drorzel | August 9, 2008SteelyKid was born in a small local hospital specializing in maternity care, with maybe 40-50 beds in the whole place. It's insanely crowded right now, with most of their patients doubled up in rooms that are often private, and one of the nurses said that they had 24 babies in the nursery last night, including at least two of the four sets of twins born in the last week.
There are only two possible explanations for this: babies are obviously bosons, so we could just be seeing baby bunching, in a sort of obstetric version of the Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment. Or it could be that other…
drorzel | August 7, 2008Behold, the cutest burrito in Niskayuna:
8 lbs, 2 oz, 20 inches long. Do your own metric conversions.
The obligatory mother-and-child picture is below the fold:
Both mother and baby are well, and resting after their ordeal. And, obviously, adorable.
FutureBaby's real name will be Claire Nepveu Orzel ("Nepveu" is a middle name, not the first half of an unhyphenated compound name). In the interests of preserving a tiny bit of privacy in this age of Google, this is the one and only time that her real name will appear on the blog, until she's old enough to decide how she wants to be known.…
drorzel | August 6, 2008I'm very happy to be an academic scientist. And I'm not alone:
a study presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association finds that academic scientists -- in the natural and social sciences -- are more satisfied than are their counterparts outside of higher education. The original hypothesis of the paper was that there might be a convergence of satisfaction levels, especially since satisfaction was defined in ways that stress traditional academic values, not more entrepreneurial ones. The scientists were asked about satisfaction with their independence and…
drorzel | August 6, 2008I've been on a big Jim Butcher kick recently, re-reading most of the Dresden Files books. This is largely because holding a regular book is still uncomfortable with my bad thumb, and I have electronic copies of the Dresden books that I can read on my Palm (well, Kate's old Palm, which I just use as an ebook reader).
While in the bookstore yesterday looking for Karl Schroeder's new Virga book (which, alas, was not to be found), I was struck by the huge number of Dresden Files knock-offs on the shelves. Well, OK, they may not really be Dresden Files copies, but it seems like there are dozens of…
drorzel | August 6, 2008Arts & Letters Daily sent me to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education with the headline How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science. "Hey," I thought, "Good to see this issue getting some more attention." And, indeed, the article starts off well enough, with a decent statement of the problems in science education:
Back in 2003, the National Science Board issued a report that noted steep declines in "graduate enrollments of U.S. citizens and permanent residents" in the sciences. The explanation? "Declining federal support for research sends negative signals to interested…
drorzel | August 5, 2008One of the things I'd like to accomplish with the current series of posts is to give a little insight into what it's like to do science. This should probably seem familiar to those readers who are experimental scientists, but might be new to those who aren't. I think that this is one of the most useful things that science blogs can do-- to help make clear that science is a human activity like anything else, with its ups and downs, good days and bad.
To that end, I'm going to follow the detailed technical explanation of each of these papers with a post relating whatever anecdotes I can think…
drorzel | August 5, 2008(This is the first in a planned series of posts writing up each of the scientific papers on which I am an author. A short description and a link to a PDF of the paper can be found at the archived Optical Control page.)
The essence of the optical control paper is contained in this one figure:
"Very pretty," you're thinking, "But what does it mean?"
The graph shows the increase or decrease in the ionizing collision rate for a sample of xenon atoms (well, two different samples, of different isotopes, but they behave exactly the same) at a temperature of 100 microkelvin or so due to the…
drorzel | August 5, 2008Here's the deal: Big Think is running a charitable donation program for everybody's favorite educational charity, DonorsChoose, and they've gotten Pfizer to agree to donate $1 for each of the first 10,000 visitors to vote for a video on Big Think's site.
Go to http://www.bigthink.com/thinksciencenow/, pick a video, and click on "Vote for This Video Profile," and Pfizer coughs up a buck. You don't even need to watch the video, if you don't want to.
It's simple, it's easy, and it steers money to a good cause. What more could you ask?
drorzel | August 4, 2008
Michael Nielsen û Why the world needs quantum mechanics
A very nice, detailed, and most importantly, accessible explanation of Bell's theorem. Needs more dogs, though.
(tags: physics quantum science blogs)
The Quantum Pontiff : When Two Zeros Are Not Zero: The Strange Lives of Quantum Cell Phones
"There exist quantum channels that, when you use them individually have zero capacity for transmitting quantum information, but when you use them together have a nonzero capacity for transmitting quantum information."
(tags: physics quantum computing theory science)
Intl. Blog Against Racism…
drorzel | August 4, 2008I've been slacking a bit, lately, in terms of putting science-related content on the blog. Up until last week, most of my physics-explaining energy was going into working on the book, and on top of that, I've been a little preoccupied with planning for the arrival of FutureBaby.
I'd like to push things back in the direction of actual science blogging, so I'm going to implement an idea I had a while back: I'm going to go back through the papers in my CV, and write them up for ResearchBlogging.org.
This offers a couple of nice benefits from my perspective. First of all, I already know what's in…
drorzel | August 4, 2008Last weekend's post, The Innumeracy of Intellectuals, has been lightly edited and re-printed at Inside Higher Ed, where it should be read by a larger audience of humanities types. They allow comments, so it will be interesting to see what gets said about it there.
I may have some additional comments on the issue later, but it's a little hard to focus while going crazy waiting for FutureBaby.
(There's also a tiny chance that this will be noticed by some of my colleagues, which could be interesting. I know that some of them read the Chronicle of Higher Education religiously, but I'm less…
drorzel | August 4, 2008Last week, I was asked my expectations about the LHC, and offered my half-assed guess. If you prefer your speculation from people with relevant knowledge of the subject, Sean Carroll weighs in with his oddly-precise guesses.
On a related, less theoretical note, Tomasso Dorigo posted a summary of the constraints on the Higgs boson mass last week, which serves to illustrate why people are so anxious to see it-- given what we know about other particles, it really ought to have been detected by now-- the most likely predicted mass has already been excluded, and they're pushing out toward the edge…
drorzel | August 4, 2008As you may or may not have seen from the banner ads on the site (depending on whether you read via RSS or not), ScienceBlogs is running a Reader Survey at the moment. Here's your chance to tell the Corporate Masters that they really need to sign up some more physics blogs.
Or, you know, whatever else you think about the site. It shouldn't take long, and they're giving away Apple stuff, so if you're bored and missing Scrabulous, take a few minutes to fill out the survey.
drorzel | August 3, 2008Bad news from the worthwhile sections of this morning's New York Times: another SpaceX rocket blew up.
A privately funded rocket was lost on its way to space Saturday night, bringing a third failure in a row to an Internet multimillionaire's effort to create a market for low-cost space-delivery.
The accident occurred a little more than two minutes after launch, and the two-stage Falcon 1 rocket appeared to be oscillating before the live signal from an on-board video camera went dead.
On the one hand, I hate to see these things blow up. I'm no free-market zealot, but I'm all for cheap space…
drorzel | August 3, 2008Every week, the New York Times Magazine features some sort of profile article about a person or group of people who are supposed to represent some sort of trend. Every week, the people they choose to write up come off as vaguely horrible, usually in some sort of entitled-suburbanite fashion.
I'm not sure if this is an editorial mandate, but if it is, this week's feature article takes it to the logical conclusion of just profiling people who are irredeemably awful, and unapologetic about it. This week, they take a look at the culture of Internet trolls:
Jason Fortuny might be the closest thing…
drorzel | August 2, 2008
Museum Review - At the Insectarium, Getting Down With All That Skitters, Buzzes or Crawls - Review - NYTimes.com
"In the new $25 million Audubon Insectarium, which opened here in June, you can watch Formosan termites eat through a wooden skyline of New Orleans..., stick your head into a transparent dome in a kitchen closet swarming with giant cockroaches and watch dung beetles plow their way through a mound of waste. "
(tags: animals biology science museums)
Phantom Diner Appears Only To Those In Their Drunkest Hour | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
"Rochester's phantom diner is…
drorzel | August 2, 2008I subscribe to a bunch of EurekAlert RSS feeds, including the "Education" feed, which could often be re-named "The Journal of Unsurprising Results." Take, for example, today's ground-breaking study, Male college students more likely than less-educated peers to commit property crimes, which comes complete with the subhead "Sociological research reveals paradox of higher education, crime":
Sociologists at Bowling Green State University found that college-bound youth report lower levels of criminal activity and substance use during adolescence compared to non-college-bound youth. However, levels…
drorzel | August 2, 2008Around 20% of women who go into labor do so after eating Chinese food.
Another 17% or so go into labor after eating Indian food.
True facts.
(No baby yet. We were amusing ourselves yesterday talking about urban legends on how to induce labor, and these occurred to me this morning as possible justifications...)
drorzel | August 1, 2008
Temporally Controlled Modulation of Antihydrogen Production and the Temperature Scaling of Antiproton-Positron Recombination
"Our observations have established a pulsed source of atomic antimatter, with a rise time of about 1 s, and a pulse length ranging from 3 to 100 s. "
(tags: physics science particles experiment articles)
Hidden Variable Models for Quantum Theory Cannot Have Any Local Part
"In this Letter, we consider general hidden variable models which can have both local and nonlocal parts. We show the existence of (experimentally verifiable) quantum correlations that are…
drorzel | August 1, 2008The second complete draft was sent off to my editor yesterday, and after a little bit of excitement regarding files that wouldn't open, it was successfully delivered. There were only minor changes since the last update, mostly having to do with the figures and section headers and so on.
I'll put the table of contents below the fold, but meanwhile, here's a silly picture of me talking to the dog about quantum physics:
Bunnies Made of Cheese:
Talking to Your Dog About Quantum Physics
(Second Draft, 7/31/08)
Introduction
Why Talk to Your Dog About Physics?: An Introduction to Quantum Physics…