drorzel | May 21, 2006I'm back from DAMOP, having spent a lazy day in Knoxville yesterday, waiting around to go to the airport. That was a much-needed respite from the non-stop conferencing of the previous few days, but I would've preferred to be home, rather than in Knoxville. Air travel continues to suck, particularly the waiting-around-airports phase.
The meeting itself was pretty good. Nothing really revelatory on the science front, though there were some very nice talks about different things that have been going on for a while. This is pretty typical-- every few years, you get a meeting where lots of…
drorzel | May 17, 2006The question for the week from the Seed overlords is:
"Will the 'human' race be around in 100 years?"
This is basically a Singularity question, and as such, I think it's kind of silly. But then, I think the whole Singularity thing is sort of silly-- as a literary device, it makes for some good SF, but as serious prognostication about the future, I think it's crap.
Razib lays out the basic logic of the options: 1) Nerd Jesus arrives and spirits us all away in a cloud of nanobots, 2) We're all gonna diiiieeee!!!, and 3) We muddle along more or less as always. PZ is more pessimistic, and also…
drorzel | May 16, 2006Every year, or nearly every year, I go to the meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society (which revels in the acronym "DAMOP" (pronounced "day-mop"), but at least we're better off than our Canadian brethren, who are just the Division of Atomic and Molecular Physics). A few years back, when I was a post-doc, the meeting was held in London, Ontario.
I flew into London on a small plane jammed with physicists, including a couple of theorists I knew from my grad school days. I hadn't seen them in a while, and we were staying in the same hotel…
drorzel | May 16, 2006For those who care, there's a list below the fold of what I bought from iTunes last night based on recommendations in the previous thread. For those who don't care so much about that, let me just note that trying to buy classical music on iTunes really is as annoying as everyone says-- as dozens of people have noted, it's hard to find specific pieces because they list everything by the name of the performer, not the composer.
Even more annoying, though, from my perspective, is that many of the more important pieces are album tracks only. For example, they have approximately fifteen different…
drorzel | May 15, 2006My lightly tossed-off shot at classical music snobs, and subsequent confession that classical music fails to make much of an impression has led to various people calling me an uncultured barbarian, but also to a surprisingly vibrant comment thread that has included some recommendations of music to try.
I might as well roll with that while it's going, so here's the deal: I'm headed out to a conference tomorrow, and will have a couple of dull plane flights and a fair bit of time in a hotel room in which to listen to new stuff. By which I mean old stuff, so pimp me some classical music, subject…
drorzel | May 15, 2006On one of the occasions when I called the gastroenterologists to complain that my heartburn wasn't getting any better (there were a couple of rounds of such calls, before I went back to my regular doctor), the woman I spoke to asked "Are you experiencing stress at work?"
"Yes," I said, "and before you say anything else, there's nothing I can do about that." Which is absolutely true-- if stress is the real cause, then I'm stuck with this until at least December (which is about the earliest my tenure decision could come through).
College teaching is an extremely stressful job, as this Inside…
drorzel | May 14, 2006Via Jim Henley, a handy guide to the key denominations, terms, and concepts in Christianity:
Catholics
Catholics are the New York Yankees of Christianity. They are the biggest and wealthiest team, and their owner is intensely controversial (this makes St. Francis of Assisi the Derek Jeter of Catholicism: discuss). Catholics all wear matching uniforms, and are divided into "parishes," or "squadrons," to make choosing softball teams easier. Catholics are rigidly controlled by a hidebound hierarchy that starts with priests and ends with priests' housekeepers. Catholics are not allowed to read…
drorzel | May 14, 2006So, after noting that yesterday morning was grey and dismal, I headed over to work to take care of some grading and other sutff, and the clouds lightened up a bit. I went out to run some errands, and the sun came out. so I headed home, and what did I do?
Yard work. Rather than, say, sitting out in the sun with a good book, I spent the nice part of the afternoon mowing the lawn, planting seeds in the herb planters over on the side of the house (my stomach is gradually improving, so I feel safe putting in some basil, sage, parsely, and cilantro), and pulling up some miscellaneous weeds.…
drorzel | May 13, 2006A study in contrasting approaches:
Scott Spiegelberg says sensible things about introducing people to classical music.
A. C. Douglas makes me less likely to listen to classical music any time soon.
drorzel | May 13, 2006It's a grey and rainy weekend morning, and I'm facing a day at work trying to put things in order before I leave for DAMOP on Tuesday, so I'm not in a big hurry to get moving. Of course, I'm not feeling all that inspired, blog-wise, either, so I'm going to fall back on one of the staples of lazy bloggers everywhere: funny search engine requests.
There's something a little odd about the way Google Analytics counts these, as "probability+of+fixation+of+neutral+mutations" comes in at #2, which is just sad-- searches for things relevant to this blog are completely dwarfed by PZ's sloppy seconds.…
drorzel | May 12, 2006The approval for the second year of my NSF grant just came through. This wasn't really in doubt, but it's nice to have confirmation that the thirty-odd thousand dollars I was counting on to run the next year of the experiment will actually, you know, be available when I start sending purchase orders out for stuff in a week or two...
Not to mention the summer salary that's part of the package...
drorzel | May 12, 2006I keep meaning to write a substantial follow-up post talking about science funding, but it's not a great Friday topic, so it'll probably wait for Monday, even though I'll be away for the latter part of next week. I'm moving a little too slowly this morning to really do it justice, so here are some random tracks from my iPod. In this case, the source playlist is limited to songs I bought in the last 60 days:
"Bonus Tack," The New Amsterdams
"A Widow's Toast," Neko Case
"Catch You Disappointed," The Divorce
"Better Days," The Goo Goo Dolls
"Turn Out the Light (Reprise)," The New Amsterdams
"We…
drorzel | May 12, 2006A very nice post from Rob Knop, exploring the the role of faith in science:
You may then ask, am I not then taking many of the results of science as faith, since I didn't check all of the experimental results and subsequent analysis myself? Answer: yes and no. It is a lowercase-f "faith", in that I trust the scientists who did the work to have known what they were doing and to have honestly and reasonably done the work. I have also trusted the others in their sub-field to keep them honest, by reproducing the experiments independently and critically reading their work. This is very, very…
drorzel | May 12, 2006Last night was the third annual faculty-student basketball game, held as a fund-raiser for charity by a local sorority. This year the threw us a team that included five players from the varsity, including the only 2,000-point scorer in school history. Needless to say, we didn't win...
It was sorta-kinda close for a while, until a stretch of about 4-5 minutes in the third quarter when the guys from the team played really hard. They eased up on us later, but the official final margin of five points owes a lot to the scoreboard operator "missing" a few of their baskets...
My personal stats…
drorzel | May 11, 2006Well before I was a footnote in a list of popular science blogs, I started out into the world of weblogging by starting a book log, which I still maintain, sort of. I haven't posted anything to it in a few months because, well, this site takes up most of my blogging energy, and I do have a day job, you know?
I occasionally feel a little guilty about this, especially since I've got big piles of books here that haven't been shelved in order to remind me to booklog them... Which is silly, because it's just a damn hobby, but there you go.
Anyway, as a reminder that I do read things other than…
drorzel | May 11, 2006Via Arcane Gazebo, a pointer to the Blender list of "The 500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born." At least, it was a pointer to that article last night-- all Blender links seem to be 404ing this morning, which also means I can't discuss the songs in detail.
That's fine, actually, as the list is very rap-centric, and thus I don't really recognize a lot of the Top 50. That's probably a fair reflection of modern pop music, which just drives home the degree to which I'm out of touch.
My real purpose in posting is to grumble about the fact that the starting date for the list is 1980. Which means…
drorzel | May 11, 2006Via a LiveJournal post on the dorkiest thing ever, a link that isn't new, but new to me: The Lord of the Rings in quotes from The Princess Bride:
PETER JACKSON: Frodo and Sam don't get burned up by the lava.
AUDIENCE: What?
PETER JACKSON: Frodo and Sam don't get burned up by the lava. I'm explaining to you because you looked nervous.
drorzel | May 10, 2006Prompted in part by Rob Knop's post on meeting with humanists, an observation about the nature of academia attributed to our late Dean of the Faculty, a former Classics professor:
The key difference between disciplines in terms of administrative business on campus is that scientists tend to do their research work (experiments, calculations, simulations) in on-campus labs and offices, while humanities faculty do their research work (reading, writing, and thinking) at home. This means that humanists only come to campus in order to teach classes and socialize with colleagues, while scientists…
drorzel | May 10, 2006As noted in passing in the previous post, I try to ride my bike to and from work when the weather is nice enough. In a good week, I might get three bike rides a week in, which is a little extra exercise, and that much more gas I don't have to buy.
The major drawback of this plan, other than the fact that I look like a dork in a bike helmet, is that at this time of the year, riding my bike in to work has me basically seining pollen from the air like a baleen whale. I'm taking Allegra anyway, which controls the symptoms, but my allergies have definitely kicked up more since the flowering tree…
drorzel | May 9, 2006Woke up, got out of bed
Ran a comb across my head...
8:40: Leave home, bike to work.
8:50: Arrive at work, stow bike in lab
8:55: Download electronically submitted papers to be graded. Determine which students haven't handed papers in yet.
9:15: Change into teaching clothes, review lecture notes.
(Continued...)
9:35-10:40: Teach class on basics of quantum computing, logic gates, supeerpositions and entanglement.
10:45: Let class go five minutes late. Run to bathroom.
10:50-11:55: Second class, review for Tuesday's exam. Answer questions about right-hand rules, magnetic fields, and Faraday's…