drorzel | October 11, 2008
nanoscale views: What's interesting about condensed matter physics
"It's amazing how many complicated phenomena result from just simple quantum mechanics + large numbers of particles, especially when interactions between the particles become important. "
(tags: physics science materials blogs)
PHD Comics: Undergradese
"Translation: 'Can I do my homework in your office?'"
(tags: academia silly education comics)
drorzel | October 11, 2008When people attending a meeting-- particularly a meeting that starts at 8am on a Saturday-- elect to drink tea rather than coffee, they do so because they do not want coffee. For this reason, it is imperative that you not select the urns at random from a large pile of them, but rather use urns for hot water that have not been used for coffee.
If I wanted brownish coffee-flavored hot water, I would drink coffee, and not bother with the tea bags.
Thank you.
drorzel | October 10, 2008
slacktivist: They need help
"The reason I've been writing about/obsessing over things like the P&G rumor or the usefulness of Snopes is that I'm trying to figure out how to liberate the captives of unreality. "
(tags: politics psychology US society culture education)
Images of the 2008 TC3 fireball from space! - The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary Society
"It seems that no one in Sudan was able to record the 2008 TC3 fireball; the only image I've seen that was shot from the ground was one very tiny pixel in the sky seen from a beach in Egypt. But in this day and age, there are…
drorzel | October 10, 2008Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton has a post titled "College as magic garden: Why Pamela Dean's Tam Lin is a book you'll either love or hate". Tam Lin, for those who don't know it, is a version of the old ballad set at a liberal arts college in the upper Midwest (I believe it's based on Carleton, but I'm not sure). Jo's got a good description of it in her post.
You might be surprised to learn that I come down on the "hate" side regarding this particular book. It's not that the portrayal of the small liberal arts college environment is off, or anything-- quite the opposite. It does a wonderful job of…
drorzel | October 10, 2008It's been a frustrating and annoying week here at Chateau Steelypips, so I was probably in the perfect mood for Mike Hoye's subway busker story:
After a relatively crappy day, I got off the subway, and there's a couple of buskers playing a fiddle and a banjo at the station. And they're really going at it, playing the hell out of those things, and I can't figure out why 'til I get up close. The answer turns out to be that a couple of local b-boys have decided that it's time to throw down, to the tune of these guys playing some good old-time country fiddlin' and pickin'.
And man, did that cheer…
drorzel | October 10, 2008I went to an evening talk last night by Brother Guy Consolmagno (about which more later, maybe), and one of my colleagues said "Hey, congratulations on your blog appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education." Being quick on my feet, I said "Hunh?"
So, of course, I checked it out when I got home. And, indeed, I am mentioned in a post at the Chronicle's jobs blog. I'm thanked for pointing them to an article I disagreed with at length.
And that, right there, is the kind of week it's been in Chateau Steelypips.
drorzel | October 10, 2008The 2008 Nobel Peace Prize goes to Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, "for his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts."
Fortunately for uneducated boors like me, they provide a press release listing some of those efforts:
Throughout all his adult life, whether as a senior Finnish public servant and President or in an international capacity, often connected to the United Nations, Ahtisaari has worked for peace and reconciliation. For the past twenty years, he has figured prominently in endeavours to resolve several serious and…
drorzel | October 9, 2008
slacktivist: False Witnesses 2
"Far more interesting than those greedy sleazeballs, though, are the members of the much larger group of gossips who enthusiastically spread [rumors about Satanism at Proctor and Gamble]. This larger group has no financial interest at stake, so what's in it for them? What motivates someone to accept the invitation to participate in deception, to accept an obvious lie and then to voluntarily tie their own credibility to something so incredible?"
(tags: society culture stupid psychology religion)
drorzel | October 9, 2008In the spirit of the previous post, I thought I would provide a short list of the reasons why I am happy to be a physicist in the area of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) Physics. Like nearly anyone who hung on long enough to get a Ph.D. in some field, I think the area I work in is the coolest thing ever, and here are some of the reasons why:
AMO Physics is cool because it's the best field for exploring quantum effects. Pick up a book that deals with fundamental quantum issues-- The Quantum Challenge, say, and look at the experimental demonstrations. Almost all of them come from AMO…
drorzel | October 9, 2008If you go by physics-related stories in the mass media, you'd probably get the impression that about 90% of physicists work at the Large Hadron Collider or some other big accelerator lab. The other 10% would be dominated by people working on foundational questions in quantum mechanics-- Bell tests, teleportation, quantum information processing-- with a smattering of people doing something with superconductors. The distribution in the physics blogosphere is pretty similar.
And yet, if you went by the mass media impression, you'd be way wrong. The largest division of the American Physical…
drorzel | October 9, 2008SteelyKid had her two-month check-up in Monday (her two-month birthday was Tuesday), and checking in with the medical profession means we've got the opportunity for some baby science. And it's not science without graphs:
That's SteelyKid's weight as a function of time. Like most babies, she dropped a bit immediately after birth, but shot right back up, and has now been growing at a pretty good clip for the last eight-and-a-half weeks. We don't have enough data points on her length to make a graph, but she's increased substantially there, too, growing by 2.75".
To put these changes in…
drorzel | October 9, 2008The 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."
I'll be honest, I've got nothing on this one. Anyone who knows anything about his work, please tell me about it in comments. My knowledge of French literature is limited to laboriously translating Le Petit Prince in class twenty years ago, so I've never even heard of this guy.
drorzel | October 8, 2008
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2008 - Speed Read
A two-minute explanation of this year's prize.
(tags: physics particles Nobel news science theory)
The Collapse of Peer Review « The Scholarly Kitchen
"Is peer review in decline? Glenn Ellison, an economist at MIT, is beginning to question the added value of being published in top journals, at least for high-ranking authors."
(tags: science publishing economics social-science)
Kevin Drum - Mother Jones Blog: Feedback Pedantry
"I know that a lot of people use this term during a crash because "negative" is the same thing as "down," but I don'…
drorzel | October 8, 2008
A Colbert Report re-run about the financial crisis has just ended, so I turn the tv off, grab my jacket and the leash, and head out for a walk with the dog. She's oddly pensive as we head up the street. After a little while, she stops and asks, "What was that all about?"
"All what?"
"All that 'crisis' and 'bailout' stuff. It sounds scary."
"Well, a bunch of banks made a bunch of really bad loans, and people have lost a lot of money."
"I got that," she says. "I may be a dog, but I'm not stupid. I'm asking how they lost a lot of money."
"Well, it's complicated, but I'll try to explain. Let's…
drorzel | October 8, 2008As the DonorsChoose fundraiser rolls along, I'm making an effort to highlight a few worthwhile proposals from my challenge entry, in case the lack of specificity is keeping people from donating. This time out, that's the "Sizzling Science" proposal, from Broward County, FL. This description echoes sentiments that are frequently expressed here and elsewhere in blogdom:
What does a scientist look like? My students need to know that a scientist looks just like them. In fact, they are scientists. They can think like a scientist, hypothesize like a scientist, experiment like a scientist and then…
drorzel | October 8, 2008The 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded for the discovery of green fluorescent protein. It's split equally among three scientists, Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien (and just out of curiousity, how do they choose the order in which they list those names?).
The citation just says "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP," which is bound to produce some snickering. Perhaps it was used in an earmark-funded study of bear DNA, or some such...
My impression, though, based on several years worth of sitting through student talks about…
drorzel | October 7, 2008
The full story of Earth-impacting asteroid 2008 TC3 - The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary Society
"All in all, I think the episode of 2008 TC3 has proven that the world's astronomical community, at least, is prepared to respond when an object on a collision course is detected. Within just a few hours of its discovery, the digitally connected world knew exactly where and when the object would hit, and also that it posed no threat. It was a wonderful simulation of the first part of the call to arms when a truly threatening object is detected."
(tags: science astronomy physics blogs)…
drorzel | October 7, 2008I got some interesting comments on last week's post about the science blogging bubble, and there were two in particular I wanted to highlight. Bee wrote (among other things):
But what I think are further obstacle to blogging is the inappropriateness of the medium to science. E.g. blogs put by format an emphasis on novelty, which occasionally disturbs me. There's the option to label posts, but who ever looks at this? I'd vastly prefer to be able if interesting topics stay on top, such that it would be easier to spin longer discussions around a specific topic. Not sure I'm making that very…
drorzel | October 7, 2008Paul Ginsparg, the founder of the arxiv preprint server for physics, has a very nice article at Physics World reminiscing about the rise of the Internet, particularly in physics. This also serves as a nice counterpoint to his talk at the Science21 conference (video, microblogging), which included a wealth of fascinating information about the current operation of the arxiv.
In both of these, he mentions that the arxiv grew out of a pre-existing preprint culture in high-energy theoretical physics. People in the field would make copies of their manuscripts in progress, and send them to other…
drorzel | October 7, 2008The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been announced. Half will go to Yoichiro Nambu "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics," with the other half split between Makoto Kobayahi and Toshihide Maskawa, "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."
I'll be honest: this is far enough outside my area of physics, that I can't say anything sensible other than "It's a good day to be a Japanese particle theorist." I can't begin to explain what these guys did. The…