drorzel | July 3, 2014I didn't plan to do a follow-up to yesterday's post about the optics of sending messages with lasers, but then I starting idly thinking about detection, prompted in part by a bunch of conversations with my summer students about single-photon detectors. which led to scribbling on the back of an envelope, which led to Googling, and suddenly, I have a follow-up post.
So: as we said yesterday, if you want to send messages over a distance of ten light years, a relatively efficient way to do this might be to send them via lasers. This results in the light being spread over a pretty big area, though…
drorzel | July 2, 2014In the comments to yesterday's grumpy post about the Fermi paradox, makeinu raises the idea that advanced aliens would be using more targeted communications than we do:
On the point about electromagnetic communications: even we are now using lasers to target communications with space, because it’s simply more efficient and reliable.
It’s also basically impossible to intercept, since you literally have to interrupt the beam to do so.
This is true, to a point, but when you're talking about interstellar distances, it's not quite true that you have to interrupt the beam to detect communications…
drorzel | July 1, 2014I've seen a bunch of people linking approvingly to this piece about the "Fermi paradox," (the question of why we haven't seen any evidence of other advanced civilizations) and I can't quite understand why. The author expends a good deal of snark taking astronomers and physicists to task for constructing elaborate solutions to Fermi paradox on the basis of shoddy and unjustified assumptions. And then proceeds to offer a different solution for the Fermi paradox based on shoddy and unjustified assumptions. Whee!
I mean, there is an element of this that's useful, namely the reminder that "We…
drorzel | July 1, 2014The physics vs. philosophy slow-motion blogfight continues, the latest major contribution being Sean Carroll's "Physicists Should Stop Saying silly Things About Philosophy. I've been mostly trying to stay out of this, but when I read through the comments at Sean's post to see if anybody offered any specific examples of problems that could've been avoided by talking to philosophers, I was kind of surprised to find a lot of people talking up Niels Bohr. (Likewise Ashutosh Jogalekar's Philosophy Begins Where Physics Ends....) If you're trying to talk up the virtues of philosophy over "pure"…
drorzel | June 30, 2014For some reason, the topic of really big rocks came up at dinner the other night, and SteelyKid declared that she wanted to find "A rock as big as the solar system." We pointed out that that was pretty much impossible, more or less by definition, rocks being sub-parts of the solar system.
"OK, how about a rock as big as Jupiter?" That's a much harder question to answer, and required a trip to the Internet. Not during dinner, of course-- it's hard enough to get her to eat when we're all sitting at the table-- but a day or so later, which led to this blog post.
So, there are a couple of…
drorzel | June 27, 2014I'm not quite awake enough yet to deal with reviewing copyedits and reformatting figures for the book-in-process, so while I wait for the caffeine to kick in, let's talk something simple and cheerful: rural poverty. This week, Vox and the New York Times both touched on this, the former with a story about the food stamp cookbook and the latter with a magazine story about Clay County, KY, spinning off a statistical study of the hardest places to live in the US.
The Vox piece is mostly on poverty in general, and how there's more to the bad diets of poor people than just lack of money--…
drorzel | June 26, 2014After a bit of a hiatus because of scheduling issues, Rhett and I are back to talk about... stuff. Mostly summer classes, World Cup soccer, and Twitter. Also, how we've each gotten a blog comment from Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Miscellaneous links:
-- My long-ago book review and Rhett's more recent complaint about Cosmos, where we each had a brush with scientific celebrity.
-- My silly cat tweet that's generated a huge amount of traffic:
Busy day at Schroedinger Industries... RT @EmrgencyKittens: How to organize your cats. pic.twitter.com/z3QS0fnSdL
— Chad Orzel (@orzelc) June 24, 2014
-- Rhett's…
drorzel | June 24, 2014A few weeks back, a Union alumnus who works at Troy Prep contacted the college to arrange a visit for a bunch of second-graders, and asked if faculty would be willing to arrange talks and demos for the kids. I said something like "Sure, we could probably make liquid nitrogen ice cream for them," and then basically forgot about it until last week, when I said "Oh, crap, I have to make liquid nitrogen ice cream for 60 seven-year-olds on Monday!"
Fortunately, our students in the Department of Physics and Astronomy are awesome, and I was able to round up a handful of helpers from the summer…
drorzel | June 23, 2014As previously noted, I'm going to the Wordlcon in London this August, and as such will be voting on this year's Hugo Awards. The publishers provided a packet with at least bits of all the fiction nominees, so I've been reading through them at bedtime, and over the weekend finished all the regular nominees-- I still have stuff that I may or may not read for the Campbell-that-is-not-a-Hugo-but-is-handed-out-at-the-same-time. I wouldn't really bother to say anything about them beyond the couple of comments I've already dropped on Twitter, but Kate quoted me in her recap of the Short Story…
drorzel | June 19, 2014As noted earlier, I was a guest on the Read Science! hangout on G+ earlier today. If you weren't able to watch it live, the video is available at that link, and I'll embed it here:
There were some feedback problems with the audio for a little while-- annoyingly, it only got bad once the hangout went live-- there was a tiny echo when we were talking about logistics beforehand, but not enough to justify screwing around with earbuds. then when we started the actual event, it suddenly got completely awful for a while. It does get better, though-- I have no idea why, but later on, the echo is…
drorzel | June 19, 2014Rhett and I haven't done Uncertain Dots for a couple of weeks due to scheduling issues, but that doesn't mean I'm neglecting the multimedia side of things. In fact, I'll be doing a hangout today, as a guest on the Read Science! hangout hosted by Joanne Manaster and Jeff Shaumeyer. The event page is here.
I've also got four summer research students to supervise this year, who quite reasonably expect a fair bit of my time (thus the blog silence this week), and thus I'll be doing this from my office on campus, which means Emmy isn't going to be joining in. Alas. Odds are good that I'll have to…
drorzel | June 16, 2014The latest in a long series of articles making me glad I don't work in psychology was this piece about replication in the Guardian. This spins off some harsh criticism of replication studies and a call for an official policy requiring consultation with the original authors of a study that you're attempting to replicate. The reason given is that psychology is so complicated that there's no way to capture all the relevant details in a published methods section, so failed replications are likely to happen because some crucial detail was omitted in the follow-up study.
Predictably enough, this…
drorzel | June 15, 2014Today is Father's Day in the US, so I got a bunch of little gifts from the kids. The Pip's was just a construction-paper card mostly made by his teachers, with a bit of scribble on it. SteelyKid's, though, included a fill-in-the-blank booklet that she wrote on and drew pictures to go with.
Some of the pictures are extremely detailed and colorful, such as this one where she describes a conversation we have Every. Single. Night.:
SteelyKid's extremely detailed depiction of a conversation we have every night.
(SteelyKid is a terrible eater, and it's a struggle to get her to eat anything. She'…
drorzel | June 12, 2014A bunch of people were talking about this Nature Jobs article on the GRE this morning while I was proctoring the final for my intro E&M class, which provided a nice distraction. I posted a bunch of comments about it to Twitter, but as that's awfully ephemeral, I figured I might as well collect them here. Which, purely coincidentally, also provides a nice way to put off grading this big stack of exam papers...
Anyway, the thrust of the article is that the GRE is a bad thing to be using as an admissions criterion for graduate school in science and engineering, because it has large…
drorzel | June 10, 2014I had a couple of conversations at DAMOP last week about career issues, and I just want to note that I will never get used to the idea that I'm a respected elder anything, whose advice would be valued. I basically feel like I lucked into my whole career, so I hesitate to advise others as to what they should do. But then, there's a huge element of luck in any tenure-track career, given the tiny ratio of jobs to candidates.
One thing that came up was, of course, the question of how it is I run a blog, which connects to the larger question of work-life balance. One of the people I spoke to…
drorzel | June 9, 2014The Cosmos reboot season finale (or possibly series finale; not sure if they're trying for a second set of episodes) was last night, but I wasn't able to take part in the live-tweeting of it thanks to a super-restless Pip who didn't drop off until 9:30 EDT. I suppose I could've waited to start the DVR until I would synch up with the West Coast showing, but then, I also need sleep. and I greatly enjoyed being able to fast-forward through the innumerable commercials.
And, really, if you want the story of the Cosmos reboot in a nutshell, there's no better capsule summary than the treatment of…
drorzel | June 8, 2014Made it home Friday evening after another bout of airline nonsense-- they had replaced the plane for my flight into Albany with a smaller aircraft, so my email boarding pass assigned me to a nonexistent seat. Which had been corrected in their computer, but was never communicated to me, or to several other passengers who found themselves holding boarding passes from online that had the same seat assignments as passengers who had printed them at the airport. To be fair to Delta, this was the only glitch out of four flights, but it was a doozy.
Anyway, DAMOP was a lot of fun, but exhausting. So…
drorzel | June 4, 2014I'm working on some short pop-quantum explainers for reasons that I'll be a little cagey about. In casting around for a novel way to introduce Schrödinger's cat states, I hit on something that probably works, but illustrates the problems inherent in being both a professional physicist and a pop-science writer.
The hook, as I mentioned on Twitter a little while back (early on a weekend morning, so nobody read it) is that you have Schrödinger's cat to thank for the computer you're reading this on. The core idea of the infamous cat paradox is that it's both alive and dead at the same time,…
drorzel | June 2, 2014I don't have anything all that new to say about last night's Cosmos reboot, and I'm leaving for scenic Madison, WI today to attend DAMOP, so I don't have a great deal of time. Kate did mention something over dinner last night, though, that's a good topic for a quick blog post.
Kate's a big listener of audiobooks and podcasts, including The Naked Scientists podcast, and she mentioned something they said in responding to a question about charging phones and the cost of electricity:
I think my favourite one is a microwave oven. So, the clock on a microwave oven uses more electricity over the…
drorzel | May 28, 2014For the sixteenth episode of Uncertain Dots, we decided to bring in some guests, Andy Rundquist and Kelly O'Shea for a conversation about standards-based grading. This came up because I'm playing around with this using the same tiered scheme I talked about back in January.
This was a fun conversation, and some interesting ideas came up. I remain kind of boggled by the amount of oral exam time Andy puts in, and I find the notion of goal-less problems intriguing, but I'm not sure I could implement it here.
Some links:
Kelly on goal-less problems
Direct Measurement Video
So, anyway, that was…