drorzel | July 10, 2006I didn't get to see either of the weekend's games, other than about five minutes at the start of the second half of the championship, so I have very little to say. I haven't even seen highlights, as I had to spend the morning at the hospital for an intensely boring test, and they didn't have SportsCenter on. I have seen the infamous head-butt, though, which I have to say is a fairly unique way of knocking a guy down.
The big topic of conversation is, of course, the fact that the title was decided on penalty kicks. In fact, something like half of the games after the group play stage were…
drorzel | July 9, 2006I was away at Readercon this weekend, which meant a fair amount of hanging out in a hotel bar socializing with writer types. One of whom was working on a novel that will have some hard-science elements to it, and had been looking for a physicist to ask questions of. Having just sat down, and being well supplied with beer, I offered to give it a shot.
Unfortunately, the first question she asked was (paraphrasing slightly, as I was well supplied with beer):
Is the speed of light a property of space-time, or a property of light?
I still don't quite know what to do with that one. Further…
drorzel | July 7, 2006This week, Seed asks:
On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to?
Answer behind the cut:
Dammit, Jim, I'm a physicist, not a developmental biologist. I didn't have any particular expectation of how cloning would develop over the last ten years, so there's nothing to compare to.
If pressed, I probably would've said something like "It's going to turn out to be a lot more complicated than this early success might seem to indicate," which would've been both accurate and unhelpful. Other than that, I…
drorzel | July 7, 2006I had errands to run this morning before work, which meant that I didn't have time to queue up the usual handful of blog posts to appear during the day. I don't want to have the site go dark, though, so I'll throw up a post or two on my lunch hour, to note some physics stuff that's kind of cool.
I've been meaning to say something about this for a while, as the physics blogosphere has been overrun with talk about how cool the Large Hadron Collider is going to be (my own contribution is a few posts back), but I keep putting it off on the theory that I'll do something really substantial. The…
drorzel | July 6, 2006The last couple of days at work have been Shop Days, with a fair bit of time spent in the department's machine shop making holes in a metal box. This would, I'm sure, be the occasion of much hilarity among my old junior high shop teachers, as my ineptitude in both metal and wood shop was pretty impressive, back in the seventh and eighth grades. I've gotten considerably more coordinated since those exceptionally gawky days, though, and I can use a drill press or a mill without too much trouble now, though no-one will ever mistake me for a machinist.
In a certain sense, Shop Days are among the…
drorzel | July 6, 2006p>Gordon Watts has some thoughts on a subject near to my heart: the ways we drive students out of physics.
For the past 6 years I've taught various versions of the introductory physics survey course. It covers 100's years of physics in one year. We rarely spend more than a lecture on a single topic; there is little time for fun. And if we want to make room for something like that we usually have to squeeze out some other topic. Whoosh!
It gets worse. At the UW we are lucky enough to have a large contingent of students from excellent high schools. This means they have seen almost all of…
drorzel | July 6, 2006My Corporate Masters have finally posted the piece that ran in the most recent print edition of the magazine, in which prominent physicists comment on the LHC. They've got predictions and explanations of why the LHC is interesting from an impressive array of people.
Most of the answers are pretty predictable. Lisa Randall talks about extra dimensions, Leonard Susskind about the Anthropic Principle, etc. My favorite answer, though, is Steven Weinberg's:
What terrifies theorists is that the LHC may discover nothing beyond the single neutral "Higgs" particle that is required by the standard…
drorzel | July 5, 2006As you've no doubt seen elsewhere on ScienceBlogs, Nature posted a little story about popular science blogs that included a list of said blogs, including a link to yours truly (tied with Deltoid for 11th in their list by Technorati rank order.
My ranking has actually climbed slightly since then (#8312 accoring to my most recent vanity search), but I had noticed the quote ranking of #8,365 last week, and I have to say, I'm absolutely gobsmacked to be in the 99.98th percentile of blogs ranked by Technorati. It's sufficiently surprising, in fact, that I need to resort to British slang.
OK,…
drorzel | July 5, 2006I didn't get to see much of the World Cup games over the weekend, as we were in Chicago at a friend's wedding, with drinks and dancing and socializing, and various other things that were more attractive than watching penalty-kick shootouts. A few scattered observations all the same:
Appearances: not always decceiving. See Wayne Rooney's attempt to geld a Portugese player.
Some really sweet goals in the recent games. Germany's two-header against Argentina to tie it up was amazing, and France's goal against Brazil was pretty sweet as well.
By the way: France? Over Brazil?
I loved the German…
drorzel | July 5, 2006I had meant to post something or another yesterday, after we got back, but, well, I was still in vacation mode, and didn't get around to it. I also didn't queue up anything for today, thinking that I would write something last night, but I didn't feel like doing that, either. You may get another "Classic Edition" post this afternoon, or you may get nothing. Check back regularly to find out.
I do want to post a belated wrap-up of the DonorsChoose fundraiser (official tallies from Janet):
Total donations: $22,554.38
Amount matched by SEED: $10,000
Completion bonus from DonorsChoose: $1447.30…
drorzel | July 3, 2006Poking through the archives to find some old physics posts to fill space while I'm away from the keyboard, I realize that back in 2002, I wrote a lot more about politics than I do now.This is largely because most of what I wrote about politics back then makes me cringe now. And, in fact, made me cringe about two weeks after writing it, which continues to be true of most of my writing about politics.
Here's one of the rare posts that doesn't make me cringe (I'm not entirely happy with it, but it's not completely embarassing), on the subject of political rhetoric (which seems vaguely…
drorzel | July 2, 2006I'm going to be away from the computer for the long weekend, but I don't want to have the site go completely dark, even over a weekend, so I'm going to schedule a few posts from the archives to show up while I'm away. Everyone else seems to be doing it (and pushing my posts off the front page, the bastards), so I might as well.
This goes back to the early days of the blog, back in July of 2002. This is the second part of the explanation started in the previous post.
So, at the end of yesterday's post, I had talked about how to use light to exert forces on atoms, and change their velocity.…
drorzel | July 1, 2006I'm going to be away from the computer for the long weekend, but I don't want to have the site go completely dark, even over a weekend, so I'm going to schedule a few posts from the archives to show up while I'm away. Everyone else seems to be doing it (and pushing my posts off the front page, the bastards), so I might as well.
This goes back to the early days of the blog, back in July of 2002. If you're wondering what I need those diode lasers for, other than sharks with lasers on their heads, here's the beginning of an answer.
Last week, when talking about how to do a public lecture, I…
drorzel | June 30, 2006I'm going to be away from the computer for the long weekend, but I don't want to have the site go completely dark, even over a weekend, so I'm going to schedule a few posts from the archives to show up while I'm away. Everyone else seems to be doing it (and pushing my posts off the front page, the bastards), so I might as well.
This goes back to the early days of the blog, back in August of 2002, and is at least vaguely relevant to the recent discussion of interpretations.
It's been a while now since I talked about science stuff, mostly because there hasn't been any news that I felt strongly…
drorzel | June 30, 2006As you have no doubt seen elsewhere on ScienceBlogs, the great DonorsChoose blog challenge ends tomorrow. I won't actually be here to do a final post on the subject, so this is the last prodding you'll get from me.
As of this morning, the Uncertain Principles challenge entry stands at $996.02, according to the leader board. If you've got a spare $3.98 that you don't know what to do with, please consider donating it to a worthy cause, to get us an even $1,000. Or kick in a little extra-- I'm not that obsessive about round numbers...
On the other hand, if you're being strategic about this, and…
drorzel | June 30, 2006The great thing about soccer is that even pets can get in on the game:
Here, Emmy shows off her ability to bat things around on the floor, in honor of the Germany-Argentina game coming up today. The toy in question is a Buster Cube, which we heartily endorse-- it's a plastic cube with a hole in one side and a chamber inside to hold food. As it gets knocked end over end, every now and then some kibble works its way out, and the dog gets to eat it.
Humans love it because there's no human intervention required: we put a handful of kibble in, and she bats it around the living room for ten…
drorzel | June 29, 2006Matt Leifer, whose blog I hadn't previously encountered, has a long and fascinating post on evaluation criteria for quantum interpretations. "Interpretation" here means the stuff of countless "Isn't Quantum Mechanics weird?" books-- Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, Bohmian hidden variable theories, all that stuff. These are the "meta-theories" that are used to explain how you get from all that weird and messy wavefunction stuff up to the reality that we see and observe in our experiments.
The list is explicitly modeled after the well-known DiVincenzo Criteria for quantum computing (see also Quantum…
drorzel | June 29, 2006I ended the previous laser post by noting that diode lasers need some additional wavelength selection to be done in order to be useful as light sources for spectroscopy experiments. In their natural state, they tend to emit light over a broader range of wavelengths than is really ideal, and we'd like to narrow that down, and also to be able to control the emission.
(I should note that, while the emission of a typical diode laser is broader than people doing atomic physics experiments would like, it's still incredibly narrow by normal standards. The actual width, in wavelength, of the light…
drorzel | June 29, 2006A little while back, JoAnne at Cosmic Variance reported on the status of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the giant next-generation accelerator that is the cover story for the current print issue of Seed. Particle experimentalist Gordon Watts reports in with some more technical details about the delay in the proposed turn-on schedule. He's also got a link to a PDF of a talk by someone associated with LHC, for those who really want to geek out.
The bottom line appears to be that this is just normal, prudent caution, and not really unexpected. Though the delay is a little disappointing to those…
drorzel | June 28, 2006From America's Finest News Source:
Professor Pressured To Sleep With Student For Good Course Evaluation
FAYETTEVILLE, AR--Alan Gilchrist, an associate professor of English literature at the University of Arkansas infamous for his tough grading standards and dry lecturing style, was coerced into sleeping with an undergraduate on Monday in order to earn a good course evaluation. "My tenure's on the line here, so I allowed a student to take advantage of me," said an emotional Gilchrist of the experience, which he hopes will earn him at least six "very much enjoyed" responses on the eight-item…