drorzel | March 5, 2008
The Quantum Pontiff : Twins in Donut Space
Mmmmmm.... Paradoxical Donuts......
(tags: physics relativity theory)
Laelaps : Preaching to the choir
"Has there ever been a time when science has been highly valued by the general public? "
(tags: science society class-war culture history)
Shockwave traffic jam recreated for first time - tech - 04 March 2008 - New Scientist Tech
Japanese scientists create flawless simulation of Washington, DC. Make sure to watch the video.
(tags: physics psychology science video youtube)
Richard Feynman Needs His Orange Juice | Cosmic Variance
What can I…
drorzel | March 5, 2008The Female Science Professor is thinking about conferences:
Some scientific conferences are dominated by talks and some are comprised of talks + poster presentations. At conferences with talks and posters, it varies from conference to conference as to whether talks are more prestigious or whether it doesn't matter very much because there are so many posters, though of course it tends to be the case that talks are preferred. Big professors typically get talks, and students and other unfamous people get posters.
Naturally, this ends up being about the difference between her and one of her male…
drorzel | March 5, 2008Another dog picture for you to admire while I'm out of town:
It's a little tough to tell what she's doing here, but this is a play-bow-- she's stretched her paws out in front of her and brought the front part of her body down, but her butt is still up in the air. One of us is just off camera, about to throw the toy she's looking up at.
drorzel | March 4, 2008
Information Processing: Bell and GHZ: spooky action at a distance
Comments and references on one of the great examples of quantum weirdness.
(tags: physics quantum science academia education)
Can I See My Grade? :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education
""Can I see my grade?" There's simply no defense against this question. You can reply as Harried Professor or Good Buddy. You can comprehend yourself or be comprehended as Registrar or Service Rep."
(tags: academia education)
BostonHerald.com - Blogs: Working Stiff» Blog Archive » What would Einstein put…
drorzel | March 4, 2008Kate and I are going out of town for a few days. I may or may not check in and post some stuff while we're gone-- it will depend on how busy we are, and how good the Internet access is in the hotel.
I had intended to schedule some substantive posts to appear during our trip, but that didn't happen. So I'm scheduling dog pictures instead. We'll start off with Action Dog!
If only that bush weren't in the way, this would be a great picture. Oh, well.
drorzel | March 3, 2008
Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Penrose's Gödel argument in rap
"About as logically sound as the original, and with a somewhat better backbeat"
(tags: math music silly)
(Don't Taunt) The Reaper: 26 tempting but inappropriate funeral songs | The A.V. Club
"What able-minded young person hasn't thought about drafting a will for the sole purpose of demanding that a particularly funny, appropriately inappropriate song be played at his or her send-off?"
(tags: music silly)
Physicists roll out nanotube paper - physicsworld.com
"Invented by physicists at Tsinghua University, China, the new…
drorzel | March 3, 2008Michael Nielsen is planning to attend an "unconference" and is considering possible topics. He quotes one from Eva Amsen:
My idea: find 4 or 5 volunteers from different backgrounds to sit on a 20 minute panel and (with audience feedback) make a list of Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Science. Since we have a wide audience, this hopefully would be a varied list. Actually, maybe we could just put up a large sheet of paper and have people write down what they think should be on the list and get back to it later.
Michale offers a suggestion, which leads him to ponder scientific literacy,…
drorzel | March 3, 2008The Sunday New York Times magazine has a big article on single-sex public education, one of the latest educational fads. The bulk of the article is taken up with looking at promoters of single-sex classrooms for kids:
Among advocates of single-sex public education, there are two camps: those who favor separating boys from girls because they are essentially different and those who favor separating boys from girls because they have different social experiences and social needs. Leonard Sax represents the essential-difference view, arguing that boys and girls should be educated separately for…
drorzel | March 3, 2008This has been a rough basketball season. What with one thing and another, I haven't been able to see many games involving either Maryland or Syracuse, and those games I have seen have been bad. Last night looked like it was going to be an exception, with my Terps holding a big lead over Clemson midway through the second half, but then they completely fell apart, getting outscored 34-11 down the stretch, including a tough 24-footer with two seconds left to give Clemson a 73-70 victory.
The decisive moment in this was probably the decision to sub Jason McAlpin in in the middle of the second…
drorzel | March 3, 2008This has to be seen to be believed:
(Via the Times Union's high school sports blog, who says it's from a high school game in Oregon.)
drorzel | March 2, 2008
Please Call Earth. We Still Haven't Found You. - New York Times
SETI: still searching after all these years.
(tags: science space astronomy)
YouTube - Life at the Olin Outpost
Clearly, they don't assign enough homework at Carleton...
(tags: academia youtube video silly physics music)
Crooked Timber » » A lot or a little, part 2
"What are the sums of money worth paying attention to in terms of economic magnitude?"
(tags: economics politics social-science)
The Reality-Based Community: Teaching
Obama says the right things about education, and gets big applause anyway.
(tags: education…
drorzel | March 2, 2008The kerfuffle over the Bayblab incident has produced no end of discussion here and elsewhere. Hilariously, this included a lengthy discussion of why they see ScienceBlogs as cliquish, conducted entirely in the private back-channel forum that nobody else can read. Irony: it's like gold-y and bronze-y, but made of iron.
I realize that there's nothing you'd rather read than noodly explorations of the true essence of science blogging, except maybe copies of the Federal income tax code. But since I'm sitting here in the lab waiting for the turbo pump to spin down so I can break vacuum (because I…
drorzel | March 2, 2008Technorati is working less and less well these days-- it doesn't update as often as it should, and misses links that I know are there-- but it's still good for the occasional new find. Such as Susan Beckhardt's Intrinsically Knotted, which features among other things a really nice post about mathematical games:
We're going to play a game called G(6, 3). It's a two person game, and you can go first. The rules are as follows: We start with a total of six counters, and we'll each take turns removing some of the counters-exactly one or two counters each turn. The winner is the one who takes the…
drorzel | March 2, 2008Little Brother is Cory Doctorow's bid for a place on this year's list of banned books. It's a book that not only encourages kids to hack computers, commit vandalism, and thwart law enforcement, it gives them detailed instructions on the best ways to do those things. It even comes with two afterwords and a bibliography pointing them to even more resources on how best to subvert the political order.
If-- oh, who am I kidding, when Little Brother is challenged and banned from school libraries, it will richly deserve it.
And when that happens, you should go buy five copies and hand them out to…
drorzel | March 1, 2008
Stephen Huneck Gallery at Dog Mountain Vermont
" I wanted to build a chapel, one that celebrated the spiritual bond we have with our dogs, and that would be open to dogs and people. People of any faith or belief system."
(tags: dog religion art animals)
Such Madness - New York Times
Let the hype assault begin...
(tags: basketball sports)
Michael Nielsen » Questions
Big picture questions about science, the Web, and everything.
(tags: science society culture internet politics education academia)
Idiom Shortage Leaves Nation All Sewed Up In Horse Pies | The Onion - America's Finest News…
drorzel | March 1, 2008Via Orac, a religious movement I think we can all get behind:
Pastor Wants 30 Days of Sex for Couples
The pastor for Relevant Church in Ybor City is challenging the couples in his congregation to get busy in bed every night for a month.
Wirth said the supposed 50 percent divorce rate is the reason behind the 30-Day Sex Challenge.
I don't really have a point to make about this. I just wanted to use that subject line before Travis Hime got to it. By way of apology, there's some live video of the Hold Steady below the fold.
And here's a music video:
drorzel | March 1, 2008The Science Fiction class for which I agreed to guest lecture is an 8am class, which is earlier than I like to be up and about. Knowing this, I went to bed early on Thursday night. Of course, being a bookaholic of long standing, I needed something to read to put me to sleep. Genius that I am, I grabbed the ARC of Cory Doctorow's upcoming YA novel Little Brother...
So, I hadn't really had enough sleep when I got to campus for the class on Friday. Still, adrenaline can make up for a lot...
I was introduced as "Not only a physics professor, but also a world famous blogger," though I suggested…
drorzel | March 1, 2008As mentioned previously, I was invited to discuss physics and politics at one of the local fraternities earlier this week. Oddly, given the primacy of Greek organizations on campus, this is only the fourth time I've set foot inside a fraternity or sorority house in seven years. The previous occasions were times when I was doing housing inspections for the committee that handles those matters.
They've cleaned up the house since the other time I was there-- they used to be Φ Γ Δ, years ago, and then there was a brief interregnum when they were officially "Alpha Beta" (referred to as "oh, those…
drorzel | February 29, 2008
slacktivist: More on subsidiarity
"[W]here it exists here in America, inefficient Big Government tends to be the direct and predictable result of anti-regulation, anti-government laissez-faire and libertarian-ish ideologies"
(tags: economics politics US society)
Second Law of Thermodynamics with Discrete Quantum Feedback Control
You still can't win, but you can do a little better than with a classical heat engine.
(tags: physics quantum energy science articles)
Control of Interaction-Induced Dephasing of Bloch Oscillations
They manage to maintain quantum oscillations in a BEC in an…
drorzel | February 29, 2008I spent the bulk of yesterday afternoon doing vacuum system work, specifically working on the system to feed gas into the atomic beam source. My feelings about this can be inferred from the Facebook status message I set at the time: "Chad Orzel abhors a vacuum."
The apparatus I'm building uses laser cooling to decelerate an atomic beam of krypton atoms in a particular metastable state. This works brilliantly to slow metastable krypton atoms down, but the only atoms affected by the laser are krypton atoms-- everything else continues along unimpeded. As a result, the entire experiment needs to…