drorzel | September 14, 2006It's been a while since I did one of these, so here's a new Dorky Poll for readers to vote on: What's your favorite of the fundamental forces of nature?
As always, vote by leaving a comment. The winning force will be entitled to display a small graphic proclaiming it the choice of ScienceBlogs readers on all its exchange bosons.
The candidates (below the fold):
The Strong Nuclear Force: Binds quarks into nucleons, and nucleons into nuclei. Arguably the most difficult to deal with mathematically, as it gets stronger at long range. The Democratic Party of fundamental forces, because it just…
drorzel | September 14, 2006The current crop of String Theory Backlash books has a lot of people wondering about what will replace string theory as the top fad in theoretical physics. Other people (well, ok, me) are worried about a more important question: What will replace string theory as the most over-hyped area in theoretical physics?
Dave Bacon selflessly offers up his own field of quantum information, noting that Lee Smolin praises quantum computing theorists as "young" and "smart." As Dave notes, this is the physics equivalent of "hip" or "hot" in more general pop culture.
And Scott Aaronson offers further…
drorzel | September 14, 2006Despite turning in early last night, I'm sleep-deprived and I have an early morning lab, so here are some random songs from iTunes to hold you until I feel more like blogging. Ten tracks from the four-and-five-star playlist, with bonus commentary on a few:
"Little Razorblade," The Pink Spiders. A new purchase, that I'm really enjoying a lot.
"You Scare The **** Out Of Me," The Frantics. The guy I shared a lab with when I was working on my undergrad thesis had a copy of this, and I spent years trying to locate one. Thanks, Lara Beaton.
"Can't Let It Go," Goo Goo Dolls
"Shame On You," Hot Hot…
drorzel | September 14, 2006Over at Science and Reason, Charles Daney has launched a new blog carnival, focussing on physical science and technology issues. I rarely remember to participate in these things-- the deadlines just go whooshing by, like deadlines do-- but the general concept is pretty popular, and we need more physical science blogging on the Interweb. There are, what, nine different bio-themed blog carnivals? There should be at least one about physics...
And there's some good stuff in the first issue, now available: Philosophia Naturalis #1. So check it out, and if you have a better memory than I do, send…
drorzel | September 13, 2006Next year's World Science Fiction Convention is being held in Yokohama, Japan, the first time a Worldcon has ever been held in Japan. With this year's Worldcon out of the way, we're starting to see some discussion of who's going, and whether various US-based fans will make the trip or not.
If I pass my tenure review, Kate and I are planning to go, and probably spend a couple of weeks doing touristy stuff before the convention as well (as a Worldcon in Japan is probably about the only way I'll get her to go...). A lot of people are, understandably, somewhat concerned about the whole idea-- it'…
drorzel | September 13, 2006Timothy Burke is thinking up new classes all the time, which is probably the bane of any academic. It's probably more common in the humanities, where the curricula are more mutable, but even us science types usually have a couple of ideas that would make for a good course if only we didn't have to teach introductory classical mechanics again...
This is as good an excuse as any for re-posting an old post I wrote on the subject back in 2004. I actually did one of these, in a very limited way-- I did one lecture of "How to Lie With Statistics" as part of a class on the election of 2004 (which…
drorzel | September 13, 2006Janet thinks she's scoring nerd points by posting a picture of her nerdy watch, but I can match her timepiece:
OK, there's nothing particularly nerdy about the watch itself-- the nerd part is the band, which in this case, is held together with a cable tie. The little loops that are supposed to keep the strap down broke off, so one day when I was in the lab, I grabbed a plastic cable tie, and made my own loop.
That was in December. I replaced the band about a week ago. I only replaced it because Kate was getting her watch fixed, and pointedly asked whether I needed anything done with mine. (…
drorzel | September 13, 2006Dylan Stiles is blogging from the American Chemical Society meeting, as only he can. He's got three daily summary posts up (one, two, three), with more presumably on the way for however long the meeting lasts.
Personally, I can't make heads or tails of the scientific content, so I can't tell you whether any of the stuff he's posting about is actually interesting to normal humans. He's way into it, though, which makes even the incomprehensible bits fun to read. Or maybe I'm just sleep-deprived.
drorzel | September 12, 2006The two most talked-about books in physics this year are probably a pair of anti-sting-theory books, Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics, and Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong, which shares a name with Jacques Distler's favorite weblog. I got review copies of both, but Not Even Wrong arrived first (thanks, Peter), and gets to be the first one reviewed.
Of course, I'm coming to the game kind of late, as lots of other high-profile physics bloggers have already posted their reviews, and various magazine reviews have been out for months. Peter has collected a bunch of links in various posts. I don't…
drorzel | September 12, 2006When Redskins running back and noted NFL whack job Clinton Portis got injured in a preseason game, he generated a lot of buzz with a press-conference rant about how stupid it is to make players go through pre-season games at all. The sports punditocracy kept the topic alive for pretty much the whole rest of the pre-season, with a good number of commentators agreeing with Portis that there's really no need for veteran players to play pre-season games.
A quick scan of the weekend's games might suggest differently. Sloppy play abounded. The Seahawks and Lions didn't manage anything other than…
drorzel | September 12, 2006I thought about posting something in advance of my annual moment of bloggy silence, to let people know what's up, as my traffic has increased by about an order of magnitude since the last time I did this. As the post is equal parts gesture of respect and protest against the use of the anniversary for grand political statements, though, I figured that posting "I am about to make a grand political statement" would be sort of self-defeating.
Anyway, my tradition of sorts is for the eleventh to be a media-free day, as far as that's practical. I don't read blogs, I don't respond to comments (a…
drorzel | September 10, 2006The NFL season starts in earnest today, and it's about damn time. Granted, the early afternoon offerings on our local cable system-- Jets/Titans and Eagles/Texans-- probably don't really qualify as "football," and the late afternoon Cowboys/Jaguars game is interesting only insofar as either Terrell Owens or Bill Parcells might explode at any moment, but it's the principle of the thing.
Also, they serve as a useful warm-up for the real attraction of the day, namely this evening's Manning Bowl pitting my Giants and quarterback Eli Manning against the Colts, quarterbacked by his older brother…
drorzel | September 9, 2006The first weekend of the Fall term is always a strange time. Classes are back in session, so I'm in Teaching Mode, but there really isn't that much to do, because I haven't collected any work requiring grading yet. I always feel like the last weekend before classes ought to be some grand last hurrah of the summer, followed by an unremitting grind for ten weeks, but in reality, the academic grind takes a few weeks to really ramp up.
And somehow, every year, I'm surprised by this.
Anyway, I find myself with some Things to Do, but nothing all that pressing. And it's a beautiful day here after a…
drorzel | September 8, 2006Some time back, I asked people to pimp me new tunes, and got a wealth of recommendations. I put in a big iTunes order not long after, and now I've had a chance to listen to most of those tracks, so I thought I should post a follow-up summary of what I bought and what I think of it (below the fold):
Andrew Bird, The Mysterious Production of Eggs. Very strange album, with odd song structures, strange lyrics, and some vocals barely above a whisper. Good, though. Key tracks: "Sovay," "Masterfade."
Chris Knight, Enough Rope. Bought after a plug on jefitoblog. Pretty much straight-up country,…
drorzel | September 8, 2006One of the things that ends up bothering me about the discussion of how to get more women in science is that it tends to focus on the college and professional elvel. Everybody seems to have an anecdote about a creepy physics professor, or an unpleasant graduate student, or a sexist post-doc.
This bugs me for a couple of reasons. The obvious one being that I'm a college physics professor, and I'm not that guy. I'm not fool enough to try to deny that unreconstructed sexist pigs exist in the profession, but I'm not one of them, and neither are my immediate colleagues, and sweeping statements…
drorzel | September 8, 2006Last weekend, when talking about the new SAT, I attributed the low quality of the essays reproduced in the New York Times to the fact that this is a test with vague questions and a short time limit. Dave Munger was a little skeptical in comments, and I remarked that:
Somebody ought to get a bunch of bloggers together, and give them the writing SAT under timed conditions, and see what they come up with.
Dave said he'd be up for it, as long as he didn't have to grade the resulting essays. That struck me as a big roadblock, as well, but in thinking about it a bit more, I don't know that it…
drorzel | September 8, 2006One of the perks of this corporate blogging gig is that it's put me on the radar of book publishers, who have started sending me free stuff. We like free stuff, here at Chateau Steelypips, and we like books, so that's a Good Thing.
It's becoming almost too much of a Good Thing, though-- In the past week or so, I've received:
Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit (thank you, Peter), which I finished last night (review forthcoming).
The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney, in the spiffy new paperback edition.
The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock (thrown in with tRWoS by the publisher).
The…
drorzel | September 7, 2006The story about Bloch oscillation gravity measurements reminds me of a True Lab Story about a different sort of sensitive measurement made using cold atoms, made during my grad school days. Sadly, this one wasn't particularly useful...
The standard technique for accumulating large numbers of cold atoms is a thing called a magneto-optical trap, which uses a combination of laser light and magnetic fields to trap a cloud of atoms and confine them in a small region of space. This works by setting up a magnetic field that goes to zero at a specific point in space, and increases as you move away…
drorzel | September 7, 2006This is nearly a month old, now, because I keep saying "Oh, Idon't have time to do this justice-- I'll write about it tomorrow." I really need to stop doing that.
Anyway, Physics News Update has a story about a scheme to measure gravity using Bloch oscillations, based on a paper in Physical Review Letters. This is especially interesting to me, because the most important paper of my career made use of Bloch oscillations to get our experimental signal.
A quick explanation below the fold:
Bloch oscillations are a weird phenomenon you encounter in condensed matter physics. The easiest way to…