drorzel | September 30, 2007
"Dude, what is your deal?"
"What? I'm just taking a couple of pictures."
"A couple? You've taken, like, forty pictures of me already today. You're cramping my style. I'm trying to go for a walk, here. I've got bushes to sniff, lawns to pee on, critters to chase-- I don't have time for photography."
"Sorry, but you remember that book contract?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I'm obliged to provide them with a number of reproduction-quality photographs of you, for possible use as chapter illustrations."
"Oh." She's quiet for a minute. "So, these are going to be published?"
"Maybe."
"Well, then, at least make…
drorzel | September 30, 2007If you like free money, Six Apart (owners of Movable Type and LiveJournal) have an offer for you: send them an email, and they'll send you $30.
"What's the catch?" you say. Because there has to be a catch...
And, indeed, there is a catch: the $30 is in the form of a gift certificate for DonorsChoose.org, the favorite educational charity of ScienceBlogs and a bunch of other people. But that's not a problem, right? After all, you like kids, and you believe in education, right?
So, send them an email by 5pm PDT tomorrow, and get your gift certificate. And tomorrow, I'll have some suggestions for…
drorzel | September 30, 2007The selection of a smaller subject area for viewing, and the contrast between the dim interior and the bright exterior really enhance the aesthetic experience of the garden:
What?
That's a picture of the garden at Koto-in, a subtemple of Daitoku-ji in northwest Kyoto, cropped down a bit from the original in this set of pictures. You can also get something of the same effect from a pure outdoor shot:
In this case, a shot through the upper gate at Ninna-ji, also in northwest Kyoto, and part of the same photoset.
drorzel | September 29, 2007I haven't even had a book contract for a month, and already I'm engaging in Authorial Avoidance Behavior...
I spent a while this morning messing around with setting up a del.icio.us account. This does actually have a worthwhile goal, namely to be an improvement over my current system of keeping a hundred tabs open in Opera containing articles I might want to mention on the blog. This way, I can file them in a central place, and not have the browser open tempting me to web-surf when I ought to be writing.
But, of course, it's also a wonderful excuse to putz around on the web, doing nothing…
drorzel | September 29, 2007America's Finest News Source has the last word in generic science articles:
According to the scientists, the electromagnetic science-maker will make atoms move and spin around very quickly, though spectators at the hearing said afterward they could not account for how one could get some atoms to move around faster than other ones if everything is made of atoms anyway. In addition, the scientists said that the device would be several miles in circumference, which puzzled onlookers who had long assumed that atoms were tiny. Despite these apparent inconsistencies, the scientists, in Rep. Gordon'…
drorzel | September 29, 2007From the "You Read Too Much SF" file: I was really disappointed by the press release that went with the headline:
Mysterious energy burst stuns astronomers
A headline like that really ought to involve bodies strewn about a remote observatory, and enigmatic alien forces roaming free, perhaps being hunted by menacing government agents. Sadly, it just refers to some sort of surprisingly large radio emitter in the very distant reaches of the universe.
drorzel | September 28, 2007Via a mailing list, two giraffes beating each other up:
I'm sure that an actual biologist could explain something about what this odd behavior signifies, and there's probably some fascinating biophysics in the way that they whip their necks around like that.
But, really, in the end, my main reaction is "Dude! Head-butting giraffes!"
(YouTube, of course, provides a wealth of other fighting-giraffe video, including this oddly disturbing video of a bald guy beating up a stuffed animal in the snow, to the sound of "Afternoon Delight" by the Starland Vocal Band. The Internet is an extremely…
drorzel | September 28, 2007Physics World had a news story about developments in quantum computation, covering two new papers in Nature:
Coupling superconducting qubits via a cavity bus from the groups of Steve Girvin and Rob Schoelkopf at Yale, also described in this press release.
Coherent quantum state storage and transfer between two phase qubits via a resonant cavity by a group at NIST at Boulder, also described in this press release.
These are completely independent experiments, as far as I know, but they're doing essentially the same thing: They're demonstrated the transfer of quantum information between two "…
drorzel | September 28, 2007The libertarian side of the blogosphere is all abuzz about "Direct Instruction" at the moment, thanks to a Marignal Revolution post by Alex Tabarrok touting the method:
Ayres argues that large experimental studies have shown that the teaching method which works best is Direct Instruction (here and here are two non-academic discussions which summarizes much of the same academic evidence discussed in Ayres). In Direct Instruction the teacher follows a script, a carefully designed and evaluated script. As Ayres notes this is key:
DI is scalable. Its success isn't contingent on the personality…
drorzel | September 27, 2007The New York Times is commemorating the 50th anniversary of Sputnik with a huge clump of articles about, well, space. I'm a little surprised that I haven't seen more said about these-- they turned up in my RSS feeds on Tuesday, but I've been both busy and slightly ill, and haven't gotten around to blogging them until now. I guess it's further evidence that space is no longer inherently cool. That, or there are just too many damn biologists on my blogroll.
Anyway, there's a bunch of retrospective material that I didn't really bother with, along with four pieces with more of a current…
drorzel | September 27, 2007Steven Gould's 1992 YA novel Jumper is one of my favorites in the category, a story about an abused teen who discovers that he has the ability to teleport, and how he uses that power to make a better life for himself. It's very much in the tradition of the famous Heinlein juveniles, though with much more realistic characterization and darker subject matter.
It took until 2005 for a sequel, Reflex to appear, so I was very surprised to walk into Borders a week or so ago and see Jumper: Griffin's Story prominently displayed. Even more puzzling was the cover note: "Based on the film Jumper, soon…
drorzel | September 27, 2007The Silver Pavilion:
The Golden Pavilion:
Which do you like better?
I actually have much better pictures of the Golden Pavilion (which can be seen at Flickr), but this is about as good as the Silver Pavilion shots get (see this set), so to make it a fair comparison, I went with the picture above. I'm also inordinately amused by pictures of other people taking pictures of stuff.
To answer a question raised in the previous poll, this is "non-dorky" because it's about making aesthetic judgements, not science stuff. As any smarmy art history major can tell you, science is for dorks, and dorks…
drorzel | September 26, 2007I had a 9pm intramural hoops game last night (the other team didn't show, so we won by forfeit, but it still pushed bedtime back a bit), and I have an 8am meeting today, not to mention the beginning of a nasty head cold that is turning my brain to cotton wool. Sounds like a good day for a shuffle-play post.
Below the fold, a good run of songs from the four-and-five-star playlist last night, to allow you to poke fun at my taste in pop music.
"Happy Birthday To Me," Cracker
"Always The Last To Know," Del Amitri
"Whenever God Shines His Light," Van Morrison
"Painless Life," Slender Means
"See…
drorzel | September 26, 2007So, I've put myself into a position where I need to spend a substantial amount of time thinking about weird foundational issues in quantum mechanics. This has revealed to me just why it is that not that many people spend a substantial amount of time thinking about weird foundational issues in quantum mechanics.
Let's consider a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, of the type shown in the figure at left (click the figure to see the original source). A photon (or an electron, or an atom, or any quantum particle) enters the interferometer at the lower left, and is split onto two paths by a 50-50…
drorzel | September 26, 2007Physics World has a somewhat puzzling news article about the solar system:
Physicists have known for some time that the motions of Pluto and the inner planets are chaotic. This means that a small external force on a planet could, over time, cause a major change in the position of the planet within its orbit. Although no planets are likely to collide or be ejected from the Solar System anytime soon, the chaos means that the orbits of these planets cannot be forecasted with any long-term reliability.
Whether the orbits of the gas giants are chaotic, however, is less certain -- some computer…
drorzel | September 25, 2007Sean Carroll is disappointed with academia, at least as revealed through the Chronicle of Higher Ed's article on guilty pleasures of academics:
As it turns out, compared to my colleagues I’m some sort of cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Caligula. Get a load of some of these guilty pleasures: Sudoku. Riding a bike. And then, without hint of sarcasm: Landscape restoration. Gee, I hope your Mom never finds out about that.
But the award goes to Prof. McCloskey, who in a candid examination of the dark hedonistic corners of her soul, managed to include this sentence:
Nothing pleases me…
drorzel | September 25, 2007It's been over a month since I last hit iTunes for new music, which is a long time for me. I'm going to be going on a mini buying spree tonight, so I have a simple question for my musically inclined readers:
What albums from the last couple of months should I be getting at iTunes?
I know there's a new Rilo Kiley, and a new New Pornographers, but I'm sure there are other essential albums that I need to buy. So what are they?
drorzel | September 25, 2007A simple question: We have the Great Buddha at Nara:
and the Great Buddha at Kamakura:
Which is better?
(Unfortunately, that's the best picture I have of the Nara Daibutsu. The camera has a million different modes, selected by a clicky wheel on the top, and the wheel kept getting spun to odd settings as I put the camera in and out of the case. The other shots I took in Nara were all blurry, because it was on some low-light-level setting and took really long exposures.)
drorzel | September 24, 2007I was just reminded again of a mysterious thing in Yokohama, that some readers may be able to help with. One of the first nights we were in Yokohama, I went up to the bar on the 70th floor, just to see what it was like. I was neither cool enough nor rich enough to really be there, but they let me sit at the bar and listen to the jazz band they had playing.
When I sat down, I asked the bartender what sort of draft beer they had, and he said "Budweiser." I said "I see a tap over there that says "Guinness," so bring me a Guinness."
Then I watched him go to a cooler, take out a bottle, and pour a…
drorzel | September 24, 2007I had a long post about Norman Spinrad all typed up when Firefox crashed, so you'll have to wait for train-wrecky SF goodness. So here's some sports commentary to pass the time.
It was a good sports weekend in Chateau Steelypips:
1) I don't really follow college football, but I do have a certain affection for Syracuse, so it was great to see the Orange, 36.5 point underdogs according to the bookies of the world, upset Louisville 38-35. It's always sweet when a 30-point underdog wins a game, but it's especially nice when it's one of my teams.
2) My Giants won in improbable fashion, stopping…