With the LHC starting up last week, this week's Saturday science video on bloggingheads.tv had a physics theme, with Sean and Jennifer getting together to chat about physics, calculus, and poker. It's good stuff, and I was surprised to hear my own name appear in the middle of it. Unfortunately, the idea Jennifer cites me for-- the concept of "lies-to-children" isn't original to me. I got it from Terry Pratchett (or possibly Ian Stewart or Jack Cohen-- I think it's in The Science of Discworld). Of course, the really important question here is how does one get on the list of people asked to do…

Charles Kuffner is the latest to note that people would rather watch football with Obama than McCain. As always, they try to delve into the reasons: "I think he'd be fun to sit back with and hear his experiences, all his stories," said Kyle Ferguson, 28, a Republican from Santa Rosa, Calif., who picked McCain. But reflecting a sense some voters have of McCain based on the complaints of a few Senate colleagues, he added warily, "I bet he'd probably get pretty angry and lit up if his team was losing." The temper isn't the real issue, though. You see, it's all about the leagues. McCain is from…

And now, a report from Uncertain Principles's Senior Middle East Correspondent, checking in from Yemen in the wake of the attack on the US Embassy there: For years, the Yemeni government has let some al-Qaida figures and other Islamic extremists go free in political deals hoping to keep them quiet. Now it finds itself having to confront a new generation of militants -- younger, more radical and fresh from fighting in Iraq. Wednesday's assault on the gate of the U.S. Embassy by a half dozen gunmen and two vehicles packed with explosives killed 17 people, including six militants, and was the…

... at least, that's the only reason I can think of for ABC News to run a story on the effects of the financial crisis containing the following: "A lot of those people will have to sell their homes, they're going to cut back on the private jets and the vacations. They may even have to take their kids out of private school," said [Robert] Frank [of the Wall Street Journal]. "It's a total reworking of their lifestyle." He added that it's going to be no easy task. "It's going to be very hard psychologically for these people," Frank said. "I talked to one guy who had to give up his private jet…

HAMLET (FACEBOOK NEWS FEED EDITION). Written by Sarah Schmelling. "Polonius thinks this curtain looks like a good thing to hide behind." (tags: books literature internet silly culture pictures) BBspot - Evolutionary Acceleration Research Institute Ready to Start "Squirrel Smasher" "Scientists currently rely on computer simulations to smash biological units, but simulations can only do so much, and without the visceral enjoyment of seeing two squirrels collide at thousands of miles an hour." (tags: science silly biology animals particles) Opportunity's got a long road ahead - The…

SteelyKid is much too young for cartoons, but it's not to early to celebrate the weekend with a riot of bright colors and stylized animal shapes: We had a really good morning of "Happy Awake Baby" (as opposed to "Happy Sleeping Baby" or "Screaming Awake Baby," which are more common), and she had a grand old time wiggling around and making gurgly noises in her little "play gym." This was aided somewhat by the absence of the dog, who spent the night at the vet's after having a messed-up nail removed-- that play gym is full of things that squeak and rattle and are generally indistinguishable…

After five long years, Fred Clark has reached the final pages in his exhaustive deconstruction of Left Behind (fittingly enough, they include a phone call). If you would like to see the beginning, the first few pages are here, but the series really starts with Left Behind Is Evil. Fred's analysis has run to much longer than the original book, but it's probably more entertaining (somebody really ought to collect the posts all together and have it printed up at Lulu-- far worse things have been done with print-on-demand). In addition to being funny and insightful, these posts are a great…

It was not a great night for helpless mammals in Chateau Steelypips last night. SteelyKid was a little colicky, and the Queen of Niskayuna has developed some problem with her paw necessitating a vet visit today, which led to some late-night whining. Kate ended up spending several hours soothing SteelyKid, while I wound up going downstairs to comfort the dog, and falling asleep on the couch for a couple hours. The resulting mental fog is not really conducive to posting Deep Thoughts today, so instead you get a few funny anecdotes from last week's conference. The first is more of a vignette: in…

Speaking of quantum (as we were), I've been meaning to link to the recent Scientific American article by Chris Monroe and Dave Wineland on quantum computing with ions. This is a very good explanation of the science involved, but you'd expect nothing else, given that the authors are two of the very best in the business. What's especially notable about this article is that either they or the graphic design people at Scientific American came up with a really excellent visual example of quantum indeterminacy and entanglement, using ambiguous cubes. It's a clever way to illustrate the phenomena…

The Pontiff beat me to it, but my Ph.D. alma mater has scored a $12.5 million grant from the NSF to fund the Joint Quantum Institute as a Physics Frontier Center for the development of quantum technology: The Physics Frontier Center (PFC) award, effective September 1, will fund 17 graduate students, seven postdoctoral scientists and seven undergraduates as well as an extensive and highly cross-disciplinary research program under the general title Processing Quantum Coherence. Ultimately the work may lead to development of a computer that exploits the strange phenomena of quantum mechanics…

...My heart's in Accra » Sumo and the cycle of nature "Every two months, there's a 15-day basho. You can set your watch by it, if you happen to have one of those watches that's accurate only to the week." (tags: sports Japan drugs blogs) Basics: Making graphs with kinematics stuff | Dot Physics "I think it is important that students understand the basics of graphing without using a spreadsheet or some other computer program. All too often students just feed numbers to a program and it spits out a picture." (tags: academia education physics science blogs) Quantum gas of ultracold polar…

Your weekly picture of SteelyKid, with Appa for scale: Note the addition of the crib mirror. She's started to become more aware of the world around her, and may parents picked up a couple of mirrors when they were here last week. The mirror is the most fascinating thing in the world, when she's awake and happy (clean diaper, not hungry, etc.).

I have often expressed a wish for there to be more physics majors, and more science majors in general. Given the demographic information in the previous post, is this just irresponsible feather-bedding on my part? I don't think so, but that's because I would make a distinction between science majors, at the undergraduate level, and scientists, by which I mostly mean people with Ph.D.'s. The study mentioned previously concerned the supply of scientists, noting that the job situation is not good for Ph.D. scientists (though I suspect that this may reflect a shortage of academic jobs, not a…

There's an article in yesterday's Inside Higher Ed about the supply of scientists and engineers, arguing that there is not, in fact, a shortage: Michael S. Teitelbaum, a demographer at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, looked at what he called five "mysteries" of the STEM work force issue. For example, why do employers claim a shortage of qualified STEM graduates while prospects for Ph.D.s remain "poor"? Why do retention and completion rates for STEM fields remain low compared with students' aspirations? Why is there a "serious" funding crisis at the National Institutes of Health after its…

On hearing that Washington Mutual is the next bank up in Wall Street's fire sale, I have to admit that my first thought was "Well, that's what they get for letting their customer service be handled by shady guys in Nigeria..." I've gotten so much scam email over the years with Subject: headers like "Washington Mutual Account Access" that I was starting to wonder whether they were actually a real bank. Obviously, I was right to be concerned.

Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Free e-books from Will Shetterly and Emma Bull Two really good books, for free. What more could you want? (tags: SF books literature) D.F.W., R.I.P. :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs "For a young writer to discover Wallace in those days could be an experience of very mixed emotions, for it meant realizing that one's generation had produced a literary genius, and that it was somebody else." (tags: books literature writing academia) Public Relations for Science - Big Think Everybody's favorite…

After talking to Cameron Neylon last week, I'm strongly considering setting up an online lab notebook for my research lab. Not so much for the philosophical reasons having to do with openness and the like-- as a practical matter, I still don't think my data will do anybody any good-- but for reasons of sheer convenience. Having the lab notebook on the web will allow me to keep tabs on what's going on during the next few months when I'm going to be spending a lot of time at home with SteelyKid. The one catch is, the system Neylon uses for his lab blog is optimized for, well, a biochemist--…

Another thing I thought was intriguing that came up at the Science in the 21st Century meeting wasn't from a formal talk, but rather a conversation over dinner with Garrett Lisi and Sabine Hossenfelder about the future of publishing. Garrett was suggesting a new model of publishing, based on pulling things from the arxiv (or something like it). The idea here is that anybody who cared to would set up a "journal," consisting of a collection of links to papers they found worthwhile. If you wanted to know what Garrett Lisi finds interesting and useful from recent research, you would look at his "…

I have never been a huge proponent of the Open Access and Open Data movements in science publishing, because they've always struck me as wasted effort. I've never really seen what value is supposed to be added by either project. When I think about the experiments that I've been involved with (see, for example, the Metastable Xenon Project blogging), and what the data for those experiments looked like, I doubt that anybody not directly associated with the experiments could do anything useful with the data. It's not just that many of the analysis steps required tacit knowledge of the set-up,…

Two new recent posts take up the question of "spherical cows," the old joke term for absurd-sounding approximations that physicists make to turn intractable problems into easy ones. First, The First Excited State explains when N=N+1: Everybody who's taken any sort of math class knows that a statement like N+1 = N is simply ridiculous. Everyone, that is, except for the physicist. Let's say that N is a really huge number, like if someone dumped an entire truckload of M&M's in your driveway. If you turned your back on me to watch the truck drive away, and I threw another M&M in the…