drorzel | August 28, 2008As I said in the introduction to the previous post, this was the first paper on which I was the lead author, and it may be my favorite paper of my career to date. I had a terrific time with it, and it led to enough good stories that I'm going to split the making-of part into two posts.
The experiment itself was based on an earlier paper by Phil Gould at UConn. Phil was a post-doc at NIST back in the day, and used to visit our group fairly regularly. On one of these visits, he stopped by the xenon lab, and gave me a pre-print of their time-resolved collision paper, saying "You guys really…
drorzel | August 28, 2008This paper is the third of the articles I wrote when I was a grad student, and the first one where I was the lead author. It's also probably my favorite of the lot, not just because of the role it played in my career, but because it packs a lot of science into four pages.
The whole thing is summarized in this figure from the old NIST web page, which is a simplified version of Figure 2 from the paper itself:
This shows the collision rate as a function of time after we hit a cold sample of atoms with a 40ns pulse of laser light tuned near the atomic resonance frequency. As discussed in the…
drorzel | August 28, 2008Here's your scaled baby picture for the week:
OK, "scaled" isn't entirely appropriate, as I haven't bothered to keep Appa a constant size in these, but it is the weekly picture of SteelyKid with her standard reference bison.
She continues to grow at an impressive rate, thanks to inheriting her father's appetite. Kate's been making a point to be extra careful about seeing that she doesn't swallow air, and burping her during and after feedings, so we've avoided any colicky outbursts for three nights running, hallelujah!
She did fuss a little at the 3 am feeding last night, perhaps out of…
drorzel | August 27, 2008
America Needs To Have A Superficial Conversation About Race | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
"The time for vagueness is now."
(tags: race politics silly internet US diversity society culture)
The Energy Challenge - Wind Energy Bumps Into Power GridâÂÂs Limits - Series - NYTimes.com
âÂÂWe still have a third-world grid,â Mr. Richardson said, repeating a comment he has made several times. âÂÂWith the federal government not investing, not setting good regulatory mechanisms, and basically taking a back seat on everything except drilling and fossil fuels, the grid has not been…
drorzel | August 27, 2008Jennifer Ouellette was inspired by the recent book "meme," and is putting together a similar list of pop-science books.
It might surprise some people, but I haven't been a big reader of pop-science books over the years. In fact, I've read few enough of the books on her list that I'm only going to copy over the ones that I have (partially) read. Bold means I finished it, italics are books I've started or skimmed, and books I intend to read someday are marked with an asterisk.
4. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman
11. *The Elegant Universe, Brian Greene
14. *Where Does the…
drorzel | August 27, 2008The New York Times, its finger squarely on the pulse of SF as always, has a very nice profile of Vernor Vinge. That last bit isn't sarcastic-- it's a good piece. The earlier snark is just because the focus is on a book that's a couple of years old already.
Of course, any Vinge piece will necessarily dwell on the "Singularity," which Jo Walton doesn't like. I'm not a huge fan of the idea myself, so it's nice to see that Jo's comments inspired Rudy Rucker to suggest some new and different ideas for SF stories.
Rucker's list, like his fiction, tends toward the "trippy," as the kids say, so not…
drorzel | August 27, 2008Over at Sciencewomen, they have a list of six things departments should do to make academic job interviews more comfortable. It's excellent and reasonable advice.
Of course, while it is an excellent post, it also contains more words than it really needs to. In the spirit of physics, which always tries to boil things down to a single, unifying principle, here's the rule for hiring committees from which all the other suggestions can be derived:
Remember that job candidates are people, too.
Think of things that annoyed you or made you uncomfortable when you were interviewing for jobs. Don't do…
drorzel | August 26, 2008
Street Corner Science with Leon Lederman | ScienCentral
In which a Nobel laureate answers science questions on the streets of Manhattan.
(tags: science physics education video internet society culture)
'Physics for Future Presidents' :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
IHE interviews Richard Muller about his book
(tags: physics education science books academia politics US)
Asteroids and comets to scale, as a single image for printing or Powerpoint - The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary Society
If you've been struggling with how to convey the…
drorzel | August 26, 2008NIST's Dave Wineland has been awarded the National Medal of Science. Wineland is one of the most impressive figures in modern AMO physics, with a long list of accomplishments. As the NIST release explains:
Wineland is internationally recognized for developing the technique of using lasers to cool ions (electrically charged atoms or molecules) to near absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature. Wineland achieved the first demonstration of laser cooling in 1978 and has built on that breakthrough with 30 years of experiments that represent the first or best in the world - often both - in…
drorzel | August 26, 2008It's four am, and your children are safe and asleep. But there's a phone in a white house, and it's ringing. Something is happening in the lab.
What do you want to answer that phone? Is it a physicist with the experience and knowledge to deal with the apparatus?
Even if he's only just gotten back to bed after two hours of dealing with a colicky baby? Well, tough, because you're stuck with him.
Yesterday was Not A Good Day...
The Empress of Eastern New York decided to get fussy Saturday and Sunday nights, which was officially brushed off diagnosed as "colic" (that's medicalese for "your baby…
drorzel | August 25, 2008
How to get a college roommate you can live with
First and foremost, don't be a jerk yourself.
(tags: academia education social-science psychology news)
Want to Lower the Drinking Age? Hope You Like Spam :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
MADD-- all class, all the way.
(tags: academia booze stupid society US politics)
'Unprecedented' 2-Year Decline for U.S. Science Funds :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
"never before in the 36 years that the NSF has produced this report have there been two consecutive years…
drorzel | August 25, 2008Seen tonight, as we were leaving for our evening walk:
That is, I believe, one of the neighborhood red-tailed hawks, having killed a rabbit in our next-door neighbor's back yard. I might be wrong about the "red-tailed hawk" part, but it's definitely a bird of prey that killed a rabbit next door. Emmy is incredibly jealous.
I got a bunch of pictures, most of them blurred because the light was low, but there's also this good "Whaddaya think you're lookin' at?" shot:
It was remarkably calm, and just sat there posing for several minutes, until the neighbor's oldest son came out and threw…
drorzel | August 25, 2008Over on LiveJournal, Johan Larson has a great discussion topic:
Our hero, the time traveling engineer, starts out in 1901, with the goal of
working on the coolest engineering projects of the twentieth century.
Assuming he knows well the history of technical development during that
time, but is not actually allowed to substantially alter history, where is
he working during each of the hundred years?
He's reposted the consensus list of great engineering projects developed in a Usenet discussion of the question a few years back. It seems to me that it would be fun to do something similar for…
drorzel | August 24, 2008
Evolving Thoughts: The real Olympic performers
"[U]sing the Wikipedia population figures and the official medal tally, I plotted gold medals per million population and medals overall per million population"
(tags: sports blogs silly)
Why You Should Turn Gmail s SSL Feature On Now - Webmonkey
"Browser Connection" in your GMail settings-- set it to "Always Use https://"
(tags: internet computing)
drorzel | August 24, 2008Total strangers keep congratulating me on the birth of SteelyKid. No, not people on the Internet, people in real life.
We have a standard dog-walking route that we take Emmy on every night, and Kate and I usually do the evening walk together. Of course, Kate's not coming along on those now, and now people along the route keep saying "Hey, did your wife have the baby? Congratulations!"
In a sense, they're not really strangers-- after all, I know where they live. But I really don't know anything meaningful about them, and tend to identify them sort of like Curious George characters-- The Woman…
drorzel | August 24, 2008Curious Baby says "I wonder what happens when I press this?"
She's going to end up a scientist, like her old man...
drorzel | August 23, 2008
DFL: Getting to the Games: A Reality Check
"A common misconception -- a result, no doubt, of the countless stories about Eddie the Eagle and Eric the Eel -- is that it's not that hard to qualify for the Olympics, if you pick your sports and countries shrewdly."
(tags: sports blogs)
Methodist advocates evolution | The Journal Gazette
âÂÂWe find that scienceâÂÂs descriptions of cosmological, geological and biological evolution are not in conflict with theology.âÂÂ
(tags: religion science society culture politics biology)
Carbon-Based Curiosities û Blog Archive û The IKEA of…
drorzel | August 23, 2008
"I think so, SteelyKid, but what if the rhinoceros doesn't want to be milked?"
drorzel | August 23, 2008To: Windows Vista
From: Chateau Steelypips
Please note that when I change your settings, I do it for a reason. You do not need to be aware of the reason, just know that there is one.
In particular, when I change the "Windows Update" setting to something other than "Install updates and automatically restart any damn fool time you please," that means that I do not want you to install updates and restart unless I specifically tell you to do so. I don't care how "critical" the updates are, I don't care how many days it's been since the last time I updated-- I'm the one who decides when you…
drorzel | August 22, 2008
Great Olympic moments on YouTube
"One of the best ways to watch the Olympics is to chase down all the references made by NBC's commentators on YouTube and watch them in addition to (or instead of) the regular telecast. "
(tags: video sports youtube history)