drorzel | January 20, 2008My Maryland Terrapins have been, shall we say, inconsistent this year, with back-to-back home losses to Ohio University (not Ohio State, Ohio U.) and American University. As a result, I didn't have really high hopes headed into Saturday's game at tope-ranked North Carolina. Much to my surprise, they played a really good game, and held on to win 82-80 on one of the ungainliest layups in the history of the game by Bambale Osby.
Carolina came into the game undefeated, and have been racking up big wins using Roy Williams's usual fast-paced style. They get up the court faster than almost any team…
drorzel | January 19, 2008
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Faculty Exchanges: Notes Toward a Proposal
The next great reality show: ProfSwap! Hey, if the writer's strike keeps up...
(tags: academia education experiment)
Words Words Words -- The Dream Cafe Weblog
Steve Brust gets sick of LiveJournal, ans dtarts a group blog.
(tags: blogs books SF)
Fantastic Japanscapes ::: Pink Tentacle
High dynamic range pictures of Japan-- freaky and hyper-real. (via Making Light)
(tags: Japan pictures gadgets)
drorzel | January 19, 2008It's not often that I find myself agreeing with the Incoherent Ponderer, but he's exactly right regarding Scientific American's "The Future of Physics" issue (via PhysMath Central):
[T]his month's issue of Scientific American has a special titled "The Future of Physics". I was quickly disappointed when I realized that the article covers only "terascale" physics, primarily focusing on LHC.
I guess I am tired of arrogant statements like "physics" = "high energy physics", which is how a lot of popular media characterizes it. The irony, however, is that with ILC construction in serious peril,…
drorzel | January 18, 2008
The Quantum Pontiff : The Contextuality of Quantum Theory in Ten Minutes
"Elves, Santa, boxes, and quantum measurements. That's the Bell-Kochen-Specker theorem: quantum measurements are contextual."
(tags: physics quantum science computing)
An Upsetting Outcome :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education
"When the researchers crunched the data, though, they found that the likelihood of assaults increased by 112 percent when the home team suffered an upset loss,"
(tags: academia social-science football statistics)
Admissions Dysfunction :: Inside Higher Ed ::…
drorzel | January 18, 2008Amazon conveniently informed me today of a very positive development in SF: Night Shade Books is republishing Glen Cook's space opera novel The Dragon Never Sleeps, which I reviewed quite some time ago. I've re-read it since then, and if anything, my opinion of it improved. It's "New Space Opera" written years before there was such a thing.
You can pre-order it from Amazon or get it direct from the publisher, but if you like Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Neal Asher, and that sort of crowd, you should buy this at once. It's terrific.
drorzel | January 18, 2008Somehow or another, I have managed never to read Feynman's famous book on Quantum Electro-Dynamics. It always seemed a little too much like work, but having found myself in the position of writing a pop-science book about quantum physics that includes a chapter on QED and Feynman diagrams, it seemed like it would probably be a good idea to get and read a copy.
An odd side effect of the mythologization of Feynman-- partly his own doing, and partly the work of hero-worshipping nerds-- is that it's easy to forget just how good he was at doing this sort of thing. So much time is spent on the…
drorzel | January 18, 2008Ernest Rutherford once said
In science, there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.
So, a really simple question: which do you prefer? Physics or stamp collecting? Leave your answer in the comments.
drorzel | January 17, 2008
The Box Of Paperbacks Book Club: Smith Of Wootton Major & Farmer Giles Of Ham by J.R.R. Tolkien (1967, 1949) | The A.V. Club
"A friend who's much smarter than I once theorized that the process of growing up involves going either through a Tolkien phase or a Beat phase, but never both."
(tags: books culture literature SF review)
Move Over, 'Meerkat Manor' | Newsweek Books | Newsweek.com
A nature writer's story about ferrets was plagiarized for pillow talk in a bad romance novel.
(tags: animals books writing stupid)
A Passage to India - New York Times
Touring Indian restaurants with a…
drorzel | January 17, 2008They're renovating a lab down the hall from mine (this is what led to the power shutdown that temporarily disabled my wavemeter). Today's agenda apparently involves a lot of drilling. Or, possibly, a bank robbery.
Whatever's going on, the intermittent violent shaking of the floor is not so conducive to research with laser diodes. When the boys clean out the bank safe, I hope they make off with quite a haul. I'm going to lunch before anybody gets stabbed.
drorzel | January 17, 2008Typing up the demolition story reminded me of another before-my-time NIST story. Again, the statute of limitations has run, so it's probably safe to tell this.
As mentioned in the earlier post, it was very expensive to get the official facilities team at NIST to do construction work, so a lot of things used to be done on the cheap by people in the research group. Most of this was fairly harmless, but it occasionally got taken to extremes.
The worst example I know of had to do with a laser that the group acquired. Large-frame lasers draw rather a lot of power, and so usually require dedicated…
drorzel | January 17, 2008The Washington Post has an article this morning headlined Navy Wins Exemption From Bush to Continue Sonar Exercises in Calif.:
The White House has exempted the Navy from two major environmental laws in an effort to free the service from a federal court's decision limiting the Navy's use of sonar in training exercises.
Environmentalists who had sued successfully to limit the Navy's use of loud, mid-frequency sonar -- which can be harmful to whales and other marine mammals -- said yesterday that the exemptions were unprecedented and could lead to a larger legal battle over the extent to which…
drorzel | January 17, 2008I've been in a bit of a funk this week, for reasons that don't bear talking about, and everything in blogdom has seemed indescribably tedious: the same boring people having the same stupid arguments over and over, with no end in sight. And don't get me started on politics.
In an effort to shake myself out of this, I've been poking around with Technorati, and stumbled across Confused at a Higher Level, a blog by a physics professor at Carleton. It's familiar material to me-- he even started there the same year I started here-- but he's got some good thoughts on physics, teaching, and academia…
drorzel | January 17, 2008Congratulations to Texas Tech coach Bob Knight, who extended his own NCAA record by winning his 900th game as a coach against Texas A&M last night. Knight being Knight, he couldn't get through this without a tiny display of churlishness:
After the game fans chanted Knight's name as he walked off the court to a thunderous ovation.
''You folks being here, seats being full for a change, really made a difference tonight,'' Knight told the crowd before leaving the court.
He's nobody's idea of a nice guy, but he sure can coach basketball.
Unfortunate mental image after the cut:
Clip from Frank…
drorzel | January 16, 2008
Quantum Hoops
We're still not sure whether they won or lost.
(tags: basketball academia sports physics movies)
slacktivist: King and Huck
The difference between the religious language of Martin Luther King and Mike Huckabee.
(tags: religion politics US society culture)
Coping With the Crunch :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education
A good summary of the physics funding problems created by the recent spending bill.
(tags: physics economics politics news academia US)
SF Signal: MIND MELD: Today's SF Authors Define Science Fiction (Part 2)
The ever-popular…
drorzel | January 16, 2008Last week, I made an oblique mention of an equipment failure, and commented about the positive experience I had in dealing with their engineers on the phone. I carefully avoided naming the broken product or the company I was dealing with, out of some obscure sense of blogging ethics.
I shipped the broken item off to them, and on Friday got an email telling me it was fixed:
Don't ask me what exactly we did; but after some alignment and
power-on-power-off, it seemed to come online and give proper readings.
Perhaps the power surge mentioned in your blog hung up some logic gates?
I did a double-…
drorzel | January 16, 2008While browsing through Border the other day, I noticed a book called Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance, which is the latest entry in the subgenre of mysteries in which improbable literary figures turn into detectives. In fact, it may represent the end of the genre-- I think they may have exhausted the possible sources, unless somebody out there has a great idea for an Emily Dickinson mystery...
This got me to thinking, though, that science is a criminally underused source of material for this sort of thing. Yeah, there's a swashbuckling Nikola Tesla book or two, and Einstein turns up…
drorzel | January 16, 2008The second half of the NOVA special on "Absolute Zero" aired last night. Like the first installment, it was very well done, avoiding most of the traps of modern pop-science television. There were some mysterious shots of amusement park rides when they started talking about quantum mechanics, and I'm not sure why, but they kept the "re-enactments" to a minimum, and didn't overdo the CGI.
They also deserve special mention for not insulting the viewers' intelligence with constant recaps.
As you can guess from the title, this part of the story covered the history of attempts to reach ever-lower…
drorzel | January 15, 2008
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Civility
The Dean Dad's one-sentence campus civility code.
(tags: academia culture society humanities social-science)
I Can Has Rezearch Papar? by Cyle Gage
The semiotics of LOLCats. Or Maybe it's the hemeneutics of LOLCats. I get those mixed up.
(tags: culture humanities internet academia)
MESSENGER: MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging
The first image of the previously unseen hemisphere of Mercury.
(tags: astronomy planets news science)
drorzel | January 15, 2008The second part of the NOVA program Absolute Zero airs tonight on PBS stations. The first part, "The Conquest of Cold" covered the theory and technology of refrigeration, while this segment, "The Quest for Absolute Zero" will include all the fun atomic physics stuff leading up to the achievement of Bose-Einstein Condensation in 1995.
Check your local listings, and set your schedules appropriately.
drorzel | January 15, 2008This is actually sort of a pre-lab story, as it happened before my lab in grad school was even established. It pre-dates my time at NIST, and happened long enough ago that the statute of limitations has surely run out, so I feel safe telling it.
The lab I worked in in grad school was acquired by the group a couple of years before I got there. It had previously been used by a group doing something involving wet chemisty, so there were lots of benches and sinks and other things that we didn't need or want in a laser lab.
They brought in the NIST facilities crew, and asked them how much it would…