Another idle thought inspired by the Bond movie (I may or may not post comments about the movie as a whole, but you can check out Kate's spoiler-laden comments. I liked it a little more than she did, but I'm more familiar with the genre, and willing to cut them more slack...): From what I can tell, this movie appears to have gotten about 50% of its budget from product placement. Any time Bond uses his laptop, the shot is carefully set up to put the big "VAIO" logo right in the center of the screen. His magic cell phone gets almost as much screen time as the girl, and there's even a scene…

The Union of Concerned Scientists has a statement on scientific integrity denouncing the various abuses of the scientific process perpetrated by the Bush Administration. If you're a scientist, and you're concerned about the politicization of the science used for policy-making, you might want to sign on to the statement by going to their site. This has already been linked a million other places, but it's still worth passing on.

I have a tablet PC that I am borrowing from work to see if I like the way it works. As a test of it's usefulness, I'm going to attempt to live-blog at least part of the Giants same. So, let's see how this works... The Giants score on their first posses, on, after Dallas missed a FG. Guess Vanderjagt doesn't look so bed... Wacky play - INT by Romo, followed by a fumble. Kiwanuka just can't catch a break. Still, you can't drop that ball. Dallas TD, after a weak pass interference call. So much for the shut-out... More below : So far, so good. The hand writing recognition i5…

As an avowed Giants fan, I suppose I really ought to say something about the epic meltdown they suffered in the past week, ideally before today's game with the Cowboys. The trouble is, last week was so horrendous that it's hard to say anything coherent... I ought to say something, though, so I'll collect a few random thoughts after the cut: Collapse Item #1: People are all over Tom Coughlin about calling for the pass play that produced the first interception, and really ignited the Tennessee comeback. I don't actually hold that one against Coughlin-- yes, they'd been running the ball well to…

Kate and I saw the new Bond flick last night (short review: nice re-launch of the franchise, Daniel Craig does a great job with the role), and as the final credits started to roll, they played that signature James Bond riff-- the "dum di-di dum, da-da-da" bass line, the "da-da di dahh, di dah-daaaah" brass thing. You know the song I mean-- it or something like it is in pretty much all of the movies. It made me wonder about the guy who wrote it, though. Does he think of it as the crowning work of his career, or is it a cheap bit of hackwork that he banged out over a bottle of muscatel in 1967…

I don't normally do blog carnival announcements. I'm not really organized enough to remember the deadlines, and most of the carnivals out there don't interest me all that much. The first edition of a new one has just been posted, though, and it's definitely worth publicizing: "Help Us Help Ourselves" (or "HUHO," if you like acronyms). Lauren explains some of the rationale: I don't need an economist to tell me what it's like to be poor, I don't have to read about it in a book that is more suited for a grad student than for me in my free time between jobs. I'm not stupid, I don't live in a…

The Queen of Niskayuna is being repressed: Actually, ignore the reproachful look. She spends every night, and all day on weekdays in her crate, and she's perfectly happy to go in there. In fact, most of the time, she goes in there of her own accord, some time before we're actually ready to leave for work, or go to bed. She knows that she gets a handful of treats when we close up the crate, and tries to hurry that along. The reproachful look in this picture is because I was messing around with the camera, rather than giving her a fistful of dog treats and letting her get on with her busy day…

One of the options that came with my new car (I bought one that they had on the lot) was an "Eight-Way Power Driver's Seat." As a physicist, I thought this sounded pretty exciting, because, you know, we appear to live in a three-dimensional world, and to get eight directions of adjustability would need to involve an extra spatial dimension or two, and that would be big news. Cancel the LHC, and everybody rush to the nearest Ford plant! After a bit of experimentation with the car, I can report that we still have only three spatial dimensions. The eight adjustments are: Move the entire seat up…

Stolen from a discussion on an email list, a small usage question: What's the difference between a "fiasco" and a "debacle"? Is there a difference, or are they perfect synonyms? My thoughts below the fold. Personally, I'm with the person on the listserver who said that "there should be a touch of comedy to a fiasco, and a touch of tragedy in a debacle," but I'm interested to hear what other people think.

Friday's a good day for silly pop music lists, so here's a couple adapted from a "meme" via Jamie Bowden: Go to http://popculturemadness.com and find the Greatest USA Hits of the year you turned 18. I refuse to spend a bunch of time dinking around with typefaces, and I'm not going to list all 75 of the songs they provide for each year, but if you'd like some insight into my formative pop culture experiences, here's the top 20 from the year I turned 18: 1. Love Shack - B-52's 2. Funky Cold Medina - Tone Loc 3. Bust A Move - Young MC 4. Wind Beneath My Wings - Bette Midler 5. Like A Prayer…

So, what's the deal with that graph I was talking about the other day? I sort of left it hanging at the end, there, but I ought to actually interpret the figure. It also serves as a nice and fairly simple illustration of how physicists approach experimental data. Here's a newer version of the plot in question, made using more recent data: shows the fluorescence signal detected in our metastable atoms source as a function of the gas pressure on the source inlet. There's a clear peak in the data at a pressure of 60-70 milliTorr (ignore that one point flying way up above all the others-- that's…

The Times last weekend had a big article on the "achievement gap" in education, where poor and minority students are found to lag behind upper- and middle-class white students in many subjects. The author looks at a number of innovative shools that are producing good results with students from the at-risk groups, and considers a number of factors that might cause the gap. If you're a regular blog reader, you've probably already run across this, as it's been commented on locally by Jonah, Dave, and Jake, and on the wider Internet by a cast of thousands (see, for example, Matt Yglesias). It's…

For those who care, a picture of my new car (I picked it up Tuesday, but didn't get around to cropping down the pictures until this morning): In keeping with Ford's general policy, this shot is sort of a three-quarters angle-- as Kate pointed out, the glossy brochure from the dealership doesn't include any pictures full on from the side. She thinks it's because the car has a certain hearse-like aspect from that angle: I think she's just, um... jealous? No, wait, she's pretty much right. I don't care, though-- it's a new car, and it's mine all mine.

There's a brief squib in the AIP Physics News Updates today about new work on protein folding. "Protein folding" is a simple-sounding term for a really difficult problem: protein molecules are made up of chains of amino acids, which can be bent into a huge number of different possible configurations. In nature, though, these proteins are normally found in only one configuration. Correctly predicting the folded configuration of a given protein is an extremely difficult computational problem. The paper highlighted by the AIP takes a new approach to the problem, employing some calculational…

Doug Natelson posted the second installment in his inside view of the hiring process for academic physics positions, this one describing the campus visit/ interview process. Again, the description is mostly accurate for a much larger department than ours, at a research insitution, but the basic idea is the same. In our department, candidates making campus visits meet individually with each of the faculty for about half an hour, and also get tours of the campus and the department labs. Throw in a meeting with the Dean, and a colloquium talk, plus a meeting with students and dinner with a…

Over at the World's Fair, David has a post with pictures showing a week's worth of food for families in various countries. It's pretty eye-opening-- the total volume of food (less packaging) for a family of four in the US or England exceeds that eaten by fifteen people in Mali. Damn, but we're gluttons.

Recently, my post about my SAT Challenge entry has leaped into the Top Five Most Emailed list over on the right, for what reason I can't really say. That gives me two of the top five, though-- eat my dust, Myers. Now there's only that Deltoid character between me and world domination... The other Most Emailed post is my PowerPoint advice, which reminds me that I'm a terrible person for not linking to Dave Munger's Casual Friday study of PowerPoint technique. In my defense, it was posted at the very busiest point of the term for me, and I forgot about it by the time I managed to dig myself…

Two quick links from yesterday's Inside Higher Ed that a browser crash kept me from posting yesterday: 1) A story on a professor at Idaho who asks students to sign a waiver acknowledging that they may be offended by some of the material in his film studies class. There's a bit of discussion of whether this is a good idea or not, but the main effect on my end is to make me grateful that I'm not a humanities professor. From talking to colleagues on the other side of campus, there's a whole bunch of stuff that they have to put up with that we don't in the sciences. It's rare to find a literature…

The ACC-Big Ten Challenge is one of those things that seems like a really good idea on paper. They're consistently two of the top basketball conferences in the country, and both have strongly partisan fans who will argue for the superiority of their conference over all others. Matching them up in the early season seems like a great way to provide some good early-season games, and settle some fan arguments. Of course, the execution has left something to be desired-- the ACC has won the Challenge every year, and the overall record isn't terribly close-- I think the graphic they put up last…

The Times this morning offers the "Well, duh!" headline of the day, and possibly the week: Energy Use Can Be Cut by Efficiency, Survey Says In other news, the Sun rose in the east this morning. Snark aside, there is an important point in the article: the efficiency savings they're talking about can be realized now, with technology we already have, and not at some indeterminate point in the future when more efficient technologies are invented. The energy savings, the report said, can be achieved with current technology and would save money for consumers and companies. The McKinsey report…