drorzel | March 16, 2008
I Watched This On Purpose: Hitman | The A.V. Club
"[A] new feature that will explore the impulse to spend time with entertainments that are unlikely to reward us in any meaningful way, or sometimes any way at all."
(tags: movies stupid)
Bad Movie Physics: A Report Card
"We rated 18 movies based on how many laws of physics they mangled, and here's our report card."
(tags: movies physics science SF silly)
Got Medieval: Did They Have Fan Fiction in the Middle Ages? (GP)
"Lancelot is totally a Mary Sue."
(tags: blogs history literature writing culture)
drorzel | March 15, 2008Paul Krugman is now a famour economist, but many years ago, he was "an oppressed assistant professor, caught up in the academic rat race." So, he did what any good academic would do in that situation: he wrote a silly paper to cheer himself up. In this case, a paper discussing the issues that arise in interstellar trade because of realtivistic effects.
It's a brilliant bit of silliness. It's hard to pick a favorite bit, but this is pretty good:
To conclude this section, we should say something about the assumption that the trading planets lie in the same inertial frame. This will turn out to…
drorzel | March 15, 2008We had an appointment yesterday for a fetal echocardiogram, to look for heart problems that might've caused the scary first trimester screen result back in January. This was basically a high-resolution ultrasound focussed on the heart (with Doppler velocity imaging to look at blood flow), and after half an hour of looking at FutureBaby's heart beating from different angles (which is so cool), all was declared well. FutureBaby appears to be perfectly healthy. Also, wiggly-- the whole thing took a little longer than it otherwise might've, thanks to a whole lot of baby squirming.
To celebrate…
drorzel | March 15, 2008
Alpha Centauri might harbour an 'Earth' - physicsworld.com
SF fans and space enthusiasts worldwide commence drooling.
(tags: science astronomy planets space news SF)
NPR: It Isn't Rocket Science: How Best to Board a Plane
Science explains why Southwest is more efficient than other airlines.
(tags: science math computing travel)
The World's Smallest Diamond Ring -- Physics News Update 858
Lots of interesting physics being done with diamond crystals.
(tags: physics quantum experiment nano meetings science news)
The Frontal Cortex : Algebra Education and John Dewey
"The solution, I think…
drorzel | March 14, 2008You know, there are really a remarkable number of bands whose names begin with "S"... There may be more "B" or "T" acts in my library, just because I own a bazillion songs by Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, but there sure are a lot of "S" artists.
This set continues to show that sing-along-ability is the most important criterion in picking FutureBaby tunes. On strict moral grounds, the Pogues have no business on such a list, not due to lyrical content, but rather the make-up of the band, but how could I not include a couple of theirs?
"Murder (Or A Heart Attack)," Old 97's (Despite the title, it's…
drorzel | March 14, 2008The next lab visit experiments I want to talk about are really the epitome of what I called the "NIST Paradigm" in an earlier post. These are experiments on "four-wave mixing" done by Colin McCormick (who I TA'd in freshman physics, back in the day), a post-doc in Paul Lett's lab at NIST. As Paul said when I visited, if they had had a better idea of the field they were dabbling in, they would've thought that what they were trying was impossible; thanks to their relative ignorance, though, they just plowed ahead, and accomplished something pretty impressive.
The basic scheme is laid out in…
drorzel | March 14, 2008
Yet another picture taken by Kate at the National Zoo. When we arrived at the beaver pen, a bunch of keepers were inside, posing for a picture. This little guy clearly thought that humans being in his enclosure indicated that it was feeding time, and was doing his best pathetic begging.
It really just begs to be LOL'ed:
I'm sure somebody else can do better, though, so have at it. Here's a high-res version, if you would like to re-edit it yourself.
drorzel | March 14, 2008Today has been dubbed "Talk Like a Physicist Day". Why? Because we're at least as cool as pirates, that's why.
Over at Swans on Tea, Tom offers some vocabulary tips:
Use "canonical" when you mean "usual" or "standard." As in, "the canonical example of talking like a physicist is to use the word 'canonical.'"
Use "orthogonal" to refer to things that are mutually-exclusive or can't coincide. "We keep playing phone tag -- I think our schedules must be orthogonal"
"About" becomes "to a first-order approximation"
Things are not difficult, they are "non-trivial"
Large discrepancies are "orders of…
drorzel | March 14, 2008
The Smart Set: Sequins & Scandals - November 8, 2007
"Figure skating is the quintessential American sport, not merely because it is fiercely individualistic while at the same time incredibly conformist, but also because the athletes and fans, like the American electorate, have an extraordinarily high tolera
(tags: sports stupid society culture)
What a Star's Orbiting Disk Is Made Of - New York Times
Sand.
(tags: astronomy science news)
nanoscale views: March Meeting III
More from New Orleans.
(tags: physics meetings science news)
News from the March 2008 American Physical Society…
drorzel | March 13, 2008Looking at this segment of the playlist, it's clear that I was, consciously or not, giving a good deal of weight to how well a given song works as a sing-along. For whatever reason, this chunk of the artist alphabet is loaded with tunes that are maybe a little dubious content-wise, but good fun to sing along with.
"Play the Hits," Hal
"Fools By Your Side," Hal
"Your Asterisk," The Halo Benders (It's just this side of word salad, but really fun to sing along.)
"The World Without Logos," Hellsing (This is word salad, on account of its Japanese origin, but there are few tunes that sound cooler…
drorzel | March 13, 2008As I mentioned a few days ago, I visited Luis Orozco's lab during our trip to DC last week. I already talked about his cavity QED stuff, but that's only one of the projects under development. He's also working on a next-generation apparatus for the laser cooling and trapping of francium, to be done at the TRIUMF accelerator in Vancouver-- francium is an element with no stable isotopes, and at most a few grams of it exist on the earth at any given moment. Luis and his students demonstrated the laser cooling of francium a few years back, using atoms made in an accelerator at Stony Brook out on…
drorzel | March 13, 2008Over at the new(ish) Of Two Minds, Shelley has posted a video giving advice on scientific presentations from a couple of guys at Michigan. They offer a few quick tips to giving better presentations:
Know your material well enough to give it without slides
Skip the outline (for short talks in particular)
Minimize text on slides
Make your figures big and visible
The central point is really to put the focus on the data, not the words or slides.
The one specific tip I would add to their list is this: When you put up a graph, you should clearly identify what is being plotted on what axes. The…
drorzel | March 13, 2008We live in a short-attention-span age. I have a huge array of feeds spewing information at me like the proverbial firehose, so I often don't do more than look at the headline and RSS excerpt, and I don't think I'm alone.
Given that, it's more important than ever that the headlines given to articles actually, you know, match the contents. For example, when I see a story in the New York Times headlined Environmental Agency Tightens Smog Standards, I would like this to accurately reflect the contents of the story. When the first sentence of the story is:
The Environmental Protection Agency…
drorzel | March 13, 2008
nanoscale views: March APS Meeting II
The latest from New Orleans.
(tags: physics meetings science news)
Whatever » The Problem With 1,000 True Fans
"The problem is that Kevin Kelly, in his enthusiasm, wants to make it seem that getting 1,000 people to give you $100 is no great trick."
(tags: economics books comics music publishing culture society internet)
WMAP gives thumbs-up to cosmology models - physicsworld.com
"As well as placing tighter constraints on parameters such as the age and content of the universe, the five-year WMAP data provide new, independent evidence for a cosmic…
drorzel | March 12, 2008As noted in the previous FutureBaby playlist post, I started doing this after hearing Don McLean's "American Pie" on the radio while running errands the other day. Amusingly, you will note that that song is not present in this part of the list-- that's because I don't have an electronic copy of it. Which I suppose explains why I haven't heard it much until the other day in the car...
There's some stuff here that would be a little... incongruous to hear sung by a small child, but nothing too offensive, I don't think. And they're all songs I like, which is the important thing.
"Good Times Roll…
drorzel | March 12, 2008One of the many very cool things going on in the Laser Cooling Empire at NIST is a series of experiments using optical tweezers to study various biological systems. I used to share an office with the biochemist in the group, who was there to handle the wet chemistry that physicists are notoriously bad at.
I've toyed with the idea of setting up an optical tweezers apparatus at Union-- the optical set-up is very simple-- so I spent a little while talking about it with Kris Helmerson, the PI on that project. He mentioned some cool things they were doing, one of which is explained very nicely in…
drorzel | March 12, 2008Via email, Reference Games, featuring two versions of the classic video game "Asteroids" (well, it's a classic if you're my age...). The cool wrinkle: light speed in the game is set to be very low, and you can toggle back and forth between the ship frame and the frame of the background stars, to see relativistic effects.
With or without length contraction, I'm still terrible at video games, but it's an amusing time-waster, and more plausibly work-related (for me) than playing poker on Facebook...
drorzel | March 12, 2008
Here's another picture Kate took at the National Zoo, showing one of their pandas (the male, I think, but I'm not sure) chowing down on a big branch of bamboo. As noted previously, they're deeply improbable creatures, but really cute.
Just don't try to hug them.
drorzel | March 12, 2008
Bad Baby Names - A Boy Named Sue, and a Theory of Names - John Tierney - New York Times
"During his 1969 concert at San Quentin prison, Johnny Cash proposed a paradigm shift in the field of developmental psychology. "
(tags: kid-stuff psychology science society culture music)
Gen Ed Reform -- Supersized :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, and Views and Jobs
'"What we're trying to do is present the material in a more coherent way," Beise said. "Students should be able to pick a theme and find courses in the sciences and humanities that are related."'
(tags: academia…
drorzel | March 11, 2008As Scalzi wrote some time back, "one of a parent's more minor but nevertheless important responsibilities is to make sure his or children grow up with a love of music that doesn't totally suck." I was reminded of this the other day while driving around, when "American Pie" came on the radio. I have weirdly distinct memories of listening to this in the car as a small child (young enough to have absolutely no idea what a "levee" was, or why one would drive a Chevy to it), which got me to thinking about music and FutureBaby.
This, of course, presented a wonderful opportunity for cat-vacuuming,…