drorzel | February 18, 2008Since basically nobody reads my inside-baseball stuff about SF, I'll put the details below the fold. Short version: Kate and I went to Boskone this past weekend, and it was good.
Various miscellany:
-- During the week, Kate came down with the cold that I had last weekend. As late as Thursday night, she was thinking of not even going, but I convinced her that moping at home would be more depressing than making the trip. She spent most of the con in her room, though.
-- This was the second year of Boskone in the Westin Waterfront, which isn't as good a space as the Sheraton at Prudential Center…
drorzel | February 18, 2008Via slashdot, I learn that a couple of colleagues of mine have achieved nerd fame with an art project in which a robot acts out dreams.
"Is there video?" you ask. Silly reader! Of course there's video!
The deal here is that one of the two, Fernando Orellana, went to a sleep disorder center and spent a night hooked up to machines that tracked his eye motions and EEG. Then they mapped patterns in the data to specific robot actions, so an eye movemet up and to the left became a lift and turn of the robot's head, for example. Then they play the whole thing back through the robot.
It should be…
drorzel | February 18, 2008I gave a talk at Boskone in the prime Sunday 10 am slot, on quantum teleportation. I read the opening dialogue from Chapter 8 of the book, and then did a half-hour (or so) explanation of the real physics behind quantum teleportation.
If you weren't one of the thirty-ish people who watched at least part of the presentation, you don't know what you missed. But you can get a little flavor of it by looking at the PDF version of my PowerPoint slides (1.1 MB). I think they're mostly comprehensible on their own, but even if they're not, there are cute dog pictures galore. So, you know, there's that…
drorzel | February 17, 2008
The Quantum Pontiff : SqUINT Live Blogging - Saturday Talks
More updates from the cutting edge of quantum information.
(tags: quantum physics meetings science)
Cocktail Party Physics: built for speed: part one
An interview with the author of "The Physics of NASCAR"
(tags: books physics science education)
drorzel | February 16, 2008
evolgen: These Are the People at Your Departmental Seminar
A field guide to academic audiences.
(tags: academia science)
The Quantum Pontiff : SquinT Live Blogging - Friday Talks
A quick tour of the latest in quantum information.
(tags: quantum physics science academia meetings)
Accounting for general relativity at Mercury - The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary Society
"[D]o MESSENGER's navigators have to take relativistic effects into account when they plan MESSENGER's trajectory?" Yes and no.
(tags: astronomy planets space science physics)
randompictures: Cans and Vegetables…
drorzel | February 15, 2008There has been another shooting on a college campus, with a gunman opening fire on a geology class at Northern Illinois, before killing himself. Early reports suggest that the safety measures put into place after the Virginia Tech tragedy all worked properly, and the response from police was as quick as could be hoped.
The word "tragedy" is badly overused in modern life, but this is an appropriate place. This is a horrible event, and my heart goes out to the families and friends of those who were killed.
I should note that this is not an appropriate time or place for political grandstanding.…
drorzel | February 14, 2008
The Neon Season - Things I Have Learned From Reading Children's and YA Books of Yesteryear (and sometimes of Year Now)
"1. The dog always dies."
(tags: books literature culture silly)
Talk Like A Physicist
Because we're cooler than pirates.
(tags: physics science silly)
Cocktail Party Physics: a little light housekeeping
I really like the KITP "Journal Club" idea...
(tags: physics science writing society)
The Quantum Pontiff : SquInT Live Blogging - Thursday Tutorials
His Holiness reports on the latest in quantum information.
(tags: quantum physics computing science)
Scientists Find…
drorzel | February 14, 2008The Physics Central Nanobowl collected YouTube videos using football to illustrate something about physics. They've got a bunch of finalists, and the polls are open for the People's Choice Award. Check out the nine semi-finalists, and vote for your favorite.
The slickest is probably "Theoretical Football":
I'm not sure whether they gain or lose points for using "O Fortuna" from Carmina Burena. There's also the extravagent use of the old-film jitter effect in "Fysics of Phootball":
And then... Well, just go look for yourself...
drorzel | February 14, 2008Over at Slaves of Academe, Oso Raro rants about student life professionals. The Dean Dad offers a defense of student life offices on procedural grounds (which is how I found the original piece).
It's hard to judge how much of the original rant is humorous exaggeration. There are some reasonable elements to his critique of student life programs, but there's a lot of dumb stuff in there, from the classic "back in my day" lament to the suggestion that what we really need is for faculty to do the things that student life people do now. As much as my eyes roll at the thought of mandatory diversity…
drorzel | February 14, 2008Via a EurekAlert release with the catchy headline "As graduation rates go down, school ratings go up", a new study of the Texas school system, which provided the inspiration for "No Child Left Behind". It's not pretty:
A new study by researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas-Austin finds that Texas' public school accountability system, the model for the national No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), directly contributes to lower graduation rates. Each year Texas public high schools lose at least 135,000 youth prior to graduation -- a disproportionate number of whom are African-…
drorzel | February 14, 2008My Terps lost to the hated Dukies 77-65 last night, in a game I barely watched. Vitale and Patrick had the call, and were their usual intolerable selves, and I needed to do some cooking for today's physics department luncheon, so I was in the kitchen more than in front of the tv. A few observations based on what I did see:
-- This was a really simple game, and the box score reinforces my impression. Duke couldn't hang with the Maryland big men down low, Maryland's big men couldn't guard their Duke counterparts on the perimeter, and Maryland's guards have judgement issues. When your back court…
drorzel | February 13, 2008
Highly Allochthonous : Battleships in space!
The importance of "Pre-Atomic" steel.
(tags: physics nuclear history science space)
Particle physicists plumb the depths for Roman lead - 13 July 1991 - New Scientist
"Pre-Atomic" steel is for wimps-- real experiments use ancient lead...
(tags: physics science nuclear history)
Jim C. Hines - The Money Post
Financial advice from a writer making much less than John Scalzi
(tags: writing publishing books SF)
ellameena: Getting a freelance career started
How to embark upon the glamorous life of a freelance writer.
(tags: writing journalism…
drorzel | February 13, 2008I'm not hugely enthusiastic about the ResearchBlogging.org project, but it's a little ridiculous that they've been active for weeks now, and there still isn't a single post in the "Physics" category. If they're going to offer the category link, something ought to come up when you click it, so let's give them some blogging on peer reviewed physics research.
The recent paper that most seems to lend itself to a quick explanation is this Phys. Rev. Letter from the Katori group at the University of Tokyo on the trapping of neutral mercury atoms. Full disclosure: Dr. Katori was a student of Prof.…
drorzel | February 13, 2008I didn't see the game last night, as I got distracted by some other tasks, but North Carolina narrowly beat Virginia last night, on a late jump hook by Tyler Hansbrough. This might seem surprising, given that UVA was .500 on the season, and 1-8 in the league, and indeed, the AP describes it that way.
Of course, nowhere in that article do you find the crucial bit of information. You have to go to ESPN's box score for that information (their game recap just repeats the AP text). From the box score, you can infer that Ty Lawson did not play, which makes the struggle a whole lot less surprising.…
drorzel | February 12, 2008
Jacks of Science â Bring Love to the Lab with a Science Valentine
Love notes for the deeply dorky
(tags: silly pictures science)
telophase: AWESOMETASTIC MANGA OF AWESOMENESS
A comic book about people who REALLY love trains and the boxed lunches you can buy in Japanese train stations. Don't even try to understand it.
(tags: comics Japan silly)
Creek Running North » Am Spayed
"They call me Thistle. I find things. Sometimes the things I find are worth something. On a good day I get a percentage. "
(tags: animals blogs silly mystery)
The Popdose Guide to Tom Waits | Popdose
An album-by-…
drorzel | February 12, 2008Over at Musical Perceptions, Scott has something that seems like a "meme": go to the Metropolitan Opera archives and see what they were playing on the day you were born (keyword search with your birth date written out).
For me, the answer was "Concert Cavalleria Rusticana {471}."
You know, this would probably be more fun if I knew something about opera...
(It appears to be a concert performance of a handful of pieces from other opera, held in the Botanical Garden. None of the names mean anything at all to me, though.)
drorzel | February 12, 2008Chris and Sheril have been working tirelessly to make a Presidential Science Debate happen, and there's been real progress:
ScienceDebate2008 is now co-sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academies, and the Council on Competitiveness. We were looking at venues, and finally settled on an offer from the Philadelphia-based Franklin Institute--named, of course, after one of this country's first and greatest scientists. We can't think of a more appropriate venue.
Our proposed date is April 18, 2008, which is just before the Pennyslvania primary. So…
drorzel | February 12, 2008I don't get this Internet thing. I was sure that yesterday's dog dialogue about evolution would generate some traffic, if only from biologists whining that I didn't explain evolution correctly. But-- nothing. I guess I failed to include the magic attention-generating phrase-- "Darwin Day" or "Michael Behe is Dumber Than My Dog," or something.
Anyway, I've had a miserable cold that I'm just clawing my way out of, so I've got nothing brilliant to post. I did spend a bunch of time yesterday looking at some old pictures in response to a request related to an alumni wing-ding. I digitized a few…
drorzel | February 11, 2008
heathervescent: Powerpoint Karaoke - The g33k way
A new party game for geeks and academics.
(tags: academia games silly meetings)
Unasked-For Advice to New Writers About Money
"[W]hen it comes to money -- and specifically their own money -- writers have as much sense as chimps on crack."
(tags: writing economics)
drorzel | February 11, 2008I'm sitting at the computer, reading blogs, when the dog comes up to me. "Hey, can I ask a question?" she says.
"Sure, go ahead."
"What's the deal with evolution?"
"Evolution, huh? Well, I'm not a biologist, you understand, but the basic idea is that every creature we see today originated from simple creatures of the past, through a process of small changes over millions of years. Every individual of a species has slightly different traits, and if those traits happen to make them more likely to survive, then they are more likely to reproduce, and have offspring who will share those traits.…