drorzel | August 10, 2006As noted by several people, most recently JoAnne Hewett, one of the players at the final table of the World Series of Poker Main Event is a Ph.D. physicist: Michael Binger, recently of SLAC. So, I guess we need to expand the list of non-academic physics careers to include "professional poker player." I'm not sure how Prof. Katz left it off his list.
JoAnne quotes from his bio:
Michael Binger hopes to continue doing research in physics without having to run the rat-race of getting a job and impressing all the right people as he puts it. A win here at the World Series of Poker Main Event would…
drorzel | August 9, 2006A while back, I noted that one student wrote on the all-important course evaluation form "He should wear more pink." I'm still not sure what that meant.
Given that the second most ridiculous comment in that class was "[student name] is the worst Warcraft player ever," I should probably point our majors to this interview with an addiction doctor (via Jake):
Having treated all types of addictions for more than 15 years, Orzack says there's little difference between drug use, excessive gambling and heavy game playing. And with millions of gamers hooked on mega-popular massively multiplayer…
drorzel | August 9, 2006Like The Pontiff, I am always happy to receive an email from a publicist offering me a free book to review. In this case, the book was Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, of UC Santa Cruz.
I have to admit, the title made me a little uneasy. There have been a great many very stupid things written about quantum mechanics and consciousness over the years, after all. It's published by Oxford University Press, though, so I figured they can't be total cranks, and hey, free book!
I'm happy to report that this book does not add to the tally of stupid…
drorzel | August 9, 2006The latest jobs in science post has prompted a lot of responses, several of them arguing that we need to expand the definition of acceptable careers for Ph.D. scientists. For example, there's Nicholas Condon in comments:
When I hear this incessant handwringing about jobs in "science," it seems like it frequently comes from people with two characteristics: they seem to believe that the only viable destination for a Ph.D. scientist is a professorship, and they who work in subfields that are oversupplied (biology) or have very limited non-academic employment opportunitites (HEP) and they mistake…
drorzel | August 9, 2006I had a bunch of students over for dinner last night, and while I was busy with that, stuff happened in the world. I hate that.
Of course, there's been a lot of energy expended on trivia like primary elections, but that's not what I'm talking about. The important news all has to do with physics.
First, via His Holiness, Peter Zoller has been awarded the Dirac Medal from the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics. It's not as big a deal as the Nobel Prize, or anything, but it's well-deserved recognition, both for Zoller and for the quantum computing sorts of topics he works…
drorzel | August 9, 2006Technorati reveals a bunch of responses to my weekend post on genre fiction, and I wanted to at least note a few of them here.
Over at Brad DeLong's, he highlights my comments about story pacing, which sparked some interesting comments. A number of people object that books and movies are too long these days, compared to the past. While there's no denying that many books have swelled, I think that's sort of orthogonal to the sort of pace I was talking about-- you may or may not think that the action advances the plot quickly enough, but there's more happening at any given moment in most modern…
drorzel | August 8, 2006Jonathan Katz's "Don't Become a Scientist" has bubbled to the surface again, turning up at P.P. Cook's Tangent Space a few days ago. I can't recall what, if anything, I said about this that last time it came around, but I'll make a few comments here, in light of the recent discussions about jobs in science.
As you can guess from the title, the piece is a long rant aimed at getting students not to go to graduate school in science. It's an unremitting tale of anecdotal woe:
American universities train roughly twice as many Ph.D.s as there are jobs for them. When something, or someone, is a glut…
drorzel | August 8, 2006Inside Higher Ed today offers another hand-wringing piece about the problem of college athletics, this time from the president of Augustana College in Illinois. It's a particularly maddening example of the form, doing a lovely job of running down NCAA Division I schools in comparison to Division III:
But I do worry that Division I sports is ill-serving far too many young people. And I challenge the NCAA to accelerate the reform movement promised in the recent past. What has happened to cries of turning down the volume in college sports? The media won't turn down the volume, so college…
drorzel | August 8, 2006The title is from the Guardian's piece on the Harry Potter convention in Las Vegas (via Bookslut), in which the traditional naive reporter is sent out to be shocked by discovering people in costumes, slash fanfic, and pseudo-academic papers:
Lumos 2006 is not just another conference, it's 'a Harry Potter symposium', and most of the audience aren't academics at all, they're common-or-garden fans, 1,200 of them in total, here for three days' worth of talks, presentations and panels. Dr Blazina's presentation is just one out of a possible six others being held in the same time slot, including '…
drorzel | August 8, 2006If you're in the habit of reading science blogs, you've probably already seen Mark Trodden's article on the science of coffee, including a chemical analysis of the contents of espresso. You might be asking "Is there nothing these science types won't analyze?"
Apparently not, as Dylan Stiles demonstrates. Now there is somebody who needs to get out of the lab for a while. Take a walk, read a book, just don't take NMR spectra of anything for a few days.
drorzel | August 7, 2006Another update from Official Middle East Correspondant Paul Schemm, working as a journalist in Baghdad. These arrive at irregular intervals, but I figure they're worth reposting when I get them, in case people want a view-from-the-ground perspective.
One officer described it to me as the "new face of violence in Baghdad is senseless indirect fire." It's cold indirect fire because you don't see where it goes. He said once it was bombs in market places or in front of mosques, these days it was just a bunch of guys with mortar launcher and some shells shooting off a few into the nearby…
drorzel | August 7, 2006Via Making Light, Chris Clarke at Creek Running North has some sharp words in response to the alleged Deep Thoughts on his Starbucks cup:
When Einstein explained his theory of relativity, he couldn't express it in the precise, scientific writing of physics. He had to use poetry. Poetry: the connection of words, images, and the relationships that gives [sic] them meaning. Quantum physics changed the world. No longer can we view the world in separate, mechanical ways, but we must accept the reality of interconnection, unity, and togetherness. Life is poetry.
This pearl of wisdom is attributed…
drorzel | August 7, 2006
We got a squirrel-free bird feeder a little while back, and since putting it up have been attracting huge numbers of these little greyish-brown guys to the yard. We've got some more interesting birds as well-- there's a pair of cardinals, and a couple of blue jays as well, but more often than not, the feeder is covered by these guys.
I figured I ought to occasionally post pictures of something other than the dog, and I know that some people around ScienceBlogs are into birds, so here you go. I couldn't get the cardinal to pose.
(The title is a reference that maybe one person reading this…
drorzel | August 7, 2006I'm very pleased to report that in the month of July, no less than 35 people found this site by searching for some variant of the phrase "Queen of Niskayuna." The dog's going to be insufferable when she hears this. I'm also pleased to report that Aaron Bergman no longer shows up in the top ten results-- Chris Mooney does show up before I do, but at least I'm the second proper name in the search terms list.
Of course, a disturbing number of people also got here by searching for some variant of "butt propellor" and, in one case, "balloon ass." I really, really, didn't need to know that.
Anyway…
drorzel | August 6, 2006Over at Making Light, the Nielsen Haydens stumbled upon a video of the Hurra Torpedo version of the Bonnie Tyler/ Jim Steinman kitsch masterpiece "Total Eclipse of the Heart," which absolutely boggles the mind. Of course, the weird thing is that their re-invention isn't actually any weirder than the original video, which Teresa also attempts to explain. All this together inspired Matt McIrvin to one of the best post titles ever.
But the really fascinating thing about this is the "explore more videos" feature on YouTube. From the original video, you can find links to several live versions of…
drorzel | August 6, 2006Written on the whiteboard in the student lounge (which has been serving as a convenient surface for student grafitti for the whole summer) last week:
Little Known Fact: Prof. Orzel is actually an evil genius working on a gigantic laser which he plans to use to hold the world ransom for $1,000,000,000,000,000.
Sadly, it was erased (and replaced with more typical cryptic comments about students) before I could get a picture of it (and the various responses).
If I promise to give 1% of the money to the college endowment, do you think that would help my tenure case?
drorzel | August 5, 2006Yesterday saw the posting (or at least the arrival on my RSS reader) of two different discussions of the current state of genre fiction. I have issues with both discussions, but reading them together makes for an interesting effect.
First, there's Charlie Stross complaining about the state of SF, and once again lamenting the lack of... something in the SF vein. I'm not entirely clear what it is that he would like to see, other than that it isn't alternate history or werewolf porn-- more on this in a bit. There are various responses and duelling anecdotes in the comments. Over at the Whatever…
drorzel | August 4, 2006This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger is right up my alley:
What movie do you think does something admirable (though not necessarily accurate) regarding science? Bonus points for answering whether the chosen movie is any good generally....
A bunch of my co-bloggers have weighed in already, and it's hard not to duplicate thier choices, so I won't even try. (Unoriginal answers below the fold...)
There are a bunch of different ways to take this question, so I'll suggest a few different movies.
The most fun of any of the science-based movies I can think of would be Real Genius. The actual science…
drorzel | August 4, 2006Over the last few months, Kate and I have fallen into a Friday evening routine involving the watching of Japanese cartoons. We started out getting discs of Fullmetal Alchemist from Netflix, and then taping the later episodes off the Cartoon Network, and then Samurai Champloo from Netflix, and most recently finished Vision of Escaflowne (a combination of discs loaned to us by Yoon Ha Lee, and Netflix). Somewhere in there, we also watched Cowboy Bebop and Hellsing, which were loaned to me by a student, but those weren't really Kate's sort of thing.
Last week, we watched the first disc of…
drorzel | August 4, 2006Friday's a good day for lightweight blogging, so here's something fun, via Roberto Alamino: A big collection of physics flash animations from the University of Toronto. It includes everything from three-body graviational motion to the Stern-Gerlach experiment, to how to use an oscilloscope.
Our DSL has been a little slow this morning, so I haven't been able to watch that many of them, but the ones I looked at are pretty cool. I'll probably be adding this link to my class webpages in the future, because you can never have too many physics-based videogames...