I had a doctor visit and a meeting schduled for this morning, which cut into my blogging time. And I have another meeting in an hour, and I need to get lunch. This sounds like a job for a Dorky Poll! So here's a quick pair of questions, based on a glance at my office shelves: What's your favorite math book? What's your least favorite? I ask this because looking at my bookshelves reveals that I have a number of books about math, and I don't really like any of them. My least favorite is easy: Arfken's Mathematical Methods for Physicists-- it's so completely useless that I'm not sure why I keep…

The Science Times this week appears to be the Special Coturnix Issue, at least judging from the titles in my RSS reader-- a huge stack of articles about sleep and biological clocks. Bora must be thrilled. Mixed in there, though, are two articles about NASA. One bears the dramatic headline "NASA Faces House Hearings on Air Safety," while the other is a detailed profile of the astronauts for the next Shuttle mission. The first one turns out to be about the "aeronautics" rather than "space" part of NASA-- it's about a survey of pilots about safety issues in air travel-- but the combination is…

Cocktail Party Physics: they do it with mirrors What's up with those "It's the mirrors" commercials for DLP. Still no explanation of the elephant. (tags: physics industry science materials gadgets) A.C.C. Teams Thinking About the Final Four Already - New York Times Let's not get ahead of ourselves... (tags: basketball) Harvard University engineers demonstrate quantum cascade laser nanoantenna Building an antenna directly on the fact of a QC laser can produce sub-wavelength scale spots. (tags: physics quantum optics experiment gadgets) Election fix? Switzerland Tests Quantum…

As mentioned in the previous post, Cut to the Chase offers two lists of skills to look at: The Popular Mechanics list of "25 Skills Every Man Should Know" and a new list of "20 Practical Skills Every Self-Sufficient Adult Should Have." This seems ripe for an Internet "meme" thing, so here's a the proposed game: Go through both lists, and determine how many of the listed skills you can claim. Compare the fractions to see if you're more of a ManlyMan or a Self-Sufficient Adult. A quick pass at the lists gives me 14/25 from the Popular Mechanics list, and 17/20 from Chase's list. That makes me…

A little while back, Popular Mechanics published a list of 25 Skills Every Man Should Know. Seven of the 25 are car-related, another four have to do with construction, and an additional six are outdoorsy things. Of course, they also threw in "extend your wireless network," for the nerds out there, but it does tend toward the parodically ManlyMan side of things. In response, Cut to the Chase posted a list of 20 "practical skills every self-sufficient adult should have", which probably errs in the other direction, with entries that are far too humorlessly sensible. (Though I notice that "Know…

I've been Netflix-ing and sloooowly watching the anime Last Exile over the last few months, and finished it over the weekend. It's all very pretty, but I really don't understand what the hell happened at the very end. Some fun stuff along the way, though. This means that I have once again run out of Japanese cartoons to watch, and the mystery anime I was recommended in Japan are not available from Netflix at present. Which means I need new stuff to watch on Friday nights after happy hour, when network tv sucks. So, oh all-knowing Internet types, what should be on my Netflix queue? Serial…

The Right-Wing Facebook - Welcome "Rudy Giuliani is wondering how he can fit 9/11 into a speech about agriculture policy." (tags: politics US silly) A Paler Shade of White: Musical Events: The New Yorker An attempt to find cultural significance in the fact that the author doesn't like indie rock. (tags: culture music) Cocktail Party Physics: e is for energy An index of sorts for conference blogging of the Industrial Physics Forum (tags: physics science industry)

Well, the DonorsChoose challenge came up short of the "stab myself with a fork" threshold by the Friday deadline, though the whole business turned out to be surprisingly effective. Go figure. At this point in things, militant atheist baiting is pretty much played out as a fundraising strategy, which means I need to turn to ways to get other segments of the readership to donate. Sadly, I'm short on ideas, and Dave's quasi-scientific study of charity gimmicks doesn't provide much guidance (I've already put in a good chunk of money, so I wouldn't be able to offer much in the way of matching…

The occasional writing update, with bonus LOLEmmy: (Photo credit: Kate) Introduction Current Revision: 1 Total Words: 422 (dialogue only) Chapter 1: Particle-Wave Duality Current Revision: 5a Total Words: 5,279 Chapter 2: The Uncertainty Principle Current Revision: 7 Total Words: 4,499 Chapter 3: The Copenhagen Interpretation Current Revision: 2 Total Words: 4,801 Chapter 4: The Many-Worlds Interpretation Current Revision: 3 Total Words: 4869 Chapter 4 has been far and away the most difficult bit to write, which is why the dog is so exhausted. This is what I get for setting myself the goal…

I appear not to have booklogged Naomi Novik's earlier books, which is something of an oversight. I think they got lost in the transition between the old booklog, and posting booklog entries here. At any rate, Empire of Ivory is the fourth book in the Temeraire series, which starts with the Hugo-nominated His Majesty's Dragon (Temeraire in the UK). These are set in a fantasy version of the Napoleonic wars, and follow the adventures of William Laurence, the captain of a ship in the British Navy who comes into possession of a dragon egg. When it hatches, and the dragon inside bonds with…

...My heart's in Accra » Pop!Tech 2007 More interesting conference blogging posts than I can link individually (tags: gadgets society science computing economics education) The Prize That Even Some Laureates Question - New York Times Nobody likes the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (tags: economics Nobel)

While I'm passing on announcements from my email, there's an online event scheduled for Tuesda and Wednesday about nanotechnology and the consumer: Nanotechnology--the ability to measure, see, manipulate and manufacture things between 1 and 100 nanometers (1 billionth of a meter)--is seen as the driver of a new industrial revolution emerging with the development of materials that exhibit new properties and potential new risks and benefits at this tiny scale. However, according to recent polls, the majority of Americans have heard little or nothing about nanotechnology, even as consumer…

As noted a little while ago, ScienceBlogs has recently redesigned the channel pages on the front page, and they now include images supplied by the bloggers. For example, the doomsday weapon photo that currently graces the Physical Science page is a picture of my lab. Now, any idiot can take pictures of cute fuzzy animals, but physics pictures are a little harder to come by. So, the corporate masters are soliciting pictures from you, the readers of this blog: It's not too hard: the image needs to be at least 465 pixels wide. Readers should send their photos to photos@scienceblogs.com. They…

The Union of Concerned Scientists emails me fairly regularly with news items and calls to action-- one of the benefits of being a C-list blogger, I guess. This week's is a "Call your Senator" item opposing Executive Order 13422: Government agencies need to use the best available science to protect our health--setting standards that limit toxins in our drinking water and pollutants in the air we breathe. But a recent presidential directive would give the White House excessive control over the work of federal agencies, making science more vulnerable to political interference. Unless something…

Terra Sigillata : News Flash: Unathletic Kids Unpopular and Lonely Also, bad at sports. (tags: education silly sports) slacktivist: Gay-Hatin' Gospel (pt. 2) Part two in Fred Clark's series attempting to explain evangelical gay-bashing (tags: politics US religion) Optical Dilution and Feedback Cooling of a Gram-Scale Oscillator to 6.9 mK Blogged a while back, now in print: LIGO used lasers to cool the motion of a 1g mirror. (tags: physics science articles quantum low-temperature) Quantum Control of the Hyperfine Spin of a Cs Atom Ensemble Precision control of the quantum state of an…

I'm not going to explain exactly what prompted this, but I want to remind my readers of one of the absolute essential rules of life in academia: The most important person in any academic department is the secretary. Naive outsiders often think that the department chair is the most important person, or possibly the most senior faculty member, or maybe the professor with the most funding. That's wrong, though. If you want to be able to get things done in academia, the person you need on your side is the department secretary. I didn't really appreciate this until graduate school... I bombed my…

For those keeping score, the DonorsChoose Challenge stands at $3,262 right now. Only hours remain before this week's incentive deadline, so act quickly: For another $290, I'll stab myself with a fork. For another $540, I'll read and respectfully review Richard Dawkins's book, or some other atheist screed For another $2,737, you'll get one blissful year free of post titles like this one. If any of those options appeal to you, act quickly. Time is running out... (I'll do something different for an incentive next week. What, I'm not sure, but there'll be something different.)

An anonymous donor cashes in a $30 donation to ask: Homework solutions from intro physics through grad school physics are available online, and while working through Jackson and Goldstein problems can be miserable without some guidance, the temptation is there to plagiarize. When you teach, do you use book-problems or write your own? Do you trust that those who are really interested in the subject will do the right thing and slog through homework like thousands before them? An excellent question. Homework is really a vexing issue. There's no way to really learn physics without doing…

To the men and woman campaigning for the President of the United States: Hey, how's it going. Boy, I bet it seems like this campaign has been going on forever, huh? All those pancake breakfasts and rubber-chicken dinners... I don't know how you guys manage it. But here's the thing: the campaign season is really only just starting. It's October now, just over a year from the election, and this is when Americans really start to think about politics. The leaves are starting to fall, there's football on tv, and the air is crisp and cool, with a faint whiff of... desperation. So, this seems like a…

Mixing Memory : Women in Math, Science, and Engineering, and Playing Video Games The solution to the gender disparity in science: Mandatory first-person shooters for everyone! (tags: gender science psychology) Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Sweetening the Deal Handing out chocolate boosts teaching evaluation scores. (tags: academia education science) Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: A Sharp Critique of MBA Education A critique of business schools that goes beyond "They're full of assholes." (tags: academia…