some sketchy reports soon. First, though, Bora asks:
What is un-modern physics?
Roughly speaking, physics gets divided into "Classical Physics" and "Modern Physics," with the dividing line coming right around 1900.
"Classical Physics" basically covers fields that were well established before 1900: Newtonian Dynamics, Electricity and Magnetism, most of Thermodynamics, most of…
drorzel | January 8, 2009My senior thesis student this year came to my office today to ask a question as he's starting to work on writing his thesis. I've given him copies of the theses of the last couple of students to work in my lab, and asked him to start on a draft of the background sections. He was worried that he wouldn't be able to make the background sections sufficiently distinct from the corresponding sections in the earlier theses.
This is a sort of tricky point when it comes to issues of academic honesty in science. Scientific questions always have definite right and wrong answers, and that limits the…
drorzel | January 7, 2009
The Quantum Pontiff : Relatively Right in Front of Your Nose
"In other words, there is a reference frame in which what is "right under your nose" is far far away, and just seconds after the big bang (let's ignore cosmology for now.) "
(tags: science physics blogs relativity)
The Best Jobs in the World | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
Why are actuaries so popular, anyway?
(tags: math economics silly jobs)
ALFALFA: The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey
Love those recursive acronyms.
(tags: science astronomy blogs internet)
Moral arbitrage -- Crooked Timber
"So, if you want to raise…
drorzel | January 7, 2009I get tons of all-campus email, and more and more of these seem to be of the form "Please see the attached Word file, containing a plain text document with minimal formatting that could just as easily have been pasted into the body of the message." Happily, I have my campus email forwarded to my GMail account, and I can opt to view the text as HTML, rather than opening Word to see it, but it's irritating.
Is there some reason why it would be preferable to send campus announcements out as Word files rather than as plain text in an email? Or is this just a case of laziness and technical…
drorzel | January 7, 2009In response to the call for uncomfortable questions, Jason Failes asks:
What's the best evidence for the Big Bang theory?
The more I read about it (25 years ago to present), the more contrived, ad hoc, and retro-dictive it seems.
At this point, what would falsify the Big Bang theory?
What would falsify the Big Bang? Jesus Christ his own self turning up at the American Astronomical Society meeting, turning water to wine, and giving a talk titled "What Big Bang? How I Hoaxed You All."
OK, that's pretty flippant, but my understanding of the matter is that the evidence supporting the current…
drorzel | January 7, 2009In the uncomfortable questions thread, David White asks:
Ever entertained the notion that attacks on true science from the muscular political creationism/ID lobby might be vitiated by exposure of their great and inexplicable theological flaw (gasp!) dating all the way back to William Paley?
Not really, no. Because, you know, there are only so many hours in the day.
I don't mean to be rudely dismissive of David's thesis, which is laid out at length on his own blog, and is detailed and well argued. The thing is, though, the political problem of creationism has relatively little to do with…
drorzel | January 7, 2009In response to my request for uncomfortable questions, Lou asks:
As a private college professor and a new parent, I'm sure you are aware that the current rates of tuition growth are unsustainable indefinitely. When do you expect to see the rates drop back to inflation levels, rather than continuing to grow 3-4% above it?
The short answer is "The minute that students and parents start going elsewhere." The setting of tuition rates is a Black Art, but the essential calculation is striking a balance between "What do we need to improve our operation?" and "What will the market bear?" If people…
drorzel | January 6, 2009
Discovering Biology in a Digital World : Another reason why science education sucks
"According to the article almost 40% of the 59 science education specialists, surveyed in the California University system, were "seriously considering leaving" their current jobs and some (20%) were considering leaving the field entirely."
(tags: science education stupid academia)
Squeezing and over-squeezing of triphotons : Abstract : Nature
The paper mentioned in the press release below.
(tags: science physics articles quantum optics experiment)
U of T physicists squeeze light to quantum limit
An…
drorzel | January 6, 2009In response to my call for uncomfortable questions, Ewan goes for the jugular:
what do you think your biggest failing as a father has been to date?
See, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about...
The answer is "I get frustrated too easily."
The first few weeks SteelyKid was home, I could get her to go to sleep by holding her curled up on my chest. It was disgustingly cute and heart-warming, and also, little did I know, a brief idyllic period. Starting around week 5, that stopped working, and I have yet to find a sure way of calming her down when she starts melting down, or getting her to…
drorzel | January 6, 2009I'm feeling kind of uninspired, blog-wise. I've got a few ResearchBlogging type posts in the mental queue, but they're not going to get written before the weekend, and the other obvious topics are things that I've written about N times before, and I'm not fired up for iteration N+1. So, we'll repeat last year's uncomfortable questions experiment, which worked pretty well:
Everyone has things they blog about.
Everyone has things they don't blog about.
Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it.…
drorzel | January 6, 2009Classes started yesterday for the winter term. This is the first time I've had to teach in six months, thanks to juggling my schedule so as to let me stay home for much of the Fall term. I'm always surprised by how much I forget, and how much I remember about the process.
The remembered stuff is pretty obvious-- bits of trivia that aren't in my lecture notes, or old ad-libs that work well to hep make some point or another. The forgotten stuff is stuff that seems like it ought to be obvious, like just how much talking is involved in the process. I came out of yesterday's class and drank the…
drorzel | January 5, 2009
EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect
"The middle fifth of the income distribution begins at a yearly income of $34,738 per household. Assume they pay 20 percent in total taxes (it's probably a bit higher), and they're left with $27,798 to live on. That's fairly rough if you're raising a family. The top 0.01 percent, by contrast, begins at a yearly income of $20,471,271. Assume they pay, including state and local taxes, 35 percent of their income (they probably pay less), and they're living on a mere $15,353,453 a year. It's hard to imagine the electorate taking much pity on that sort…
drorzel | January 5, 2009It's NFL playoff time, which means that sports fans will be treated to the sight of the most high-stakes farce in sports, namely the ritual of "bringing out the chains" to determine whether a team has gained enough yards for a first down. We've all seen this: the play is whistled dead, a referee un-stacks the pile of players, picks up the ball, and puts it down more or less where the player was stopped. Then he tosses the ball into the middle of the field, to a second referee, who tries to replicate the spot closer to the center of the field. Then a guy on the sideline carrying a big stick (…
drorzel | January 5, 2009As Kate notes, I am a paid-up member of this year's Worldcon, and thus entitled to nominate works for the Hugo Awards. Of course, there are a zillion categories, and I'm not entirely sure what to nominate for any of them.
So, if you are a reader or watcher of science fiction and/or fantasy, this is your opportunity to influence my nominations. If there's a book, story, tv show, movie, editor, or artist that you really, really want to see on the ballot, drop me a comment and let me know. I'll look at the work, if I have time, and give it proper consideration.
If you are a person who cares…
drorzel | January 5, 2009Rebecca Goldstein's Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel is another book in the Great Discoveries series of short books by noted authors about important moments in the history of science, and the people behind them. Previous volumes include Everything and More and A Force of Nature, both of which were excellent in their own way, and Incompleteness fits right in there with them.
As the subtitle makes clear, this is a book about Kurt Gödel's famous Incompleteness Theorem, which shows that any formal logical system complex enough to describe arithmetic must allow the formation of…
drorzel | January 4, 2009
Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind: Donald Westlake, R.I.P.
With links galore.
(tags: books writing mystery)
A question of mass? « Physics and cake
"The Penrose interpretation of quantum mechanics...
...states that the mass of a system affects the system's ability to maintain quantum coherence. This is the basis for some theories of quantum gravity. Above the Planck mass, which is ~1E-8kg, a system can no longer maintain coherence for any measureable time, due to the onset of gravitational interactions."
(tags: science physics quantum mass philosophy)
A little rant about that 2012…