drorzel | March 5, 2007It's been a while since I did a "Basic Concepts" post. They tend to take a good bit of effort, and things have been hectic enough at work that I haven't had the energy. To make up for the blizzard of basketball-related stuff over the last week (with more to come), here's a look at the concept of measurement.
This one is almost more philosophy than physics, and there is a distinct possibility that I'll accidentally say something really stupid. The question of measurement in physics, particularly modern physics, is a very subtle and fascinating one, though, and it's worth a little discussion.…
drorzel | March 5, 2007The ACC Season came to a bloody and unpleasant end last night, with Duke's Gerald Henderson busting UNC's Tyler Hansbrough open with an elbow to the face in the final seconds of a Carolina victory. Henderson was ejected from the game, and will reportedly be suspended for Duke's first-round ACC tournament game.
(My take: looking at the replay, I think it's clear that Henderson was going in there intending to hit Hansbrough. It don't think he deliberately hit him in the face, but the way he came flying in from an angle disn't leave any room for him to not foul Hansbrough. It ended up worse than…
drorzel | March 5, 2007The March Meeting of the American Physical Society is happening this week. This is one of two large multi-divisional meetings the APS has each year (the other is in April), and it's billed as the largest physics meeting of the year.
I've only gone to a March Meeting once and that was the year it was combined with the April Meeting to form one gigantic Centennial Meeting, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the APS. I didn't care for it much-- it was much too big to get a sense of what was going on, and the schedule was incredibly busy with no built-in breaks. I much prefer the annual DAMOP…
drorzel | March 4, 2007I don't usually do "memes," but the "weird things" one (via Janet) seems entertaining. So here are some weird things about me:
1) I carry on complicated conversations with the dog, translating her bits into English in a high-pictched voice. I started doing this to amuse/ annoy Kate, but now I do it even when Kate's not around. (This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened to me-- my freshman year in college, a bunch of us started saying "Dude" a lot to mock one guy on my floor, and it stuck. I still say "Dude" a lot, and so does the dog...)
2) I have a weird obsessive thing…
drorzel | March 4, 2007It's officially March, which means my basketball obsession kicks into high gear. As if you hadn't noticed from the last week or so of posts...
Anyway, it's clear from the lack of comments that my basketball obsession is not that widely shared, so here are some links to amuse the rest of you while I go hoops-wacky:
The March Physics World is out, featuring a very nice article on commerical quantum cryptography, and a blog profile of Tommaso Dorigo.
Speaking of quantum stuff, Scott Aaronson explains Shor's algorithm, with not a single state vector to be seen.
If you've been saying to yourself…
drorzel | March 4, 2007It's that time of year, when "mid-major" and small conferences have their basketball tournaments, with the winners earning one shot at sports-geek immortality with a chance to score an upset in the first round of the NCAA's. Four teams earned automatic bids yesterday, and they deserve a post of their own:
Winthrop: At 28-4, the Slow Moving Basset Hounds Eagles probably ought to be favored in their first-round game. The system being what it is, though, they needed to sweat it out a little bit, winning a tight game over VMI, who had a chance to tie at the buzzer.
Belmont: The Bruins blew out…
drorzel | March 4, 2007It was a regular hoopsapalooza yesterday in Chateau Steelypips, with Syracuse playing Villanova at 2:00, and Maryland playing NC State at 3:30, both games on tv. And, of course, there were a host of other games on, including UCLA getting waxed at Washington, THE Ohio State University narrowly avoiding a loss at Michigan (and putting Tommy Amaker's ability to miss the NCAA's to the test...), and Stanford almost overcoming a 20-point deficit against Arizona, to name just the major-conference games I watched bits of.
Most of the major-conference games were the final home games for one team or…
drorzel | March 3, 2007I'm not quite sure why it's behind the paywall, but the New York Times today features a column by William Rhoden marking the 20th anniversary of the introduction of the three-point shot to college basketball. It's not anything terribly ground-breaking-- complaints from the usual suspects, like perpetual optimist Jim Boeheim ("'It hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be -- in fact it helped us this year,' Boeheim said. 'I never liked it, but it's here to stay, so there's no use in talking about it.'"), and the usual calls for reform of the rule:
Two weeks ago, coaches, administrators and…
drorzel | March 3, 20071) Take a 20 oz Poland Spring bottle, or other lightweight plastic container with a screw-on lid.
2) Using a pocket knife, cut a small (~2 mm diameter) hole in the lid.
3) Put ~5 oz of liquid nitrogen in the bottom of the bottle.
4) Screw on the cap.
5) Shake vigorously once, then quickly place the bottle on the floor on its side.
(This was an improvised demo yesterday, after a late decision to lecture about superconductivity. I had liquid nitrogen for use with the high-Tc supercondustor we use to demonstrate the Meissner effect, but none of the other usual liquid nitrogen props, so I had to…
drorzel | March 2, 2007Inside Higher Ed's regular "Quick Takes" feature is chock full of weirdness today.
From the "I Thought Mormons Were Nice" file:
The Utah Legislature has passed legislation allowing students at public colleges and universities to request that they share rooms only with students who don’t carry concealed weapons,
The Salt Lake Tribune. But lawmakers rejected a proposal to allow faculty members to bar guns from their offices or classrooms. The legislation follows a legal dispute in which the University of Utah asserted its right to bar guns from campus — despite Utah’s ban on state entities…
drorzel | March 2, 2007As I've noted many times, I grew up out in the sticks, in a small town which nonetheless has a Wikipedia page. I should note, though, that I am not hick enough to have been the ScienceBlogger to discover this article about cutting-edge physics research:
Margo Lillie, a doctor of zoology at the University of British Columbia, and her student Tracy Boechler have conducted a study on the physics of cow-tipping.
Ms Boechler, now a trainee forensics analyst for the Royal Canadian Mounted Corps, concluded in her initial report that a cow standing with its legs straight would require five people to…
drorzel | March 2, 2007Over at metadatta, Sujit has video of Jim Carrey and Conan O'Brien talking about experimental physics.
(There are a bunch of more serious things that I really ought to be posting-- I owe Dave an answer to his questions about X-Ray lasers, for example-- but there's an ice storm, I have a class to teach and an NSF progress report to write, and my brain appears to have turned to cheese, so you're getting fluff this morning. Maybe later I'll have something to say about science.)
drorzel | March 1, 2007Dr. Lonnie Thompson of THE Ohio State University spoke at Union Wednesday night as part of the Environmental Studies Seminar Series on Abrupt Climate Change. Dr Thompson is an eminent climate scientist, and has spent thirty-ish years doing research on glaciers around the world, and what I learned from his talk is that I'll never make it as a single-issue blogger.
His talk was basically an overview of what we can learn from ice cores, taken from a variety of palces all around the world, and what we learn is that the 20th century was a pretty unique time, climate-wise. There were lots and lots…
drorzel | March 1, 2007This is probably too arcane to be an official Dorky Poll, but I thought of it yesterday, and sort of like the idea. In pop-culture circles, it's very common to find people making list of "Desert Island Books" or CD's or DVD's, or whatever. The idea being to list those pop culture items that are of sufficient quality that they would be sufficient entertainment if you were stranded for years on a desert island.with nothing else to read/ listen to/ watch.
So here's an extremely nerdy variant of the "Desert Island" idea: imagine that you're being exiled to a remote island or a a space colony or…
drorzel | March 1, 2007You can't buy a car these days without a rear window defroster-- the little built-in electric heaters that melt ice and frost off the rear window. You push a button on the dashboard, and the ice just melts away, no scraping required.
Why is it, then, that to clear the windshield, you have to rely on a combination of warm air blowing on the inside of the glass, and scraping crap off the outside? Why don't they build little electric heaters into the windshield, which would make life much easier for those of us in cold areas?
drorzel | March 1, 2007One-sentence review of this game: I don't think I've ever seen so many two-foot shots missed in a Division I game.
Maryland played Duke last night in the overhyped confines of Cameron Indoor Stadium, and for the way Dick Vitale talked about it, you would've thought that they were playing for first place in the conference, rather than to break a tie for fifth. Of course, the players went at it like it was a title game, so I suppose we can cut the bald idiot a little slack. This was a very intense game, though the intensity led to a lot of sloppy play at points-- ill-advised extra passes,…
drorzel | February 28, 2007Back when I first mentioned the idea, people were kind of down on the idea of SciRate.com, Dave Bacon's project to make a collaborative filter for the arxiv.org prerprint server. Not one to be easily discouraged, Dave has continued to work on it, and it now features papers from all the different arxiv categories, instead of just quant-ph.
If you've been sitting around thinking "Gee, I wish there were a Digg for hep-th, well, today's you're lucky day. If you haven't, well, umm... Look over there! Shiny thing!
drorzel | February 28, 2007The Cosmic Variance post that led to the Cult of Theory post earlier this week was really about a New York magazine article about the negative effects of praising kids for intelligence. It mostly concerns a study done by Carol Dweck, in which fifth-graders who were praised for being smart after an easy test were more risk-averse and scored lower on subsequent tests than students who were praised for working hard:
Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. "Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control," she…
drorzel | February 28, 2007One of the under-reported effects of cheap and widely available personal computers is the increasing dorkification of sports.
I'm talking here about the rise in obsessive stat-geekery across the board, with the accompanying increase in "fantasy" sports. Those phenomena have hardly been ignored, but not many commentators put the blame where it belongs: on the computer industry.
Back in the day, stat-wanking was mostly confined to baseball, which is so ridiculously boring that calculus seems like a fun way to spice things up. As computers have become more common, though, it's become easier for…