drorzel | January 12, 2007In a back-channel discussion among ScienceBloggers, John Wilkins suggested that it might be interesting to do occasional posts on really basic concepts in our fields-- the sort of jargon terms that become so ingrained that we toss them around without realizing it, and end up confusing people. A lot of these terms often have a technical meaning that is subtly (or not-so-subtly) different from the use of the word in everyday language, which provides a further complication.
The original example given was "vector," which turns up a lot in mathematical discussions, and loses a lot of people (it's…
drorzel | January 12, 2007For tedious reasons, I find myself faced with giving what will basically be a pure math lecture next Friday. I need to introduce a bunch of mathematical apparatus that we will need in the coming weeks, and I know that the Math department doesn't cover these topics in any of the classes that these students have taken. If I want them to be able to use this stuff, I need to teach it myself.
Formal mathematics is probably my least favorite part of teaching physics. I'm very much inclined toward the "swashbuckling physicist" approach to math, in which we cavalierly assume that all sorts of picky…
drorzel | January 11, 2007I get a fair number of emails from people who have blogs or other web stuff that they would like to advertise. I do look at most of the links I get sent, but I end up posting very few of them. Not because I dislike what I see, but because I just don't have the time or energy to thoroughly research the links. I don't want to inadvertently endorse any kooks or cranks by linking to them (and I get a good number of those, too), and I tend to err very much on the side of caution.
Which means that a fair number of worthy or interesting sites go un-linked. To give you an example of the sorts of…
drorzel | January 11, 2007One year ago today, Uncertain Principles went live on ScienceBlogs. In honor of the anniversary, here's the first year at the new site, in one graph:
Well, ok, that's not that informative. In fact, for all you know, that could be an NMR trace from a chem experiment-- the little bump to the right is the reactant, the little bump on the left is the product, and the two big spikes in the middle are solvent. A more informative version is below, along with a few of my favorite posts:
Like a good physicist, I've re-done it as a semi-log plot (which is appropriate, given that the traffic numbers…
drorzel | January 11, 2007There's been lots of news from the AAS meeting in Seattle this week, but the best from my perspective is that high school physics enrollments have neevr been higher:
Presenting new data that encourage this outlook, [Michael] Neuschatz [senior research associate at AIP's Statistical Research Center] will show that enrollment in high school physics classes is up and likely to continue increasing. The data show more than 30 percent of high school seniors have taken physics classes, more than ever before. This percentage has been rising steadily since the mid-1980s.
In addition, the percentage…
drorzel | January 10, 2007Janet reminds me that this has been declared National De-Lurking Week. If you're in the habit of reading this blog, but don't usually comment, here's a made-up holiday you can celebrate by leaving a comment here. You'll need to put in a name (it needn't be yours) and an email address (I promise it won't be spammed as a result), but then you can type anything you like (within reason) into the comment box, and post it here.
If you'd prefer something concrete to say, I'll give you a topic: How 'bout this weather we're having?
drorzel | January 10, 2007The last time I talked about our job search, I got a lot of comments of the form "Why does the process take so damn long?" As the first of our short list candidates shows up today for a campus visit/ interview, I thought I'd go through a sketch of what we do, and why it takes so long. I'm going to be vague about some details, because it wouldn't be appropriate to disclose too much of the process, but I'll try to give you an idea of what goes on and why.
I should note that, for all my bitching about the current search (mostly to Kate, but a little bit here), this has actually been about the…
drorzel | January 10, 2007PhysicsWeb provides me with yet another blog post topic today, posting a lament about the death of letter writing, which makes life more difficult for historians:
Now that e-mail has replaced letter writing as the principal means of informal communication, one has to feel sorry for future science historians, who will be unable to use letters and telegrams to establish facts and gauge reactions to events. In addition to the Copenhagen episode, another example of the role of letters is Stillman Drake's startling conclusion, based on a careful reading of Galileo's correspondence, that the…
drorzel | January 10, 2007I am not a baseball fan-- I suck at the game, and it's boring as hell on tv-- but I can't help noticing occasional bits of baseball news. such as, for example, yesterday's announcement of the Hall of Fame voting, which prompts the post title. Eight writers did not vote for Cal Ripken to get into the Hall of fame.
Let me say that again, in bold: Eight writers did not vote for Cal Ripken.
This has to be one of the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Leave aside for the moment that Ripken holds what may be the most impressive record in the sport, playing in 2,632 consecutive games. And forget the…
drorzel | January 9, 2007In the last week, The IoP's Physics Web has posted two news updates that fall into the category of "regrettable physics," here defined as "the sort of work that makes Daniel Davies say mean things about physicists." I'm talking here about the application of physics concepts to fields where they're neither immediately relevant nor particularly wanted.
The first gets bonus black marks for the title "Physicists Make Religion Crystal Clear" (which, I realize, isn't the fault of the authors, but really...). This reports on forthcoming work applying solid-state models to the growth of world…
drorzel | January 9, 2007Noted travel writer Bill Bryson has a real gift for making entertaining anecdotes out of basically nothing. His travel books are frequently hilarious, but if you think carefully about what actually happens in the books, there's very little there. His gift as a writer is to inflate mundane experiences-- waiting on line at a train station in Italy, dining alone in a Chinese restaurant-- into vast epics of comic ineptitude. He really doesn't experience anything out of the ordinary, but he manages to make it sound tremendously entertaining.
This comes in handy for his new memoir, The Life and…
drorzel | January 9, 2007A lot of people have commented on this New York Times article on science budgets, mostly echoing the author's lament about the negative effects of operating at 2006 funding levels. I really don't have much to add to that, but it's worth reminding people where the blame for this belongs:
Last year, Congress passed just 2 of 11 spending bills -- for the military and domestic security -- and froze all other federal spending at 2006 levels. Factoring in inflation, the budgets translate into reductions of about 3 percent to 4 percent for most fields of science and engineering.
Congressional…
drorzel | January 9, 2007Over at Page 3.14, Katherine highlights a Psychology Today article about the different approaches young men and women have to dating. It's more or less what you expect, but for one eye-popping sentence (emphasis added):
[New Mexico psychology professor Geoffrey] Miller believes boys actually overestimate their mate value during adolescence, and none more so than jocks. "Young men who were captains of the football team graduate thinking they're God's gift to women, and women respond, 'I'm interested in corporate attorneys and well-cited professors. Who the hell are you?' "
Yeah, I really…
drorzel | January 9, 2007Well, that's what I hear...
(It's been a couple of days since anyone said anything mean about him on ScienceBlogs. I wouldn't want him to think we don't care any more...)
drorzel | January 8, 2007Paul Davies's forthcoming book Cosmic Jackpot is subtitled "Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life," so you know that he's not going after small questions, here. The book is a lengthy and detailed discussion of what he terms the "Goldilocks Enigma," and what others refer to as "fine-tuning"-- basically, how do you account for the fact that the universe allows us to exist? A small change in the values of any of the constants of nature would very likely make it impossible for life as we know it to exist. And yet, here we are-- so how did that happen?
Though this book won't be released for a…
drorzel | January 8, 2007The American Astronomical Society is meeting in Seattle this week, which means a banner week for astronomy news: lots of press releases, and a bunch of live reports. If you're into space stuff, you should have plenty to read and talk about in the next few days.
drorzel | January 8, 2007Movable Type tells me that this is the 1,000th post to this blog since the move. This comes just short of the one-year anniversary of the move (the first posts are dated earlier, but the official launch was on January 11th, so that's when I'll do a full year-in-review.
For comparison, the total number of posts in the three-ish years of Uncertain Principles prior to ScienceBlogs was 1,087 (according to Blogger). So, my posting rate has increased just a little bit-- an average of 2.75 posts per day for the past year or so. Why the big spike, given that I promised to only blog once a day in my…
drorzel | January 8, 2007A busy sporting weekend for Chateau Steelypips:
First, there were two NFL wild card games on Saturday, as a sort of appetizer for the real action on Sunday. The Colts borrowed a defense from somewhere, and despite Peyton Manning deciding to play like his little brother for the first half or so, Indianapolis moved on in convincing fashion. I liked Manning's offer to do Ty Law's Hall of Fame induction, after lobbing another two easy picks in his direction.
Then there was the ignominious Cowboys loss, about which all I can say is: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH!!!! And, really, that's all I can say, because…
drorzel | January 7, 2007I haven't done a straight-up links dump in a while, but it's that kind of weekend, so here's some stuff:
What Would Brian Boitano Do?: Iain Jackson at Grim Amusements, who ought to get more press than he does, watches South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, and finds contemporary political relevance:
We've pretty much actually turned into the version of the US shown in "South Park", or a reasonably facsimile thereof. (Perhaps an unreasonable facsimile thereof would be a better way to put it.) OK, we're not randomly imprisoning Canadians and exeduting them because they've made all our children…
drorzel | January 6, 2007While working on a review of a book that talks about the fortuitously bio-friendly constants of nature (review forthcoming, don't worry), I mistyped "ratio of proton to electron masses" and "ratio of proton to electron charges." Which is, of course, 1, and thus not a terribly interesting ratio.
But that got me wondering: is there a solid fundamental reason why that ratio is one? This is, could you have a self-consistent universe in which the electron and proton had different charges-- say, a proton having twice the charge of an electron? That wouldn't be a useful sort of universe, of course,…