drorzel | March 25, 2008Dick Vitale is yapping about changing the rules of college basketball again, undeterred by the fact that the last time they listened to him it was an unmitigated disaster (the season or two when they replaced the alternating possession on a held ball with a "ties go to the defense" rule that proved totally unworkable). This time out, he's upset that Georgetown lost in the second round, in part because Roy Hibbert got in foul trouble, and he wants to get rid of the rule that disqualifies players after five fouls. He thinks coaches should be able to keep their star players on the floor, and…
drorzel | March 25, 2008Here's a picture of the gas-handling line leading to the discharge region seen in the plasma post:
How many valves can you count in that picture? If you said "seven," give yourself a pat on the back. Here's the same picture with the valves numbered for your convenience:
("Seven! Seven valves! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!! thunder, lightning)
So why all the hardware?
Well, the gas bottle contains krypton gas at a pressure of several atmospheres. The discharge tube feeds into a vacuum system at 10-7 torr, thanks to some honkin' big pumps. We'd like both of them to stay that way, so some valves are…
drorzel | March 25, 2008EurekAlert provides the latest dispatch from the class war, the the form of a release headlined " Family wealth may explain differences in test scores in school-age children":
The researchers found a marked disparity in family wealth between Black and White families with young children, with White families owning more than 10 times as many assets as Black families. The study found that family wealth had a stronger association with cognitive achievement of school-aged children than that of preschoolers, and a stronger association with school-aged children's math than with their reading scores…
drorzel | March 24, 2008A couple more pretty pictures of the apparatus, to pass the time:
This is the plasma discharge source that we use to make metastable atoms. We excite the gas using a RF coil (under the tinfoil) with a couple of watts of power at 145 MHz (local ham radio people must love me...), which creates a discharge in the glass tube. Some small fraction of the atoms are excited to the state that we want in the chaos of the plasma, and we work with those downstream.
When it's working right, there's a pretty steep pressure drop across the discharge region:
The pressure is much lower on the left (there's…
drorzel | March 24, 2008Behold, the end of the world is at hand!
They said I was mad-- mad!-- but now they'll pay...
Well, ok, it's not actually a doomsday weapon. It's a shot of the main experiment chamber in my lab, taken in very low light in an attempt to capture the orange glow of the ion gauge inside the chamber. It only looks like an instrument of apocalypse.
Here's a better lit picture:
And here's one showing a bit of the atomic beam line behind the chamber:
The large copper coils in the foreground are for the magneto-optical trap, while the longer coil stretching off to the right is the Zeeman slower. The…
drorzel | March 23, 2008Today is Easter Sunday, which I will be celebrating in the traditional manner: by, um, driving across half of New York and Pennsylvania... OK, maybe that's not the usual tradition...
I'm giving a talk tomorrow at Bucknell, so I need to get to Lewisburg, PA tonight. This will allow me to stop through Scenic Whitney Point and see my family, though, so I will get a little traditional Easter stuff in.
Anyway, for those who celebrate it, Happy Easter. For those who don't, have a nice Sunday. I've scheduled a couple of things to keep you amused tomorrow, but otherwise, don't expect much from me…
drorzel | March 23, 2008Ladies and gentemen, one of the three worst pictures ever taken of me:
There is, of course, a story behind this. It's not a particularly good story, but there is one...
That's my college ID, from my freshman year at Williams. It's actually the second ID I got, because while I was on spring break with the rugby club, I lost my wallet, and all my ID with it. When we got back to campus, I had to start replacing all that stuff, and the first stop was the Security office, to get a new ID.
I wasn't real happy about this, so the first picture taken by the young woman working the camera looked…
drorzel | March 23, 2008
Relativity: Measuring the speed of light « Skulls in the Stars
A history of experiments through the ages.
(tags: precision-measurement experiment history science)
Nanocrystals could help recover waste heat - physicsworld.com
"[T]he thermoelectric figure of merit (ZT) for the ingots increased to 1.2 at room temperature (from a value of 1.0 previously). Moreover, they found that the ZT peaks at 1.4 at 100 °C."
(tags: physics materials science news energy experiment nano)
Unsolicited Advice, Part Six: Talking to the Media | Cosmic Variance
A guide to discussing scientific issues with…
drorzel | March 22, 2008I got a late start this morning, and had to run some errands today, but I would be remiss if I didn't post something to commemorate the wackiness in the Tampa subregional of the NCAA Tournament. They played four games yesterday in Tampa: the first two went into overtime, with Western Kentucky beating Drake on a last-second three and San Diego knocking off UConn the same way. Then Siena thumped Vanderbilt (Woo! Capital region!), and Villanova closed the day with an upset of Clemson. Two #4 seeds fell to #13 seeds, and two #5 seeds fell to #12 seeds.
This is what makes the NCAA tournament the…
drorzel | March 22, 2008
Security Beat
The DHS gets security advice from Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and David Brin. I feel safer already.
(tags: stupid SF war US politics)
States' Data Obscure How Few Finish High School - New York Times
"Like Mississippi, many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only
(tags: education politics US academia)
Antihydrogen Production within a Penning-Ioffe Trap
Using magnetic fields to trap…
drorzel | March 21, 2008Congratulations to Davidson, who just knocked off Gonzaga. It's a 7-10 game, so not that big an upset, but there aren't a lot of liberal arts schools winning NCAA games, so let's hear it for the Wildcats.
drorzel | March 21, 2008There was a faculty-student happy hour event last week for St. Patrick's Day, and I spent a bunch of time drinking Irish beer, listening to Irish music (one of the English department faculty is an accomplished piper, and brought a bunch of other local musicians in to play for the party), and talking to some students from one of the local fraternities. Inevitably, one of them asked me what I really think about frats.
This is a hot topic on campus, because fraternities have historically been huge at Union, but there are a number of people on the faculty who make no secret of their opinion that…
drorzel | March 21, 2008There was a lot of basketball played yesterday, and a lot more will be played today, but the most important of these games was unquestionably Syracuse's victory over Maryland last night in the Carrier Dome.
What? Yes it's an NIT game, not an NCAA game. So what? They're the two teams I root for, and I've never seen them play each other before. That makes it the most important game of the day for me, and this is my blog. If you liked some other game, get your own blog.
Anyway, with the game taking place a mere two hours from here, and tickets not exactly being in high demand (there were a few…
drorzel | March 21, 2008The Hugo Award nominees for this year have been released. The category I care most about is Best Novel, where we have:
The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins, Fourth Estate)
Brasyl by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr)
Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer (Tor; Analog Oct. 2006-Jan/Feb. 2007)
The Last Colony by John Scalzi (Tor)
Halting State by Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit)
Does Robert J. Sawyer have secret mind control powers, or something? The Chabon is a fantastic book, Scalzi's book is the best thing he's written, the Stross is very good and he's a buzz-worthy author, and I've…
drorzel | March 21, 2008
Backreaction: Experimental Traffic Jams
More detail on the Japanese simulation of Washington, DC.
(tags: physics science experiment video youtube)
What is the matter with the universe? - Telegraph
An article on CP violation experiments, which is pretty good, but might be dated=-- I thought BaBar was shut down?
(tags: physics experiment science)
Supersymmetry could be seen in ultracold atoms - physicsworld.com
A bit of over-enthusiastic titling-- something analagous to one sort of super-symmetry might be able to be simulated in BEC's at some point in the future.
(tags: physics theory…
drorzel | March 20, 2008Over at Making Light, Abi has proposed a parlour game using books as Tarot cards. As always for Making Light, the resulting comment thread is full of dizzyingly erudite responses, and clever literary in-jokes.
But it strikes me that there's a fundamental flaw in the game-- Abi's examples all involve selected works, chosen to be appropriate for the subject of the reading. For true divination, though, you need an element of randomness, whether it be yarrow stalks tossed in the air, or the iTunes randomizer. Fortunately, we have LibraryThing: if you look at our library, you'll see a "Random…
drorzel | March 20, 2008Johan Larson asks:
How would you change the requirements and coursework for the undergraduate Physics major?
This is a good one, but it's a little tough to answer. I have ideas about things I'd like to change locally, but I'm not sure I really have the perspective I would need to be able to say how much of what I see is a problem with physics education in general, and how much is due to local quirks (our trimester calendar being the biggest such issue) that don't generalize well.
That said, my feeling is that most of the problems we have are with the introductory classes. I went to an…
drorzel | March 20, 2008I give you the last four rounds of the Worst NCAA Pool Bracket Ever:
That's small and hard to read, but it's filled out with the winners determined by the rankings of the physics graduate programs of the competing schools. (If only one of the schools offers a Ph.D. program in physics, that school wins; if neither school has a graduate program, the higher seed wins.) You can get the whole thing as a 1.03 MB PDF.
I wouldn't bet any money on this prediction, if I were you: the winner ends up being #14 seed Cornell...
Obviously, this is not a serious prediction. I entered four serious brackets…
drorzel | March 20, 2008The coolest-sounding science news of the moment is undoubtedly "Hubble Finds First Organic Molecule on an Exoplanet""
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has made the first detection ever of an organic molecule in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting another star. This breakthrough is an important step in eventually identifying signs of life on a planet outside our solar system.
Of course, that sounds a little more dramatic and impressive than the reality: they used absorption spectroscopy of the plent's atmosphere to detect the presence of methane in its atmosphere. Now,…
drorzel | March 20, 2008
HLS: News: Harvard Law School launches new Public Service Initiative
"Harvard Law School is announcing that it will pay the third year of tuition for all future students who commit to work in public service for five years following graduation. "
(tags: academia economics law society)
Oh, he's good « Liberal Fascism
"[W]hen the wingnut feels threatened, it excretes a foul substance which forms a protective layer of disingenuous stupidity designed to deflect dissonant facts and beliefs which could damage the wingnut's tender underbelly of pure stupid. "
(tags: US politics video youtube…