drorzel | December 10, 2008
Water confirmed on distant planet - physicsworld.com
Any lingering doubts about whether water exists on a planet orbiting a star 63 light years away have been quashed by astronomers in the US. The team measured infrared light emitted by the planet, known as HD 189733b, and found distinct spectral features that, they say, can be explained only by the presence of water. Researchers had been puzzled because a previous attempt by the team to find water on the planet had failed, even though other astronomers claimed to have spotted the stuff.
(tags: science astronomy planets news)
The…
drorzel | December 10, 2008Cosmic Variance (among others) reports that 1997 Nobel Laureate in Physics Steve Chu will be the next Secretary of Energy. Sean gives a good run-down of the many reasons why this is a Good Thing.
Like Sean, I've met Chu in person. Unlike Sean, my one meeting with him doesn't shed any light on anything.
I met him at a reception at the National Academy of Sciences in honor of the American science laureates (Chu, Bill Phillips, and... somebody else). I was talking to Paul Lett, one of the permanent members of Bill's group about something or another when Chu stopped to say hi to Paul.
He was…
drorzel | December 10, 2008Will Wilkinson has some comments about an article by Malcolm Gladwell from The New Yorker. I basically agree with him about Gladwell, but I'm bothered by the last paragraph:
Now, there's no point in saying things that will make your readers think you are an evilcrazy person, so I can understand why Gladwell wastes words on quarterbacks instead of on the deeper mechanisms at work here. But why is it that "society devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?" The obvious answer is that care and patience are in greater…
drorzel | December 10, 2008I'm a little cranky after a day of reviewing grant proposals, so it's possible that I'm overreacting. But commenter Neil B has been banging on about quantum measurement for weeks, including not one, not two, but three lengthy comments in Tuesday's dog post.
For that reason, I am declaring this post's comments section to be the Official Neil B. Quantum Measurement Thread. Until such time as I declare the subject open again, this is the only thread in which I want to see comments about quantum measurement. Attempts to bring the subject up in comments to other posts-- even other posts having to…
drorzel | December 9, 2008
Swans on Tea » The Migration and Herding Tendencies of Tools
"Tools are routinely used and then set aside on the most convenient unoccupied flat surface, after which they are shuffled around to create more unoccupied surface area, which eventually obscures some of the items that have been piled up. Murphy's law dictates the most critical items will be obscured the most. "
(tags: science experiment silly blogs)
A Young Mad Scientist's First Alphabet Blocks | Xylocopa
"We are pleased to announce the release of our Young Mad Scientist's First Alphabet Blocks. These lovely blocks contain…
drorzel | December 9, 2008SteelyKid turned four months on Sunday, and thus went in for a four-month check-up today. Since I'm sure you're all dying to know her progress, here's the OBGraph:
She's one ounce shy of 14lbs, putting her in the 55th percentile for her age. She's now 25.5 inches in length, up from her initial 20, which is the proportional equivalent of me growing a bit more than 20 inches in four months. Babies grow really fast.
See Kate's LiveJournal update for more fun baby stuff. No graphs there, though-- I'm the scientist in the family.
drorzel | December 9, 2008I'm sitting at the dining room table eating lunch, when I get the feeling of being watched. I look around, and see the dog across the room, curled up on her pillows staring at me. She's quietly chanting to herself "I get stuff. I get stuff. I get stuff."
"You're not trying that hypnosis thing again, are you?" I ask. "You know it won't work."
"No. I'm manipulating the wavefunction of the universe to bring me good things. Such as, for example, that cheeseburger you're eating."
"Really. Manipulating the wavefunction of the universe?"
"Really. You see, all conscious beings are surrounded by an…
drorzel | December 8, 2008
Hope in a box: The A.V. Club's guide to holiday gifts for the new era of good feelings | The A.V. Club
"Words like "need" or "necessary" lose all meaning around Christmas, even when the economy is collapsing. For example, does anyone actually need a flexible plastic case to prevent their bananas from getting bruised? Of course not. "
(tags: silly onion gadgets)
Fafblog! the whole world's only source for Fafblog.
So I'm headin out to the store to get some popcorn when a snowstorm hits town an freezes me in a block a ice. A coupla thousand years later I get thawed out by some friendly…
drorzel | December 8, 2008In comments to last week's rant about the low esteem in which science is held, taffe writes:
Ok then, what should scientists be doing, individually or as a community? Maybe the masses just plain find political info more interesting. I mean hell, you had to use dog fans as a hook for your popular book, right?
One of the maddening things about blogging as a medium is the way its ephemerality leads to repetition. I feel like I've written this before, but it's unreasonable for me to be peeved about it, because there's no reason why anybody commenting last week would've seen the earlier post. So…
drorzel | December 8, 2008I made a run to the library last week on one of the days I was home with SteelyKid, as an excuse to get out of the house for a little while. I picked up three books: Counterknowledge, The Devil's Eye by Jack McDevitt (an Antiquities Dealers Innnnn Spaaaaaace novel, and a good example of Competence Fiction), and a pop-science book titled The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Came of Age by Louisa Gilder, because it looked fairly relevant to my own book-in-progress.
Amusingly, my RSS feeds yesterday brought me the latest in a series of posts in which ZapperZ waxes peevish about the book…
drorzel | December 8, 2008SteelyKid was kind of fussy for the early part of the afternoon, and my Giants lost. It's hard to say whether she was fussy for reasons of her own, or just picking up on my irritation at the Giants' lousy play. In any case, the correlation between Happy Baby and football victories remains intact-- she cheered up later on, and Kate's Patriots won.
Blame for the loss falls largely on the receivers, who dropped a bunch of good passes. Philadelphia was stacking their defense up to stop the run, and trying to force Manning to throw, but they couldn't get the completions to loosen things up at the…
drorzel | December 7, 2008
Holiday Guide 2008: Gifts - Best Books of 2008 (washingtonpost.com)
Only three science books, but at least they have a Science category.
(tags: books review science society culture)
Mike the Mad Biologist : Framing Good Transit Policy Poorly: The Efficiency Argument
"I don't like the subsidizing of the 'burbs by the urbs either, but, if you're talking to someone who is subsidized, you better come up with some good, specific--and 'bite-sized'--examples of how these policies will help them specifically and immediately."
(tags: blogs environment economics class-war society social-science…
drorzel | December 7, 2008Carl Zimmer sent me a message via Facebook, which made me think I might owe the New York Times an apology for last week's ranting. Publishers Weekly has come out with their list of the best books of the year, and they do even worse than the Times: not one of the 27 books in their "Nonfiction" category are about science-- the closest they come is probably Gladwell's Outliers.
Better yet, in a move that will no doubt delight my colleagues here at ScienceBlogs, they have an entire category on their list for "Religion," but no category for "Science." Fantastic.
I'm not quite as bothered by this…
drorzel | December 7, 2008I spent most of yesterday helping out with an on-campus workshop for high school teachers and students. Seven high school physics teachers and seventeen high school students spent the day doing a half-dozen experiments to measure various physical constants.
I was in charge of having them measure Plack's constant using the photoelectric effect. The actual measurement (made using a PASCO apparatus) takes about fifteen minutes, so I gave each group a quick explanation of the history: Einstein proposed the particle model of light as an explanation for the photoelectric effect in 1905, and nobody…
drorzel | December 6, 2008
Grading Medical Students (and More on Grade Inflation) -- Crooked Timber
"But, if grade inflation is supposed to be analogous with price inflation, rising grades do not, in themselves, constitute inflation. Rather, grade inflation occurs when grades rise relative to the quality of the academic performance of the students. And because we do not keep records of the quality of work students have done, we do not know whether grades have risen relative to the quality of that work. Perhaps, in any given university, the students are more talented, or harder working, or better prepared on entry, or…
drorzel | December 6, 2008As always, if you want penetrating analysis of the news, you need to go to a comedian. Jon Stewart explains why Congress is willing to bail out Wall Street, but not Detroit:
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The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
Autoerotic Explanation
Barack Obama InterviewJohn McCain Interview
Sarah Palin VideoFunny Election Video
It's kind of sad that this is one of the best arguments I've heard for giving the car companies the money they want.
(As an aside, Comedy Central's embed code for their video player is just about the ugliest thing ever. It's four times the size of the…
drorzel | December 5, 2008
The Intersection: Announcing Unscientific America
A new book, from Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, coming to fine bookstores everywhere in May
(tags: science books writing politics society)
PLoS Genetics: Taken to School: An Interview with the Honorable Judge John E. Jones, III
The judge in the Dover "Intelligent Design" trial, in case you don't recognize the name. A good interview, hitting a lot of good points about how the law works.
(tags: science law education biology politics religion us articles)
Christmas tree lights and series circuits | Dot Physics
"So, why are christmas…
drorzel | December 5, 2008One of the links in the previous post was to Josh's thoughts on the CNN science shutdown. Toward the end, he had an interesting note on why science doesn't get more play:
This is especially bad for CNN, since so much of their airtime is taken up by talking heads yelling at one another. Science doesn't work like that, and scientists fare poorly in a setting where rhetorical speed is valued over empirical evidence and fact-checking. This means that science is less likely to be covered at all, and when it is covered, it will be covered poorly.
He's right about CNN, but I wonder about the…
drorzel | December 5, 2008A few days ago, I complained again about the relative lack of science books in the New York Times "Notable Books of 2008" list. Yesterday, one of the big stories was CNN axing its entire science unit, such as it was, which drew comments from lots of blogs (and more whose links I can't be bothered to track down).
I'm probably the only one who thinks this, but in my opinion, these two are related. I'm not saying one caused the other, but that they're both symptoms of the same thing: the broad lack of respect for science among educated people. (Which I've ranted about before.)
One of the…
drorzel | December 4, 2008The weekly baby pictures have been getting a little monotonous, so Kate graciously agreed to help out with this week's shot. Here, SteelyKid is showing off her ability to "stand," like a big girl:
(She's not really standing, but this is one of her new things. She enjoys being held upright in a standing position, and will hold her head up and look all around, wide-eyed. )
(I also play "Giant Monster Baby" with her standing on my chest, rocking her back and forth to simulate stomping through Tokyo... That's been known to stave off a crying jag for a good half-hour.)