drorzel | August 15, 2007The thirteenth edition of the physics-themed blog carnival Philosophia Naturalis has been posted at Cocktail Party Physics. There's a whole bunch of good stuff there, and also some links to the recent silliness about the term "God Particle."
If you're looking for good physics-related reading on the Internet, it's your one-stop shopping source.
drorzel | August 15, 2007Legendary Yankee shortstop Phil "Scooter" Rizzuto died Tuesday at 89. I've never been a huge baseball fan, and Rizzuto's playing days ended well before I was born, but as an announcer and pitchman, he was an absolute fixture of my childhood.
(Obligatory Celebrity Dead Pool: If famous people's deaths come in threes, who completes the set with Alpher and Rizzuto?)
Rizzuto's best days as an announcer were probably also behind him when I used to hear him doing Yankee games-- by the 80's, he was mostly just charmingly addled, offering rambling anecdotes that he sometimes lost track of-- but he was…
drorzel | August 14, 2007A simple but high-stakes fill-in-the-blank question:
The right and proper symbol to represent the square root of negative one is _______.
The incorrect answer will brand you as an engineer, and you will be cast into the outer darkness to spend eternity converting drill sizes into sensible units.
Choose wisely.
drorzel | August 14, 2007In just a few days, Kate and I are leaving for Japan, for a couple of weeks of tourism before Worldcon. Most of the important things have been done-- we've got tickets, and hotel reservations, and JR Pass vouchers, and that sort of thing. Things remaining to be dealy with (a partial list):
Medication. What a drag it is getting old-- when I went in 1998, I didn't take anything other than Advil and Aleve, but now, Kate and I rely on a variety of prescription medications. We need to pick up refills of our various drugs, and copies of the prescriptions are supposed to be in the mail to us-- I'm…
drorzel | August 14, 2007I don't know if it's official enough for Wikipedia, but the college has posted a nice obituary for Ralph Alpher:
Alpher taught at Union from 1986 to 2004 and was director of the Dudley Observatory. He also spent more than 30 years at the General Electric Research and Development Center in Niskayuna.
In 1948, as a young doctoral student, he wrote the first mathematical model for the creation of the universe and predicted the discovery of cosmic background radiation that proves the Big Bang theory.
Hundreds of people showed up at George Washington University for his dissertation defense, but…
drorzel | August 13, 2007A simple question today:
Which do you prefer, e or π?
They're both irrational, they're both "about three," and of course they're related by Euler's formula, but they're very different. One is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, the other is the base for the exponential function.
You can only pick one: which one is it?
I think I'll go with e. Nothing against π, but I've spent a lot of time working with differential equations, and you just have to love a function that is its own derivative.
And nobody has ever been dorky enough to attempt to show off by memorizing the…
drorzel | August 13, 2007The New York Times Sunday book review section yesterday had on the cover a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. "Oh," I said, "That could be interesting."
Then, I noticed. It's by Christopher Hitchens. "Well," I said, "Maybe they just don't know all that many British people..."
It opens with:
In March 1940, in the "midnight of the century" that marked the depth of the Hitler-Stalin pact (or in other words, at a time when civilization was menaced by an alliance between two Voldemorts or "You-Know-Whos"), George Orwell [...]
And that's where I stopped, because, you know, life is…
drorzel | August 13, 2007I am sorry to report the passing of Ralph Alpher, of the famous "Alpher-Bethe-Gamow" paper. I don't know many details, but he's been in poor health for some time, so this is sad but not surprising news.
Ralph Alpher was an astrophysicist and cosmologist whose thesis work with George Gamow on the origin of the universe was a critical early step in the development of the "Big Bang" theory. Alpher predicted the existence of the cosmic microwave background, and estimated its temperature (at 5K, not far from the correct value of 2.7 K) in 1948, nearly two decades before it was detected by Penzias…
drorzel | August 12, 2007Why is it that, in the universe of The Bourne Identity and sequels, Jason Bourne's girlfriends need to cut and dye their hair in order to go on the lam, but he makes no effort to disguise his appearance? He just wanders around looking like Matt Damon, and nobody notices him at all.
Is it double-blind reverse psychology? "The last thing they would expect is for me to go around without any disguise at all, so that's just what I'll do!"
Or is he using the Matt Damon thing to his advantage? Is the CIA of that world too busy waterboarding Ben Affleck to notice that there are two guys who look like…
drorzel | August 12, 2007I first encountered Matt Ruff on Usenet, as a poster on rec.arts.sf.written. When I found out he had books published, I picked up Sewer, Gas, and Electric, which was good enough to put him on the buy-immediately list. Of course, that hasn't cost me a great deal of money, as he's only written two books since then, Set This House in Order back in 2003, and the new Bad Monkeys, which I bought and read on the way to St. John.
Bad Monkeys is the story of Jane Charlotte, a woman who is in prison for a murder that she cheerfully admits committing, who has a remarkable story to tell. She claims to be…
drorzel | August 11, 2007Our vacation in the Virgin Islands was with family, so we spent most of our time in a group of six people, and there was no small element of cat-herding involved in getting things arranged. This tends to drive me up the wall, so I made a point of spending one morning doing something that didn't require me to wait on anybody else: I hiked the Caneel Hill Trail:
(The sign in the picture is actually near the end of the hike that I did, but it shows the trail clearly.)
The trail really starts in Cruz Bay, but I picked it up where it intersects the Lind Point Trail, just up the hill from where we…
drorzel | August 10, 2007I'm working on something at the moment that involves talking a bit about the historical development of quantum theory, and specifically the demonstration of the wave nature of electrons. One of the famous proofs of this is the Davisson-Germer experiment, showing that electrons bouncing off a nickel target produce a diffraction pattern.
(As an aside, let me note that I love the fact that the Wikipedia stub on the experiment blatantly plagiarizes the text of the Hyperphysics page (which is screamingly obvious, in that it refers to a figure that they didn't cut-and-paste into Wikipedia). Way to…
drorzel | August 10, 2007The National Science Board has released a draft report for public comment titled "A National Action Plan for Addressing the Critical Needs of the U.S. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education System." You can dowload the PDF of the report from that page, and email any comments to: NSB_STEMaction@nsf.gov.
I've only skimmed the report, so I won't be sending comments in any time soon, but if I were to make a snap suggestion, it would be that they re-order their suggestions to reflect the usefulness of the recommendations.
They have a helpful one-sentence summary of their two "…
drorzel | August 10, 2007This might be too abstract for a really good Dorky Poll, but I've got a bunch of stuff that I really need to do, and I've been thinking a bit about curricular issues, so this came to mind:
Which would you rather know more about, Classical Optics or Thermodynamics?
Imagine that you're being offered a choice by some sort of magical being: you can choose one of these two disciplines, and know absolutely everything there is to know about it, while you will never know more about the other than you do at the moment of the decision. Which would you pick?
drorzel | August 10, 2007Via Inside Higher Ed, the Center for Responsive Politics has a new report on political contributions by academics
So far in the '08 election cycle, people who work for institutions of higher education have given more than $7 million to federal candidates, parties and committees, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Nearly 60 percent of that money has gone to presidential candidates. The industry's favorite, Barack Obama, has raked in nearly $1.5 million in the campaign's first six months, followed by Hillary Clinton with almost $940,000.
Seventy-six percent of the…
drorzel | August 9, 2007Blogging will continue to be relatively light for the next few weeks, as I'm currently in a sort of Vacation Interregnum-- as you can tell from the picture posts, we just got back from the Virgin Islands, and at the end of next week, we're heading to Japan for three weeks of tourism and Worldcon. Also, I'm still catching up on stuff that happened when I was out of town last week.
As a child of the 80's, though, I can't let jefitoblog's new project pass by without comment: for the month of August, he's posting a Power Ballad of the Day. Notable songs to date include "The Flame" by Cheap Trick…
drorzel | August 9, 2007The American Express "Members Project" has selected a winner, though not without a whiff of controversy. Of course, given that the winning project is intended to provide safe drinking water for children, which is exactly the sort of unglamourous but necessary work that really needs more funding, it would be tacky in the extreme to complain at length.
The locally hyped DonorsChoose proposal came in second in the voting, and will receive $100,000 (as will three other runner-up projects), which isn't too shabby. Thanks to all those who voted and contributed, and congratulations to all the…
drorzel | August 9, 2007I should preface this with a note that I am one of the world's worst nature photographers. I don't have a very fancy camera, and I'm not terribly good at spotting critters at the best of times, so my best pictures are of relatively immobile creatures like the crab in yesterday's post. Still, I find myself trying to take pictures of lots of animals and bird, and here's a selection of what I got from St. John. The vast majority of these are birds, for whatever reason, such as these pelicans off Lovango Key:
(click for larger image). Pelicans on land or in the water are ridiculous, ungainly-…
drorzel | August 8, 2007South Carolina football coach Steve Spurrier is hopping mad over the decision to deny admission to two recruits who were above the NCAA minimum standard for eligibility, but did not meet the University's requirements. Said Spurrier:
"As long as I'm the coach here, we're going to take guys that qualify. If not, then I'm going to have to go somewhere else because I can't tell a young man to come to school here, he qualifies, and not do that. And we did that this year."
In a sane world, the response to this ought to be "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out," but, of course,…