drorzel | March 11, 2008Another of the labs I visited while in DC was Steve Rolston's lab at the University of Maryland. This actually contains the apparatus I worked on as a graduate student, including many of the same quirky pieces of hardware-- Steve was the PI (Principal Investigator) for the metastable xenon lab in the Phillips group at NIST, and when he left NIST to take a faculty position at Maryland, he took the apparatus with him.
The xenon lab is now dedicated to work on ultracold plasma physics, which they were just starting when I graduated. The idea is that you can use laser cooling to accumulate a…
drorzel | March 11, 2008In the previous post on this topic, I discussed the various types of noisy vacuum pumps, both clean and dirty varieties. This time out, we'll deal with the quiet pumps, the ones that don't deafen people working in the lab.
Quiet and Dirty: The quintessential quiet and dirty pump is an oil diffusion pump. These have no moving parts, but operate by heating a low-vapor-pressure oil inside a series of baffles so that it sprays out in a downward jet. The oil jet will collide with air molecules in the way, and force them back into the reservoir region of the pump, where they can be pumped away by…
drorzel | March 11, 2008The annual March Meeting of the American Physical Society is happening this week in New Orleans. This is the biggest physics conference of the year, by far, with close to 7,000 attendees-- despite what you might think from the Internet, the Condensed Matter crowd who attend the March Meeting significantly outnumber particle physicists and high-energy theorists.
I don't usually go to the March Meeting-- it's just too damn big. I went to the Centennial Meeting in Atlanta in 1999 (and gave an invited talk, in fact), and didn't care for it all that much. I prefer DAMOP, which is much smaller-- a…
drorzel | March 11, 2008
Southern Baptists Back a Shift on Climate Change - New York Times
'[T]he new declaration, which will be released Monday, states, "Our cautious response to these issues in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring, reckless and ill-informed."'
(tags: politics religion science news environment)
Jacks of Science â Top 10 Greatest Video Game Scientists
"Professor Oaks is known for his generous public outreach intitiative. You can't go wrong with a selection of a free water turtle, free fire lizard or free plant dinosaur. "
(tags: silly games science)
God Hates Elves…
drorzel | March 10, 2008Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean has a post highlighting some physics blogs that he's adding to the blogroll. Which reminds me that I've been remiss in updating my own links-- I've recently started reading Swans On Tea regularly, and he's got some great science content. Via Tom, I've also discovered Skulls in the Stars which mixes physics with pulp literature, and Physics and Physicists by ZapperZ, which is chock full of physics-y goodness.
All of this new-to-me bloggy activity drives home the fact that Mixed States, which I've relied on for most of my physics blog reading for a while now, is no…
drorzel | March 10, 2008While Kate was off being all lawyerly at her NAAG workshop, I spent my time visiting my old group at NIST, and some colleagues at the University of Maryland. This wasn't just a matter of feeling like I ought to do something work-like while she was workshopping-- I genuinely enjoy touring other people's labs, and hearing about the cool things they're working on.
I figure that, having spent a day and a half talking about hot new physics experiments, I may as well mine them for blog fodder. I've managed to scrounge up papers related to a lot of the experiments in question on the arXiv, but the…
drorzel | March 10, 2008A great many physics experiments need to be conducted at low pressures, in order to avoid sample contamination, thermal effects, or dissipative forces produced by interaction with air. Some experiments don't require all that much in terms of vacuum, while others require pressures so low that they're limited by the diffusion of gasses through stainless steel.
To cover the wide range of pressures needed for different experiments, there are lots of different types of vacuum pumps, and there are nearly as many schemes for classifying them. As an experimental physicist and blogger, though, I've…
drorzel | March 10, 2008
A picture from the Small Mammal House at the National Zoo. This is a two-toed sloth (according to the sign on the cage, anyway) that has wedged itelf into a box mounted near the ceiling to take a nap. Tbey had two sloths, actually-- the other had also stuffed itself into a box to sleep. I guess it's a sloth thing.
(Picture by Kate).
drorzel | March 10, 2008
Math Suggests College Frenzy Will Soon Ease - New York Times
Changing demographics make admissions offices nervous
(tags: academia education society culture)
drorzel | March 9, 2008
Mandarin ducks at the National Zoo's bird house. These guys were perched on a railing in the fligt area, and didn't move, even though people were passing no more than a few feet from them, taking pictures.
(Picture by Kate.)
drorzel | March 9, 2008Kate was attending a workshop run by the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG, a wonderful acronym) in Washington, DC this Wednesday and Thursday, and when she told me that, I said "Hey, I'm not teaching this term, why don't I tag along?" So, we extended the trip a little bit, and made it a family vacation (because, after all, it's going to be a while before we take any more long trips...).
While Kate did generally attorney-like things all day Wednesday and Thursday morning, I visited labs at NIST and UMD, about which more later. After her workshop was done, we decided to take…
drorzel | March 9, 2008Physics comes through at the ballot box:
Stunning many who considered the district west of Chicago reliably Republican territory, Bill Foster, a physicist and Democrat, won a special election on Saturday to fill the Congressional seat that J. Dennis Hastert, the former speaker of the House, held for two decades.
[...]Mr. Foster defeated James D. Oberweis, a dairy company owner, in a contest for the 14th Congressional district, a long swath that runs from the far western suburbs of Chicago nearly to the state's Iowa border. He will fill the remaining months of Mr. Hastert's term.
Mr. Foster…
drorzel | March 8, 2008
Let's Play a Game, Part 2: Game Trees and Totally Finite Games « Intrinsically Knotted
Classifying games based on possible moves and winning strategies.
(tags: math science academia games)
...yet I'll hammer it out
The Mentally Scarring Public Service Announcement Tournament. With YouTube links, so you can experience the trauma yourself.
(tags: youtube video television society)
The Sexual Paradox - Susan Pinker - Book Review - New York Times
'"If you were to predict the future on the basis of school achievement alone," Pinker writes, "the world would be a matriarchy."'
(tags: sex…
drorzel | March 8, 2008Dave Munger has been spending a lot of time in waiting rooms:
When it comes to waiting rooms, it turns out, eye doctors wipe the floor with everyone else's ass. Not only does the eye doctor have the least shabby interior decor, it also arguably offers the best selection of reading material and visual entertainment (in the form of an infomercial for Lasik surgery on a 40-inch plasma TV mounted on the wall).
Here at the allergist nearly all the magazines are of the complimentary local shoppers' guide variety. We've got Charlotte Woman, the area Seniors guide, and a holistic medicine brochure.…
drorzel | March 8, 2008ScienceBlogs is launching a new "Super Reader" program, where each blogger can nominate two readers as "Super Readers" who will be given the ability to tag three posts a week from all of ScienceBlogs for a special RSS feed (this will be done using del.icio.us). This is envisioned as a first step toward greater interactivity between bloggers and readers, but it's very much an experiment at this stage-- it might work, it might flop, it might mutate into something totally unexpected.
Anyway, I know who I won't be picking, but choosing readers to get special bloggy powers is a harder question. So…
drorzel | March 7, 2008
The Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club: Rollin' With Dre | The A.V. Club
"I will read all these terrible books so you don't have to. It's my latest attempt to transform the stupid, pointless shit I do in my free time into the stupid, pointless shit I am obligated do for my job."
(tags: books music movies television society culture silly)
Primer: Alan Moore | The A.V. Club
A guide to the essential work of everyone's favorite cranky comics auteur.
(tags: books comics review)
Einstein Versus the Physical Review - Physics Today September 2005
"[I]t is likely that the [1937] gravitational wave…
drorzel | March 7, 2008Today is the last day of our trip, so here's a shot of Her Majesty showing off her regal side.
Of course, the snow on her muzzle kind of undercuts the dignified affect...
drorzel | March 7, 2008SportsCenter this morning is basically a big Favre-a-thon, with wall-to-wall coverage of Brett Favre's tearful retirement press conference yesterday. I watched the footage of him choking up, and said "Yeah, he does look pretty old. Probably time to hang it up."
Then I realized: He's less than two years older than I am.
I guess I've pretty comprehensively missed my chance to be a pro athlete, haven't I?
drorzel | March 6, 2008
nanoscale views: Reviewing- why, how, and how often?
"well written, thorough, timely referee reports almost always improve the quality of scientific papers"
(tags: academia science physics articles writing)
Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Long-dreaded politics post
"[A]fter seven years of Bush, to ask whether I'd "prefer" Hillary or Obama is like asking a drowning person surrounded by sharks which of two lifeboats he prefers to be rescued by (and adding, in case it's helpful, that one lifeboat is rowed by a
(tags: US politics)
Gravity-test constrains new forces - physicsworld.com
"…
drorzel | March 6, 2008Day three of our vacation, and another Action Dog! shot:
Here, Emmy demonstrates that among her other superlative qualities, she is exceptionally strong and stubborn. This is a good shot of the Kong Wubba, as well.