drorzel | June 27, 2007It's been ages since I posted a True Lab Story, mostly because I've been too busy to do anything really dumb. I had a good day for True Lab Stories yesterday, though, so here's a tale of something idiotic I did, or, rather, had my students do.
I have a student working on a project to put anti-reflection coatings on some diode lasers, which will help improve their performance in various ways that don't really matter here. This requires the deposition of a very even layer of material that's a couple hundred nanometers thick, which we do using a vacuum evaporator. This consists of a bell jar…
drorzel | June 27, 2007The final step in the tenure process here is the Very Nice Letter. I'm not sure that it's an official step, as opposed to an established tradition, but whichever it actually is, at the end of the process, a candidate who passes the tenure review gets a letter from the faculty committee that handles tenure and promotion reviews highlighting the positive things said in the course of the tenure review.
As one of my colleagues noted, this is probably the only time (prior to retirement) that you get an official letter telling you how great you are, so these are to be cherished. I got my Very Nice…
drorzel | June 26, 2007Inside Higher Ed today offers an opinion piece about "assessment" which is the current buzzword in academia. It correctly identifies a split in academic attitudes toward internal ("for us"-- assessment of classes and programs within the academy) and external assessments ("for them"-- assessments to be used in comparing institutions, as called for by the Spellings commission), and speculates a bit about the reasons, including:
We know the "us" -- faculty members, students, department chairs, deans -- and we know how to talk about what goes on at our institution with each other. Even amid the…
drorzel | June 26, 2007Two news releases came across my EurekAlert feeds containing findings that I'm shocked-- shocked!-- to learn about. The first delivers the startling news that "A high percentage of young males appear willing to purchase alcohol for underage youth." They conducted a "shoulder tapping" study, in which young-looking students approached strangers outside liquor stores, and asked them to buy booze. Eight percent of the general population agreed, compared to nineteen percent of "casually dressed [males] entering the store alone who appeared to be 21 to 30 years old."
You might question whether 19%…
drorzel | June 26, 2007This is the last of the short fiction categories. You can read my comments on the Best Novella and Best Short Story nominees in the archives. This means the only fiction nominees I have left to read are Blindsight and Glasshouse.
The nominees in the Best Novelette category (the full text of all the stories can be found via the official nominations page) are:
"Yellow Card Man,"Paolo Bacigalupi
"Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth," Michael F Flynn
"The Djinn's Wife,"Ian McDonald
"All the Things You Are,"Mike Resnick
"Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy),"Geoff Ryman
Best…
drorzel | June 26, 2007Ethan Zuckerman has an interesting addition to the discussion of class and networking, offering a description of a talk by danah boyd (whose name I have been capitalizing, which apparently isn't right) about the history and usage of MySpace and Facebook. What's particularly striking is the opening:
danah began her discussion with two quotes, one from über-blogger Kathy Sierra's 16-year old daughter Skyler, who observed, "If you're not on MySpace, you don't exist." The other quote, from a 16-year old named Amy, explains the appeal of these spaces for some American teens: "My mom doesn't let…
drorzel | June 26, 2007Yesterday's Danah Boyd article has produced a lot of responses around the Internet, with plenty of blogger types turning out to be social butterflies with accounts on both Facebook and MySpace. So much for social science, I guess.
There was an interesting collision of articles in my RSS feed this morning, though, with Travis Hime offering an aesthetic comparison:
The second point in favor of Facebook is the fact that it doesn't make my eyes bleed when I read it. The visual layout is clean and simple, in direct contrast to the garish hideousness of MySpace, even before users take the…
drorzel | June 25, 2007There's a lot of buzz in physics blogdom about the Strings 07 meeting, which starts today in Spain. They currently have a list of speakers, and promise slides and video to come.
Also, there's a new paper by Edward Witten on the arxiv, cue sound of heavenly choirs:
We consider the problem of identifying the CFT's that may be dual to pure gravity in three dimensions with negative cosmological constant. The c-theorem indicates that three-dimensional pure gravity is consistent only at certain values of the coupling constant, and the relation to Chern-Simons gauge theory hints that these may be…
drorzel | June 25, 2007I mostly read science-oriented blogs these days, where I get to hear again and again about how awful the treatment of academic scientists is, and how physics departments are horrible Kafkaesque operations dedicated to crushing the souls of postdocs and junior faculty. Which makes the train wreck that is the Philosophy department at William and Mary particularly interesting to see:
The norm in academe is for junior faculty members to sit out departmental votes on tenure decisions. Such matters should be handled only by those who have already earned tenure, the theory goes.
When it comes to…
drorzel | June 25, 2007The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has suffered some setbacks in recent months, but they aren't letting that hold them back:
CERN has announced that the Large Hadron Collider will switch on in May 2008, with collisions at full energy starting in summer 2008.
"We'll be starting up for physics in May 2008, as always foreseen, and will commission the machine to full energy in one go," said LHC project leader Lyn Evans.
Of course, they're currently working to repair a magnet that was damaged during a pressure test, so starting on schedule will mean some corners have to be cut. Specifically, they'…
drorzel | June 25, 2007Via Bora, a very interesting essay by Danah Boyd about class divisions in social networking sites:
Over the last six months, i've noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it's not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Which go where gets kinda sticky, because it seems to primarily have to…
drorzel | June 25, 2007Scott Eric Kaufman must have a dissertation deadline coming up, because his procrastination is getting intense. He's just set up a text adventure game on his blog:
You are standing near the Moral High Ground. To your South are Theists (or Theorists). To your North are Atheists (or Anti-Theorists). To your East and West are scorched earth, battered egos and hurt feelings.
> e
The land has been salted with the blood of Deleuze. There is nothing for you here.
> w then
You can play by leaving instructions in the comments. Go help Scott avoid work.
drorzel | June 24, 2007The other book that I've torn through really quickly this week is the sequel to Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell. The first third of the sequel, Ragamuffin is freely available on the web page for the book, for those who are interested. I tend to find sample chapters frustrating, though, so I didn't read it until this week, when Kate brought home a hard copy.
Crystal Rain was Caribbean-flavored steampunk set on a lost colony world, where a war between humans and the alien Teotl has left both groups stranded on the planet Nanagada with very little technology. The war is still being waged, though…
drorzel | June 24, 2007There are lots of other books in the booklog queue, but this one is due back at the library today, so it gets bumped to the front of the list. Of course, it doesn't hurt that it's probably the most widely discussed of the books waiting to be logged...
In case you've been hiding out in a cave that no book reviews can penetrate, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is Michael Chabon's new novel about a Jewish homeland in Alaska. In this alternate history, the founding of Israel went catastrophically wrong, and the Zionists were driven into the sea by Arab armies. Lacking a home in the Holy Land, a…
drorzel | June 22, 2007The great media relations debate is starting to wind down, but there's still a bit of life in it. In particular, I want to comment on something that Bora said, that was amplified on by Melinda Barton. Here's Bora's comment:
Everyone is afraid to use the F word, but the underlying tension is, at its core, the same as in the discussion of Framing Science:
The scientists want to educate.
The journalists want to inform (if not outright entertain, or at least use entertaining hooks in order to inform).
There is a difference between the two goals. The former demands accuracy. The latter demands…
drorzel | June 22, 2007The other day, while we were walking from my office back to the lab, one of my students asked me a question that's perfect for a Dorky Poll:
What's the coolest single word you've encountered in physics?
His vote was for "antineutrino," but I've got to go with "counterintuitive," as in "Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage uses a counterintuitive pulse sequence to excite atoms without populating the intermediate state," or "the idea of making atoms cold by shining laser light on them is somewhat counterintuitive."
"Counterintuitive" captures a lot of what I enjoy most about physics. We work…
drorzel | June 22, 2007Here's my achievement for the week:
OK, that may not seem like much, but this is what it looked like before I started:
OK, that's not really my only accomplishment for the week-- I have three students for the first half of the summer (two of them for the whole summer), and all three got off to good starts on their summer projects this week. That's why it's taken me a whole week to clean my office-- I've been run ragged getting them all going, and keeping on top of their progress.
Still, the important papers have been filed, the unimportant ones recycled, and the trash taken away. Time to…
drorzel | June 22, 2007Via Jennifer Ouellette, I find that there's a site where you can get a movie-style rating for your blog. And the answer is:
by Mingle2
Well, fuck.
drorzel | June 21, 2007President Bush vetoed a bill that would have allowed more funding for stem cell research, saying that it would force taxpayers to support the destruction of life:
"Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical," Mr. Bush said in a brief ceremony in the East Room of the White House. He called the United States "a nation founded on the principle that all human life is sacred."
In totally unrelated news, we continue to rain fiery death upon Middle Easterners who have displeased us.