drorzel | September 7, 2006In email, David Rosenthal asks my opinion of a rant at globalresearch.ca about the stupidity of physicists:
Indeed, the modern professional physicist has usually subjected himself (less often herself) to extreme specialization, to be able to handle the technical side of the profession. This training is also largely about adopting the culture of the professional physicist: Examples and examples of what are "good problems - good questions" and what are "bad (= 'unmanageable') problems"; and examples and examples of how one tames a new problem and fits it into the mould of what a physicist can…
drorzel | September 7, 2006Clearing some more posts out of Bloglines, to mark the start of the new term. My first lecture is today, and as a bonus, there's a film crew coming to my class...
First, there's a very nice essay at Fighting for Science on the Equivalence Principle. Via See You at Enceladus.
Next up, Biocurious offers thoughts on the desirability of a Unified Theory for biology. I don't quite agree with Andre about the disunification of physics, but it's worth a look. See also RPM.
Finally, Alex has reposted his lists of the Best and Worst parts of science. I meant to link these months ago, so I'm grateful…
drorzel | September 6, 2006The Female Science Professor offers some thoughts on institutional hiring:
Only one graduate in the past 10 years from my research group is now a professor at a small liberal arts college, and that person attended a SLAC as an undergraduate. When I was in job-search mode, I got interviews at SLACs, as did my fellow job-seekers who had attended SLACs, but it was very rare for a SLAC to interview someone who had spent their entire career at large universities. Colleagues at small schools admit that they discriminate in this way because they think that someone who hasn't been part of the culture…
drorzel | September 6, 2006Fed up with the hotness contest results, Janet has decreed a nerd-off, asking for:
your geekiest jokes, your nerdiest life-lessons, your testimonial to your favorite programing language (or tissue culture medium), what have you.
We've already had a local thread of funny physics jokes, but for sheer nerd value, it's hard to top the classics:
Q: What's purple and commutes?
A: An abelian grape.
or
Q: What do you get when you cross an elephant with a mountain climber?
A: You can't. A mountain climber is a scalar.
It just doesn't get nerdier than those...
drorzel | September 6, 2006There was a fair bit of talk last week about Pope Giblets Benedict's weekend seminar on evolution. I haven't seen any post-seminar commentary yet, but I'm not sure I would expect much, given that no official statements are forthcoming.
I'm sort of puzzled as to why this is a story, though. As the Times puts it:
In 1996, Pope John Paul declared evolution "more than a hypothesis," and in 2004 as Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict endorsed the scientific view that the earth is roughly four billion years old and that species changed through evolution. Indeed, there has been no credible scientific…
drorzel | September 6, 2006There was a flurry of activity yesterday, while I was working to get ready for the start of classes, regarding a flawed contest to select the hottest science blogger. Clearly, when some pasty English dude wins, there's a problem with the methodology. Like, for instance, basing it off a blog aggregator that doesn't include physicists...
I'd try to cobble together a "hottest physics blogger" contest, but really, who needs that?
Also, classes start today. Whee! Posting will probably be light for a few days.
drorzel | September 5, 2006In the previous clock tutorial post, I described the basic workings of a cesium atomic clock, which looks sort of like this:
It works by sending a beam of cesium atoms through two microwave cavities. The first cavity synchronizes the "clock" in the atoms with the microwaves, and the second cavity checks whether the two are still in synch. If they are, the microwaves are at the right frequency; if they aren't, the frequency is corrected.
The key feature that determines the performance of this clock is the time between cavities. The longer the atoms spend in between the two, the better the…
drorzel | September 5, 2006As we were driving around the other day, the iPod served up "Valerie" by the Crooked Fingers, which is a weirdly unclassifiable little song. It opens with a skiffle-ish acoustic guitar riff, adds a little steel guitar in the background, then thumping sort of jug band bass drum, with a the vocals coming in aheadlong rush, and just when that's all beginning to make sense, the mariachi horns come in, and you just have to say "Fuck it," and roll with the song. It's a good tune, in an odd way.
Anyway, that reminded me of a long-ago party in grad school (circa 1996), where we spent a great deal of…
drorzel | September 5, 2006The passing of Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin in a freak accident while diving with stingrays (and not while sticking his thumb of the butt of some exotic and venomous creature) has made a big splash in blogdom. I was never a fan of his shows, so I don't have anything specific to say about him, but he seems to have been very good at getting people interested in rare and interesting wildlife, and it's always sad to lose someone like that.
As a tribute of sorts, I'll bump Douglas Adams's wildlife book Last Chance to See up in the booklog queue. The concept here was vaguely similar, though not…
drorzel | September 5, 2006That's the number of books in our collection at the moment. Kate went nuts with a bar-code scanner, and entered them all into LibraryThing. Well, OK, that's just the stuff at home-- it doesn't include the textbooks I keep in my office, or the maybe twenty science-related books I keep in there for extra reading material.
Still, a lot of books, now browsable on the Web.
drorzel | September 5, 2006On Inside Higher Ed this morning:
The University of Florida has distributed several thousand T-shirts in which Roman numerals intended to indicate 2006 (MMVI) in fact indicate 26 (XXVI). After discovering the mistake, the university will have many thousands of other T-shirts redone, The Gainesville Sun reported.
But, hey, the football team is supposed to be pretty good.
drorzel | September 4, 2006Speaking of "Iain M. Banks without the literary ambitions," some time back, I read Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon, but never got around to booklogging it. In many ways, it's similar to the Asher book, though, so I might as well take care of it today.
This is the first of a series of books following the exploits of Takeshi Kovacs, who may or may not be a UN Special Envoy (it's a little unclear to me what his exact status is). He's an unpleasant fellow with a lot of blood on his hands, who has been hired to investigate a murder.
Of course, as in any private-eye novel, things quickly turn out…
drorzel | September 4, 2006Neal Asher is one of those authors who's big in the UK, but not so much in the US. He gets talked about a fair bit, but it's only fairly recently that I've started seeing his stuff in stores here. He's been on the list of authors I mean to check out for a while, and I finally got around to picking up Gridlinked, which was the earliest book they had of the loosely connected Polity series.
The capsule review is "Iain M. Banks without the literary ambitions." This book offers pretty much all the special-effects sequences you would expect from a Culture novel, with none of the literary games.
Ian…
drorzel | September 4, 2006It's Labor Day today in the US, which means it's a day off from work for everybody who isn't in academia. Our fall classes start Wednesday, though, so I'm going to spend Labor Day, well, laboring. This is nothing new, but at least it's better than my first year, when classes started on Labor Day.
Anyway, I know that in the current Gilded Age, we're supposed to regard labor unions as just this side of Pure Evil for their interference with the joys of unfettered capitalism, but if you're lucky enough to have the day off, take a few minutes to reflect on the good things organized labor has given…
drorzel | September 3, 2006Behold the undeniable dignity of the Queen of Niskayuna:
I've heard a bunch of different people give sort of pop-science explanations of what dogs are really doing in various circumstances-- sort of a canine version of evolutionary psychology. According to this theory, lots of the cute things that dogs do are actually evolved behaviors that play a crucial role in communication within dog packs.
I've always sort of wondered what the dog thinks she's doing when she flops over to have her belly rubbed. Is this some ingrained pack-bonding response, or is it just that belly rubs feel good?
drorzel | September 3, 2006Today's New York Times has a story on the new SAT, particularly the writing test. The print version has images of the opening lines of three essays that received a perfect score, while the on-line version includes images of the full text of three perfect-score essays.
The essays themselves are kind of interesting to look at. The question was one of those hideous, vague college application things: "Do memories hinder or help people in their effort to learn from the past and succeed in the present?" The three answers presented in full take different approaches. Essay #2 (there is no #1 on the…
drorzel | September 2, 2006Oh, c'mon, how could I pass that up?
So, if you didn't know, no sooner did I say nice things about Team USA than they turned around and reverted to NBA ball, playing a couple of closer-than-expected games, and getting bounced in the semifinals of the World Basketball Championships by basketball powerhouse Greece. I blame Mike Krzyzewski.
I'd discuss the game in detail, but, well, it was on at three in the morning US time, so I haven't seen more than the highlights on ESPN. Apparently, the Greeks got very hot in the middle part of the game, shredding the US defense with a series of pick-and-…
drorzel | September 1, 2006Behold, the Tenure Box:
Well, actually, it's an oversize milk crate, but that's nit-picking. The stuff in the box is all for my tenure review: the blue folders are copies of my research materials, the green folders are my teaching materials, the yellow folders are my CV and statements, and the thing at the front is a bound copy of my Ph.D. thesis.
I'm not handing it in just yet-- I'm still waiting for an update on a paper that's been submitted-- but it's basically done. That's the whole stack of stuff, and now that I look at the picture, I'm sort of wondering whether I shouldn't've made…
drorzel | September 1, 2006Articles have been piling up in my Bloglines feeds as I keep saying "Oh, that'll make a good blog post..." and then not getting around to actually writing anything. In an effort to clean things up a bit (in much the same way that I clean my desk off every September, whether it needs it or not), I'm just going to throw a bunch of them out here with mininal comments. This post is a collection of links from academic bloggers.
The Dean Dad has absolutely been on fire for the last month. He's got good posts up on institutional inertia, strategic planning, measuring outcomes, and academic…
drorzel | September 1, 2006Lots of my fellow ScienceBloggers have been playing with the Official Seal Generator (Tara, Steinn, Bora, and Josh, and probably others by the time this posts). I'm just punchy enough to play along, but I can't decide which way to go with this. So, below the fold, I present the competing options for the Official Seal of Uncertain Principles. Vote for your favorite in the comments, if you're so moved:
Serious option:
Silly option: