drorzel | February 16, 2007Inside Higher Ed has a story today about a former Middlebury College president who is launching a non-profit organization to advocate a serious discussion about drinking age laws in the US. As he notes, real data on the topic are a little hard to come by:
What was striking about the research, McCardell said, was how little of it conclusively backs up claims about the positive impact of the 21-year-old drinking age. "This is by definition a very emotional issue, but what we need is an informed and dispassionate debate," he said. He said that the major flaw in analyses to date has been false…
drorzel | February 16, 2007I am totally mystified by the vagaries of the publishing industry. Karl Schroeder's latest novel, Sun of Suns apparently came out back in October, but I can't recall ever seeing a copy in a bookstore. I think I would remember it, because he's on my "buy immediately" list after Permanence and Lady of Mazes. And it's a Tor book, too-- their stuff is usually easy to find. I expect this "In print but instantly unavailable" crap from Ace, but Tor's usually reliable.
Anyway, I ended up getting this from the local library, and I'll probably buy a copy this weekend at Boskone. As I expected from the…
drorzel | February 16, 2007There's a press release on EurekAlert about new measurements limiting the change in the fine structure constant from the Time and Frequency division of NIST in Boulder:
Some astronomical and geological studies suggest there might have been very small changes in the values of fundamental constants over billions of years, although the results have been inconsistent and controversial. If fundamental constants are changing, the present-day rates of change are too small to be measured using conventional methods. However, a new comparison of NIST's cesium fountain and mercury ion clocks, scheduled…
drorzel | February 15, 2007In general, EuerkAlert has been a useful source for drawing my attention to interesting things that I might not otherwise notice. Every now and then, though, there are press releases that just make me faintly embarrassed for everyone involved.
Such as yesterday's announcement from LSU:
Subhash Kak, Delaune Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at LSU, recently resolved the twin paradox, known as one of the most enduring puzzles of modern-day physics.
[...]The fact that time slows down on moving objects has been documented and verified over the years through repeated…
drorzel | February 15, 2007I'm giving an exam at 9:00 this morning-- neither snow, nor more snow, nor blowing snow, nor single-digit temperatures shall stay the progress of shaping young minds. Anyway, to keep things lively while I'm proctoring the test, here's a poll question inspired by the exam:
What's your favorite calculational shortcut?
Today's test is on basic quantum mechanics-- photoelectric effect, Compton effect, the Bohr model of hydrogen, and simple solutions of the Schrödinger equation-- and as such, features a lot of problems that are made easier by knowing some shortcut or another. Sometimes, these are…
drorzel | February 15, 2007I read Guy Gavriel Kay's newest book, Ysabel a while ago, but I've been dithering about what to say in the booklog entry. I've been dithering long enough, in fact, that Kate beat me to it, so now I have to post something.
Kay is best known for a set of very loosely connected pseudo-historical fantasy novels, which re-cast important bits of European history in fantasy worlds. My favorite of the lot is probably still Tigana, but the "Sarantine Mosaic," consisting of Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors is probably the most polished of the lot.
For whatever reason-- he can't have run out of…
drorzel | February 15, 2007One of those only-on-the-Internet, adventrues-in-D-list-celebrity videos: A YouTube clip of a hair metal cover band joined onstage by one of the teachers from "Saved by the Bell" and Dallas Cowboys snap-dropper Tony Romo, singing "Somewhere in the Night" by Journey. Romo really gets into it, and Mr. Belding drops the F-bomb a few times, and, well, it's not for the faint of heart.
It's like somebody accelerated the Eighties to a good fraction of the speed of light, slammed them into a wall, and now we're looking at the spandex-and-hairspray clad particle tracks.
drorzel | February 15, 2007As usual, Scott Aaronson says it better than I did:
[M]ost of the commentary strikes me as missing a key point: that to give a degree to a bozo like this, provided he indeed did the work, can only reflect credit on the scientific enterprise. Will Ross now hit the creationist lecture circuit, trumpeting his infidel credentials to the skies? You better believe it. Will he use the legitimacy conferred by his degree to fight against everything the degree stands for? It can't be doubted.
But here's the wonderful thing about science: unlike the other side, we don't need loyalty oaths in order to…
drorzel | February 14, 2007Before we get to the dog pictures, I want to give a quick shout-out to the Comment of the Month here, which is Josh's bunny made of cheese. That's great.
Anyway, we went outside with the camera for a little while this afternoon, to get the table picture posted earlier. This was an adventure for Her Majesty, chronicled in photos:
1) "Oh, boy! White stuff! Everything looks different!"
2) "There must be bunnies here somewhere..."
3) "Actually, this kind of sucks."
4) "C'mon, dude, open the door. I've had enough."
Total elapsed time: something like five minutes. She likes snow, but isn't…
drorzel | February 14, 2007Somebody at work had printed out a table of MCAT scores by major, compiled by the AIP. I couldn't find it on the web, but I found the original source, and made my own version of the relevant bit. This shows the average numerical scores on the three sections of the MCAT test for students majoring in biological and physical sciences (shortened to "biology" and "physics" for the table), for students who applied to med school, and students who got into med school:
The results are striking. Not only did the physics applicants do better than the biologists on the physics portion of the test, as…
drorzel | February 14, 2007
This is our cast aluminum patio table, which always looks really cool when snow piles up on the lattice-work pattern of the top. Click the image above for a slightly larger picture.
We've gotten more than a foot of very powdery snow thus far, and it's still coming down hard. I taught my class, gave some instructions to my thesis student, and came home, where I plan to spend the afternoon in a warm and cozy house with Kate and Emmy, heading outside only to re-shovel the driveway and maybe throw some toys for the dog. If you're in the snow zone yourself, stay safe and warm.
drorzel | February 14, 2007A couple of years ago, we undertook a grand revision of our General Education curriculum, the set of core liberal arts courses that all students are required to take in order to graduate. The old system was very specific, requiring a large-ish number of courses in very specific areas, and was biased toward Western culture in a way that really doesn't reflect the modern realities of academia-- students were required to take four courses in either American or European history and culture, or four courses in Classics, and that was it. Nobody was happy with this, so it needed changing.
In the…
drorzel | February 14, 2007Over at metadatta, Sujit is doing spectroscopy experiments with interferometers, and has posted a very nice introduction to the technique. Basically, if you have a light source emitting two different wavelengths that are very close together, you can determine the wavelength difference by shinging the light into an interferometer, and seeing how far you need to change things to make the interference patterns of the two wavelengths overlap.
That's a really sketchy description, so you should follow the link, and read Sujit's description which is, as I said, very nice. And if I find myself…
drorzel | February 14, 2007Over at Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee celebrates everybody's favorite annoying holiday with a look at two scholars of sex: the late Gershon Legman who coined "Make love, not war" back in 1963; and Blaise Cronin, who currently studies the more respectable sort of pornography at Indiana. Personally, I half think the real purpose may have been to give him the chance to write the sentence about Legman:
Any scholar publishing a book called Oragentialism: Oral Techniques in Genital Excitation may be said to have contributed something to the sum total of human happiness.
but there is a larger…
drorzel | February 13, 2007A couple of times a year, our department secretary will organize potluck luncheons, and badger the faculty into cooking things and bringing them in for a big gathering in the conference room. We invite all the students, and everybody eats way too much, talks too much, and generally has a good time.
We had another luncheon today, in honor of Valentine's Day, so the stated theme was red food. This did not produce what you might call a heartburn-friendly menu, but that's why I've got a sixpack of Red Seal Ale in the fridge... Hooray, beer!
My contribution was what I think of as Grad School…
drorzel | February 13, 2007PhysicsWeb has a
story about a new theory of axions that claims to resolve some discrepancies between past experiments. Two previous experiments looking for axions-- hypothetical weakly interacting particles that might be an explanation for dark matter-- have found conflicting results: the CAST experiment looking for axions produced in the Sun found nothing, while the PVLAS experiment looking for axions by studying the rotation of polarized light in a magnetic field may have seen something. (I talked a bit about the latter here.)
Of course, the new theory is not without its complications:
Now…
drorzel | February 13, 2007I'm having the sort of morning where I feel like lobbing a grenade at somebody, and the predictable outrage over yesterday's story about a creationist paleontologist is as good a target as any.
The issue here is whether it's appropriate for Marcus Ross to receive a Ph.D. for work in paleontology, given that he's a young-earth creationist. His scientific papers are all perfectly consistent with modern understanding, speaking of events taking place millions of years in the past, but he himself believes the earth is less than 10,000 years old, and was created as described in the Bible.
The usual…
drorzel | February 13, 2007The New York Times reports that Purdue has officially cleared Rusi Taleyarkhan of charges of scientific wrongdoing over his claim to have produced nuclear fusion on a tabletop through the magic of sonoluminescence. You might recall that these claims were made a couple of years ago, but nobody else has been able to replicate them.
Purdue has conducted some sort of inquiry into the matter, and declared that there was nothing dishonest about the results. The inquiry was not what you'd call a model of transparancey, though:
Purdue did not reveal what allegations the committee had considered. It…