drorzel | February 13, 2007The guys over at the World's Fair have created an Order of Science Scouts, for those who find themselves longing for merit badges to display on their blogs. Such as, for example, this one:
The "has frozen stuff just to see what happens" badge (LEVEL III)
In which the recipient has frozen something in liquid nitrogen for the sake of scientific curiosity.
They're a bit too bio-focussed-- too much gooey stuff, not enough big explosions-- but some of them are pretty entertaining. If you're looking for some graphics to brighten up your web page, go have a look...
(As for the title, the Treasure…
drorzel | February 12, 2007So, as mentioned previously, Kate and I are planning to go to Japan for the World SF Convention, and spend a couple of weeks doing touristy stuff. We're down for about a week in Kyoto, and a week in the Yokohama/Tokyo area (where the con is). Then, there are 3-4 days at the end of the trip that we haven't decided what to do with.
We've pretty much got it narrowed down to one of two options, as you might guess from the post title. We're working on not much more than guidebooks and web sites, though, so input from anybody with actual experience of Japan would be more than welcome. The candidate…
drorzel | February 12, 2007Via EurekAlert, the American Association for the Advnacement of Science has announced the 2006 winners of their science journalism awards. Most of the written pieces are available online, so if you're looking for science-y things to read, this could be a good source of material.
None of the winners are bloggers, and there's no blogging category. I guess it's Advantage: MSM! For the moment, at least...
drorzel | February 12, 2007Light blogging today, because yesterday was a Hoops Day here in Chateau Steelypips. A goog hoops day, too, with victories in all three games that mattered: Syracuse edged St. John's, Maryland beat the hated Dukies, and the intramural team I'm playing on won a tough game last night to more or less lock up first place in our division.
Of course, in addition to preventing me from scheduling weighty blog posts, these games conflicted with each other-- the Syracuse game was shown on tape delay (the live game was only on pay-per-view) in a slot that overlapped with the Maryland game, and I had to…
drorzel | February 12, 2007There's an interesting story in the New York Times this morning about a young earth creationist studying paleontology
[Marcus Ross's] subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that, as he wrote, vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago. The work is "impeccable," said David E. Fastovsky, a paleontologist and professor of geosciences at the university who was Dr. Ross's dissertation adviser. "He was working within a strictly scientific framework, a conventional scientific framework."
But Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is…
drorzel | February 11, 2007Here's something a little lighter than the last couple of entries, seeing as it's a weekend and all: Pop-music blogger Jason Hare has a regular Friday feature called "Chart Attack!" in which he posts the Top Ten songs from a past week ending on the same date, and goes through the songs. This week's entry, from February 11, 1989 is right in my wheelhouse, or ought to be:
10. Walking Away - Information Society
9. She Wants To Dance With Me - Rick Astley
8. I Wanna Have Some Fun - Samantha Fox
7. The Lover In Me - Sheena Easton
6. All This Time - Tiffany
5. When The Children Cry - White…
drorzel | February 11, 2007Kate passes along a link to a New Scientist article noting this today has been proclaimed Evolution Sunday 2007 by the Clergy Letter Project:
On 11 February 2007 hundreds of congregations from all portions of the country and a host of denominations will come together to discuss the compatibility of religion and science. For far too long, strident voices, in the name of Christianity, have been claiming that people must choose between religion and modern science. More than 10,000 Christian clergy have already signed The Clergy Letter demonstrating that this is a false dichotomy. Now, on…
drorzel | February 11, 2007I don't have a lot to add to this link, I just wanted to quote Ethan Zuckerman on virtual journalism, from a post about being interviewed for Pitchfork magazine:
The most interesting aspect of the discussion to me was the idea that Chris brought to the table - that we might pay more attention to imagined worlds than to the real one. First, this helped me understand precisely why I find the Second Life hype so disconcerting - I find it deeply odd that journalism is expanding into these illusory spaces (link to Reuters) while it's shrinking in the real world. I think the answer may be that…
drorzel | February 11, 2007I've long been of the opinion that if sanity is ever restored to the relationship between politics and religion in America, it will owe a lot to people like Fred Clark. He writes passionately and persuasively about the many problems caused by the "Religious Right" from a Christian perspective, in religious language. His Left Behind posts in particular are a treasure-- he explains why LaHaye and Jenkins's books are a disaster not only because they're aesthetically bad, but because they're theologically bad, relying on a gross misinterpretation of Christianity.
Of course, well-informed,…
drorzel | February 10, 2007
The term "fast break" refers to those situations in the game of basketball in which the offense is attempting to push the ball up the court and score quickly, rather than running a play from their normal offensive set. This usually involves a temporary numerical advantage for the offensive team, as the defenders hurry to get back into position.
Any given fast break will last no more than a few seconds, but these are some of the most important seconds in a basketball game. Understanding the basics of the fast break is absolutely essential to playing basketball, or even watching it played.
For…
drorzel | February 10, 2007Piled Higher and Deepr nails it this week:
A Pofessor's Negation Field is the unexplained phenomenon whereby mere spatial proximity to an experimental set-up causes all working demonstrations to fail, despite the apparent laws of Physics or how many times it worked right before he/she walked in the room.
I haven't been on the faculty long enough to develop a really effective Negation Field, but my boss when I was a post-doc was the absolute king of this. I eventually stopped telling him when things were working well, because he'd invariably want to come see it, and then something would go…
drorzel | February 9, 2007A marginally less cranky physics post than the previous: the big story in my area of physics this week is probably the Harvard experiment involving the storage and transport of light pulses. Like the ILC announcement, this has been written up in the Times, and you can also read the Harvard press release or the much more informative PhysicsWeb report.
The basic idea here is an extension of the "stored light" trick that Lene Hau's group at Harvard did a few years ago. They illuminate a sample of atoms with two different laser beams, which leads to the absorption of one of the two. They then…
drorzel | February 9, 2007The big story in high-energy physics this week is the release of a report on the projected cost of the International (very nearly) Linear Collider (ILC), which comes out to $6.7 billion-with-a-b (not including labor). There's a story in the Times this morning, and an expert view on Cosmic Variance, and... well, if you read physics blogs, you've seen it mentioned. They'd revoke my blogging license if I failed to say anything about it.
Maybe I'm just cranky at the end of a long week, but I have a hard time getting all that excited about this. For one thing, it's not my area of physics. More…
drorzel | February 9, 2007Or, um, a banana. Or something...
The Evil Monkey at Neurotopia is soliciting donations to support an essay contest to be run by the Alliance for Science. The idea is to offer prizes for students to write essays about evolution, to encourage students to learn more about the foundations of biology.
They're a registered charity and everything, and this probably fits the definition of "noble cause" (if you give them money, the Discovery Institute suffers humiliations galore), so I'll plug it here for those who might be interested.
drorzel | February 8, 2007Union is opening a new Center for Bioengineering and Computational Biology this week, and the keynote speech was given last night by Steven Vogel of Duke, on "Power from the People: Life When Muscle Was Our Main Motor." Basically, this was an hour-long survey of some speculative ideas on what biomechanics can tell us about the ancient world.
Sadly, a quick Google search doesn't turn up anything coherent about this on the web, because it was a fun talk. Vogel started with the observation that to a good approximation, humans are all the same size and shape, and can exert about the same amount…
drorzel | February 8, 2007Another Thursday, another early lab section. Which means it's time for another audience participation entry...
I think something like this went around ScienceBlogs once before, but if so, it was a while ago, and it's a fun question:
What's the worst job in science?
What's the nastiest, most unpleasant task facing anyone in science? Cleaning machine parts? Washing out animal cages? Justifying climate research to James Inhofe?
If you are a scientist, leave a comment describing the worst task you've had to do as part of your training. If you're not a scientist, leave a comment describing the…
drorzel | February 8, 2007Inside Higher Ed reports that Indiana State is eliminating physics and philosophy, among other majors, in a move to streamline their programs. These programs have very few majors relative to the number of faculty (physics has five faculty and nine majors, philosophy four faculty and 19 majors), so they're on the block due to an accreditor's comment that they have too many programs.
The discussion in the article centers on the question of whether you can really call a university a university if it doesn't teach physics or philosophy. Several people in comments object that they're only…
drorzel | February 7, 2007Janet asks "Where do scientists learn to write?" Well, actually, being a good academic, she asks many more questions than that:
Do scientists need to write well? If so, in what contexts and for what audiences? If not, why not?
Where do scientists really learn to write? What kinds of experiences shape their writing? Are these teaching scientists to write clearly and effectively? Are they entrenching bad habits?
Where do you think scientists ought to learn to write? What are the most important things they need to learn about writing in a scientific context? What are the best ways to…
drorzel | February 7, 2007So, what's the deal with last night's silly obituary? Basically, the main laser in my experiment died because I'm a jackass.
More specifically, the laser in question is a diode laser, similar to the kind found in CD and DVD players. These are broadly tunable, available in a wide range of powers and wavelengths, and relatively cheap. They're also extremely sensitive to static shock, to the point where I have to be careful to always touch something metal before working on the laser or anything close to it.
To check that we have successfully tuned the laser to the right wavelength, we need to do…
drorzel | February 7, 2007Eurekalert has a press release from Yale proclaiming that:
Chemists at Yale have done what Mother Nature chose not to -- make a protein-like molecule out of non-natural building blocks, according to a report featured early online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Nature uses alpha-amino acid building blocks to assemble the proteins that make life as we know it possible. Chemists at Yale now report evidence that nature could have used a different building block - beta-amino acids -- and show that peptides assembled from beta-amino acids can fold into structures much like…