drorzel | September 3, 2008We're taking SteelyKid on her first road trip today, down to Boston to visit Kate's parents for a few days. This ought to be interesting, as the drive is approximately as long as her longest naps.
The disruption in her normal routine may or may not lead to an increased need for baby-calming, so this seems like an opportune moment to invite readers to suggest their favorite baby-calming tricks:
If you have a fussy infant to deal with, what do you do to quiet her down?
I've got a small repertoire of tricks that usually work:
Gentle Agitation: I hold her against my chest, and bounce her up and…
drorzel | September 3, 2008What's this graph?
The cosmic microwave background? Preliminary results from the LHC? No, it's SteelyKid's feeding schedule. The horizontal axis is in days since we brought her home, the vertical axis is time of day on a 24-hour scale (in half-hour bins), and the color scale indicates the duration of the feeding in minutes.
If you can spot any clear pattern in this, you're doing better than I am. There may be a hint of a developing pattern toward the end (she's eaten at 1am, 8am, 1:30 pm, and 5pm each of the last four days), but there's still a lot of scatter. There were some points in the…
drorzel | September 2, 2008
Making Light: Why RMS Titanic Didn't Have Enough Lifeboats
"Sixteen hundred people died in the Titanic disaster because no one had worked out the implications of tuned circuits."
(tags: history science blogs gadgets)
The TNR Q&A: Charles Barkley
"People can always bring up stuff. When I get involved in politics, I am not even going to talk about what the other guys do. The media likes that. I am not going to sit around saying, "The other guy sucks worse than me." I don't need to be governor; I want to be governor."
(tags: politics US sports race basketball)
Why Assistant Professors…
drorzel | September 2, 2008Comedy Central is re-playing Friday's episodes of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, which includes Stephen Colbert's interview with Lori Lippman Brown of the Secular Coalition for America. It's interesting to see that she doesn't really fare any better than any of the religious nutjobs he's had on in his various interview segments, in more or less the same way:
I doubt there's really any way to not look somewhat silly, given his whack-job act and good video editing, but it's always a little surprising just how unprepared a lot of his interview subjects are. You'd think they'd have some…
drorzel | September 2, 2008This was the last of the experiments that I did for my thesis (it's not the last xenon paper I'm an author on, but the work for that one was done while I was writing up), so my memories of it are bound up with the thesis-writing process.
My favorite story about this stuff was when I gave a talk about this work at NIST-- I don't recall if it was before or after my defense-- and somebody asked the obvious question about how the quantum statistical rules are enforced. That is, how is it that you never get two identical fermions colliding in an s-wave state? Since an s-wave collision is just a…
drorzel | September 2, 2008 This is the last of the five papers that were part of my Ph.D. thesis, and at ten journal pages in length, it's the longest thing I wrote. It was also the longest-running experiment of any of the things I did, with the data being taken over a period of about three years, between and around other experiments. As usual for this series of posts, I can sum up the key result in one graph:
(No spiffy color figure this time, as the experiment never made it onto the old web page, and my original figures are three or four computers ago.)
What we found was that when we prepared samples of metastable…
drorzel | September 2, 2008Everybody's favorite local troll left a comment in yesterday's links dump about the scandal surrounding Sarah Palin's daughter. It was remarkably coherent for an "Uncle Al" post, and actually bordered on funny.
If you look at it now, though, you'll find it's undergone lossy compression. I dithered about this for a while, and then decided that I find the whole topic sufficiently loathesome that I'm not going to support talking about it in any way.
Yes, I'm aware that, were she a Democrat, this news would've given Rush Limbaugh a stiffy visible from space, and the wingnut-o-sphere would be so…
drorzel | September 1, 2008
Swans on Tea û How Does Calculus Compare?
Darth Vader explains the Pythagorean Theorem. Why? Why not?
(tags: youtube silly math education)
Roald Dahl's seductive work as a British spy - Telegraph
"I think he slept with everybody on the east and west coasts that [was worth] more than $50,000 a year."
(tags: sex history politics war)
His Physics Theories Added Up - Yahoo! News
A short biography of James Clerk Maxwell. The attempts to connect with modern physics are a little odd, but it's a good capsule summary of his life and character.
(tags: physics math history science)
The Science…
drorzel | September 1, 2008One week from today, barring anything catastrophic, I will be speaking at the Science in the 21st Century workshop at the Perimeter Institute. Sabine Hossenfelder has a nice run-down of the program at Backreaction, and it sounds really interesting.
I have my talk more or less ready-- I started making slides a week or two ago, because I wasn't sure how long it would take, doing talk prep in between diaper changes and baby feedings. I had hoped to get a couple of colleagues to listen to it, but that's probably not going to happen, so I'll be working without much of a net (Kate's heard me run…
drorzel | August 31, 2008
Setshot: Basketball for the Aging and Infirm: Politics: McCain panders to aging ballers
"Apparently, "Sarah Barracuda" (her high school hoops nickname) played point guard on a state championship squad from Wasilla, Alaska, but there is scant evidence that she plays anymore."
(tags: US politics basketball sports blogs)
drorzel | August 31, 2008As you have no doubt seen by now, if you read any of the other blogs on ScienceBlogs, the Science Debate 2008 group has gotten Barack Obama to answer their 14 questions on science issues. John McCain has apparently promised answers at some point in the future.
The answers are, well, pretty much what you would expect. For example:
What policies will you support to ensure that America remains the world leader in innovation?
Ensuring that the U.S. continues to lead the world in science and technology will be a central priority for my administration. Our talent for innovation is still the envy…
drorzel | August 30, 2008
Philosoraptor
"John McCain has revealed that his apparent choice of Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running-mate was, as many observers predicted, a carefully-staged hoax."
(tags: US politics stupid blogs silly)
drorzel | August 30, 2008Over at Built om Facts, Matt is working toward a Tope Ten list of physicists. He says the top three are obvious, but he's soliciting nominations for the rest.
Back in the early days of this blog, I ran a poll for the greatest experiment in physics, and there are worse places to start. Newton and Galileo are two of the obvious three (Einstein is the third), and I think Rutherford and Faraday absolutely belong on the list (Faraday gets bonus points for his interest in outreach to a wide audience). If you want to keep astronomy in with physics, Hubble belongs as well.
Broadening things to…
drorzel | August 29, 2008
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Stories / Shade by Steven Gould
Teleporteurs sans frontieres.
(tags: SF stories)
Search Magazine - On God
P.J. O'Rourke does his best Gregg Easterbrook impression.
(tags: science religion stupid)
Built on Facts : Falling from Heaven
" If my opinion is worth anything though, I think classic literature is improved by a little physics."
(tags: physics math science blogs culture literature humanities)
Michael Nielsen û Quantum computing for everyone
"[I]magine for the sake of argument that I could give you a simple, concrete explanation of how…
drorzel | August 29, 2008Well, OK, there aren't any graphs, so it's not real Physics Style, but Physics Today has been blogging the Democratic National Convention, talking in detail about the science content. Start with this post, and move forward in time.
They apparently have somebody lined up to file reports from the Republican convention next week, as well. Unless he gets captured by the Spanish Inquisition, which would be unexpected.
drorzel | August 29, 2008As anybody who has studied Quantum Optics knows, correlation functions play a very large role in our understanding of the behavior of light. Roughly speaking, the correlation function tells you how likely you are to detect a second photon some short time after detecting one photon from some source. This shows up in the famous Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment, and definitive proof of the existence of photons was provided in 1977 when Kimble, Dagenais and Mandel demonstrated photon anti-bunching, where the correlation function goes to zero for short times.
Correlation functions are a powerful…
drorzel | August 29, 2008No, not me. Not literally, anyway-- I'm quite happy with my current family.
Sigma Pi Sigma, the APS, and the AAPT are running a program called "Adopt-a-Physicist to help high school students learn more about what careers in physics are like:
Physicists and students interact through discussion forums for a three-week period. Before the three week period begins, the physicists and classes (via the teachers) each create a brief introduction page. After registration closes, teachers choose some physicists for their classes to interact with, preferably from different career categories.
The…
drorzel | August 29, 2008I departed from my policy of getting convention news only via Daily Show reruns last night, and watched Obama's big acceptance speech. You can find substantive commentary elsewhere, and endless reams of wankery about whether he did what he "needed" to do, blah, blah, blah.
My main thought watching it was "Boy, it would sure be nice to have a President whose speeches aren't physically painful to listen to." The man sure can deliver a speech.
drorzel | August 28, 2008
Shtetl-Optimized û Blog Archive û Can we?
"IâÂÂd like propose the following question: what non-obvious things can nerds who are so inclined do to help the Democrats win in November? "
(tags: politics US society culture computing internet)
I Watched This On Purpose: Bio-Dome | The A.V. Club
"Bio-Dome doesn't exist to please critics or audiences. It exists to lead easily entertained dumbasses with low standards to Christ."
(tags: movies religion review stupid drugs)
Trying to satisfy too many agendas slows school reform
"Advocates of the liberal perspective can learn from those who…
drorzel | August 28, 2008I said in the previous post that the time-resolved collision paper was one of my favorite experiences in grad school, even the paper-writing process. It's not so much that the paper-writing process was all that exceptionally good-- it was the usual "paper torture," arguing over every single word in an effort to fit everything into Physical Review Letters's four-page limit-- as because the refereeing process was surprisingly good.
We spent a month or so working on the paper, going through several drafts before sending it off. At around the time that we submitted it, the Physical Review…