drorzel | October 11, 2006Having just posted an extremely cranky comment, I should compensate with something happy. So, , um... here: Jo Walton posted a poem about General MacArthur in Faerie. Because, as she puts it, "If the American Right think they own Churchill, I can definitely write about MacArthur in Faerieland."
The poem was commissioned as part of her auction for the John M. Ford Memorial Endowment for the Minneapolis public library. She's got lots of nice things on offer, and it's a far nobler cause than watching me snap at string theorists, so go take a look, and send them some money, OK?
drorzel | October 10, 2006We had a general faculty meeting today at work. As a general rule, I don't talk about the details of internal campus politics, and I am not going to discuss the substance of the meeting here. The new SAT was brought up, though, and a couple of people made comments of the general form "Nobody knows what to make of the new SAT writing test..."
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to mention the Blogger SAT Challenge. Discretion is the better part of tenure, though, so I kept my mouth shut...
It's a pity. That kind of opportunity doesn't come around often...
drorzel | October 10, 2006Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics is probably the hot physics book of the year. Granted, that's not saying very much, relative to whatever Oprah's reading this week, but it's led to no end of discussion among physics types. And also, frequently, the spectacle of people with Ph.D.'s squabbling like children, so reviewing it is a subject that I approach with some trepidation.
I'm coming to this late enough that it's hard to talk about the book without also talking about the various responses to the book. I'll do my best to split that material off into a separate post (if I post it at all),…
drorzel | October 10, 2006In a weird example of synchronicity, Dr. Free-Ride posted about science journalism yesterday, and Inside Higher Ed offers a viewpoint piece by Michael Bugeja on the same topic this morning. You might almost think it was one of those "meme" things.
They both agree that there's a problem with science reporting, but come at the problem from different ends. Bugeja is mostly concerned with the supply side of the problem, talking about the difficulties scientists have with communicating to the public:
These professors rank among the most ingenious, passionate people I have ever met.
Put some of…
drorzel | October 10, 2006Henry Farrell thinks he sees a parallel between music critics and the Mafia:
I think that there's a similar problem in the relationship between music artists and music consumers, in which critics play a key brokerage role, just as the Mafia does in a rather different sphere of commercial relations. Critics serve to guarantee to the public that certain artists, certain music, is 'good' (there are a whole bunch of sociological questions about what constitutes 'good' in this sense that I don't want to get into). But they also want to preserve their own role as critical intermediaries and…
drorzel | October 9, 2006It's college application season, and the New York Times style section ran a nice article Sunday about parents touring colleges with their children. It's mostly about the bonding that goes on on such trips, which is probably instantly recognizable if you're the sort of wealthy Northeasterner who is the target demographic of the Sunday New York Times.
I'm sort of on the fringes of that demographic, so what really resonates for me is a different part of the story:
Tom Likovich of Bronxville, N.Y., who was at Hamilton College with his wife, Ellen, and daughter, Alex, on a recent weekend morning,…
drorzel | October 9, 2006Thinking a little more about the soundtrack post from a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by the fact that I don't seem to have the same strong associations with more recent songs that I do with some older stuff. It's not that I'm buying less music, I don't think, but rather that iTunes and the lack of good radio has changed the way I listen to music.
In particular, I miss good radio, and I wonder if it would be possible to get iTunes to simulate the sort of thing I'm after (explained below the fold).
In my opinion, a really good radio station playlist breaks down sort of like this:
50%…
drorzel | October 9, 2006So, I recently finished The Trouble With Physics (initial comment here, full review forthcoming) and I read Not Even Wrong a little while ago (review here). I suppose I could dig up Lawrence Krauss's book, and go for the String Theory Backlash trifecta, but I could also hit myself in the head with a brick...
My first inclination is to not read anything more about string theory for a good long while, but that seems a little unfair. Given that I've read a pair of anti-string books, the responsible thing to do would probably be to read something pro-string, to see how the other side views the…
drorzel | October 9, 2006The Blogger SAT Challenge made the front page of Slashdot last week, making a huge spike in the traffic here, and bringin this blog to the attention to this blog-- I've had a half-dozen emails and comments from students and colleagues who hadn't seen the blog before.
Of course, after a blitz of posts associated with the unveiling of the Challenge, I pretty much reverted to being the King of the Physical Science Channel, and didn't post anything more about it. Dave Munger has kept talking about it, though, and has posted a lot of interesting material, including comments on his own essay, an…
drorzel | October 8, 2006About fifteen minutes from now, my Giants will take the field against the Redskins. The Giants are coming off a bye week (in which they somehow managed to trail by 10 going into the fourth quarter), so the big story leading up to the game has to do with the always-volatile Jeremy Shockey, who popped off after a bad loss at Seattle, and said the team was outcoached.
This has led to a lot of hand-wringing about whether the team is in crisis, or whether Tom Coughlin should bench Shockey, and the sports pundits have had a field day analyzing every aspect of the story. The consensus seems to be…
drorzel | October 8, 2006I finished Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics last night, and will write up a full review in the next couple of days. On the whole, I thought it was a well-done book, and he makes some good points. It's not without its problems, though, chief among them being the fact that the title is missing some words.
The book is really The Trouble With [Theoretical Particle] Physics, but Smolin, like the string theorists he criticizes for arrogance and narrow-mindedness, consistently talks about string theory and quantum gravity as if they were the only areas of physics that matter, and about physics…
drorzel | October 8, 2006The new Hold Steady record, Boys and Girls in America was released on Tuesday, and I picked it up immediately at iTunes. I've listened to it straight through a bunch of times now, while doing onther things. So, how is it?
The short answer is "Not as good as Separation Sunday." At least, it doesn't have any songs that made the same kind of electric, immediate impact as "Your Little Hoodrat Friend" and "How a Resurrection Really Feels."
Of course, that's praising with faint damns-- very few records grab me as quickly and effectively as Separation Sunday did, so saying that this one failed to do…
drorzel | October 7, 2006While I'm being cranky about graphics in the mass media, a quick Bronx cheer for the New York Times and their Mars rover story this morning, which opens:
NASA's Opportunity Mars rover spent 22 months trekking almost six miles to a large scientifically promising crater. Like a tourist who asks a passer-by to take a picture for proof he made it to a famous site, the robot rover has had another spacecraft snap an image of it sitting on the rim
The picture isn't included with the article. There's a very nice picture taken by the Opportunity rover, but not the picture of the rover. For that, you…
drorzel | October 7, 2006Sean Carroll comments on an item in the Atlantic Monthly on test scores compared across nations. There are two things that really bug me about this item, the most important of which is the deeply dishonest graphic the Atlantic did to illustrate the item.
Here's the honest version of the graph, redone using data from this table (the relevant figures don't appear in the report cited in the original piece). (Click on the graph for a larger version.)
I've plotted the normalized test score (the score for each country divided by the reported maximum score, because I'm a physicist and like…
drorzel | October 6, 2006Kate points me to a real head-scratcher from Slate, about Harry Collins posing as a physicist. Collins is a sociologist who studies expertise, and also has a very strong interest in gravitational wave detection experiments. Collins and co-workers collected a bunch of qualitative questions about gravitational waves and detectors, and got an expert in the field to write answers to them. He then wrote his own answers, and sent both sets of answers to a bunch of people in the field, and asked them to guess which set of responses was from the expert in the field.
The surprising result from this is…
drorzel | October 6, 2006Third and final post in a series about "teleportation" from July 2002. This one is mostly dedicated to voicing the same complaints I have about the more recent stories that kicked this whole repost business off.
The more things change, the more I keep repeating myself.
So, having discussed how to do "quantum teleportation," how does this get us to "Beam me up, Scotty?" Well, that's the thing. It doesn't, not in any meaningful sense. What gets "teleported" is just the state of the initial quantum particle, not the particle itself. There's no reason why you couldn't do "teleportation" with…
drorzel | October 6, 2006Part two of three of an explanation of "quantum teleportation" experiments, from July of 2002. This one goes through the basics how teleportation works. I might be able to do better now, having worked through it in more detail in order to teach about it in my Quantum Optics class, but it's been a busy week, so I'll just repost the old entry for now.
So, the last whopping huge physics post here covered the idea of quantum entanglement-- how do you get from entanglement to "quantum teleportation", which is what the article that kicked the whole thing off was about?
The first step here is to…
drorzel | October 6, 2006As threatened in the previous post on new "quantum teleportation" results, here's the first of three old articles on teleportation. This one discusses EPR states and "entanglement." It's somewhat linkrotted-- in particular, the original news article is gone, but the explanation is still ok.
This dates from July of 2002, which is like 1840 in blog years.
Yet again, SciTech Daily provides me with weblog material, this time in the form of an oddball article in the Las Vegas City Life archives (how do they find this stuff? It never would've occurred to me to look there...). The article is mostly…
drorzel | October 6, 2006The latest physics news is an experimental demonstration of "teleportation" involving both light and atoms, done at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and reported on by the Institutes of Physics and CNN, among others, and remarked on by Dave, among others.
I wrote up some stuff about teleportation in the early days of this blog, and I'll Classic Edition those posts in a little while. "Teleportation" stories always kind of annoy me, though, because the reality isn't nearly as cool as the image that the term evokes. To some degree, it's a triumph of marketing more than a scientific…
drorzel | October 6, 2006Via Kevin Drum, a story about who's on the no-fly list:
Gary Smith, John Williams and Robert Johnson are some of those names. Kroft talked to 12 people with the name Robert Johnson, all of whom are detained almost every time they fly. The detentions can include strip searches and long delays in their travels.
"Well, Robert Johnson will never get off the list," says Donna Bucella, who oversaw the creation of the list and has headed up the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center since 2003.
"Anyway, that's what he gets for selling his soul to the devil for the ability to play guitar."