drorzel | September 1, 2006Here are the answers to last week's list of quotes from seventeen books:
1) "The way to a man's heart is through his chest." Use of Weapons, Iain Banks. This one was a little sneaky, as it's in the poem on the opening page.
2) "...Highly Unpleasant Things It Is Sometimes Necessary to Know..." One for the Morning Glory, John Barnes. A surprisingly delightful little book from an author whose other works inspired the rule "John Barnes books containing forcible sodomy are bad." (Nothing was said about dinosaurs.)
3) "All is waves, with nothing waving, across no distance at all." Songs of Earth…
drorzel | September 1, 2006August was the highest-traffic month since the move, with Google Analytics recording 51,752 "Unique Visits" (whatever that means-- it's not 50,000 different people, I don't think). I'm sort of boggled by that number, which is about an order of magnitude higher than what I was seeing at the old site.
Somewhere in there, we also passed a quarter-million visits for the year, with the total as of this morning standing at 259,636 visits. Again, bogglement.
Anyway, I just wanted to note that, and say thanks for reading.
drorzel | August 31, 2006A couple of guys goaded me into trying to dunk at the lunchtime basketball game today. "You've lost a lot of weight," they said, knowing I'm a sucker for flattery, "You've got to be close." So I tried, and much to my surprise, succeeded.
It wasn't what you'd call Jordanesque-- I barely got the ball over the rim-- but that's the first time I've managed to dunk a basketball since... sometime in my first year or two of grad school. I believe the phrase is "w00t."
I'm sorely tempted to call that my accomplishment for the day, and go home now.
drorzel | August 31, 2006Classes for the Fall term start next week, which means that things are starting to gear up on campus. We've been sent our class rosters, and lists of new freshman advisees, and have started to have meetings about team-taught courses and department policies and the like. And, of course, the new faculty hired for this year have shown up.
There was a meet-and-greet last night with the new faculty, which was fun (though as usual, I got to talking to people, and wound up coming home an hour later than I had said I would...). This also reminded me that I should dip into the archives for a Classic…
drorzel | August 31, 2006(A couple of regular commenters will recognize this one...)
Every working research lab has a sort of rhythm to it. There's always a collection of background sounds, in a particular pattern, that indicates that the lab is functioning properly. When I was a post-doc, the pattern was something like three mintues of white noise (the humming of the fans on the various electronic instruments, and the cooling water running through the magnet coils), followed by a sharp click (a mechanical shutter closing), then a loud clunking sort of noise (as the high-current supply for the magnetic trap switched…
drorzel | August 31, 2006The American Institutes of Physics run an occasionally updated news feed, Physics News Updates, that I have in my RSS subscriptions. Yesterday, for some reason, it coughed up a squib about last week's Pluto news, which starts:
Just as in the Bible Adam achieved dominion over the objects of the earth by naming them, so scientists partly establish human dominion over the cosmos by naming or classifying all things animal, vegetable, or mineral.
While I find myself in the odd position of being the token Defender of Religion on ScienceBlogs, or at least the local Tolerator of Religious Language…
drorzel | August 30, 2006In yesterday's post, I outlined the history of clocks starting from the essential feature of any clock, namely the "tick." I ended by saying that the best clock you can possibly make is one based off the basic laws of quantum physics, using the energy separation between two energy levels in an atom to determine a fixed frequency of light. In this case, the "tick" is the oscillation of the electromagnetic field-- whenever the electric field points "up," you count that as a "tick" of the clock. For light corresponding to the transition between the hyperfine ground states of cesium, those "ticks…
drorzel | August 30, 2006Chuck Klosterman is a dangerous author for me to read. Not just because it leads to me posting quotes that upset people, but because I like his writing in a way that tends to creep into my own writing. After he releases a new book, I have be be really careful when I blog about pop culture, or else I end up with bad imitation Klosterman all over my blog.
(David Foster Wallace is another writer who has this effect on me-- I was deleting footnotes for a week after I read Consider the Lobster...)
The safest thing to do would be to avoid the subject altogether until the feeling passes, but then…
drorzel | August 30, 2006OK, they dumped the analogy questions ages ago, but for oldsters like myself, those are still the signature SAT questions...
Inside Higher Ed has a piece today on the new SAT results, which expresses concern over some declines:
Mean scores on the SAT fell this year by more than they have in decades. A five-point drop in critical reading, to 503, was the largest decline since 1975 and the two-point drop in mathematics, to 518, was the largest dip since 1978.
Gaps among racial and ethnic groups continued to be significant on the SAT, including the new writing test, for which the first mean…
drorzel | August 30, 2006So, you're interested in discussing politics or religion or other Deep Issues with other people. What do you do?
You could go on the Internet, but you end up talking to, like, freaky physics professors and stuff, so you'd prefer to talk to real people face to face. You could randomly approach strangers, ask their political affiliation, and refuse to talk to Republicans or Democrats, but that's kind of weird. So what's a would-be conversationalist to do?
Inside Higher Ed has a suggestion: tie an orange rag to your backpack:
Shruti Chaganti, an undergraduate at James Madison University, loves…
drorzel | August 29, 2006Medium Large has critical advice for all you websurfers.
Of course, you didn't need me to tell you that, because you already read Medium Large. Right? Right?
drorzel | August 29, 2006Over at A Blog Around the Clock, Bora put up a sixteen part series of posts talking about clocks. Unfortunately, he was talking about biological clocks, which are a specific and sort of messy application, from the standpoint of physics.
I talk a bit about clocks for our first-year seminar class, as a part of my two-week module on laser cooling (laser-cooled atomic clocks being one of the major applications). Like most of the other good bits of that module, this is shamelessly stolen from talks I've heard Bill Phillips give, but it works pretty well.
In order to really discuss the physics of…
drorzel | August 29, 2006It appears to be a good week for non-controversial posting, so while I'm making enemies, I might as well go all out...
The recent call for book ideas from the Feminist Press has sparked an interesting discussion at Cocktail Party Physics, but I want to highlight one comment in particular:
There is a lot more of a macho-subculture in the sciences than appears at first glance. For example, the quotes "Nobody gets an A in my class!" Or "You guys aren't cut out for the sciences."
I don't know if you found those discouraging, but for young boys, those kinds of statements are challenges. They don't…
drorzel | August 29, 2006Tim Powers is one of those authors who has carved out a niche for himself telling a particular type of story, sort of like Guy Gavriel Kay with his pseudo-historical fantasy novels. In Powers's case, the niche might be summarized as "supernatural secret history." His best novels are set in something that's more or less the real world, but with a twist. There are ghosts and spirits and poorly-understood magic in the world, and famous scientists and inventors and politicians turn out to be deeply involved in the supernatural underground.
His latest, Three Days to Never fits right in with…
drorzel | August 28, 2006Here's the other quote from Chuck Klosterman IV that I mentioned earlier, this one from an essay in Esquire on people who feel betrayed by pop culture:
Do you want to be happy? I suspect that you do. Well, here's the first step to happiness: don't get pissed off that people who aren't you happen to think Paris Hilton is interesting and deserves to be on TV every other day; the fame surrounding Paris Hilton is not a reflection on your life (unless you want it to be). Don't get pissed off because the Yeah Yeah Yeahs aren't on the radio enough; you can buy the goddamn album and play "Maps" all…
drorzel | August 28, 2006It feels a little silly to quote Chuck Klosterman as some sort of Deep Thinker-- this is a guy whose whole claim to fame revolves around the expression of weirdly absolute opinions about pop culture ephemera, after all. Then again, the best political reporting being done these days is done by a pair of comedy shows, so maybe it's not so stupid.
Anyway, there were two passages in his new collection, Chuck Klosterman IV, that really struck a chord when I read them the other night. Well, OK, there were more than two, but there were two that struck me as worthy of blog posts. Here's the first:
It…
drorzel | August 28, 2006Word has reached me[1] that, "me that the most notorious creationist on the Ohio State Board of Education, Deborah Owens Fink, has a challenger in the Novemeber 7th election." For the politically inclined out there, some information:
The challenger is former Ohio congressman Tom Sawyer. She is asking for help from the other Citizens for Science groups in getting the word out and encouraging people to donate and get involved with the campaign...Collectively, we likely have several thousand readers in Ohio that we can encourage to get involved and support Sawyer's campaign. So I'm asking all my…
drorzel | August 28, 2006Via a comment at Cocktail Party Physics, I have become aware of the existence of the "Physics Chicks" LiveJournal community. It's probably safe to assume that the Female Science Professor isn't wild about the name.
It's billed as "An online community for crazy and cool women in physics," or at least those crazy and cool women in physics with LiveJournal accounts. So, you know, there you go. Something for everyone out there on the Internets.
drorzel | August 27, 2006The Internet has been broken all afternoon at Chateau Steelypips, which is where there hasn't been anything new psoted, and why it's taken forever to approve a couple of comments that were held for moderation. Sorry about that.
(I'm typing this from my office on campus-- we turned Her Majesty's evening walk into an email-checking trip, with the added bonus being able to chase rabbits across the lawns on campus. Great fun was had by all, at least until I wiped out on the wet grass...)
As long as I'm posting to say why I haven't been posting, though, I might as well turn this into a technical…
drorzel | August 27, 2006This year's Hugo Awards (either the Oscars of the Golden Globes of the science fiction/ fantasy field, depending on who you ask) were announced last night at the Worldcon in LA. Pleasant surprises abound:
1) Spin by Robert Charles Wilson won the Best Novel Hugo. As I've said before, I think it was far and away the best book in the field, but I didn't think it would win. They've made a lot of bad calls in recent years, but this one, I like.
2) The Best Professional Editor Hugo goes to David Hartwell. This is nice to see not just because David is a nice guy, and does good work, but because…