drorzel | November 1, 2006This is a couple of days old, but I only got around to reading the story last night. The New York Times has an occasional sports magazine supplement, and this week, they published a nice article on Bill Parcells:
Bill Parcells is the only coach in N.F.L. history to take four different teams to the playoffs, but that only begins to set him apart. In 1983, in his first N.F.L. head coaching job, he took over a New York Giants team that had one winning season over the previous decade, turned it around on a dime and led it to Super Bowl titles in the 1986 and 1990 seasons. In 1993, he became head…
drorzel | November 1, 2006College basketball season is almost upon us (practices have started, but there won't be real games for another couple of weeks), which means that college basketball previews are thick on the ground. Over at the world-wde leader in sports marketing, they have a column about the Maryland guard situation this season:
In 2004-05, point guard John Gilchrist seemed to spend more time rocking the Terrapins' chemistry than he did handling the rock. And when Gilchrist bolted after his junior season, swingman D.J. Strawberry assumed those duties last year, mostly because Maryland had no other reliable…
drorzel | November 1, 2006NASA has scheduled a mission to service the Hubble. This should keep the space telescope flying and producing great science until 2013 or so.
Obviously, there are a lot of caveats in there-- the mission isn't scheduled until 2008, so the Hubble needs to last that long, and there can't be major delays or disasters with the Shuttle before then-- but this is genuinely good news. Congratulations to the scientists and politicians who lobbied hard for this.
drorzel | November 1, 2006I didn't take any pictures, but Monday night, I went to a Balinese gamelan concert on campus, put on by a group of twenty-odd students from a couple of Asian music classes, aided by some visiting musicians from Bali. There were also dance performances by three students, and one visiting Balinese dancer (who is actually a student at Kansas State, if I heard the introduction correctly...).
I've never heard gamelan music before, so I'm not sure what it's supposed to sound like, but it seemed like the students did a very good job. There were also a couple of breaks during which they explained…
drorzel | November 1, 2006Well, vote for a ScienceBlog, anyway. Shelley is a finalist for a student blogger scholarship.
Weirdly, the outcome appears to be determined by a popular vote, which seems like it's just asking for Internet Drama. But if you're interested in student blogging, go read the nominees, and vote for one.
drorzel | October 31, 2006So, in the previous post about symmetry and the difference between bosons and fermions, I threw in a bunch of teasing comments about how the requirement that quantum particles be indistinguishable has surprising and interesting consequences. Of course, I never quite explained what all that was about. Which, I suppose, means I'm obliged to pull out something pretty big to hold up as an example of an interesting consequence of the symmetry requirements.
Well, how about chemistry? Not some sub-part of it-- the whole field. If it weren't for the requirement that quantum particles be…
drorzel | October 31, 2006A couple of weeks ago, when I bought the new Hold Steady album, I also picked up Sam's Town by the Killers. I bought it in spite of some pretty harsh reviews, but in the end, I think that The Onion's AV Club got it right:
The Killers have created a batch of easily digestible pop songs that would be disposable if they weren't so catchy; in other words, they've more or less done their job. Sure, it would be nice if the hooks were sharper, and if songs other than "When You Were Young" could approach "Mr. Brightside"-like enormity, but overall, Sam's Town stays the course the way a sophomore-…
drorzel | October 31, 2006At least, that's the obvious conclusion to draw from today's Medium Large...
drorzel | October 31, 2006The Times this morning has an article on the future of computer science:
Computer science is not only a comparatively young field, but also one that has had to prove it is really science. Skeptics in academia would often say that after Alan Turing described the concept of the "universal machine" in the late 1930's -- the idea that a computer in theory could be made to do the work of any kind of calculating machine, including the human brain -- all that remained to be done was mere engineering.
The more generous perspective today is that decades of stunningly rapid advances in processing speed…
drorzel | October 30, 2006I've had a chance now to read through the new papers mentioned in the Wolfgang Ketterle post last week, and there's some interesting stuff there. The second item on the list from the AIP news article, "First observation of Mott insulator shells," is particularly interesting, as I did some early work in that area when I was a post-doc. We're coming down to the end of the term here, and I have a ton of things to do, but I feel weirdly inspired to try to explain what that item is about. I really ought to do something about my blog addiction.
Anyway, explaining the new Ketterle experiment will…
drorzel | October 30, 2006Because I'm a Bad Person, I no longer remember who pointed me to Halfway There's primer on polling, but it's really an excellent of the effects of sample size, and why it's legitimate to project results based on small numbers of interviews. Some important notes from the conclusion:
Second, even a poll that is supposed to be within its estimated margin of error 95% of the time will be wrong and fall outside those bounds 5% of the time. That's one time in twenty. Therefore, whenever you see a political poll whose results seem way out of whack, it could be one of those flukes. Remember, polling…
drorzel | October 30, 2006In honor of Halloween tomorrow, a menacing picture of Emmy, Queen of Niskayuna:
Caption: "Don't even think about trying to take my Kong."
drorzel | October 29, 2006Gina Kolata in the New York Times today reports on new attempts to blame obesity for the problems of the world:
Last week the list of ills attributable to obesity grew: fat people cause global warming.
This latest contribution to the obesity debate comes in an article by Sheldon H. Jacobson of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and his doctoral student, Laura McLay. Their paper, published in the current issue of The Engineering Economist, calculates how much extra gasoline is used to transport Americans now that they have grown fatter. The answer, they said, is a billion gallons a…
drorzel | October 29, 2006The Day the Earth Stood Still was on tv yesterday, and we watched most of it because it's a classic, and because the alternative was bad college football. Kate had never seen it before, and was surprised to find that it wasn't campy.
There is, however, one scene that has become unintentionally hilarious over the past fifty-odd years. Two Army doctors are outside the room where Klaatu (Michael Rennie) is being held, and they have a conversation that goes something like this (paraphrased, from memory):
Doctor 1: How old would you say [Klaatu] is?
Doctor 2: Thirty-five, or thirty-eight.
Doctor 1…
drorzel | October 29, 2006I got a comment to my recent "Classic Edition" post on peer review asking permission to translate the post into French, and put it on a French-language blog. Needless to say, I was kind of flattered that anybody would think it was worth that much work, so I agreed, and now it's appeared. Cool stuff.
I took four years of French in high school, and remember very little of it, but then I wrote the original article, so I can just about make sense of what it says. I can't assess the quality of the translation, but really, does it matter?
drorzel | October 28, 2006Two nights before my college graduation, I was having a beer in one of the two bars in town, and one of the Deans was at the bar, holding forth. "Do you know," he said to me and a couple of other students, "there are five people in your class who aren't going to graduate because they don't have enough PE credits?"
"Really?" I said, "Who?"
He looked at me, and said "What's your name again?"
I always think of that when somebody brings up the subject of Phys. Ed. requirements, as the Dean Dad did a little while ago. Williams had both a Phys. Ed. requirement and a mandatory swim test (that…
drorzel | October 28, 2006There's been a lot of discussion of single-sex education in blogdom recently, in the wake of new rules allowing more single-sex schools. Matt Yglesias offers links, and Kevin Drum expresses concern:
It turns out, though, that my real fear is just the opposite: what if we try it and Becks turns out to be right? What if it works? Does that mean we just give up on the whole idea of figuring out how to make co-ed education work? I can't be the only one who thinks that would be a bad idea, can I?
There are all sorts of problems of race, gender, class, religion, and so forth that can seemingly be…
drorzel | October 27, 2006I've had a tab open for a while containing an Inside Higher Ed article on a new approach to introducing science at Emory University:
David Lynn, who chairs the department of chemistry at Emory University, spoke about Emory's seminar program for entering freshmen. All Emory freshmen must take a seminar the first semester and the one for math and science teaches students how to think like a scientist.
The course consists of five modules. Each module is taught by a grad student who presents his own research, guiding students through the research process, from designing studies to defending…
drorzel | October 27, 2006I'm lecturing to our first-year seminar today about Bose-Einstein Condensation, using slides that haven't been updated since 2002. Given the pace of research in the field, that's a little crazy, so I spent a good while last night looking at pretty pictures on the Ketterle group web site, among others, so I can report on the latest and greatest developments, or at least that subset of the latest and greatest that I think I can boil down to one slide targeted at college frosh.
Coincidentally, the AIP news feed is also highlighting recent results from the Ketterle group, citing three new results…
drorzel | October 27, 2006Steinn reports a new metric for research productivity that some people are using: the "H-number":
The H-score, takes all your papers, ranked by citation count; then you take the largest "k" such that the kth ranked paper has at least k citations.
So, you start off with a H-score of zero.
If your 5th highest cited paper has 5 citations but your 6th highest cited paper has 4 citations then your H=5.
If your 10th highest cited paper has 11 citations, but your 11th highest cited paper has 9 citations, then your H=10.
And so on. High H is better.
Yeah, that's just what we need, another quasi-…