drorzel | April 8, 2008An ad-lib from yesterday's lecture about interactions between electric fields and neutral matter, paraphrased:
So, we can divide macroscopic objects into two categories, based on what happens when you bring large numbers of atoms together. In materials that are insulators, the electrons aren't free to move. The atoms hold onto their electrons very tightly. They're kind of like Republicans.
In materials that are conductors, on the other hand, the electrons are free to move. The atoms share their electrons freely through the whole material. They're basically Communists.
Semiconductors are like…
drorzel | April 8, 2008The world's best known shrieking basketball analyst was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame yesterday, and event which ESPN is understandbly hyping to no end. I've written before about how Vitale is, in my opinion, one of the very worst color commentators in the business, so you might be wondering "What do you think about this yowling idiot being in the Hall of Fame?"
I'm perfectly fine with it, actually. It's a well-deserved honor-- as much as I dislike listening to him, and think that any useful insight he may once have had to offer has long since sunk into a sea of shtick, there's no…
drorzel | April 8, 2008When I went to bed last night, I thought the crucial moment of the NCAA men's basketball championship game was Bill Self's mystifying decision to go to a box-and-one on Chris Douglas-Roberts in the middle of the second half.
That's because I went to be lat night with two minutes to play and Memphis up seven. I assumed that there was nothing left but free throws, missed threes, and Jim Nantz's desperate attempts to say something immortal, or at least memorable.
Whoops. Memphis's poor free-throw shooting finally came back to bite them in the ass, Kansas hit some big shots, and the Jayhawks won…
drorzel | April 7, 2008
Administrating « Confused at a higher level
"Why did I say yes to the Dean when he asked whether I would take on this position? He made the request/offer to me a week after calling me to let me know I had tenure -- he claimed that this gave me a fair shot at saying no."
(tags: academia society culture science physics math education)
College Isn't Worth a Million Dollars :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, and Views and Jobs
Squabbling over how much more a college graduate earns than a high-school graduate. This completely ignores quality-of-life issues.
(tags:…
drorzel | April 7, 2008Having brought in a huge new audience at the end of last week-- partly through the "framing"/"screechy monkeys" things, but mostly because my What Everyone Should Know About Science post hit the front page on Reddit-- I figured I should take this opportunity to... Well, drive them all right the hell away again with a peer-reviewed physics post.
Unfortunately, I seem to have misplaced the papers I was going to write about, on experiments with qubits in diamond. They're probably on my desk at work, doing me no good at all. That's OK, though, because it would probably benefit from a little bit…
drorzel | April 7, 2008I had planned to let the current round of screechy-monkey-bashing die, but I woke up this morning to an accusation from commenter Andrew that I don't want to leave unanswered:
As for the blog - I'm not sure you are actually moderate really, it sounds more like vaguely apathetic. Or more accurately (and without the negative connotations), perhaps "unconcerned" would suffice. As you don't seem to be pushing for any moderate position as much as you are pushing for the (as you see them) fringe views to kindly quieten the hell down so you can get on with stuff you do find interesting/concerning…
drorzel | April 7, 2008When I was talking to my parents on the phone last night, my father told me about a guest op-ed in the Press and Sun-Bulletin that might be of interest to some ScienceBlogs readers and bloggers:
As if there aren't enough problems in the world, we are now on the verge of a phenomenon that will dwarf the projected scenarios of global warming. The cause is the alarming and accelerating loss of Earth's weight and mass by the burning of fossil fuels.
Every year that goes by, millions of tons of coal and millions of barrels of oil are burned. Nothing is left but ashes, soot, and gases, and there is…
drorzel | April 6, 2008
In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop - New York Times
"To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. "
(tags: blogs writing journalism society culture computing internet)
Calorimeters for High Energy Physics experiments - part 1 « A Quantum Diaries Survivor
A detailed exploration of high energy physics hardware.
(tags: physics experiment science)
Meteorites delivered the 'seeds' of Earth's left-hand life
This seems to be a narrow argument about chirality, rather than…
drorzel | April 6, 2008Stealing a post-generating method from Brad DeLong, Bill Tozier posted and interesting comment that I wanted to highlight:
I've often wondered why people place me (a moderate in a lot of polarized
debates) "in the middle".
I think I'm orthogonal, not "in the middle". I'm concerned about
plenty of things; they're just not what's being discussed, and in some
cases they can't even be framed in the terms used in the core debate. My
suspicions grow that fundamentalism should not be defined as being extreme,
or merely holding extreme opinions, but rather as framing every discussion
including those…
drorzel | April 6, 2008I'm looking for some recommendations of music in the instrumental jazz sort of vein, and I figure this is an area in which the Internet knows more than I do. I have some fairly idiosyncratic constraints, though, so please read the whole post before recommending stuff in comments.
Background: For reasons that don't bear going into, I prefer to listen to music at bedtime. I can get to sleep without it, but I get to sleep faster and sleep better with music than without. Other noise sources don't work-- ticking clocks drive me up the wall, and actually keep me awake, and the glurping noises the…
drorzel | April 6, 2008Well, that was certainly an odd pair of national semifinal games. They were very similar in some ways-- Memphis ran circles around UCLA from start to finish, and Kansas did the same to UNC, save for a ten- or fifteen- minute stretch in the middle of the game.
I watched very little of the Memphis-UCLA game-- I don't really like either team, and it was clear from early on that Memphis wasn't going to be seriously challenged. I had heard that UCLA this year was an improvement over the last two years in that they could actually score some points, but they really seemed to revert to the mold of…
drorzel | April 5, 2008
PHD Comics: Campus architecture
"Sure, the could have built three building for the same price, but those buildings would be functional and non-leaking."
(tags: academia comics silly)
Baby's Named a Bad, Bad Thing
"I once met a lady named Rodana. I think she runs a successful internet business." "In her spare time she destroys Tokyo."
(tags: culture silly stupid society)
Swans on Tea » Don't Waste Your Money
Do you really need a 576 megapixel digital camera?
(tags: physics optics pictures science biology gadgets)
drorzel | April 5, 2008It's probably a little foolish to continue this on a Saturday, but I'd like to wrap up the giant framing/ religion/ screechy monkeys mess and get back to more pleasant topics, at least for a while. Putting it off until Monday would make this more visible, but it would also drag things out, so I'm just going to get it out of the way now.
In the wake of my two recent posts about the "framing" controversy, I've gotten a number of comments and emails on the general topic of speaking out. These come in two basic forms, which I would paraphrase as:
It's very important for people with more moderate…
drorzel | April 5, 2008I am obscurely glad to learn from this Times human-interest story that Kansas center Sasha Kaun is from Russia. Otherwise, he is at the age where any parent naming their child "Sasha Kaun" would've had to deal with everybody thinking "Sasha Kaun Sasha Kaun everybody Sasha Kaun..." Yes, I am both a Bad Person and a Child of the 80's.
It's a reminder, though, of how many ways names can go wrong. This is a question of more than academic interest, of course, because we need to come up with a name for FutureBaby in the reasonably near future (we considered and rejected sticking with "FutureBaby…
drorzel | April 4, 2008
Inactive kids face 6-fold risk of heart disease by teen years, study finds
Correlation or causation?
(tags: education medicine US social-science science news)
Reassigned Time: PSEUDONYMITY is not Anonymity, duh
"Pseudonymity is not about being untraceable but rather about taking on a traceable identity that is distinct from one's legal identity, or one's identity at birth. It's about taking on a "pen name," a name that people can follow, and by extension a way o
(tags: blogs academia writing society culture)
drorzel | April 4, 2008I had the first lab of the term yesterday in my introductory E&M class. This is the first time I've taught out of this book (Matter & Interactions by Chabay and Sherwood), which actually includes the basic elements of this lab as suggested activities in the second chapter of the text. The lab was more successful than I expected (I've done the lab before), and I even managed to add a somewhat more free-form element to it, that worked out well.
The materials for the lab are extremely simple: One roll of "invisible" tape for each group, plus some sort of stand for them to stick tape to.…
drorzel | April 4, 2008In the comments to yesterday's post about framing, Damian offers a long comment that doesn't actually contradict anything I said, but re-frames it in terms more complimentary to the Dawkins/ Myers side of things. I may deal with some of what he says over there (probably not today, though, as I have a class to teach), but I wanted to single out one particular part of his comment for response:
Nisbet has claimed repeatedly, and without much evidence I might add, that PZ and Dawkins are poor advocates for science. For a start, neither PZ or Dawkins has ever claimed to be an advocate (at least,…
drorzel | April 4, 2008The Perimeter Institute will be hosting a workshop in September on "Science in the 21st Century":
Times are changing. In the earlier days, we used to go to the library, today we search and archive our papers online. We have collaborations per email, hold telephone seminars, organize virtual networks, write blogs, and make our seminars available on the internet. Without any doubt, these technological developments influence the way science is done, and they also redefine our relation to the society we live in. Information exchange and management, the scientific community, and the society as a…
drorzel | April 3, 2008
VQR » The Christian with Four Aces
A biography of the deeply creepy and corrupt Pat Robertson.
(tags: culture religion television journalism politics US society)
Coming to New York, a Science Event for the Masses - New York Times
"Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, who described himself as being from Muppet Labs, extolled the family-oriented programs. The most important thing they could show, he said, was "that science can be as explosive and violent as any TV program.""
(tags: science education news meetings academia society culture)
World Science Festival -- World Science Festival 2008 - Five Day…
drorzel | April 3, 2008EurekAlert provides a sort of firehose feed of press releases, some of which contain really hilariously awkward phrases. This release about a graphene-based measurement of the fine structure constant is one of the all-time greats, though:
Prof Geim, who in 2004 discovered graphene with Dr Kostya Novoselov, a one-atom-thick gauze of carbon atoms resembling chicken wire, says: "Change this fine tuned number by only a few percent and the life would not be here because nuclear reactions in which carbon is generated from lighter elements in burning stars would be forbidden. No carbon means no life…