Back when I was a grad student at NIST, we had a large frame argon ion laser that put out 10-15 watts of green light that we then used to pump a Ti:Sapph laser to produce the infrared light we used for laser cooling. This particular type of laser had a small design flaw-- the energy needed for laser operation was pumped into the medium by exciting a plasma discharge in the tube using a high-voltage filament, which was coiled around the beam line. Over time, the filament would soften slightly from the heat of the plasma, then droop into the beam line, and mess up the laser mode, rendering it…

Lounge of the Lab Lemming: Geophysicists moderate neutrons Estimating conference attendance by the attenuation of the cosmogenic neutron flux due to people on the exhibit floor. (tags: physics silly science) A Natural Scientist: Before You Sign Up For Indentured Servitude The three most important decisions in grad school: Advisor, Advisor, Advisor. (tags: academia science education) Mars Gets Women: Grad School Letters "[S]ubmitting the letters has gotten to be such an aggravation that it just sent me into a steaming rage, loudly swearing a blue streak that could be heard up and down…

The first half of NOVA's Absolute Zero program aired last night, and I was able to watch the whole thing. Well, more or less-- it was a long day, so I was drifting off a little bit about fifteen minutes in, and didn't get all of the Michael Faraday story, but a phone call woke me up, and I watched the rest of it. This half was mostly devoted to the history of ideas about cold, and the technology of making things cold. It didn't include any of the atomic physics topics of most immediate interest to me-- those will be in next week's installment-- but it did present a lot of fascinating…

I occasionally joke that some of the articles passing through my EurekAlert feed ought to be published in the Journal of "Well, Duh!", but I think this one takes the cake: Teens find the benefits of not having sex decline with age: The study, reported in the January 2008 issue of the "American Journal of Public Health," studied teens from the fall of their ninth-grade year through the spring of their tenth-grade year. Among teens who remained sexually inexperienced during the study, the percentage reporting only positive experiences from refraining from sex fell from 46 percent to 24 percent…

Gordon Watts is mad as hell about funding cuts, and blaming petty partisan politics: As far as I can tell, here is what happened: Congress just about finishes the omnibus spending bill. [Snark: exactly how late was this!?] At the last minute Bush says he will veto it unless it comes at his number. [Snark: Presumably this is to prove that he is a fiscal conservative.] Democrats and Republicans in congress go round and round. They do not have the votes to override a veto in the end. Democrats give up and say “he wants it 22 billion cheaper? OK, we’ll do it”. [Snark: how did we not miss this…

Via a back channel, the Gardner Project of EniTech Research. They have an argon laser, so you know it's science! (This is way too slick to be the work of real crazy people, and, of course, there's this ad... This is almost certainly either performance art or viral marketing for an upcoming tv show, but it's pretty amusing. Make sure to at least skim through the comments.)

PHD Comics: Research Diagram/Research Reality No schematic survives its first encounter with the apparatus. (tags: silly comics science experiment) Teens find the benefits of not having sex decline with age "The greatest change in attitudes was among teens who became sexually experienced during the study period. For those teens, the percentage who said that not having sex resulted in only positive experiences dropped from 40 percent to 6 percent." (tags: sex news science psychology society) New nanostructured thin film shows promise for efficient solar energy conversion "When compared…

Having made a snide comment or two about engineers earlier, I feel like I should relate a positive experience today: Over the Christmas break, there was a power outage in my lab. Not an accidental outage, but a planned outage that nobody told me about-- a contractor cut the breakers in order to do some work down the hall. After the outage, a piece of laser diagnostic equipment wasn't working. After exhausting the really sketchy information in the manual about the particular failure mode of this device, I tried to call the manufacturer. Of course, the original company got bought by a different…

In my email this morning, I have a note from everybody's favorite online retailer, informing me that: We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by Christopher Moore have also purchased Esther's Revenge at Susa: From Sennacherib to Ahasuerus by Stephanie Dalley. OK, fine, they see a correlation, and are sending me a heads-up. Of course, they then go on to provide the jacket copy for the book being recommended: Why are the names of the chief characters in the biblical Book of Esther those of Mesopotamian deities? Stephanie Dalley argues that the narrative reflects real…

One final note on the teachers-unions argument: The comments to the original post on the low regard for teachers relative to lawyers immediately jumped on the union thing. Commenter Doug Hering provided what's probably the best statement of the causal link: I do agree that teachers must be treated as professionals. However, part of that is eliminating a union. How many professional groups have unions? It seems to me that gives the impression of a non-professional class of employees. You hear this sort of thing all the time, most frequently from engineers and computer-industry people, and…

Commenter "Matt" wrote a comment that pissed me off, and while it's probably futile to take on union-bashing again, it does highlight a couple of the things that make this so frustrating. In response to several people observing that teaching is not the cushy 8-to-3, summers-off job that lots of people claim, he writes: Here are the facts. Teachers do not "have" to work harder than the rest of us. They do not "have" to deal with different or unique problems. Granted, some choose to work hard and some choose to deal with parents, misbehaving kids, etc. But people the world over in all jobs have…

Tonight at 8pm (Eastern) is the premier of the NOVA program "Absolute Zero". This is the first of two one-hour specials talking about the physics and technology of ultra-low temperatures. I haven't seen nearly enough hype for this on the Internet-- actual results aren't as sexy as wild speculation-- but the science here is fascinating, if I do say so myself, and at the very least, they have an impressive list of participants, and a nice Q & A about BEC with Luis Orozco of the University of Maryland (who was at Stony Brook when I was a grad student, but spent part of a sabbatical working…

Economists Say Movie Violence Might Temper the Real Thing - New York Times "From 6 p.m. to midnight on weekends -- when the largest numbers of people are in theaters -- violent crimes decreased 1.3 percent for every million people watching a strongly violent movie, the study found. Violent crimes dropped 1.1 percent for every (tags: economics movies society psychology) xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe Ron Paul shot before Greedo. (tags: comics politics SF silly movies) Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: ABC…

I unwisely agreed to cover the first class for one of my colleagues with a late-arriving flight back from break before finding out when the class met, which was 8:00 this morning. As a result, my whole morning blog routine was disrupted. I'm saved from having the site go completely dark, though, by an email from a colleague who's teaching a course on science fiction, asking if I'd be interested in doing a guest lecture. I'm open to the idea, but I don't know what I would talk about. So, here are two Dorky Poll questions, one very specific: 1) If I were to do one guest lecture for a class on…

On Friday, Steinn was playing dictator of the universe, and presented a modest proposal to reform US public education. It's a mix of pretty good idea and cosmetic changes to make things more like Europe, and I agree with a good deal of it. I do want to highlight one thing, though: Teachers could probably do with being paid better, and they could also probably do with being quality controlled a little better. Teachers in middle and high schools ought to have BA/BSc degrees in their fields, with MEds or equivalent for pedagogy. This is particularly interesting, in light of Sunday's New York…

BBC NEWS | Magazine Monitor 100 things the BBC didn't know until last year. (tags: culture politics review society science education environment humanities history)

Myers: There are atheists who look on a tragedy and cry, "There is no god," in despair. But we are atheists who look on beauty and complexity and awesome immensity and shout out, "There is no god!" and we are glad. That's the distinction we've got to get across. We are fulfilled, happy atheists who rejoice in the superfluity of the old myths. We generally don't have a tragic backstory -- quite the contrary, we've come to our conclusions because we have found natural explanations satisfying and promising. Clearly, this is a result of insufficient vigor in calling religion stupid. Redouble…

The context for this would take too long to explain, so I'll just throw it out there: Can anyone think of an example of an Internet troll changing their opinions or behavior because of the savage wit of people responding to their comments? I ask this because I spent a good seven years on rec.arts.sf.* before moving to blogdom, and I can't think of one, either on Usenet or in a weblog's comments. I can think of a few people who made flame-tastic debuts on one group or another and later turned into reasonable regulars (Tshen comes to mind, for the RASWR-J crowd), but they always had a spark of…

... because it's evidently a bad weekend for teams Jim Henley is rooting for. (Edit: typo fixed.) (Also, their secondary continues to suck.)

World Hum | Travel Books | The Trouble With 'Smile When You're Lying' Thoughts about what's wrong with travel writing, and why. (tags: travel writing books review journalism) What if the BCS Ran the NFL - FanHouse - AOL Sports Blog "Cowboys fans are upset that they have been shut out of the Bud Bowl championship game, but the Cowboys late-season slide allowed the Colts to jump ahead of them in both the coaches poll and the computer rankings. " (tags: football sports silly television) WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL The parable of the talents re-enacted: a pastor gave $50 loans to every adult in…