drorzel | June 5, 2007Blown Away is the sixth Frank Corso novel from G. M. Ford, featuring the exploits of an intrepid investigative reporter and true-crime author with a knack for getting involved in spectuacularly bloody crimes. As the sixth book in a mystery series, you pretty much know what you're going to get.
At least, it looks that way for most of the book. Really, the only reason this book rates prompt book-logging is the ending, which is all I really want to talk about here. There's just no way to do this without massive spoilers, which I will put below the fold-- if you've read the other Corso books,…
drorzel | June 4, 2007Steinn links to a post by the "Incoherent Ponderer" that was pretty much guaranteed to raise my blood pressure. It's an analysis of "Ph.D. Pedigree", spinning off earlier arguments at Cosmic Variance and elsewhere in which the Ponderer argued that there's a hiring bias in favor of "big name" Ph.D. programs.
The analysis in this case consists of tallying up the Ph.D. institutions of the faculty at the Top 50 research universities, and coming to the shocking conclusion that:
Top 10 universities contribute 59% of US PhD hires, those ranked 11-20 provide another 18%, the next ten ranked 21-30…
drorzel | June 4, 2007Once again, physics news stories are piling up in my RSS reader, so here's a collection of recent stuff:
My old group at NIST has done cool things with Bose-Eisntein condensates in an optical lattice. They load atoms into a regular array of sites, and then split each site into a double well, which is a classic test system for quantum theories. This is cool not only because it was done by people I know, but also because it's really similar to work that I did as a post-doc.
A French group has made a single electron source, that produces, well, single electrons more or less on demand. Like…
drorzel | June 4, 2007Ethan Zuckerman is blogging from the TED Global conference on Technology, Enetertainment, and Design as they apply to Africa. He's live-blogging the talks by people ranging from Ethiopian paleontologist Zeray Alemseged to some mononymic Irish singer.
This is one of those things where reading Ethan's blog makes me feel like a schmuck. I mean, he's using his blog to spread the word about ways to use technology to improve the lives of millions of the world's poorest people, and I'm posting links to doggerel poetry about cats...
I'll be doing some conference blogging of my own later this week,…
drorzel | June 4, 2007The LOLcat phenomenon has reached the world of physics, with this Schrödinger cat picture, which is pretty good. I'm also amused by Serge's poem from Making Light:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
Is Schrödinger's Cat dead?
That remains up to you.
I may need to get out more.
drorzel | June 4, 2007So, as previously mentioned in this space, Kate and I will be spending a few weeks in Japan in August/ September. Out of a combination of politeness and self-interest, it would be good if we knew at least a smattering of Japanese before going there. Back in '98, I did the book-and-tape thing, and learned at least phrasebook Japanese ("Eigo ga hanashimasu ka?"), but I remember very little of that, and Kate doesn't know any.
We've heard good things about the Rosetta Stone software packages, but those are really expensive. The goal here isn't to be able to watch anime without subtitles, it's…
drorzel | June 3, 2007Via Charles Kuffner, a story about new footage of the Loch Ness Monster. It's a dinosaur from the Bible...
I tried to watch the video with the CNN story, but their annoying player took forever to load and the kept glitching up. So I fired up YouTube, and found this Scottish news broadcast. On the bad side, it has a big watermark from the video editing program used by the person who posted it, but it features such fabulous "I swear she ain't usin' real words" accents, that I'll stick with that link.
This is also an excellent place to use this Bookslut link to a Tome Bissell's article about…
drorzel | June 3, 2007Whatever you may think of his own books (and, really, don't bother to tell me what you think of his books), this New York Review of Books article by Lee Smolin on a great whack of Einstein biographies is well worth a read. I don't really have anything to say other than that, so here's a long quote:
In his new book, Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson explains that
studying Einstein can be worthwhile [because] it helps us remain in touch with that childlike capacity for wonder...as the sagas of [science's] heroes reminds us.... These traits are...vital for this new century of…
drorzel | June 3, 2007Matt Yglesias spent a while on Friday taking shots at Newt Gingrich, and made a dumb argument in the process:
I'm consistently baffled by the invocation of China and India in this context; I'd love for somebody to write up a model for me in which the optimal level of US investment in math and science education is increased by an increase in the number of Asian scientists and engineers. If anything, it should be the reverse, right? If engineers are scarce, then a country with a lot of engineers will be a country with a lot of relatively well-compensated people. But if the supply of foreign…
drorzel | June 2, 2007Just when I'm finally starting to get a bit of a handle on what's going on in particle physics (or at least map out the areas of my ignorance), along comes Howard Georgi with "Unparticle Physics":
I discuss some simple aspects of the low-energy physics of a nontrivial scale invariant sector of an effective field theory--physics that cannot be described in terms of particles. I argue that it is important to take seriously the possibility that the unparticle stuff described by such a theory might actually exist in our world. I suggest a scenario in which some details of the production of…
drorzel | June 2, 2007Setshot lurches back to life to point out the only Democratic primary coverage I need to read: a New York Times piece on Barack Obama's love of pick-up basketball:
From John F. Kennedy's sailing to Bill Clinton's golf mulligans to John Kerry's windsurfing, sports has been used, correctly or incorrectly, as a personality decoder for presidents and presidential aspirants. So, armchair psychologists and fans of athletic metaphors, take note: Barack Obama is a wily player of pickup basketball, the version of the game with unspoken rules, no referee and lots of elbows. He has been playing since…
drorzel | June 1, 2007Five years ago today:
It's working out ok so far. I think we'll stick with it a while longer.
drorzel | June 1, 2007As a sort of companion to the previous post:
What's the last book you read because it connected to your job in some way?
I'm being a little more restrictive in the phrasing of this one, because I don't want to get a whole bunch of journal articles and arxiv links in the comments, so let's keep this to published books.
I've been doing more work-related reading of late, for a variety of reasons. Why the Sky Is Blue was work-related, in the sense that I was sent a review copy because of this blog. My other recent work-related read was Jennifer Ouellette's Black Bodies and Quantum Cats, which I…
drorzel | June 1, 2007I'm kind of fried this morning-- it's been a long week full of after-work events associated with the end of the year-- so I'm not up to doing weighty posts about physics, so here's a lighter discussion topic:
What's the last non-Internet thing you read for fun?
Blogging and work have cut into my pleasure reading recently, but the most recent thing I read just for amusement was Vol. 7 of Bill Willingham's Fables comic book series, titled Wolves. The last regular book I read was Kenneth Oppel's Skybreaker, a sequel to Airborn, his YA novel about a quasi-Victorian world full of giant world-…
drorzel | May 31, 2007Everybody's abuzz about the article by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg (the link goes to a reprint at Edge.org; you can find an illicit PDF of the Science article if you poke around a little) about research into why people don't automatically believe scientific explanations. From the article:
The main source of resistance to scientific ideas concerns what children know prior to their exposure to science. The last several decades of developmental psychology has made it abundantly clear that humans do not start off as "blank slates." Rather, even one year-olds possess a rich…
drorzel | May 31, 2007Over at evolgen, RPM is indignant about being rated by students, citing some pig-ignorant comments from RateMyProfessors. Interestingly, someone brought this up to the Dean Dad a little while ago, and he had an interesting response:
A reader wrote to ask a dean's-eye perspective on ratemyprofessors.com.
The short version: I consider it electronic gossip.
The slightly longer version: I've had enough social science training to know that small, self-selected samples lead to skewed outcomes.
The long version: and yet, from what I've seen, the ratings usually aren't that far off. Which is…
drorzel | May 31, 2007This picture is from yesterday, but the scene was more or less the same this morning:
A rabbit had hopped into our yard, to eat the spilled seed under the bird feeder (or something over there-- it's like a Disney movie sometimes, with all manner of happy little woodland creatures), so we let the dog out. She spotted the bunny, and sloooooowly crept across the patio toward it, moving very quietly so as not to disturb her prey.
Eventualy, some invisible-to-humans line was crossed, and the rabbit took off for the back part of the yard, with Her Majesty in hot pursuit. There are a number of gaps…
drorzel | May 31, 2007Steinn points to that rarest of rarities, a Gregg Easterbrook column on scientific matters (in Wired no less!) that isn't completely idiotic. In this case, he takes on the misplaced priorities of NASA.
Of course, this being Easterbrook, it can't be entirely right, and I think he's too harsh in assigning all the blame to NASA itself. For example, he writes:
NASA's to-do list neglects the two things that are actually of tangible value to the taxpayers who foot its bills -- research relevant to environmental policymaking and asteroid-strike protection. NASA has recently been canceling or…
drorzel | May 30, 2007Why the Sky Is Blue, by Götz Hoeppe is subtitled "Discovering the Color of Life," so I was a little puzzled when Princeton University Press asked me if I wanted a review copy. But, hey, free books!
This is ultimately a physics book, but it's really in the category that I think of as "Smart People Books," those books that take an exhaustive look at some phenomenon from a wide range of different perspectives. In this case, it's a survey of several thousand years of thought about the blue color of the sky.
This is an extremely comprehensive look, and I'd be surprised if there's any historical…
drorzel | May 30, 2007Seed is running an essay contest with a $2,500 prize, so if you like science, and think you write well, take a whack at this question:
What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st century?
How do we measure the scientific literacy of a society? How do we boost it? What is the value of this literacy? Who is responsible for fostering it?
They're looking for the best essay of 1,200 or fewer words, and are offering a $1,000 second prize as well. The winning entries will be published in Seed, which is a nice bonus.