drorzel | October 16, 2006The AIP Physics News service last week highlighted a new result from the Athena collaboration at CERN with the headline "First Antimatter Chemistry". That conjures images of sticking anti-carbon atoms together to make anti-buckballs, but that's not exactly what's going on...
The experiment in the case involves the interaction between anti-protons and molecular hydrogen ions. They slow and trap the anti-protons, and bring them into the same region with the H2+ molecules, and a reaction occurs that pulls the molecule apart, producing a neutral hydrogen atom and something they're calling "…
drorzel | October 16, 2006Some time back, I offered the right to pick a post topic to anyone who managed to name one of the Physics Nobel laureates for 2006. Tom Renbarger won, and picked his topic:
OK, with Midnight Madness on the horizon, I've decided to request a sort of season preview of two (trying to press my advantage since I got two names) of the following three conferences: A-10, plus one of the Big East or ACC. Or, if you get on a roll, all three. If you're pressed for time, the A-10 would suffice, and maybe something about Maryland. :-)
I'm going to do the ACC first, because I know a bit more about them…
drorzel | October 16, 2006Some time back, I offered the right to pick a post topic to anyone who managed to name one of the Physics Nobel laureates for 2006. Tom Renbarger won, and picked his topic:
OK, with Midnight Madness on the horizon, I've decided to request a sort of season preview of two (trying to press my advantage since I got two names) of the following three conferences: A-10, plus one of the Big East or ACC. Or, if you get on a roll, all three. If you're pressed for time, the A-10 would suffice, and maybe something about Maryland. :-)
I'm going to try to do all three leagues (though I know basically…
drorzel | October 16, 2006Inside Higher Ed today features an opinion piece calling for more basic research funding:
For the first time since we won the Cold War, other nations are mounting an aggressive challenge to the United States' position as a world leader in science. China and India combined produce more than twice as many engineers each year than the United States. Both have exceeded our rate of economic growth over the past decade and, although they're starting from a much lower base, both have increased funding for basic research more quickly than we have.
This presents a challenge because we're currently…
drorzel | October 15, 2006Jim Henley proposes a "meme" about literature:
Adrienne Aldredge has a twist on Bookish Questions I'm herewith turning into a meme:
What authors have you given up on for good? And why?
I'm going to stick to authors who continue to produce work, and whom I used to follow eagerly, not authors I felt obligated to try and didn't like once I did.
Jim offers Dan Simmons and Alan Furst as his choices (read his post to see why). Simmons would be an excellent choice, but, um, I bought both Ilium and Olympos in hardcover. (In my defense, I read Ilium from the library first, and it seemed like a…
drorzel | October 15, 2006Symmetry magazine has an article on travel tips for physicists, from other physicists. There are two scary things about this:
1) The degree to which the picture that emerges from the different tips aligns with unflattering stereotypes of physicists. Some of the items are funny travel stories, but the tips are all about keeping your laptop running, and how to live out of a single back for two weeks, and how to avoid actually talking to anyone during your travels.
2) The fact that I think most of the advice is excellent. God, I'm a dork.
They're absolutely right when they say "if you must check…
drorzel | October 14, 2006The preceding comments about my alumni oganization were brought on by a bunch of factors-- the arrival of a Maryland alumni publication this week, the update-your-information questionnaire from the Society of Alumni, a visiting speaker last week who was two years behind me at Williams. Probably the biggest was the fact that this is Union's Homecoming, which also means I'm off to spend most of the afternoon on campus, watching football and rugby, and talking to whatever students, parents, and recent alumni I encounter.
This is one of those small-college things that I think is actually fairly…
drorzel | October 14, 2006No, it's not another spoof religion like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and it's not a real religion for people to get outraged over. The title refers to my college alumni organization-- Williams uses a cow as the unofficial mascot, and the school colors are purple and gold, so little purple cows are all over everything. But as Kate has noted many times, there's a certain cult-like air surrounding Williams alumni (she only married into the cult).
It's sort of hard to explain what I'm talking about, but possibly the best example is the story of the Alumni Review. Many colleges and universities…
drorzel | October 13, 2006The previous post was written at about 9:30 last night, and ends on an optimistic note. Of course, any hint of optimism demands retribution from the Lords of Karma, so I got a phone call at 9:45 telling me the power had gone out on campus. The power was apaprently off for something like an hour and a half, which is distressingly typical.
Happily, the person who called me was my research student, calling from the lab to tell me that he had shut down the valves on the roughing pumps. This is an important step, because the turbopumps don't automatically re-start, but the roughing pumps do, and…
drorzel | October 13, 2006We've continued plugging away at the optical excitation experiment discussed in the Week in the Lab series last year, and have finally managed to get a decent metastable signal out of the thing. The signals are at pressures that are considerably higher than I would like (and quite a bit higher than the turbopump is happy with), but recent results from a colleague at Argonne National Lab suggest that this may well be due to the fact that one of our lasers is operating at much lower power than would be ideal. Still, it's data, and data are always good.
As always with experimental work, getting…
drorzel | October 13, 2006The silliest graph I've ever seen presented in public looked something like this:
It was an after-dinner talk at a DAMOP meeting a few years back, and the speaker was somebody associated with the Hubble Space Telescope. I don't recall what was being plotted, but he talked for a while about ho proud they were of this data, and how well it fit the theory, and then he put up this plot. The blueish circle is the data point, and the dotted line is a theoretical fit to the data.
The physicists in the audience all guffawed. He asked "What's so funny?" and somebody near the front asked "What's the…
drorzel | October 13, 2006"Imperialism"
"Colonialism"
I have a vague sense that these two terms are not interchangeable, but I can't for the life of me explain what the difference is. But there seems to be one, at least based on listening to colleagues from the other side of campus talk about their research.
So, what's the difference?
(Some context can be found on Kate's LiveJournal.)
drorzel | October 12, 2006I'm inordinately amused by this Overheard in New York entry. Quite possibly because it reminds me of the Jesus Bread-Golem Project, or maybe just for the suggested headline "If Jesus Wanted Us to Eat Him with Salsa, He'd Be Appearing on Tortillas.... Oh... Wait."
I'm a Bad Person. Also, I miss Fafblog.
Update: See also this LiveJournal post. It's a meme!
drorzel | October 12, 2006There's an academic joke that says that the job of a university president is really pretty simple. To ensure happiness on campus, all he or she needs to do is make sure that there's sex for the undergraduates, food for the graduate students, and parking for the faculty.
It's certainly true that parking enforcement has been one of the most efficient departments on every campus I've been associated with. At Maryland, it was practically the only efficient thing there, but it was a fearsome oepration. I once parked my car in a faculty lot just long enough to run inside and drop a homework set in…
drorzel | October 12, 2006Kevin Drum and Mark Kleiman both pick up on the new book from Dennis Kuo saying that the "faith-based initiatives" program was a political scam.
The MSNBC piece contains a few colorful quotes about the shenanigans Kuo is reporting, which sound pretty bad. Kevin cites them, then asks:
Like I said a few days ago, are social conservatives ever going to catch on to the way they're being conned by the Republican Party?
I agree that they're being conned, but at the same time, what, exactly, does Kevin think they're going to do about it?
This is one of the central problems with the "What's the…
drorzel | October 12, 2006I'm pretty thoroughly disgusted with the string theory arguments at the moment, so I told myself I wasn't going to say more about the subject. And then, they post a detailed explanation of what strings have to do with RHIC over at Backreaction....
Given my preference for layman-level science blogging over dense technical science blogging, I can't not link to it. If you've wondered what that particular argument is about, but can't make heads or tails of the ArXiV preprints usually offered as explanation, take a look at this post. The English is shaky at points, but that's because the authors…
drorzel | October 11, 2006Back in late July, I got email from a writer for Physics World magazine (which is sort of the UK equivalent of Physics Today), asking my opinion on a few questions relating to particle physics funding. The basis for asking me (as opposed to, you know, a particle physicist) was presumably a post from April in which I ranted a bit about the justification of Big Science projects.
The article is now out, but not available on-line, so I haven't read it. I spent a fair amount of time typing up my response, though, so I'm going to recycle it into a blog post, because I can do that.
The original…
drorzel | October 11, 2006Over at Crooked Timber, Daniel picks up the Harry Collins thing I talked about last week, and asks an interesting question about the role of math:
We don't want to make "understanding the subject" mean "being able to do calculations about the subject", unless we have some reason to believe that this is a necessary condition rather than a sufficient one (and to be frank, I don't believe it's a sufficient condition; I've spent enough time with economists to know that ability to do the maths does not mean that someone understands the economics). Is there anything? Or is Collins' concept of "…
drorzel | October 11, 2006I know I have said this before, but it obviously didn't take, so I'll do it again. Allow me to explain a basic principle of economics.
You make high-quality technical instruments. I am interested in getting my hands on some high-quality technical instruments. In fact, I am sufficiently interested that I will write grants to obtain money to give you in exchange for your high-quality technical instruments. You are interested in obtaining money in exchange for your high-quality technical instruments.
However, and this is the key point, in order to obtain the money to give you in exchange for…
drorzel | October 11, 2006So, last week's SAT Challenge rollout got picked up by Slashdot, which led to a great big spike in traffic. How big? Well, here's a graph:
"Big deal," you say, "It's not that big a spike."
Thing is, that's a semi-log plot. The top of the spike represents almost a factor of twenty more visits than the average for the two weeks before we got slashdotted-- 26,103 versus 1,380. That's why the log plot is the appropriate graph-- on a linear scale, you can't even see the weekly variation in traffic. Look below the fold if you don't believe me:
See what I mean?
As it stands, even if I don't get…