drorzel | October 6, 2008
Interview with Chad Orzel
It's me, doing a blog interview on how I got into science, how I got into blogging, and the future of science outreach.
(tags: science blogs physics academia)
xkcd - A Webcomic - Depth
Negative powers of ten, xkcd style.
(tags: science comics xkcd)
Seeing race and seeming racist? Whites go out of their way to avoid talking about race
"Our findings don't suggest that individuals who avoid talking about race are racists," Apfelbaum explained. "On the contrary, most are well-intentioned people who earnestly believe that colorblindness is the culturally sensitive…
drorzel | October 6, 2008I got email this morning from the Obama campaign, bearing news that will no doubt have the more rabidly partisan Democrats of blogdom dancing with glee: The Obama campaign as prepared a video about the Keating Five scandal (Wikipedia link, not the campaign video), and John McCain's role in it. The video will be released at noon today.
Some bloggers have been demanding this for weeks, now, but I can't say it makes me happy. I don't like seeing the Obama campaign go there, and it's particularly disappointing because I don't think they need to go there.
Yeah, fine, the McCain campaign has…
drorzel | October 6, 2008The Empress of Eastern New York is dissatisfied:
Why? Because at this point, my DonorsChoose Challenge entry has only raised $475 from 7 donors. A bunch of theorists are cleaning our clocks.
This makes SteelyKid grumpy. And we don't want a grumpy baby.
To put things into perspective, this blog gets about 2,000 hits per day, so the challenge goal of $6,000 amounts to just $3 per daily hit. So, if something you read here gave you at least $3 worth of amusement, please click and contribute. If you do, we'll have a happy SteelyKid:
And isn't that better?
For a larger donation, you can claim one…
drorzel | October 6, 2008Over at Terra Sigillata, Abel has a post on the limiting of job searches that is an excellent example of the problems with the academic mind-set:
The short summary: postdocs and other academic job candidates are disqualifying themselves from even applying for certain positions because:
1. they don't feel they meet the job description in the ad
2. the job is at a "lesser" institution or department
3. the job is in a place (they think) they'd never want to live
4. they'd feel bad about turning down a position at a place they know they'd never want to be.
First things first: in this climate,…
drorzel | October 6, 2008The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was split three ways, with half going to Harald zur Hausen for the discovery that Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) causes cervical cancer. The other half is split between Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for the discovery of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV, and won't this make the denialists' heads explode?).
Clearly, finding a three-letter-acronym for your work is the key to Nobel glory.
Nobody had any of these names in this year's Nobel betting pool. The Physics prize announcement is tomorrow, so this is your last chance to claim…
drorzel | October 5, 2008
The politics of girliness - Ultrabrown
"Last night, Palin winked at the camera, scrunched up her nose and added a smiley timbre before thrusting any rhetorical daggers. In these moments she resembled an anime character. Kawaii ne!"
(tags: US politics stupid gender society blogs)
slacktivist: Connections
"[W]hen I say that these baseless and illegitimate attacks "don't prove anything," that's not quite accurate. They don't prove anything about the person being attacked, but they do prove quite a bit about the people making the attacks. They prove the attackers to be capable of the level of…
drorzel | October 5, 2008The best way-- really, the only way-- to sum up David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Brief History of ∞ is by quoting a bit from it. This comes from the middle part of the book, after a discussion of Fourier series, in one of the "If You're Interested" digressions from the main discussion:
(IYI There was a similar problem involving Fourier Integrals about which all we have to know is that they're special kinds of 'closed-form' solutions to partial differential equations which, again, Fourier claims work for any arbitrary functions and which do indeed seem to-- work, that is-- being…
drorzel | October 5, 2008Jennifer Ouellette's pop-science book project post and the discussionaround it reminded me that I'm really shockingly ill-read in this area. If I'm going to be writing pop-science books, I ought to have read more of them, so I've been trying to correct that.
Hence, Longitude, which I actually read a few weeks ago at the Science21 meeting, but am just getting around to blogging. Longitude is Dava Sobel's bestselling book about English clockmaker John Harrison and his forty-year sturggle to win 20,000 pounds for making a clock capable of keeping time at sea well enough to allow navigation.
This…
drorzel | October 4, 2008
...My heart's in Accra » Cultural appropriation of the kick-ass kind
The haka comes to Texas.
(tags: rugby football culture society sports)
VOTD: I Love Sarah Jane (Zombie Short Film) | /Film
"Jimbo is 13. All he can think about is one girl, Sarah Jane. And no matter what stands in his way - bullies, violence, chaos, zombies - nothing is going to stop him from finding a way into her world."
(tags: video movies SF)
The Shakespeare Programming Language
"The design goal was to make a language with beautiful source code that resembled Shakespeare plays. There are no fancy data or control…
drorzel | October 4, 2008Over the past several weeks, I've written up ResearchBlogging posts on each of the papers I helped write in graduate school. Each paper write-up was accompanied by a "Making of" article, giving a bit more detail about how the experiments came to be, what my role in them was, and whatever funny anecdotes I can think of about the experiment.
If you haven't been following the series, or would just like a convenient index of the posts, here's the complete set:
Introduction and explanation of metastable xenon.
Experiment 1: Optical Control of Ultracold Collisions and the making thereof.…
drorzel | October 3, 2008
Ideas: Prediction vs Explanation: A Puzzle
"We do ten experiments. A scientist observes the results, constructs a theory consistent with them, and uses it to predict the results of the next ten. We do them and the results fit his predictions. A second scientist now constructs a theory consistent with the results of all twenty experiments.
The two theories give different predictions for the next experiment. Which do we believe? Why?"
(tags: science psychology statistics games blogs)
Daily Kos: Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart
(tags: politics US stupid blogs)
Improbable Research
This year's…
drorzel | October 3, 2008I've got meetings and phone calls most of the day, so here's something to keep you amused. Each of the following two-word phrases is taken from a pop song, some well-known, some faintly obscure. If you think you can identify one, leave a comment containing a more complete version of the line in which it appears-- enough to indicate that you know the whole song. Then supply a new two-word lyric for other people to guess (or don't-- it's all good).
strobe-lit space
rowboats landing
devil jumped
wearing tulle
she cat-sits
circus floor
said, quote
talking allegorically
wrestling gators
spare…
drorzel | October 3, 2008Over at Nature Networks, Timo Hannay has posted a conference talk in which he questions the future of science blogging:
"Science blogging is growing" I confidently wrote in an essay a few months ago. Then, like any good scientist, I went in search of evidence to support my prejudice. But I couldn't find any beyond the anecdotal. For a year or more, estimates of the number of blogs by scientists about science seem to have been stuck at about 1,500 (give or take). Services such as Alexa and Compete.com (if they can be believed) show traffic to sites like ScienceBlogs.com to have been flat for…
drorzel | October 3, 2008I made it through half an hour of last night's VP candidate debate. When they got to the question of global warming, I realized that her answer was indistinguishable from something the Sarah Palin Interview Generator might cough up, and opted for Tombstone on the History Channel (!) instead.
"Evidently, Mr. Ringo is an educated man. Now I really hate him."
If I'm going to have to listen to someone saying ridiculous things in a funny accent, there should at least be gunfights.
drorzel | October 2, 2008It's been eight weeks since her birth, and SteelyKid celebrates by doing the Baby Dance:
I almost didn't get to this today, but I wanted to make sure I got something up to serve as a debate alternative. She's much cuter than Sarah Palin, to say nothing of Joe Biden...
drorzel | October 2, 2008As mentioned in the previous post, the cold plasma experiment was the last of the metastable xenon papers that I'm an author on. My role in these experiments was pretty limited, as I was wrapping things up and writing my thesis when the experiments were going on.
The main authors on this were Tom Killian, now running his own cold plasma lab at Rice and Scott Bergeson, now running his own cold plasma lab at BYU. Scott was a pulsed-laser expert with a remarkably cavalier attitude toward things like anti-reflection coatings on vacuum windows, and Tom came from Dan Kleppner's hydrogen BEC project…
drorzel | October 2, 2008This is the last of the papers I was an author on while I was in grad school, and in some ways, it's the coolest. It's rare that you get to be one of the first people to do an entirely new class of experiment, but that's what this was. It kicked off a new sub-field (or sub-sub-field...), the history and status of which was written up in Physics a little while back.
The ultracold plasma experiment may be the ultimate version of what we jokingly called the "NIST Paradigm" of cold-atoms physics research, which could be summarized as "I wonder what will happen if we stick this other laser in?" It…
drorzel | October 2, 2008Over the course of the next month, I'll be highlighting some of the proposals in my DonorsChoose challenge, to let you know the benefits you can provide. Some of the proposals are heartbreakingly basic, asking for things like copy paper, but this is a science blog, so let's look at some science proposals. For example, "I Do, Therefore I Learn":
"Science is boring!"
I hear this phrase from students all too often. Despite the use of colorful, informational textbooks, Science is often dreaded by students. Having witnessed the astounding learning opportunities from hands on projects in Science,…
drorzel | October 2, 2008First, you hit "ctrl-p" which brings up a print dialogue box. Then you check the settings, andclick "OK." At this point, a small status bar pops up at the bottom of the page, showing that 0 pages have been sent to the printer:
This bar will remain in this state forever. Wait as long as you like, and it will continue to show 0 pages printed.
If you want the document to actually print, you must click the red X next to the status bar (if you mouse over it, it says "Cancel"). Once you click the cancel button, the counter will rapidly scroll up through the pages, and the document will print.…