drorzel | June 21, 2008
Earth Will Survive After All, Physicists Say - NYTimes.com
A new safety review says that the LHC won't really kill us all. I'm sure this will put the whole issue to rest for good...
drorzel | June 21, 2008"What'cha doin'?"
"Huh? Oh, I'm playing with the Spore Creature Creator. It's a videogame thing, that lets me design little computerized critters."
"What sort of critters?"
"All kinds of things. I could even make one that looks sort of like you. Here, take a look."
"Oooh! That's neat. I should have bigger claws, though."
"Well, OK, I guess I can do that..."
"And my ears are bigger than that."
"Fine, here you go."
"Oooh! Can I have a knocker thingy on the end of my tail?"
"You don't have a spiked ball at the end of your tail."
"But I want one...."
"Oh, all right..."
"And wings."
"What? No way…
drorzel | June 20, 2008
Experimental Realization of an Optical One-Way Barrier for Neutral Atoms
"[A] realization of Maxwell's demon [that] has important implications for cooling atoms and molecules not amenable to standard laser-cooling techniques."
(tags: physics articles science experiment news atoms optics)
Spatially Resolved Observation of Dipole-Dipole Interaction between Rydberg Atoms
A possible mechanism for making a quantum computer with neutral atoms.
(tags: science quantum physics articles news experiment)
High-Fidelity Gates in a Single Josephson Qubit
"By carefully separating out gate and…
drorzel | June 19, 2008
Redefining Where Salary Gaps Linger :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
"[M]en and women are being hired at four-year colleges at comparable salaries as they start their faculty careers, but there is one significant exception: research universities. At research universities, even controlling for variables such as discipline a
(tags: academia jobs gender economics education)
Gregg Easterbrook is - wait for it! - an idiot « The Poor Man Institute
"Nobody is stupid enough to make these mistakes by accident, and no liar would be brazen enough to cite a…
drorzel | June 18, 2008A bunch of academic bloggers have been talking about the American Scholar essay by William Deresiewicz. The always-perceptive Timothy Burke offers some insightful comments about the general problems of elite education.
Burke is also a lot kinder to Deresiewicz than I'm inclined to be. Because, frankly, the piece pisses me off, from the very first paragraph:
It didn't dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I'd just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a…
drorzel | June 17, 2008
June 18: Polar Land and Life Day
Happy birthday to me...
(tags: animals environment science news education biology geology)
Halo: The Cole Protocol (and welcome to all you new readers) at Tobias Buckell Online
"Project X" revealed.
(tags: books games SF blogs)
The Giant's Shoulders
A monthly science blogging event about classic science papers.
(tags: blogs science history)
Testing your free energy machine.
"Here therefore is the Built on Facts Protocol for testing perpetual motion or free energy. It is a literal instantiation of a black box test."
(tags: physics energy blogs)
drorzel | June 17, 2008As noted at Making Light, the recent disasters in Iowa have depleted the American Red Cross's disaster relief fund, and they're borrowing money in order to keep running:
"The disaster relief fund today is completely depleted. The balance is zero," Jeffrey Towers, chief development officer, said in a conference call with reporters.
Towers added that the Red Cross "needs immediate funds to deploy in a variety of ways to provide the scale of services that this disaster demands."
The Red Cross is congressionally chartered to provide disaster relief but operates largely on private donations. The…
drorzel | June 16, 2008
Disorder puts the brakes on matter waves - physicsworld.com
Using cold atoms in optical lattices to simulate "Anderson localization."
(tags: physics atoms optics low-temperature experiment materials news science)
drorzel | June 16, 2008The Corporate Masters have posted a new Ask a ScienceBlogger question:
The question (submitted by a reader) is this: There are many, many academic bloggers out there feverishly blogging about their areas of interest. Still, there are many, many more academics who don't. So, why do you blog and how does blogging help with your research?
Taking these in the opposite order, how does blogging help with my research? The answer is simple: it doesn't. Not one bit.
I am an experimental physicist, so my research is done in the lab, not
in my office (well, data analysis, when I have data to analyze…
drorzel | June 15, 2008Another year in academia, another graduation ceremony. It poured for a lot of the day yesterday, so everybody was a little nervous coming in, but the weather turned out to be good-- clear blue skies, a few puffy white clouds, and temperatures that were a little warm for sitting outside in long black robes, but quite reasonable other than that.
This year's Physics class was the largest in recent memory, and one of the very best. They distinguished themselves not only in physics classes, but on the campus in general-- we don't get a lot of majors who are widely known on campus, and exert a…
drorzel | June 14, 2008
Acephalous: "Sleep is for the weak."
The weak and fuzzy, that is...
(tags: animals pictures silly)
drorzel | June 13, 2008
Optics basics: Polarization « Skulls in the Stars
What you need to know about light polarization.
(tags: physics optics blogs science education)
"Plutoids": the new name for Pluto-like dwarf planets - physicsworld.com
When, oh, when will the IAU stop jerking Pluto around?
(tags: astronomy planets science news)
PhotoshopDisasters: Washington Post: Unlikely
From the MC Escher Open
(tags: journalism pictures silly sports)
drorzel | June 11, 2008
xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe
They forgot the philosophers, or maybe ran out of room in the right margin...
(tags: biology chemistry physics psychology science math comics)
drorzel | June 10, 2008
Do We Really Need a Few Billion Locavores? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog
"To eat locally grown food or, even better, food that you've grown yourself, seems as if it should be 1) more delicious; 2) more nutritious; 3) cheaper; and 4) better for the environment. But is it?"
(tags: blogs food economics environment society culture)
drorzel | June 10, 2008I'm giving the final exam in my E&M class tonight (from 5-7 pm, thank you oh-so-much, Central Scheduling), which you might think would bode well for blogging in the future. However, I also have two summer students starting on Monday, a baby on the way, and major book revisions to do that need to get done before the baby arrives, if that's possible.
Somethings's got to give, and the blog is it. There's just no way I can maintain the posting levels I have for the past several months, so I'm not even going to try. The site won't be going completely dark-- I've got a few things in the mental…
drorzel | June 9, 2008Reading Final Theory last night reminded me of something Patrick Nielsen Hayden said on a con panel once. The question was raised of why thriller-ish science fiction books don't do as well as thrillers with a thin SF gloss-- basically, "Why doesn't Greg Bear sell as many books as Michael Crichton?"
Patrick noted that there's a very different attitude toward the products of science in the two genres. In thrillers, he said, the plot is set in motion by the unleashing of some scientific discovery, and the plot is resolved by destroying or covering up that discovery. In genre science fiction, on…
drorzel | June 9, 2008I've gotten a fair number of free science books in the last few years, from publishers looking for bloggy publicity, but Mark Alpert's Final Theory is the first time that I've been asked to review a novel on ScienceBlogs (I've gotten advance copies of some other novels, but I've specifically requested those). Mark Alpert is an editor at Scientific American, and Final Theory is his debut as a writer of thrillers.
David Swift, a former physics student turned historian of science, gets a call to come to the dying bedside of Hans Kleinman, a former mentor from his physics days, who has been…
drorzel | June 8, 2008We got back from my 15th college reunion weekend earlier today, and I've spent the afternoon dozing off in front of European championship soccer and enjoying sweet, sweet central air conditioning. I had a great time, but didn't get a whole lot of sleep. Also, ordering Colonial Pizza at 1am continues to not be as good an idea as it seems at the time.
As a part of the cult festivities, there was a run-down of the various accomplishments of the class (slightly more doctors than lawyers, almost as many children as members of the class), which included the statistic that 97 of the 550-ish members…
drorzel | June 6, 2008
'When We Left Earth' Shows When Man Stretched to Reach the Moon - NYTimes.com
"Like many gadget-happy Americans, NASA took lots and lots of home movies. For this series it threw open the doors of its film and video archives, which have been transferred to stunning high-definition format."
(tags: television space science history)
Physics of GPS relativistic time delay « Unused Cycles
More than you may have wanted to know about how relativity affects GPS.
(tags: physics science education blogs precision-measurement space relativity)
Crooked Timber » » Money talks and the social…