drorzel | October 5, 2006So, there's a new issue of Physics World magazine out, with a bunch of feature stories on the Large Hadron Collider. Three of these are available free online:
Life at the high-energy frontier, a sort of overview of the accelerator and the people involved.
Expedition to inner space, a discussion of what they hope to discover at the LHC.
How the US sees the LHC, which is obvious.
I'm particularly interested in one of the articles that isn't free online, though: "Beyond the Higgs" discussing what would happen if the LHC fails to find the Higgs boson. My interest stems from the fact that the…
drorzel | October 5, 2006Last week, Mike Dunford was struggling with some teaching issues, relating to what level of effort he should expect from his students. His original decision drew some harsh criticism, both in his comments and from Sandra Porter, leading Mike to reconsider matters.
I meant to comment at the time, but I gave an exam last Thursday, which kept me kind of busy, and then there was the SAT Challenge to get ready.The issues Mike raises present some tough questions: on the one hand, you want students to learn to learn for themselves, and that occasionally runs counter to their immediate impulses,…
drorzel | October 5, 2006For those who are new to the blog (which is a lot of people...), a good friend of mine (best man at my wedding) is a journalist based in Cairo, who does regular shifts as a wire service stringer in Baghdad. He sends occasional email updates about what's going on over there, and I repost some of them here.
Many of these, as you might imagine, are pretty depressing stories about what is essentially a civil war. This one's a little on the lighter side: it's a story about how the wire service system got an Iraqi judge fired.
The full story is below the fold, but I'll put the opening up here.…
drorzel | October 5, 2006The announcement of a distinctly bio-flavored Nobel Prize in Chemistry has a lot of science-blogging folks either gloating (see also here) or bemoaning the use of Chemistry as an overflow category for prizes awarded to work in other disciplines.
Of course, it must be noted that this is not a new state of affairs. After all, Lord Rutherford, the man famous for saying "In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting" won the 1908 Nobel Prize in... Chemistry.
So, there's a long and distinguished tradition of chemistry as the overflow category for smart people from other fields…
drorzel | October 4, 2006The discussion of Lee Smolin's book just keeps on rolling. One of these days, I'll actually finish it, and make my own informed comments. (It's been a busy couple of weeks hereabouts.)
For the moment, I'll have to settle for pointing you to two new reviews. One is by Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance, who has posted the full draft of the review he wrote for New Scientist. It's lengthy, and detailed, and I don't have anything more specific than that to say, because I've only just reached the section introducing string theory.
The other, quoted by his Holiness, is an Amazon review by Peter Shor,…
drorzel | October 4, 2006Another weird Nobel note: When we were talking about this yesterday at work, a colleague noted that this is one of several prizes awarded for observations based on radio astronomy (Penzias and Wilson, and a couple of things to do with pulsars), but we couldn't think of any given for optical astronomy. There's even the 2004 prize for neutrino and X-ray observations, but we couldn't think of any astronomers who won for work done using visible light.
This probably isn't significant, but it was sort of interesting. Or were we missing something really obvious?
drorzel | October 4, 2006The Paper of Record provides the Story of Record for yesterday's Nobel Prize in Physics for Mather and Smoot, including recent photographs of both. One of my favorite bits of the 1997 Nobel was seeing the media circus that went on around the Prize-- I'll put some amusing anecdotes into another post.
All the usual blogger suspects have weighed in with comments, including but not limited to Sean, Rob, Steinn, Clifford, and Jennifer Ouellette. Most of them took the time to find the appropriate COBE graphics to illustrate their posts, which I was too lazy to do.
Janet Stemwedel deserves special…
drorzel | October 4, 2006The Chemistry Nobel Prize was announced this morning, and goes to only one guy (which is somehwat unusual in this age of massively collaborative science): Roger D. Kornberg of Stanford University, "for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription".
I am very much not a chemist, so all I can really do is sound those words out, and get that "eukarote" is a term for a type of organism, and "transcription" usually seems to involve DNA, so this must have something to do with getting messages from DNA to other parts of the cell. Well, OK, I can also read the press release, which…
drorzel | October 3, 2006Over at his AOL gig, John Scalzi points to a list purporting to be the Top Ten All Time Pop Singalong Songs. Here's the list:
1) Baha Men - Who Let the Dogs Out
2) Beatles - Hey Jude
3) Bee Gees - Stayin' Alive
4) Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You
5) Tommy James and the Shondells - Mony Mony
6) Joan Jett and the Blackhearts - I Love Rock and Roll
7) Don McLean - American Pie
8) Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody
9) Santana Featuring Rob Thomas - Smooth
10) Village People - YMCA
Words fail me. Almost. Words like "madness" and "sadly deluded" and "totally on crack, maybe cut with something…
drorzel | October 3, 2006I've got a silly pop-culture post planned, but we'll put that off for a moment, because this is the 666th post to this blog, according to the counter on Movable Type. That would appear to demand something evil, so here you go:
Behold the Evil! Evil!
drorzel | October 3, 2006A little while back, I offered a Nobel betting pool, and promised to allow anyone who successfully predicted the name of at least one of the winners of the Physics prize to pick a post topic here:
If you correctly predict the name of at least one of the winning physicists, I'll post an article on a topic of your choosing (within reason-- I reserve the right to refuse to write on offensive or inflammatory topics) on Uncertain Principles.
Much to my surprise, Tom Renbarger got two names right.
So, congratulations, Tom. Feel free to gloat, and leave your topic request in the comments.
drorzel | October 3, 2006Hot off the presses: The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John C. Mather and George Smoot "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." This is recent enough that they don't even have much on the Nobel site, but happily for me, it's something I know a tiny bit about.
The prize here is for the COBE ("Cosmic Microwave Background Explorer") mission back in the early 1990's, which made extremely precise measurements of the radiation left over from the Big Bang (the discovery of which led to a previous Nobel for Penzias and Wilson). Mather…
drorzel | October 2, 2006Visit the Official Blogger SAT Challenge site.
After the grading was finished, a few of our volunteer graders made general comments about the essays they read. One thing that really jumped out at me about this was the way that the problems they described sounded like exactly the sort of thing you would expect from a bunch of bloggers:
(Continued after the cut.)
I'll leave the names off, to be polite, so here's Grader One:
I was struck by the number of people who wrote essays without apparently thinking the directions applied to them. They made assumptions about the assignment, or decided…
drorzel | October 2, 2006So, how did I score in the Blogger SAT Challenge? (Because this is all about me, after all...)
Here's my entry. I'm not terribly proud of it, but it got a score of 4 from the graders. Looking more closely, one grader generously gave it a 5/6, while the other gave it a 3/6, presumably because it didn't have a clear enough argument.
All in all, I think that's fair. It wanders around a bit, and equivocates about whether to agree or disagree with the quote. Reading it, you pretty much get to see my thought processes while writing it-- I stared at the question for a minute or two, then started re-…
drorzel | October 2, 2006Visit the Official Blogger SAT Challenge Site
The graph shows a histogram of the scores for the essays entered into the Blogger SAT challenge. It's really a pretty nice distribution, with an average score of 2.899, a standard deviation of 1.28, and a standard deviation of the mean of 0.123 (so I'd make my students write it as "2.9 +/- 0.1"). The median and mode were both 3.
(Well, OK, we cheated a little on the stats to make life easier-- the scores were averaged and then rounded up. If we keep the half-integer scores, the mean drops to 2.7 +/- 0.1, and the distribution looks a little more…
drorzel | October 2, 2006We're very pleased to announce the unveiling of the official Blogger SAT Challenge web site. "We" in this case meaning "me and Dave Munger, plus some other people who know more about computers than we do."
The site, run on the ScienceBlogs framework, allows you to view each of the 109 entries submitted to the Challenge, and rate them for yourself hot-or-not style. You can also see the score given to each essay by the expert graders, a fine collection of volunteers who each read a big stack of these things for no other reason than we asked. Thanks again, David Bruggeman, Suzi D, Elisa Davis,…
drorzel | October 2, 2006The Editors, in a stunning revelation, provide the innocent explanation for the Mark Foley instant-message transcripts: Foley's lines were real, but he was actually IM'ing the Editors about non-sexual topics. Sample passage, with the real responses restored:
Maf54 (7:46:01 PM): well I better let you go do oyur thing
Editorz (7:46:11 PM): yes I have to go do some hand modeling
Editorz (7:46:18 PM): because I am trying to break into the hand modeklling game
Editorz (7:46:22 PM): but it's hard
Editorz (7:46:27 PM): I have to go audition for the girls who give out the hand model jobs
Maf54 (7:46:…
drorzel | October 1, 2006I'm a huge fan of the last Hold Steady album, Separation Sunday, and I've spent about six months (not consecutively) earwormed with "Your Little Hoodrat Friend," so I'd be really remiss if I failed to note that there's a new Hold Steady album coming out Tuesday. There's also a nice article about the band in today's New York Times.
I have to say, from the photos with the Times article, they could hardly look less like rock stars. Great band, though, and I'm really looking forward to the new album.
drorzel | October 1, 2006That BaconCat guy has two interesting posts this weekend on the detailed workings of blogdom. The first is a closer look at the blogs on Technorati's Top 100, and the second is a look at Big Posts and how they affect traffic. I have a few responses to these, which probably aren't terribly interesting to anyone who isn't already a blog obsessive, but that's why I'm posting this on a Sunday...
Two things strike me as interesting about John's look at the Top 25. The first is just how much movement there is in the Top 100-- when I first followed that link, the ScienceBlogs front page was #26.…
drorzel | October 1, 2006I've been trying hard to resist commenting on the spectacular meltdown of Mark Foley over inappropriate contacts with a Congressional page. The Editors pretty well have the schadenfreude angle covered (including a link to the deeply creepy IM transcripts), so I don't have much to add there.
Much has been made of the fact that Foley was on the committee drafting legislation to protect kids from creepy guys on the Internet. "Set a thief to catch a thief," I suppose. The absolute best comment on the matter that I've seen, though, comes from this post at the Corpuscle:
I think it's great that…