Angels and Demons Frequently asked questions about antimatter at CERN. Dan Brown has a lot to answer for. (tags: books physics science stupid) Major physics breakthrough in understanding supersolidity The weirdness continues, in this remarkable uninformative press release. (tags: physics low-temperature news quantum science) Tuneable gap semiconductor is a first - physicsworld.com Applying a voltagee across a graphene bilayer produces an energy gap that depends on the transverse voltage, which might make it a tunable semiconductor. (tags: physics science news materials experiment)…

The building where my office is is one of those 60's era brick buildings with lots of basically identical little offices arranged along indistinguishable hallways. Tenured professors are known to get lost in there trying to find specific offices. To make it a little easier, some of us decorate our doors: The key identifying the numbered items is below the fold, but as this is a fairly general phenomenon in academia, I thought I'd try making this a Bonus Photo Edition Dorky Poll: What's on your office door? (If you don't have your own office, then what's decorating your workspace? If you're…

There's a piece by Michael Dine in Physics Today this month with the ambitious title "String theory in the era of the Large Hadron Collider, thus combining two of my very favorite topics... I was going to give it a pass, but I was surprised to discover that it's freely available-- most of their articles are behind a subscription wall-- and as long as it's linkable, I might as well say something about it. The bulk of it is stuff that anybody with a passing familiarity with high-energy physics has heard before. Unification of forces, blah, blah, quantum gravity, blah, blah, only game in town.…

Yahhhhhhh: Canadian PSAs Are Clearly Not Messing Around Canadians are terrifying (tags: video youtube television Canada) "Dinosaur Mummy" Found; Has Intact Skin, Tissue A surprisingly intact hadrosaur provides all sorts of interesting information (tags: biology dinosaurs news science) Why do high school seniors drink? "New study identifies 4 major motivators to drink alcohol -- 1 of them could be a sign of problem drinking." How is this news? (tags: education science news society US) Cheap Toy Round-Up 2007 | The A.V. Club "As we do every year, The A.V. Club has scoured the bargain…

Physics World has an interview with Alastair Reynolds, who was trained as an astrophysicist but is now a full-time SF author: How does your physics training help with your writing? Less than people imagine. I think the most important attribute for a science-fiction writer is to be fascinated by science -- in all its manifestations. It's not necessary to be able to understand all the details, but just to be inspired and stimulated. Most of the ideas that have fed into my writing have come from reading popular articles on subjects far away from my own very limited specialization, such as…

While I'm ranting about Inside Higher Ed articles that pissed me off, here's another. Rob Weir walked uphill through the snow to his first academic job, and thinks the academy shouldn't be hiring the spoiled kids we have these days: [J]ust about one year ago the popular media sounded alarmist notes about how "gray" the academy had become, especially at top research institutions and elite colleges. Predictable anecdotes were bandied about, sprinkled with a few carefully culled statistics -- apparently we should be alarmed that 2.1 percent of tenured profs are over 70 -- and the call for…

Over at Inside Higher Ed, they have a piece looking at the state of college football as we enter bowl season. This is dominated by two large tables of numbers, one good, and one bad. The first table is the good one, as it explains why the college football "championship" is so messed up. It lists the 32 bowl games that will be played over the next month, and the per-team payout for each. The five major BCS bowls pay each team $17 million, which neatly explains why the college football elite are unwilling to put in a playoff-- in any real championship system, they might end up having to share…

It was not a stunning display of football, but the Patriots' win over the Ravens was at least a tense and interesting game down to the last minute of play. New England looked awful, but pulled it together on the last drive, picking their way down the field for a game-winning touchdown with 44 seconds left. It didn't hurt that the Ravens went into total meltdown, of course, with 13 penalties for 100 yards in the game, with thirty yards' worth of unsportsmanlike conduct penalities handed out to Bart Scott for throwing a tantrum after the final touchdown. New England kicked off from the Ravens'…

Ralph Asher Alpher - Physics Today December 2007 A very nice obituary (tags: astronomy physics) Chemical & Engineering News - ACS News - Class Of 2006 Salaries And Jobs The overall situation is pretty good, but Ph.D. Salaries dropped somewhat. (tags: chemistry academia news jobs) MIT sculpts 3-D particles with light Rapid production off micron -scale particles using Continuous flow Lithography (tags: materials chemistry physics science news) Tonight, thank God it's them instead of you: 16 morally dubious holiday entertainments | The A.V. Club "Macaulay Culkin, as abandoned kid…

I burned out some diode lasers a while back, and needed to buy replacements. Here's one of the replacements on top of the tube containing the other, with a US quarter for scale: Here they are, with the box and packing material used to ship them to me: I realize that this is probably due to somebody at the laser company deciding to save money by standardizing on a single size of shipping container. Still, this seems just a tiny bit excessive...

An off-line question from someone at Seed: Fundamentally, what is the difference between chemistry and physics? There are a bunch of different ways to try to explain the dividing lines between disciplines. My take on this particular question is that there's a whole hierarchy of (sub)fields, based on what level of abstraction you work at. The question really has to do with what you consider the fundamental building block of the systems you study. At the most fundamental level, you have particle physics and high-energy nuclear physics, which sees everything in terms of quarks and leptons,…

A handful of sports items of interest to me: 1) My Giants defied expectations, and pulled out a 21-16 win over the Bears on two late touchdown drives, after sucking for most of the game. Well, OK, the defense was good throughout, though they were aided by the Bears not having a quarterback better than Rex Grossman, but the offense was dreadful. Eli Manning gets most of the blame for that, somewhat unfairly. Some of the blame has to go on injuries-- the second INT he threw wasn't a terrible throw, if Plaxico Burress was healthy-- and some on the coaching staff, who as usual reacted to Manning'…

Hamlet - The Text Adventure "It's so unfair! You're in trouble again, just because you called your uncle - or rather, your new stepfather, Claudius - a usurping git." (tags: games internet literature silly) YouTube - The Killers - Don't Shoot Me Santa Silly spoof Christmas song video, featuring Brandon Flowers in a tragic sweater. (tags: youtube video music silly) Dynamical Control of Matter-Wave Tunneling in Periodic Potentials Shaking a Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice can stop the atoms from moving through the lattice. (tags: physics experiment low-temperature news…

Important Notice: I am not interested in what Cory Doctorow has termed "helpiness" (in analogy with Stephen Colbert's "truthiness") namely comments that have the general syntactical form of useful advice, without the content of useful advice. I don't want to hear about how I really should've bought a Mac, or ought to be running Linux, or whatever. This is commentary on the specific Tablet PC that I purchased recently, and nothing more. As noted here a few times, I recently acquired a Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet PC, which does, in fact, have the touch screen option, though I didn't think it did…

I don't really want to turn this blog completely over to bitching about the poor representation of science in "Year's Best" lists of books, but it's that time of year when every media outlet puts out their lists of favorite books, so it's hard not to talk about it. Today's list is from the Washington Post's Holiday Guide, where they helpfully break their non-fiction list down into categories. By my count, there were 94 non-fiction books listed, divided among 11 categories: Arts: 7 Biographies: 17 Culture and Society: 9 Current Events: 8 Foreign Affairs: 9 History: 23 Literature: 2 Memoirs: 9…

Amazon.com: Uranium Ore: Electronics "When mixed with Tuscan whole milk I gained the power to control deceased woodland creatures. I am now in the process of raising an army of undead wombats to overthrow the government from deep within my volcanic lair. " (tags: silly internet) FilmChat: Philip Pullman -- the extended e-mail interview Phillip Pullman on the upcoming movie of The Golden Compass, and His Dark MAterials generally. Less crazy than some of his other interviews. (tags: books literature movies religion culture society) Second Sight Rob Knop's new digs. (tags: blogs computing…

Another Jonah Goldberg moment-- can anybody recommend a reasonably neutral discussion of Bohm's non-local hidden variable version of quantum theory? A little Googling turns up this encyclopedia article and a tutorial dialogue on the arxiv, but I'd like to see a fairly complete treatment of it that doesn't go to great lengths to make proponents of other interpretations sound like clueless goobers who are just too dim to perceive the obvious correctness of the Bohmian approach. This isn't critical by any means-- the hour and a half I've just spent reading these pieces is really more cat-…

"Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake! Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake!" "Stop that! What in hell are you barking at?" I look out the window. "It's a squirrel. Why are you barking like that at a single squirrel on the tree outside?" "It's an evil squirrel! A threat to the home!" "No, it's not. It's little and furry and harmless." "Dude, you're wrong. Squirrels are dangerous. They're like ninjas. Haven't you seen that video?" "What video?" "See! See!" "OK, fine, there is at least one squirrel somewhere in the UK that has been trained to have ninja skills by somebody with way too much free time." "I told you!" "…

The Washington Monthly "It turns out that the only thing these GOP voters hated more than helping the poor was being told that it's wrong to torture people." Whee! (tags: politics US) The Wetzel plan - NCAA Football - Yahoo! Sports This is far too sensible to ever happen. (tags: football sports stupid) Off the Kuff: Just hear those sleigh bells jingling...again and again Exactly how sick of "Jingle Bell Rock" are you going to be by December 25th? Charles Kuffner does the math... (tags: music stupid culture society) Easily Distracted » Blog Archive » After You, Alphonse "Why can't…

Via Kate, a story from a legal blog about a decisions in the case of a messy professor: "Clean your room or get out!" Words from a frustrated parent to a messy teenager? Not quite. The mess-maker in this case was a chemistry professor at the University of Texas, who ignored repeated warnings to clean up his dangerously cluttered lab space. When University officials decided to clean it themselves, the professor caused such a disturbance that campus police had to lead him away in handcuffs. The professor was eventually fired, which prompted a lawsuit claiming that the University retaliated…