drorzel | January 18, 2007Well, ok, it doesn't generally suck, but it's absolutely horrible at ripping CD's. I haven't done much of this lately, but in doing some other stuff, I recently discovered that I never ripped the Death cab for Cutie album Transatlanticism into my collection. So I popped it into the CD drive, and happily added all those tracks to the Music Library.
And now I'm going to delete them all, because the rips suck. The tracks skip and stutter all over the place, as if it were playing on a boom box that was being pushed down a flight of stairs. It's not just this disc, either-- I have this problem…
drorzel | January 17, 2007I spent the better part of an hour putting nail polish on mirror mounts yesterday.
No, this isn't a tragic misinterpretation of my students' advice to "wear more pink." It's because the optical table looks like this:
All those black things are mirror mounts like the one in the top picture, holding mirrors that are precisely positioned as part of one beam line or another. There are at least four different important paths in the picture above, and they tend to bend around a lot, and cross each other. Here's the same picture with the beam lines roughly sketched in:
There's one laser under the…
drorzel | January 17, 2007A couple of quick stories off Physics Web:
First, they have a short article about a record-breaking cat state. This is a state in which a group of researchers have maneged to "entangle" six photons so that they are either all polarized vertically, or all polarized horizontally. This breaks the previous record of five entangled photons, and is interesting mostly because it's getting to the system size where you can start thinking about using these entangled photons to transmit quantum information and do quantum error correction.
There's also a lovely "artist's conception" picture, reproduced…
drorzel | January 17, 2007I'm running about a day behind on my Inside Higher Ed commentary because the ongoing search has made this a Week From Hell, but there was an interesting news item yesterday about an economic study suggesting that health care subsidies would improve education more than tuition credits:
The study's bottom line finding, in the authors' words, is that "health plays an extremely important role in determining an individual's educational attainment. On average, having been sick before the age of 21 decreases [an individual's average educational attainment] by 1.4 years."
(I assume that "sick" here…
drorzel | January 17, 2007Scott Aaronson talks sense about religion, in response to an emailer who stopped reading his quantum computing lectures because he made references to "God":
What I'm trying to say, Bill, is this: you can go ahead and indulge yourself. If some of the most brilliant unbelievers in history -- Einstein, Erdös, Twain -- could refer to a being of dubious ontological status as they would to a smelly old uncle, then why not the rest of us? For me, the whole point of scientific rationalism is that you're free to ask any question, debate any argument, read anything that interests you, use whatever…
drorzel | January 16, 2007Over at Good Math, Bad Math, Mark offers two entries for the Basic Concepts series:
Mean, Median, and Mode
Normal Distributions
Between those two, he tells you almost everything you need to know to lie with statistics. Or how to spot when somebody else is trying to lie to you with statistics, which is probably more useful.
Either way, they're well worth reading.
drorzel | January 16, 2007This is the first post I'm doing for the "Basic Concepts" series. When I asked for suggestions, I got a good long list of stuff, and it's hard to know quite where to start. I'm going to start with "Force," because physics as we know it more or less started with Isaac Newton, and Newton is best known for his work on forces. In fact, as-you-know-Bob, the SI unit of force is the "Newton," in ol' Isaac's honor.
(I should note that this particular discussion is adapted from a lecture that I give in the introductory mechanics class, so there's also a "path of least resistance" argument for starting…
drorzel | January 16, 2007Via a mailing list, I got sent this link to a really mind-boggling Microsoft marketing video from the 80's. It really defies description, but the original poster made a good attempt:
Microsoft sent this tape to retailers to explain the benefits of Windows 386. Boring until the 7 minute mark when the production is taken over by crack-smoking monkeys.
The link goes directly to the seven minute mark, or I'll embed the full video below the fold (mostly because I want to see how that works). It's nice to see that Microsoft have been PR aces for close to twenty years...
drorzel | January 16, 2007As part of the upcoming science blogging conference, Bora Zivkovic at A Blog Around the Clock has put together an anthology of the best science-related blog posts of last year. He's titled it The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006, and it's now available for purchase at Lulu, should you be interested in a dead-tree version (or even a formatted PDF) of your favorite blog posts.
Fortunately, I have almost a full year before I have to decide whether to list it as a publication on my annual merit activities sheet...
drorzel | January 16, 2007Inside Higher Ed had an article yesterday about a survey of student attitudes that they analyze in terms of gender differences, finding that women entering college are generally better prepared than their male counterparts, but men entering college are more confident in their abilities, particularly in math and science. As you might expect, this leads to a bit of discussion in the comments.
One thing I'd like to pull out of the bickering, though, is a "big picture" comment:
Ignore the gender differences for a minute and focus on the big picture. 9 out of 10 students (male & female)…
drorzel | January 15, 2007Quick! To Professor Science's house!
(I'd do that experiment for three lab coats, and I don't even wear lab coats...)
drorzel | January 15, 2007I make a habit of checking my Technorati search results regularly, partly because I'm just vain enough to care that other people are linking to me (my rank is holding steady in the 8,000's, but it hasn't updated in a while), but mostly because it's a good way to find new blogs, and there are a few new science-type blogs linking to me.
The most developed to this point has to be metadatta, written by an undergraduate student at UPenn. He's working on a series of nice posts about liquid crystals Part I, Part II, Part III) and it generally looks pretty interesting.
There's also Remaining Eye, at…
drorzel | January 15, 2007"Thoreau," guest-posting at Unqualified Offerings, has a nice post commenting on a Physics Today article about the use of language in science, by Helen Quinn. The article is pretty standard stuff for anyone following the "culture wars" debates here-- use of the word "belief" to describe scientific conclusions causes confusion, and attempts to put science on the same level as faith. She calls for scientists and science writers to use "Scientific evidence supports the conclusion that" instead of "scientists believe."
Thoreau rightly points out that this issue is somewhat overblown, in that the…
drorzel | January 15, 2007Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean has an idea for an Undergraduate [Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology] Theory Insitute, a six-week summer course that would cover a bunch of the basic tools and techniques of the field, and prepare students to do theoretical research in those fields. The proposed syllabus:
Special relativity, index notation, vectors, tensors.
Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics.
Classical scalar field theory.
Gauge theories and electromagnetism.
Basics of Lie groups, SU(n).
Non-abelian symmetries.
Spontaneous symmetry breakdown, the Higgs mechanism.
Topological defects.…
drorzel | January 15, 2007Tobias Buckell is experimenting with a new concept to keep himself on pace as he writes his next novel. He's publicly stated a goal of 6,000 words per week, and pledges to donate a nickel for every word he's short of that, to a charity chosen by his readers (a different one each week).
How's he doing so far? He's out almost $200 in the first two weeks. But it's early yet...
If you're so inclined, head on over there and vote for who should get the money. You might also consider buying a copy or two of Crystal Rain, which really is excellent. And it looks like he might need the money...
drorzel | January 14, 2007You might think that the most interesting thing in this morning's New York Times was the photo essay about the Large Hadron Collider, but you'd be wrong. The most interesting article is this story about cheerleading.
Why is that, you ask? Because it's written about my home town:
Thirty girls signed up for the cheerleading squad this winter at Whitney Point High School in upstate New York. But upon learning they would be waving their pompoms for the girls' basketball team as well as the boys', more than half of the aspiring cheerleaders dropped out.
The eight remaining cheerleaders now…
drorzel | January 14, 2007An article from the Chronicle of Higher Education has landed in my inbox, describing efforts to recruit students to conservative groups:
Ryan J. Sorba stands before a table covered with mini-cupcakes and whoopie pies, calling out to students as they pass. A sign lists the prices: $6 for customers under 18; $3 for 19-year-olds; $1 for 20-year-olds; 25 cents for 21- to 39-year-olds; and free to those 40 and over.
"Don't get screwed by Social Security, support private accounts," says Mr. Sorba, a conservative activist who has come here to Bentley College's Student Union to help recruit new…
drorzel | January 14, 2007Kij Johnson's The Fox Woman, the story of a fox in Heian-era Japan who becomes a woman for the sake of love, was a beautiful and moving book, so, of course, I bought her next book, Fudoki immediately. And then, it took me three years to get around to reading it... There's no real good reason for the delay-- I just kept passing over it for other things. Now that I've finally got around to reading it, I wish I had read it sooner. It's another marvelous book, and richly deserved its World Fantasy Award nomination.
Fudoki tells two stories. The first is the story of a cat who turns into a woman…
drorzel | January 13, 2007One of my favorite experiments in physics has released a new set of results in Physical Review Letters, putting experimental limits on the size of any extra dimensions of the sort predicted by string theory:
We conducted three torsion-balance experiments to test the gravitational inverse-square law at separations between 9.53 mm and 55 µm, probing distances less than the dark-energy length scale λ~85 µm. We find with 95% confidence that the inverse-square law holds (|α|<=1) down to a length scale λ=56 µm and that an extra dimension must have a size R<=44 µm.
You'll need a…
drorzel | January 12, 2007I did an iTunes run recently, and picked up Tom Waits's three-disc collection Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, along with a couple of other albums (TV On the Radio and the Decemberists among them). As is my usual practice, I put these records into the "Party Shuffle" on iTunes, so I get a chance to hear most of the songs a few times, and I've been listening to them for the past couple of weeks while I work on the computer.
The overall reaction is pretty much "Enh." I continue to not really get the Decemberists or TV on the Radio-- they have a couple of good songs each, but I'm not…