drorzel | November 24, 2008
FQXi Community: Articles, Forums, Blogs, News
"For the current [essay] contest, [the topic] is "The Nature of Time," including, but not limited to, the arrow of time; the emergence of time in quantum gravity; time, free will and determinism; time travel; the beginning or ending of time; and timelessness."
(tags: physics time internet quantum astronomy science)
The Quantum Pontiff : Dewy Eyed Pastoralism
"A scientific life lived in short breaths, one publication at a time, until it's too late, and no one can even understand what you are doing. "
(tags: science academia biology history…
drorzel | November 24, 2008The Corporate Masters have decreed a new question Ask a
ScienceBlogger question, and this one's right up my alley:
What do you see as science fiction's role in promoting science, if any?
If you look over in the left sidebar, you'll see a
href="http://scienceblogs.com/principles/sf/">SF category, which
is all about, well, science fiction stuff. I read a lot of SF,
regularly attend Boskone (a Boston-based convention), and we scheduled
our big Japan trip to coincide with the Worldcon in Yokohama. So,
yeah, this is a question I can spend a little time on...
The short version of the answer is…
drorzel | November 22, 2008
CHART ATTACK!: 11/24/84 | Popdose
"When you're on fire like Lionel Richie in 1984, you can do whatever the hell you want. You can write a song called "Penny Lover," which is not actually about somebody who loves pennies, or even about someone who loves girls named Penny. And you can sit back and watch your song reach the Top 10, without batting an eye. "
(tags: music review blogs silly)
Cocktail Party Physics: what is physics?
"I've been traveling giving a lot of talks lately, and I always ask people I'm visiting what makes physics "physics". Why is biophysics bioPHYSICS and not…
drorzel | November 21, 2008Next Thursday is Thanksgiving, and the impending holiday and associated travel has thrown our schedules all out of whack. I'm making myself crazy trying to maintain the usual posting schedule while still meeting work and family responsibilities. Thus, for at least the next week, and possibly longer, I'm not even going to try.
If something really big comes up that needs to be mentioned, I'll probably post about it. Other than that, you can expect links dumps, and not much more.
If you need something to entertain you right now, here are a couple of party games:
The Elevator Pitch Contest at…
drorzel | November 20, 2008
The End of Wall Street's Boom - National Business News - Portfolio.com
It seems I'm obliged to link to this. Apologies for the delay.
(tags: politics economics culture business books)
MPR: Challenged ballots: You be the judge
Do you like politics? And radio-button Internet polls? Well, this is the post-election article you've been dreaming of...
(tags: politics us internet journalism)
What Would You Do in the Worst Case? A Freakonomics Quorum - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com
"Imagine you just lost all your possessions and money, and you were suddenly living in the streets. 1. What's…
drorzel | November 20, 2008Here we see SteelyKid modeling the very latest in baby fashion:
It's important to start the cult indoctrination early...
The fuzzy white thing over the purple cow onesie is her warm fuzzy hooded outfit, seen in more detail in this week's Appa picture:
That was taken yesterday, as Kate was headed out to get a flu shot.
drorzel | November 20, 2008I seem to have been sucked into a universe in which I'm talking about the Many-Worlds Interpretation all the time, and Neil B keeps dropping subtle hints, so let me return to the whole question of decoherence and Many-Worlds. The following explanation is a recap of the argument of Chapter 4 of the book-in-progress, which will cover the same ground, with cute dog dialogue added.
The central question here is what sorts of things count as producing a "new universe" in Many-Worlds. The scare quotes are because I've come around to the opinion that the whole "parallel universe" language does more…
drorzel | November 20, 2008I flagged this Matt Yglesias post about post-mortem examinations of the financial crisis as something to respond to. Matt writes:
I was at an interesting discussion with an ideologically diverse group of people last night of the future of financial regulations. One thing that there was broad agreement on that hadn't really snapped into focus for me previously is the idea that doing rigorously precise forensic work on how to understand "what went wrong" and then design the rule that would have prevented this is neither necessary nor sufficient to improving things going further.
The basic…
drorzel | November 19, 2008
Swans on Tea » How (not) to Cook the Books
Fun with Benford's Law, one of those cool mathematical principles whose name I can never remeber.
(tags: science math blogs youtube statistics)
Chuck Klosterman reviews Chinese Democracy | The A.V. Club
"Reviewing Chinese Democracy is not like reviewing music. It's more like reviewing a unicorn. Should I primarily be blown away that it exists at all? Am I supposed to compare it to conventional horses? To a rhinoceros? Does its pre-existing mythology impact its actual value, or must it be examined inside a cultural vacuum, as if this creature is…
drorzel | November 19, 2008A little while back, when I complained about the treatment of the multiverse in Anathem, a number of people commented to say that it wasn't all that bad. And, indeed, they were right. Compared to last night's History Channel program on "Parallel Universes," Stephenson's book is a miracle of subtle nuance, teasing out the crucial distinctions between different theories, and making them clear to the reader.
Yeesh. That was so actively irritating that I don't know where to start. So I won't-- you can read what I wrote in the earlier post, and apply it to the History Channel, ten times over.…
drorzel | November 19, 2008I got a bunch of really good comments to yesterday's post about athletes and attitudes toward education. Unfortunately, yesterday was also a stay-at-home-with-SteelyKid day, and she spent a lot of time demanding to be held or otherwise catered to, so I didn't have a chance to respond. I'd like to correct that today by responding to the main threads of argument in those comments.
Taking these in no particular order, Moshe writes:
Not sure there is a serious argument here, athletes are different in so many ways, but I'll bite - here is another difference. Some students and athletes have their…
drorzel | November 18, 2008
Is getting takeout that much worse for the planet than cooking at home? - By Jacob Leibenluft - Slate Magazine
Probably not.
(tags: environment science society social-science slate)
Michael Nielsen » Malcolm Gladwell's new book, "Outliers", and the 10,000 hour rule
"One of the main claims of Outliers is that putting in 10,000 hours of practice is a prerequisite for great achievement. I believe this is the wrong way of thinking about the relationship between achievement and the 10,000 hour rule. A clue to a better way comes from some examples which to some extent disprove the claim."
(…
drorzel | November 18, 2008In this post we present an update to our earlier measurement of the Baby Feeding Correlation Function:
The figure above shows a histogram of the interval between feedings for SteelyKid in the 14 weeks since birth. Error bars represent 1-σ statistical uncertainties.
As you can see, we have added a great deal of data since we last posted. The correlation function clearly shows a large peak between 3 and 4 hours, dropping off rapidly to zero for longer feeding times. The zero value for feedings within half an hour clearly demonstrates anti-bunching, indicating that baby feedings are quantized…
drorzel | November 18, 2008It's a great time of year if you're a sports fan. The NFL is in full swing, and college football is coming to the inconclusive end of its season (save for the weird six-weeks-later coda of the bowl games). The NBA and NHL are just starting up, and most importantly, college basketball season has just started.
The abundance of sports, particularly college sports, at this time of year makes it a great time to be a fan. Unfortunately, the fact that both college football and college basketball (the biggest of the big-money sports) are in season at the moment also means that this is the peak season…
drorzel | November 18, 2008In the previous post, I promised to say something more about Einstein and the photoelectric effect. It turns out that I already wrote about this, back in 2005. That post is the end of a long chain of links about the history of photons.
This is a good thing, because it frees me from having to try to type a new post with a baby on my lap. You're kind of getting short-changed, though, so to make up for the lack of new content, here's a relevant footnote from Chapter 1 of the book-in-progress:
Millikan thought the Einstein model lacked "any sort of satisfactory theoretical foundation," and…
drorzel | November 18, 2008The History Channel ran a two-hour program on Einstein last night. I had meant to plug this in advance, but got distracted by the Screamy Baby Fun-Time Hour yesterday, and didn't have time to post.
The show restricted itself more or less to the period from 1900, just before his "miracle year" in 1905, to 1922 or so, when Einstein received his Nobel Prize. This was his most fertile period, scientifically, and they did a fairly comprehensive job of covering his life during this time, including his struggles for acceptance and his complicated personal life.
There were, of course, some…
drorzel | November 17, 2008
Kevin Drum - Mother Jones Blog: Conservatives and Unions
"Overturning Roe is certainly a conservative priority, but it's only been on the list for about 30 years. Fighting unions has been on the list for more like 130 years. If it's not central to the conservative identity in America, I don't know what is."
(tags: politics law us blogs society class-war)
Cocktail Party Physics: a spark in the dark
"This also establishes [Francis] Bacon as the earliest to record the phenomenon, known as triboluminescence, a.k.a., "the Wint-O-Green Life Saver Effect." "
(tags: science physics chemistry…
drorzel | November 17, 2008Nobody reading blogs, anyway. Doug Natelson asked for comments on a recent workshop on iron arsenide superconductors yesterday, and the count of comments still stands at zero.
The under-representation of condensed matter physicists among bloggers and blog readers, relative to their abundance in the general population, really is amazing.
drorzel | November 17, 2008Regarding the current financial crisis, a consensus has developed that the government needs to do something, and do something dramatic. The argument is, basically, that the normal sources of cash flow that might stimulate the economy out of recession have dried up, either through idiotic investments, or out of fear caused by all the idiotic investments. The government, then, is the only entity with the financial resources needed to get things moving, and they should be pumping cash into the economy through infrastructure projects and the like, to get things moving again.
There is another…
drorzel | November 17, 2008There's a link in today's links dump to a post from Pictures of Numbers, a rarely-updated blog on the visual presentation of data (via Swans On Tea, I think). There's some really good stuff there about how to make graphs that are easy to read and interpret.
I would like to dissent mildly from one of their points, in the Better Axes post, specifically the advice about not starting at zero. In many cases, this is good advice, but like most rules of thumb, it shouldn't be followed too closely.
Take, for example, this post from one of my metastable xenon papers:
A strict application of the…