drorzel | May 9, 2006One of the perks of my job is that sometimes people send me books for free. Granted, these are mostly introductory physics textbooks, which tend not to be page-turners, but I'm a big fan of books, and I'm a big fan of free stuff, so free books are great.
Thus, when I was contacted by someone from Houghton Mifflin offering me a free copy of their new 100 Science Words Every College Graduate Should Know if I'd say something about it on the blog, of course I agreed. The specific book almost doesn't matter-- this is the sort of behavior I want to encourage among the publishing community: send me…
drorzel | May 8, 2006A low-key True Lab Story, in honor of the previous post on knowing more about your experiment than anybody else.
One of the first times I had to run my grad school experiment all by myself, I had trouble getting the discharge in the metastable atom source to light. I went through all the usual steps, but nothing worked. Happily, the student who had built the experiment was still around, and working on writing up his thesis, so I went over to his office and told him what the problem was. He said "I'll take a look," and we headed over to the lab.
Before we even got into the room, he started…
drorzel | May 8, 2006Derek Lowe offers another Law of the Lab, and it's a good one:
Today's law is: You are in real trouble if someone knows more about your project than you do. That's a realization that hits people at some point in their graduate school career - preferably not much past the midpoint. It marks the transition from being a student to being a working scientist.
Back in grad school, I had a slightly different spin on this. I used to say that getting a Ph.D. requires that you become the World's Leading Expert in something that nobody else cares that much about. It's a cynical spin on the same basic…
drorzel | May 8, 2006Timothy Burke, my go-to-guy for deep thoughts about academia, had a nice post about student evaluations last week. Not ecvaluations of students, evaluations by students-- those little forms that students fill out at many schools (not Swarthmore, though) giving their opinion of the class in a variety of areas.
(Probably not entirely coincidentally, as this is the time of year when semester-school faculty fret about evaluation scores, Inside Higher Ed offers yet another RateMy Professor.com article, showing a positive correlation between "hotness" and positive evaluations there...)
Those…
drorzel | May 6, 2006The Powers That Be at Seed/ ScienceBlogs are initiating a new feature, cleverly called "Ask a ScienceBlogger," in which they will pose one question a week to the group of us, and we'll answer (or not) as we choose. The inaugural question was posted last night:
If you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?
(Why they've chosen to roll this out on a Friday, when nobody reads blogs over the weekend, I have no idea... I just work here.)
Some thoughts on the question below the fold:
This is the part where I reveal the…
drorzel | May 5, 2006I'm going to be busy nearly all day today with our annual undergraduate research symposium on campus. I'm bribing some of my intro students to attend (five points on next week's exam), and chairing a session, and judging the annual student research award, so it's a full day.
As a distraction (the best way to avoid dread, as any fule kno, though some fules with brain scanners have now conclusively shown it), here's a set of ten songs that my iPod threw out yesterday while I was running errands. With one exception, they were all pretty good songs for driving around on a gorgeous spring day:
"Do…
drorzel | May 5, 2006For the record: I am well aware that the tornado ad for the History Channel is incredibly annoying. You may or may not have noticed the additional charming feature that it breaks links that it passes over, at least in some browsers (Opera and Safari).
The dissatisfaction with the ad has been widespread and general, and has been communicated to the Powers That Be at Seed/ ScienceBlogs. We have been assured that there will not be any more ads that extend out over the text after this one finishes its run.
Many apologies for the inconvenience, and feel free to post any additional gripes you may…
drorzel | May 5, 2006Well, OK, they're mostly not new, just new to me. I'm vaguely ashamed at having to rely on Sean Carroll to point out new blogs to me, especially since one of the authors comments here moderately regularly, but my defense is that unlike faculty at semester schools, who are winding things down, I'm right in the middle of the most hectic part of the academic term. I barely have time to post original stuff, let alone read other people's blogs.
Nevertheless, Sean points out some good new blogs, that have gone into the RSS aggregator, and will make it onto the sidebar when I finally get around to…
drorzel | May 4, 2006Dr. What Now? has a nice and timely post about helping students prepare for oral presentations, something I'll be doing myself this morning, in preparation for the annual undergraduate research symposium on campus Friday. Of course, being a humanist, what she means by oral presentation is a completely different thing than the PowerPoint slide shows that we do in the sciences:
She did a run-through, and then we sat down together and reworked the first three pages to set up the project more clearly and helpfully for her listeners, and then we designed a handout to help her audience situate her…
drorzel | May 4, 2006Since people have asked about the outcome of the Mike and Mike "Mount Sportsmore" thing that kicked off yesterday's post about iconic scientists, I made it a point to catch their final list today:
Muhammed Ali
Babe Ruth
Michael Jordan
Wayne Gretzky
They specifically put Jackie Robinson off in a special category of his own ("looking down from above"). Gretzky was apaprently the choice in a fan vote, beating out Secretariat, Jesse Owens, and Jim Brown. No mention of Pele at all, as far as I could tell.
Meanwhile, over in the "Mount Rushmore of Science" thread, the nomination geenrating the most…
drorzel | May 3, 2006Another set of Quantum Optics notes, dealing with entanglement, superposition, EPR paradoxes, and quantum cryptography. A whole bunch of really weird stuff...
Lecture 11: Superposition and entanglement.
Lecture 12: EPR "paradox," introduction to Local Hidden Variables.
Lecture 13: Local Hidden Variable theories, Bell's Theorem/ Bell's Inequalities.
Lecture 14: Bell's Inequality experiments.
Lecture 15: Cryptography, quantum key distribution.
Also, don't forget to suggest people to fill the Teddy Roosevelt spot on the Mount Rushmore of Science...
drorzel | May 3, 2006On the way in to work, I was listening to ESPN radio's Mike & Mike show, and they were discussing "Mount Sportsmore," that is, the Mount Rushmore of sports. They had two of the four spots filled with Babe Ruth and Muhammed Ali, and were debating baseball players for the other two (which is stupid-- the other two are Wayne Gretzky and Michael Jordan).
This raises the question, though, of who belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Science: Who are the four most iconic scientists out there, who deserve to be memorialized in titanic stone sculptures, ideally on the Moon or somewhere similarly cool…
drorzel | May 2, 2006A couple of good science stories in today's New York Times:
First, an article on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The current news hook, weirdly, appears to be a recent calculation of the expected magnitude of the signal resulting from the collision and merger of two black holes. Why this merits a long article, I'm not sure-- I was under the impression that they already had a decent idea of the expected signal sizes-- but it's a decent article.
The other story will probably get more play, as it's about the deathless topic of problems with peer review. As others…
drorzel | May 2, 2006I had a surreal moment in the airport on the way out Friday, when I got a call from a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor and spent half an hour talking about particle physics and physics funding and whatnot in the gate area. The guy sitting next to me was reading a magazine about NASCAR, and the guy across from me was reading Maxim, and they both kept giving me odd looks.
I didn't end up being quoted in the article (which is fine by me, what with not having tenure...), but it was a kick just to have a reporter contact me to ask questions about stuff I said on my blog.
Other…
drorzel | May 1, 2006I'm back from the Vegas trip, lighter by about $100 at the tables (thanks entirely to a bad run Sunday morning at the tables, one of those games where you get dealt a 19 with the dealer showing a 4, and the dealer draws four cards to a 20...), and heavier by well, quite a bit, probably, as I rather comprehensively went off the heartburn diet for the weekend.
While the laws of statistics continue to work in the house's favor, medicine remains a mystery. The official medical advice I got was to avoid alcohol, carbonated beverages, overeating, fried or oily food, and spicy food. Saturday, I had…
drorzel | April 28, 2006I'm going to Vegas, baby!
A good friend from college is getting married this summer, and there's a bachelor party for him this weekend at a casino in Las Vegas. It looks to be quite the affair, with thirty-odd guys, and reservations at a bunch of cool spots, because they're high-rolling financiers.
This is going to be quite the experience, as I've been living like a freakin' monk for the past two months, on account of my stomach problems-- no booze, in bed early most nights, highly restricted diet... It'll be an adventure, seeing whether I can avoid doing major damage to myself. Then again,…
drorzel | April 28, 2006We had 45 responses to yesterday's poll/quiz question-- thank you to all who participated. The breakdown of answers was, by a quick count:
How do you report your answer in a lab report?
0 votes A) 4.371928645 +/- 0.0316479825 m/s
3 votes B) 4.372 +/- 0.03165 m/s
18 votes C) 4.372 +/- 0.032 m/s
21 votes D) 4.37 +/- 0.03 m/s
2 votes E) Some other answer that I will explain in comments.
So, it's a narrow victory for D, among ScienceBlogs readers.
The correct answer and the reason for the poll are below the fold.
As far as I'm concerned, the correct answer is D). There's absolutely no reason…
drorzel | April 27, 2006The big physics story of the day is bound to be this new report on American particle physics:
The United States should be prepared to spend up to half a billion dollars in the next five years to ensure that a giant particle accelerator now being designed by a worldwide consortium of scientists can be built on American soil, the panel said. If that does not happen, particle physics, the quest for the fundamental forces and constituents of nature, will wither in this country, it said.
You might assume that, as a physicist, I'm all in favor of this-- half a billion is a lot of money, after all…
drorzel | April 27, 2006Have you ever wondered about the accuracy of the descriptions in chemical manuals of what different compounds smell like? "Sure," you say, "the book says that this smells like cheese, but does that really help me in my daily life?"
Well, worry no more. Dylan Stiles does the experiment so you don't have to.
(If you haven't responded to the poll question below, please consider it...)
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drorzel | April 27, 2006Imagine that you are doing a physics lab to measure the velocity of a small projectile. After making a bunch of measurements to four significant figures, and doing a bunch of arithmetic, you get a value of 4.371928645 m/s. After yet more gruelling math, you find the uncertainty associated with this number to be 0.0316479825 m/s.
How do you report your answer in a lab report?
(There was talk a while back about getting ScienceBlogs some fancy poll software that would allow me to do this with radio buttons and automatic counting, but I don't know how to do that yet, and I'm curious about the…