drorzel | September 30, 2006The Onion's AV Club review of Chuck Klosterman's Chuck Klosterman IV came across my RSS feeds the other day, and reminded me that I haven't actually booklogged it. That's a glaring omission, as a quote from it was the basis for the third most viewed post on this weblog to date.
The book is subtitled "A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas." The "Dangerous Ideas" part has already been covered in the problematic quote bit above, said ideas showing up here in the form of fourteen essays originally for various magazines (with cute/ clever little "hyoptheticals" as introductions for each…
drorzel | September 30, 2006A week ago, I suggested a meta-contest for The Trouble With Physics, with a copy of the book going to the person with the best suggestion of an appropriate way to give away the book. The turnout wasn't exactly overwhelming (maybe a little too abstract to really draw people in, or maybe too obviously fishing for comments-- tough to say). Anyway, I've sort of fallen down on reporting the results-- I've been busy with my actual job, and some blog time has been eaten up with getting the SAT Challenge results ready to go.
Anyway, the most notable entries are below the fold:
Honorable mention: Jenn…
drorzel | September 29, 2006Physics Web has a story about new discoveries in excitonic systems with the eye-catching headline BEC's confound at higher temepratures. The main idea is that two exotic systems have been found in which quasi-particles undergo Bose-Einstein Condensation at realtively high temperatures-- 19 Kelvin for a system of "polaritons," and room temperature for a system of "magnons." If you're wondering why those sound like Star Trek particles-of-the-week rather than real particles that you might've heard of before, it's because they're quasi-particles involving several real particles coupled together…
drorzel | September 29, 2006Inside Higher Ed had a story yesterday about the release of the new graduation rate data for college athletic programs. The data are summarized in the table at right.
The two columns in the table show the graduation rate under the federal standard, and the new "graduation success rate" which fixes some of the problems with the older standard. The older rate calculation counted students who transferred out of a program as not graduating, while not counting students who transferred in as graduates. The new calculation is a little more realistic, and counts students based on their academic…
drorzel | September 29, 2006John Scalzi saves me some typing:
I'm proud to be an American, but I'm tired of being ashamed of my government. I'm tired of having to count the seconds until this bilious waste of a president is shoved out the door in January of 2009. I'm tired of hoping that some members of the president's political party might actually put principle over political expedience, particularly when it concerns the Constitution. And I'm tired of waiting for the opposing party to actually grow a goddamned spine and become an opposing party. I'm tired of wondering why the people we elect to lead us don't seem to…
drorzel | September 29, 2006Over at Evolution Blog, Jason Rosenhouse looks at the String Theory argument through the New Yorker's article about Woit and Smolin, and draws a parallel with his own field:
As an outsider looking in, I would want to know how physicists respond to these charges. After all, creationists level precisely the same charges against university biology departments (that they are ruled by dogmatic Darwinists yada yada). And in that context I know the charge is bogus. I suspect the same is true here. Physicists are not receiving professorships at prestigious institutions merely for expressing their…
drorzel | September 28, 2006I got yet another comment about how much weight I've lost today, from somebody who's only met me a half-dozen times. Apparently, I used to be quite the fat slob, or something.
Anyway, for those who care, the third-quarter weight-loss figures are below the fold, including a spiffy color graph. Because it's not science without graphs...
(Yes, I'm a huge dork... If I'd posted this during the nerd-off, I might've made the Top Five...)
Explanation of the color code: I started tracking my weight on January 5, and making a concerted attempt to lose some weight by cutting out snacks, taking the…
drorzel | September 28, 2006The fourth and final post in my 2003 series attempting to explain experimental particle physics to the lay reader. This one talks about the specifics of the "pentaquark" experiment that was announced that year, and provided the inspiration for the whole thing.
It should be noted that that discovery is by no means certain, but I'm still fairly happy with the explanatory aspects of these posts. I'm certainly not bothered enough to re-write them.
So feel free to ignore pentaquark-specific comments in these reposts. If you'd like a more recent experimental hook for this, Tommaso Dorigo has you…
drorzel | September 28, 2006This is the third in a series of posts covering the basics of particle physics, originally posted back in 2003. In this installment, I talk about some of the hardware involved, specifically the CLAS detector at Jefferson Lab, because I've heard a good number of talks about that.
It should be noted that the inspiration for this whole thing was the announcement of the discovery of a "pentaquark" particle at a couple of accelerators. That discovery is by no means certain, but I'm still fairly happy with the explanatory aspects of these posts. I'm certainly not bothered enough to re-write them.…
drorzel | September 28, 2006Blogging will be light today, as I'm giving an exam and making another magnet coil. I've also been working on getting the Blogger SAT Challenge results ready to go-- big roll-out coming soon!-- so I haven't been able to pre-schedule posts.
All I have time for this morning is a quick follow-up to yesterday's betting pool post, noting some other people trying to guess the winner's of this year's dynamite money.
First, guessing the Nobel winners is the topic for this week's Ask a ScienceBlogger (archival link here), so you can see what my colleagues have to say. Not much, yet, but maybe they'll…
drorzel | September 27, 2006Well, not really. That wouldn't be legal.
But the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2006 is scheduled to be announced next Tuesday, and this clearly calls for some irresponsible speculation. Who do you think will win? How about a guess as to what field of physics will be honored this year?
If you think it'll help, the last five prizes were:
2005: Quantum optics
2004: Asymptotic freedom
2003: Superconductivity theory
2002: Neutrino and X-ray astronomy
2001: Bose-Einstein Condensation in atomic vapors
I wouldn't bet on anything from the AMO realm this year, as they've got two of the last five.…
drorzel | September 27, 2006This is the second of a set of old posts, dating back to 2003, discussing the business of experimental particle physics. In this installment, I talk about how you get exotic particles by slamming ordinary ones together at high speed.
In a previous post, I gave a quick outline of the Standard Model of elementary particles, and how it relates to the recent discovery of a new particle. The best illustration of the process is probably the picture on the Ohio University reference page: A deuterium nucleus (one proton and one neutron) is sitting there, minding its own business, when a photon comes…
drorzel | September 27, 2006Since I found myself talking about particle physics yesterday, and since I find myself in the middle of a seasonal allergy flare-up that's sapping my bloggy motivation, I thought I would dust off and re-post some old articles about particle physics. These date back to 2003, but I think they still stand up reasonably well.
This is the first of four Classic Edition articles, covering the different types of particles making up matter in the universe.
A few days ago, I linked to a news story about this paper in Physical Review Letters describing the discovery of a new type of subatomic particle.…
drorzel | September 27, 2006While checking out the official Nobel Prize web site to see when the prizes will be announced, I was surprised to discover that the Nobel Foundation offers little Flash games on their web site. In particular, I had to check out the Laser Challenge site.
Oh. My. God. Maybe it's just the cold talking, but that has a surreal brilliance to it. It's basically a sub-Mario walk-and-jump game where your job is to gather supplies for an "Amazing Laser Party" in honor of "Dr. Photon" inventing the "super-laser." You pick up little CD's (representing music for the party) and bananas (representing snacks…
drorzel | September 27, 2006The AIP news feed features a story about a paper suggesting that the universe is ellipsoidal. Or at least, that it was, back in the early days.
The work is based on the famous WMAP picture of the microwave background (and no, it's not because the picture is oblong):
As you know, Bob, the picture shows the distribution of temperature fluctuations in the early universe. These temperature correlations correspond to slight variations in the density of matter at that time, density fluctuations that eventually evolved into galaxies and galaxy clusters.
(Explanation after the cut.)
We can't…
drorzel | September 26, 2006I'm in the middle of what is either a fall cold or a seasonal allergy flare-up-- I lean toward the latter, for various reasons that don't really matter. The important thing is, my head feels like it's stuffed with cotton balls and vacuum pump oil.
This isn't the real gripe of the moment, though. The main complaint I have today is that my stomach problems are preventing me from doing anything about my cold/allergy problem. Not for any good reason, but because the gastroenterologist made me paranoid.
(Cut for whinging-- if you click below the fold, you've brought it on yourself...)
What I…
drorzel | September 26, 2006(Apologies to Lou Barlow...)
Earlier, I explained why it is that I bought parchment paper for the lab, as part of the process of making magnetic field coils for an atom trap. What's the actual coil-making process like? Details and pictures below the fold:
Here's the form again:
That's a brass pipe wrapped in parchment paper, with some cooling water lines soldered to the pipe. To turn it into a magnet, we need to put about 500 loops of wire around the pipe. This is more than I'm willing to do entirely by hand, so I took it to the machine shop, and popped it onto the lathe:
We wedged an…
drorzel | September 26, 2006I end up buying a lot of weird things for my lab-- really expensive sand, for example-- but the latest purchase was a little strange even by my usual standards:
The other day, on my way into work, I stopped by the store and bought a roll of parchment paper, for use in the lab. It actually makes perfect sense, though it'll require a little explanation, below the fold
The brass thing in the picture above is a length of 3" diameter pipe, which is intended for use as a holder for a magnetic field coil. The coil, one of a pair used to produce a magnetic trap for neutral atoms, will consist of…
drorzel | September 26, 2006Quantum Diaries survivor Tommaso Dorigo offers an inside look at experimental particle physics, describing new results from combing through CDF data to look for rare events producing two leptons with the same charge:
Indeed, 44 events were found when 33.7 were expected, plus or minus 3.5. That corresponds to a roughly 2-sigma fluctuation of expected counts. The picture on the left shows the leading lepton spectrum for the 44 events in the signal region.
What he leaves out is that this is 44 events out of a total number that's almost certainly in the millions. Particle physicists are sort of…
drorzel | September 26, 2006Dave Bacon explains heating-induced decoherence:
One problem with ion traps qubits has been the heating of the motional degrees of the trapped ions, due mostly to fluctuating potentials on the trap electrodes. The electrode potential goes yee-yaw and the ion goes wee-wah, heating up and thus ruining the motional degree of freedom of the ion.
See, this is why he gets to be Pontiff, and I'm a cardinal at best...
The highly technical use of "yee-yaw" and "wee-wah" is in order to introduce a new paper from Chris Monroe's group in Michigan, who have found that cooling the trap electrodes greatly…