drorzel | April 19, 2007It's Decision Season in academia.
Across the country, high-school students are losing sleep at night worrying about where to go to college next year. We've had our annual Accepted Students Open House days (the second was Monday, with the turnout significantly reduced by the bad weather), at which we meet with students who are considering coming to Union, show them around, and try to talk them into coming here next fall. Our chairman desevres a special award of merit for the effort he puts in-- in addition to going to the massive all-campus lunch, and talking to students there, he'll conduct…
drorzel | April 19, 2007One of the things that I always have to explain toward the end of my laser cooling spiel is that the technique only works well for particular atoms. Somewhere on the high side of twenty different elements have been laser cooled and trapped, but the standard techniques don't generalize well to even simple diatomic molecules, let alone solids.
Given that, you might be surprised to see the headline "Laser Cooling of Coin-sized Objects," referring to this paper in Physical Review Letters. The description sounds really cool:
Now, a collaboration of scientists from the LIGO Laboratory at MIT and…
drorzel | April 19, 2007The other night, while ranting to Kate between my posted rants about Virginia Tech (have I mentioned that she's way too good to me?), I mentioned in passing that the gun control debate is one of the two great brain-sucking quagmire arguments of American politics, where even a passing mention ends up with all the particpants being trapped in an endless and pointless argument that accomplishes nothing.
"What's the other one?" she asked.
"Abortion."
And today, I see that Scalzi's proving me right. Thanks, John.
drorzel | April 18, 2007Orac is struggling to understand the problem with "framing," and thinks he has the answer:
I've concluded that a lot of issues underlying this kerfuffle may be the difference between the "pure" scientists and science teachers (like PZ and Larry Moran, for example), who are not dependent upon selling their science for the continued livelihood of their careers, and scientists like me, who are, not to mention nonscientist journalists and communications faculty (like Mooney and Nisbet), for whom communication is their career.
That's a thought, but I think the answer is much simpler: PZ and Larry…
drorzel | April 18, 2007I've got another long lab this afternoon, so I'm stealing an idea for an audience-participation thread from James Nicoll:
Name five things we didn't know in the year that you were born that make the universe a richer place to think about.
This is actually a really interesting exercise for showing how rapidly the world has changed in the last N years. I'm not all that old-- to put it in pop-culture terms, the Beatles broke up before I was born-- but when I try to think about the landscape of science since then, it's astonishing how much the world has changed:
My own field of laser cooling,…
drorzel | April 17, 2007I'm sick and tired. Not metaphorically, literally. I had two labs today, and the cold I thought I had shaken back when classes started has come back with a vengeance, so I'm all congested and coughing. So here's something silly to pass the time, via Kate among others:
The following are "plot keywords" from IMDB for some movies I really like. Guess the movie based on the keywords.
Small Town, Alcoholism, High School, Redemption
Repressed Homosexual, Small Town, Missouri
Small Town, Quitting Job, Famous Song, Real Time
Eccentric, Widower, Small Town, Garfield Assassination
Eating Contest,…
drorzel | April 17, 2007Mike Dunford didn't like my previous post, and says that it's important to talk about gun control right now:
But we also cannot forget that people are dead. We cannot forget that people have been murdered. We cannot forget that many - too many - lives have been brought to a sudden, random end. We cannot forget that these deaths were not necessary, that they could have been avoided. [...]
How, in good conscience, could we possibly be expected to shut up right now?
I managed to edit all the f-bombs out of yesterday's post, but this annoys me. I'm not sure exactly which straw caused the fatal…
drorzel | April 16, 2007Like everybody else, I'm horrified by the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech. It's the sort of nightmare situation you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy.
Of course, the bodies aren't even cold yet, and already the blogosphere is a-flutter with people touting this as proof that the US needs to change its gun laws in one direction or another. I'm not going to link to them, but I've already seen three or four pieces using this to push one side or the other of the gun control debate, and I have a simple message for those people:
Stop. Please, just stop.
For the love of God, show a little tact, and…
drorzel | April 16, 2007The big physics news of the week last week came while I was in transit on Wednesday: The MiniBooNE (the odd capitalization is because it's sort of an acronym) neutrino experiment released their first results on the neutrino oscillation studies they've been doing, and found, well, nothing new. In contrast to a previous experiment that hinted at the possible existence of a fourth type of neutrinos, the MiniBooNE results were entirely consistent with having only the three previously known types. There's a news article here, and one of the MiniBooNE experimenters did a excellent guest post…
drorzel | April 16, 2007After three glorious sixty-degree days in California, we returned to Schenectady just in time for a major winter storm. In mid-April. There's an inch or two of icy slush all over everything, and it's still raining. Whee!
It occurs to me again that what we're seeing locally from climate change feels more like a climate phase shift than a consistent warming. Yeah, December was really warm, but March and April have been cold and shitty. Summer extended well into September last year, but it didn't really get started until July-- teeth were chattering at our commencement ceremony last year in mid-…
drorzel | April 15, 2007Scott Aaronson is explaining "Physics for Doofuses," and has started with electricity. He's got a nice breakdown of the basic quantities that you need to keep track of to understand electricity, leading up to Ohm's Law. He asks for a little help on this point, though:
Well, as it turns out, the identities don't always hold. That they do in most cases of interest is just an empirical fact, called Ohm's Law. I suspect that much confusion could be eliminated in freshman physics classes, were it made clear that there's nothing obvious about this "Law": a new physical assumption is being…
drorzel | April 14, 2007Physical Review Letters this week features a paper on a topic that might not seem to be in dispute: Newton's Second Law of Motion:
We have tested the proportionality of force and acceleration in Newton's second law, F=ma, in the limit of small forces and accelerations. Our tests reach well below the acceleration scales relevant to understanding several current astrophysical puzzles such as the flatness of galactic rotation curves, the Pioneer anomaly, and the Hubble acceleration. We find good agreement with Newton's second law at accelerations as small as 5Ã10-14 m/s2.
I'm writing this on…
drorzel | April 14, 2007The NCUR meeting and associated activities (including a minor little adventure into San Francisco) have kept me really busy over the last few days. We're headed out early this afternoon, which means that we finally have a morning without any obligations. And, of course, there's a cold, steady rain falling after two days of spectacularly beautiful weather. So I'm blogging from the hotel while waiting for the shuttle to the airport.
The conference was a national meeting for undergraduates doing research, and the presentations included everything from art exhibitions to literature talks and…
drorzel | April 12, 2007Greetings from pitch-dark Northern California, where I'm just ecstatically happy to be awake at 5am. Jet lag sucks.
Other things that suck? Weather delays. We were supposed to arrive at about 1:00 yesterday afternoon, but snow in Chicago screwed that up completely. We spent a good hour and a half sitting on the plane at the gate at O'Hare, where they were down to one working runway, and two working de-icing trucks. This, on top of delays getting into Chicago due to the weather (see "one working runway") meant that we didn't get in until 4:00, so rather than spending a leisurely afternoon…
drorzel | April 10, 2007I'm headed out to the West Coast at an ungodly hour tomorrow morning, as one of the faculty accompanying the students who are presenting at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research. I'm looking forward to the trip, other than the bit where I have to get up at 4am to go to the airport.
Prior to departure, I decided to check the current Security Theater status, and looked at the Official List of Things You Can't Take On Planes. The TSA helpfully provides a very long table of items that you might be thinking of bringing on the plane (lacrosse sticks, flare guns, cattle prods, nunchakus…
drorzel | April 10, 2007Let me be the millionth person to link to the Washington Post article about the busking virtuoso. Let me also agree with Kevin Drum about the reasons nobody listened:
Plus, of course, IT WAS A METRO STATION. People needed to get to work on time so their bosses wouldn't yell at them. Weingarten mentions this, with appropriately high-toned references to Kant and Hume, but somehow seems to think that, in the end, this really shouldn't matter much. There should have been throngs of culture lovers surrounding Bell anyway. It's as if he normally lives on Mars and dropped by Earth for a few minutes…
drorzel | April 10, 2007I forgot to link to Sunday's New York Times article about D-Wave and their controversial claim to have made a working quantum computer, which prominently features quotes from the world's second funniest physics blogger:
Scott Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist at the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Canada, fired the first shot. He wrote in his much-read blog, called "Shtetl-Optimized," that Orion would be as useful at problem-solving as "a roast beef sandwich." In an e-mail message to me, Dr. Aaronson denounced Orion as "hype." He said that he could…
drorzel | April 10, 2007An idle observation: One of the more ironic things about the whole framing argument (other than the sheer number of people talking past one another, as Mike notes in passing) is how quick a lot of the anti-framing people are to declare that Mooney and Nisbet are just completely and totally wrong. And the people who are most adamant about Nisbet and Mooney being way off base are the people who are most outraged whenever somebody with an engineering degree dares to say something stupid about biology.
The irony here is that this framing business is exactly Nisbet's area of expertise. This is…
drorzel | April 9, 2007The Official Uncertain Principles Cosmic Jackpot Giveaway Contest was even more popular than I expected, with 122 comments (at the time of this writing) each trying to pick the "best" number.
As promised, the winner will be announced today, but this really comes down to deciding which number is the best. So, what's the best number?
The "best" number should obviously be something with intrinsic fundamental importance. Numbers like 7 and 37 and 206 (I liked that entry a lot) are interesting, but not all that fundamental. Constants of nature like h, c, or even the fine-structure constant alpha…
drorzel | April 9, 2007The Comics Curmudgeon and others note the death of Johnny Hart, arguably the best known religious wing nut from Broome County, New York, where I grew up. (Sadly, this is not a set of one, as the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue also traces its origins to the Binghamton area.) Hart was the creator of the comic strip B.C., in which wisecracking cavemen occasionall veered off into discussions of or lengthy quotes from Scripture.
The strip hasn't been consistently funny for at least fifteen years, and I found his personal views kind of obnoxious, but the man was a Broome County icon, and it's…