drorzel | January 6, 2007In that it's bombarded by meteorites, anyway. The object that crashed into a New Jersey house has been confirmed as a meterorite by, well, looking at it:
The family has not yet given permission for physical testing of the meteorite, but from looking at it, Dr. Delaney and other experts were able to tell that the object it had been part of -- perhaps an asteroid -- cooled relatively fast.
It is magnetic, and reasonably dense, they determined. The leading edge -- the one that faced forward as it traveled through the earth's atmosphere -- was much smoother, while the so-called trailing edge…
drorzel | January 5, 2007I'm A Boy
I'm A Ghost
I'm A Loner Dottie, A Rebel...
I'm A Man You Don't Meet Every Day
I'm A Midnight Mover
I'm a Rocker
I'm A Terrible Person
I'm A Wheel
I'm Actual
I'm Against It
I'm Allowed
I'm Always In Love
I'm Amazed
I'm Comin' On Back To You
I'm Easy
I'm Free
I'm Free
I'm Goin' Down
I'm Going to Stop Pretending That I Didn't Break Your Heart
I'm Gonna Crawl
I'm Gonna Love You Just A Little More, Baby
I'm Hanging Up My Heart For You
I'm Holding Out
I'm In Love
I'm In The Battlefield For My Lord
I'm In The Mood
I'm Just A Bill
I'm Lost Without You
I'm Not Feeling It Anymore
I'm Not Okay…
drorzel | January 5, 2007Jack McDevitt is a prolific SF author, with a couple of running series that recently appeared in booklog entries here (see, for example, Antiquities Dealers in Spaaaace!!!). Coincidentally, he's also talked to the Slush God, in an interview posted at SciFi Weekly. He says a bunch of interesting stuff, and not just about his books:
The problem with space travel is that you don't really get much benefit from it. Not the sort that makes, say, for better transportation or better toothpaste. NASA is always trying to sell it that way, but the money would be better spent developing the toothpaste…
drorzel | January 5, 2007Via Tobia Buckell, Jeff Bezos is looking for a few good geeks:
Blue Origin; Blue Origin wants you! Actually, Blue Origin needs you and wants to hire you ... assuming you're a hard working, technically gifted, team-oriented, experienced aerospace engineer or engineering leader. If you might be interested in joining us, please keep reading.
We're working, patiently and step-by-step, to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. Accomplishing this mission will take a long time, and we're working on it…
drorzel | January 5, 2007A Christmas gift from my sister:
Yes, that's an origami Discworld. A big turtle, four elephants, and a flat world inhabited by silly people. All folded out of paper (well, the map was printed and cut out, but the elephants and turtle are origmai).
From a different angle:
The map got badly overexposed from the flash, but you can see the elephants a little more clearly in this one.
drorzel | January 4, 2007It's a little-known fact that gravity is stronger in the vicinity of our couch:
Her Majesty just can't manage to lift her head. I think string theory is involved, but I'm not sure.
drorzel | January 4, 2007One of the standard elements of most academic hiring and promotion applications, at least at a small liberal arts college, is some sort of statement from the candidate about teaching. This is called different things at different places-- "statement of teaching philosophy" is a common term for it, and the tenure process here calls for a "statement of teaching goals."
I spent hours and hours on this, because I get a little obsessive about written work. It did get read closely by the ad hoc committee, at least-- at my first meeting with them, they asked a couple of questions about details of…
drorzel | January 4, 2007Inside Higher Ed reports on an impressively bad idea from the upper midwest:
"If we can't lure them here, let's tether them here," said Mark O'Connell, executive director of the Wisconsin Counties Association, a lobbying organization, and a member of the Commission on Enhancing the Mission of the Wisconsin Colleges, a group created to advise the network of 13 two-year colleges in the state.The commission, appointed by the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin Colleges in August, submitted a report late last month calling for an investment in new scholarships pegged to residency…
drorzel | January 4, 2007The Times has an article announcing the discovery of methane lakes on Titan:
The discovery, reported yesterday by an international team of researchers, was made by a radar survey of Titan's high northern latitudes by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn and its retinue of satellites since July 2004. One of the mission's major objectives is the investigation of Titan's environment, thought to be a frigid version of conditions on the primordial Earth.
The radar imaging system detected more than 75 dark patches in the landscape near Titan's northern polar region, the scientists…
drorzel | January 4, 2007I've got lab this morning, so I don't have time for detailed physics blogging today. Happily, there's a new edition of the physics-centered blog carnival Philosophia Naturalis posted today, which should provide plenty of physics content to get your day off to a good start.
drorzel | January 3, 2007Today is the first day of classes, so I'm going to be kind of busy at work. Here's a bit of pop-culture silliness to lighten things up while I'm teaching and setting up labs.
The Neil Diamond chestnut "Sweet Caroline" got brought up in a back-channel discussion, prompting much revulsion from the older members of the ScienceBlogs collective. I'm in the age range where the song was just starting to acquire kitsch value, so I don't really mind it.
It occurs to me, though, that between Neil Diamond and OutKast (specifically, the song "Roses"), pop music has been pretty rough on people named "…
drorzel | January 3, 2007A little bit before Christmas, I spent an afternoon swapping mirrors out of one line of the apparatus. I was losing too much of the laser light before it went into the chamber, and replacing the mirrors increased the power entering the apparatus by a factor of two or so.
Here's a picture of the two types of mirrors, side-by-side:
"Well, of course you had to replace them," you say. "The one on the left is a perfectly nice mirror, but the one on the right is utter crap. You dolt."
The thing is, the mirror on the right is the type I was putting in. The one on the left is the type that wasn't…
drorzel | January 3, 2007As you know if you've been reading these occasional updates, my friend Paul has been working as a reporter in Baghdad for the last year. He's based in Cairo, but has been spending six weeks at a stretch in Baghdad, with breaks of a week or two at home.
His Iraq shift has come to an end, and he's moving back to Egypt full-time. This is the final dispatch from Iraq, in which he reflects on his year as an interpid war correspondant.
-----------------------------
So that was it. The plane took off, we did the familiar stomach churning spin and I looked out and watched the airport dip in and out…
drorzel | January 3, 2007The January issue of Physics World magazine has just hit the electronic newstands, and they're doing a special issue on physics on the web. Among the free on-line offerings, they have a discussion of blogs and Wikipedia with various comments pro and con, and an essay about physics blogging by Sean Carroll.
Oh, yeah, and they also profile some blogger guy...
(By a weird coincidence, I already had posts scheduled for today that cover most of the range of stuff I post here, so new visitors will get the full Uncertain Principles experience, as it were...)
(Also, the specific post quoted in the…
drorzel | January 2, 2007Classes start tomorrow, so I spent some time last week filing papers and cleaning off my desk. I've been here just long enough to fill up the file drawers in my desk, so I went through and pulled out a few old papers:
That stack is a collection of graded exams and lab reports from the 2001-2 academic year. I spent about half an hour feeding them into the shredder this afternoon (even though the students involved have all graduated, we can't just throw graded work into the recycling bin).
There was a weird sort of nostalgia involved in this. Shredding these papers reminded me of a bunch of…
drorzel | January 2, 2007The 2007 World Science Fiction Convention will be held in Yokohama, Japan this year, and Kate and I are going. It's a bit of a delayed celebration for my tenure-- I'll be on sabbatical in the Fall, so I won't need to worry about prepping a class for September, and we can make it a nice vacation.
We're planning to spend about three weeks there, and have most of the itinerary sketched out (details below the fold), but there's a little time left unaccounted for. I'm pretty sure there are people reading this from Japan, and I know there are lots of people who have more knowledge of the country…
drorzel | January 2, 2007Kind of an arcane philosophical point, here, so I'll be a little surprised if anybody responds, but this occurred to me while writing the previous post, and I thought I'd throw it out there. In the previous post, I quoted Feynman's one sentence for the future:
Everything is made of atoms.
and suggested as an alternative:
Light is both a particle and a wave.
Part of the idea behind these is that the sentences would allow people who had received that bit of information as Revealed Truth to reconstruct much of modern physics. If you take seriously the idea that material objects are made of…
drorzel | January 2, 2007Some time back, Dave Munger called me out for the one sentence challenge, originally phrased thusly:
Physicist Richard Feynman once said that if all knowledge about physics was about to expire the one sentence he would tell the future is that "Everything is made of atoms". What one sentence would you tell the future about your own area?
Dave, as a writer, offers "Omit needless words." Over at Cosmic Variance, Risa responds with the much less elegant: "The Universe began, about 13.7 billion years ago, as a hot, dense soup of elementary particles, and has been expanding, cooling, and clumping…
drorzel | January 2, 2007So, remember a month or two back when everybody was whining about how Michigan got screwed out of a shot at the Mythical National Championship? They lost to USC last night.
USC, you'll recall, demonstrated their inferiority to Michigan by losing to UCLA, which is how they ended up in the Rose Bowl, rather than playing Ohio State for the MNC.
How about the undefeated Boise State? The knock on them has always been that they play in a weak conference, and couldn't really hang with big conference teams. They beat Oklahoma last night, in a wild game, and end the season undefeated.
What can we…
drorzel | January 1, 2007As usual, John Brockman has asked a large number of prominent science types to answer a broad and general question, and posted the results to the Web. This year's question:
WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT? WHY?
Many of the answers are of the form "I am optimistic that my personal research topic or political obsession will transform the world for the better," but not as many as I feared. A large number of physics types talk about the LHC and other experiments that are expected to come on line this year, and predict a new "Golden Age" for particle physics.
I haven't read all of them (or, really…