drorzel | August 21, 200660 MinuteS last night had an interview/profile thing on Michael Jordan, shot mostly at his fantasy camp for rich middle-aged guys. For those who haven't encountered the concept before, this is a pseudo-basketball-camp thing where investment bankers pay $15,000 apiece to spend a few days playing basketball with Michael Jordan. Or, based on the shots they had of the games, standing around stupidly while Jordan makes them look silly.
This got me thinking that this is a market we really need to exploit. I mean, granted, there are a lot more ex-jocks with a spare $15,000 than there are scientist-…
drorzel | August 21, 2006Every summer, we go to a concert or two up at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC). We already had lawn seats for Springsteen, and last week, we had indoor seats for Guster and Ray Lamontagne. We ended up not using the actual seats, thanks to some exceptionally drunk college girls in the row behind us ("Do you need to throw up again?" is not a question you want to hear asked of the person seated immediately behind you), but we had good weather, and it was a pleasant evening sitting on the steps of the pavillion.
Musically, there's not a whole lot to say about the show. If you've heard…
drorzel | August 21, 2006In an effort to keep from turning into a total slug on weekends, I've taken to riding my bike on the Mohawk-Hudson Bikeway, which passes fairly close to our house. Getting on the trail can be a little nerve-wracking, depending on the traffic, but once on it, it's a pleasant ride all the way to Colonie:
That sign is roughly ten miles out, and is the farthest point I reached last weekend. (This weekend just past, I headed in the other direction, and got caught in a rainstorm. It wasn't photogenic.) For those who care, there are more pictures from the ride below the fold.
The trail itself runs…
drorzel | August 20, 2006Verizon, in its wisdom, has decided that Chateau Steelypips is not, in fact, in need of DSL service this weekend. We've been without Internet connectivity since mid-afternoon yesterday. This is probably for the best, as my neck and shoulder are starting to suffer some twinges indicative of muscle spasms brought on by too much typing, so after this quick trip into the office to check email and do a quick blog sweep, I'm going home to lie on the couch and watch tv, the way God intended us to do on Sunday.
If you're wholly dependent on my recommendations for your entertainment, here are a couple…
drorzel | August 19, 2006Since everyone else is doing it, I'll go along with the game, and post five random quotes that "reflect who you are or what you believe," chosen from the randomizer at quotationspage.com.
This actually took a while, because I'm not wild about most of what they throw out. I'll throw in a bonus sixth quote, though, because this one:
"Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm." --John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963)
is pretty lightweight, but accurate.
More serious quotes after the cut.
"This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what
to do with it." --Ralph…
drorzel | August 18, 2006The Times takes up the critical question of locating the boundary between Red Sox and Yankees fans in New York and Connecticut. They do a comprehensive survey of the boundary line in CT, but only a fairly cursory sweep north.
Albany is on the Yankees side of the line, but it's a near thing. Union's student body is drawn heavily from New England, and runs probably 50/50, maybe leaning a bit toward the Sox (since some of the NY students are actually Mets fans).
Sadly for Kate, the situation is less positive for expat Bostonians in football-- between the Giants (whose training camp is held in…
drorzel | August 18, 2006For some reason, I've been thoroughly exhausted all week, and being out late last night for a concert hasn't helped any. Thus, you're not going to get much in the way of substantive blogging from me today.
I did want to note a weird example of synchronicity in the physics-related blogosphere, though, as both Clifford Johnson and Jennifer Ouellette have recent posts in praise of B movies. Clifford sings the praises of Jurassic Park, particularly:
The fact that every time I am almost in tears when the scientists -not the annoying one played by Jeff Goldblum- see the dinosaurs for the first time…
drorzel | August 18, 2006Lately, I've taken to putting ESPN's Mike and Mike show on the tv in the morning while I make breakfast and do my morning exercises. It's sort of interesting to watch people doing a radio show on tv, I enjoy their shtick, and now that the NFL season is nearly upon us, it actually sort of resembles interesting sports programming (in mid-July, even PTI is nearly unwatchable).
The down side of the rapid approach of the NFL, though, is the wall-to-wall coverage of Terrell Owens-- Is he really injured? Did he practice? Did Bill Parcells make him practice? What did he have for breakfast? Did he…
drorzel | August 18, 2006As the "binary liquid explosive" plot sounds a little implausible, and the usual lack of, you know, hard evidence regarding the plot begins to become clear, the question has to be asked: what was really up with the terror plot that has banned an entire phase of matter?
Wondermark has the answer.
(Register link via Calpundit Monthly, Wondermark link via a mailing list.)
drorzel | August 17, 2006Back when I was an undergrad, I spent the summer before my senior year on campus working on my thesis project (trying to build a MOT for rubidium, which never did work). That same summer, one of the guys I did problem sets with, we'll call him J., who was only a rising junior, was working with the oldest member of the faculty on a different experimental project.
My summer actually went pretty well, but J. and his advisor had one of those nightmare stretches where absolutely nothing would work right. Something would break, and when they got it fixed, something else would break. It was awful,…
drorzel | August 17, 2006Inside Higher Ed has a short news story on a new report on textbook prices that finds the big publishers failing to offer low-cost books:
In reviewing the catalogs of each of the publishers, the group looked for 22 frequently assigned textbooks, which had an average cost of $131.44 per book. Of the 22 textbooks, less than half had a comparable lower cost book. Two of the books were available in a low-frill format, while nine books were available as e-books.
Of course, the publishers are a little upset,
Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for higher education at the Association of American…
drorzel | August 17, 2006Some new additions to the physics blogroll:
1) Not all that new, but I keep forgetting to post a link: Clifford Johnson has spun off Asymptotia from Cosmic Variance, to house his own brand of bike-riding, concert-going, vegetable-buying physics blogging. If you read Clifford's stuff at Cosmic Variance, you know what you're getting. If you haven't read his stuff, well, go check it out.
2) A new group blog: The n-category Cafe, featuring John Baez, David Corfield and Urs Schreiber. It's a little tough to say what this will really be about, since they only have two posts up, but they all have…
drorzel | August 17, 2006True Lab Stories really are everywhere these days. Via Inside Higher Ed's Around the Web, a blog called "What the Hell Is Wrong With You?" offers True Lab Stories: The Party Game (my name, not hers):
Back in the good old days, when La Blonde Parisienne and I were bright young grad students working in the same genetics lab, we used to play a little game called "Too Stupid To Be A Scientist." The game goes like this: you do something stupid, and you tell the other person what a stupid thing you did, and they cheer you up by telling you something even stupider they did. For example, one day I…
drorzel | August 16, 2006Over at Gene Expression, Razib is collecting ten-word summaries of evolutionary theory, with follow-up posts here and here. Because I'm completely shameless about this sort of thing, I'm going to swipe the idea, and apply it to physics.
Of course, physics as a discipline covers a bit more conceptual territory than "evolutionary theory," so it's probably impossible to boil down to a single statement of ten or fewer words, but Razib had to cop out as well, settling on ten ten-word statements. So let's take that as a goal, and ask, following the original phrasing: If you had 10 words or less,…
drorzel | August 16, 2006Over at Cosmic Variance, JoAnne is soliciting ideas for graphics to explain the Higgs Mechanism and Supersymmetry. If you understand these processes, and have a flair for graphic design, go over there and help her out. She's going to take the best ideas to a workshop on this topic at SLAC, so this might be a path to fame, of a sort...
I'll offer some miscellaneous thoughts about the example graphics she provided, below the fold.
Here are the existing Higgs boson graphics:
(This is a collage of four different graphics from different sources-- JoAnne's post has the original links.)
As stand-…
drorzel | August 16, 2006Sarah Monette, aka truepenny is somebody that Kate knows from LiveJournal, so when her first novel, Melusine was published, Kate bought it right away. Weirdly, though, I got around to reading it before she did (thanks to positive reviews of the sequel in Locus, and in spite of the dreadful cover), and then went directly on to the recently-released sequel, The Virtu. Thus, the combined booklog entry.
Melusine is a major city in a fantasy world, of the sort parodied by Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork, full of run-down neighborhoods, crime, and riff-raff, and ruled by an elite group of wizards in the…
drorzel | August 16, 2006Over at Cognitive Daily, Dave Munger post about research into the effect of athletics on academics:
Achievement can be measured in many ways -- grades, homework, attendance, standardized test scores, and enrollment in college. In all of these areas except standardized test scores, even after controlling for economic status, race, and other background variables, athletic participation was significantly correlated to academic achievement. Even after controlling for academic success in 8th and 10th grade, athletic participation was still associated with positive academic outcomes in 13 out of 21…
drorzel | August 16, 2006True Lab stories are everywhere, as Arcance Gazebo today features a story of new and interesting liquid nitrogen experiments:
Condensed matter labs such as ours receive frequent deliveries of liquid nitrogen in one- or two-hundred liter dewars. Unfortunately, most of the Berkeley cond-mat labs are in Birge Hall, which has no loading dock, so that the LN2 dewars arrive on the first floor of neighboring LeConte where they must be wheeled over to their destination by some low-seniority student. Since the Berkeley campus is on a hill, the loading dock at the back of the building is one floor…
drorzel | August 15, 2006Yesterday, I spent $52 (plus shipping) buying sand. Not a gret big sack of sand, either-- just 200 grams of it. I count it as a bargain, too, because I was prepared to spend twice the amount for half as much.
Now, granted, the $1000/kg sand is extremely high purity silicon dioxide, designed to be used in putting high-quality coatings on optical elements, and I would've bought that if it hadn't been back-ordered. The cheaper stuff is slightly lower purity-- 99.9% instead of 99.95%-- but it ought to work. And they had it in stock at Aldrich, so I decided to take a chance, and save $50 in the…
drorzel | August 15, 2006I'm in the process of putting together my tenure documents (I know I've been saying this for weeks. It's a long process, OK?). Most of these are really not appropriate for reproduction here, but I'll post a few of the things I'm writing, when it's reasonable to do so.
A major part of the tenure process is finding external reviewers for the research material. As most institutions don't really have enough people in a given sub-field to assess research in-house (especially at a small college), and as trusting such an assessment would be a little dodgy, the research review is traditionally…