drorzel | April 18, 2006I just got a link-pimping piece of spam that suggests they're improving the targeting algorithm for Subject: lines:
Subject: hep-th index update
(For those not in the know, hep-th is the High Energy Physics- Theoretical category on the porn server.)
It's still a "close, but not quite," as I read hep-th about as well as I read Sanskrit, but at least they're in the right department...
drorzel | April 18, 2006Two items from the sports pages this morning:
1) Not really a sports story, but I saw it first on ESPN: two Duke lacrosse players have been indicted. It really doesn't deserve a whole "CSI: Durham" post, because it's a sealed indictment, so there's basically no real information. But if you're following the story, there's the latest.
2) More importantly, from ESPN's NBA pages:
Larry Brown does not plan to coach the Knicks' final two games because of acid reflux, ESPN learned Monday morning.
Maybe I'm just a sad, pathetic little person, but this makes me feel like less of a wuss for bitching…
drorzel | April 17, 2006For those following along with my Quantum Optics class, here's a bunch of lectures about photons:
Lecture 7: Commutators, simple harmonic oscillators, creation and annihilation operators, photons.
Lecture 8: Coherent states of the electromagnetic field.
Lecture 9: Number-phase uncertainty, squeezed states, interferometry.
Lecture 10: Photon anti-correlation revisited, beamsplitters and vacuum states.
This material, unsurprisingly, produced the most panicked looks from students to this point. One of the homework problems was also to recapticulate a couple of calculations from a Phys. Rev. A…
drorzel | April 17, 2006Are you unhappy with the way you look? Feel like you're carrying around some large extra dimensions? Want to compactify your manifold before the summer conference season gets here?
If you answered "Yes!" to any of those questions, then you're ready for the String Theory Diet!
Each rich, satisfying meals of eleven-dimensional noodles, and watch the pounds melt away! You'll lose weight so fast, your friends will think that gravity is leaking off your brane and affecting them more than you! You'll be your own walking hierarchy problem!
You can lose as much as one Planck mass per Planck time (…
drorzel | April 16, 2006That's what yesterday was, at least. It was a gorgeous spring day here, which we spent mostly outside, first doing some errand-running, and then some lounging in the sun reading and napping. I didn't even try to keep track of what was posted on other blogs, and I didn't miss it all that much-- it was much more entertaining to watch the dog patrolling the back yard against squirrel incursions.
Spending a slow day yesterday means that I've ended up with an awful lot to do today. In fact, I'm typing this from my office (yes, before 10:00 on Easter Sunday), and heading down to the lab once I…
drorzel | April 14, 2006RPM is dropping his Double Entendre Fridays, which threatens to cut off the world supply of really dorky sex jokes. But never fear, I'm here to pick it up with a physics version!
Back when I was a lowly undergrad, I was the TA for an optics lab section, and was helping some students to adjust a Michelson interferometer. One of them made some comment about being amazed that I could make such minute adjustments to the alignment of one of the mirrors (done by turning an 80-pitch screw very, very slowly), and the professor running the class (who was one of my honors thesis advisors that year)…
drorzel | April 14, 2006The usual suspects are all upset about John Barrow's crack about Richard Dawkins:
When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer's Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, "You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you're not really a scientist. You're a biologist."
I don't quite understand the problem, here. I mean, he's right-- stamp collectors, the lot of 'em...
Consider this a sort of poor man's Casual Friday psych experiment-- I'm curious as to whether…
drorzel | April 13, 2006I know the cookie bug is still afflicting some commenters-- the folks who make Movable Type are aware of the bug, and it will be fixed with the next release, whenever that is. You can get around the bug by either deleting cookies from scienceblogs.com, or by logging out from TypeKey, if you have a TypeKey identitiy, and have logged in.
Other than that, if there's anything I ought to be aware of-- bugs with the site, articles on other sites, nifty tricks involving magnets-- you know where the comments are.
UPDATE: the developer for ScienceBlogs recommends the "zap cookies" tool from this…
drorzel | April 13, 2006A slightly more serious topic, also noted via Inside Higher Ed: Money magazine has deeemd "College Professor" the second-best job in America. The fact that it trails "software engineer" makes me a little dubious about their methodology, but there you go-- I have the second-best job in the country.
Of course, looking at the detailed results, you really have to wonder what they were basing some of this on. In particular, 30+% job growth over the next ten years? Don't tell me they've bought into the "There's going to be a huge wave of retirements any day now..." myth...
They also appear to be…
drorzel | April 13, 2006Of special interest to Nathan, evidence that the process of dissertation writing is the same across disciplines:
> work on dissertation
You spend three hours reading five articles which have nothing to do with the dissertation.
> work on dissertation
You spend twenty minutes online reading about baseball.
> tear out hair
Taken. You find the Elvish sword.
(Today's a Lab Day, so you're mostly getting silly posts...)
drorzel | April 13, 2006Via Inside Higher Ed, a story with the nearly unbeatable headline: Feds Pounce on Student Dresses As a Ninja. Why was a student running around the Georgia campus dressed as a ninja?
Ransom told The Red & Black student newspaper that he had left a Wesley Foundation pirate vs. ninja event when he was snared by agents with guns drawn.
Damnit, now I want to know more! What is the Wesley Foundation, and why are they running ninja vs. pirate smackdowns on college campuses? Or, more precisely, why aren't they running them on my campus?
"Arr!" "Yaaah!!!" Brilliant!
(Note: I don't want to know…
drorzel | April 12, 2006Back when ScienceBlogs was all new and shiny, I did a couple of posts asking questions of the other bloggers. I got involved with other things after a while, and stopped posting those, so I'm not sure this will still work, but here's a question for other ScienceBloggers, or science bloggers in general, that I thought of when I was writing about science books:
What topic or phenomenon that's generally in your area do you really wish people would stop asking you about?
I don't mean a major political controversy that you have a strong opinion about, but might be tired of (so no "creationism"…
drorzel | April 12, 2006The Kuiper Belt Controversy continues, with the lastest round showing up in the Times today: Planet Discovered Last Year, Thought to Be Larger Than Pluto, Proves Roughly the Same Size:
The object -- still unnamed more than a year after its discovery but tagged with the temporary designation 2003 UB313 and nicknamed Xena by the discoverer -- covered an area only 1.5 pixels wide in the digital image, taken by the space telescope in December. But that was enough to extract the diameter: 1,490 miles, give or take 60 miles.
A previous estimate by a team of German researchers, based on measurements…
drorzel | April 12, 2006Having previously mentioned the Duke lacrosse mess, I feel obliged to at least note the latest events: DNA tests failed to link any of the players to the crime, but the DA says the alleged victim has identified one of them.
I don't plan to make this a regularly recurring feature, because the whole thing is sort of squalid and depressing. If, however, you find that you just can't get enough, you can find lots of coverage elsewhere. There's a fairly comprehensive and mildly pro-Duke blog (via Dave), and of course there's the strongly anti-Duke coverage at Alas, A Blog. (Though I have serious…
drorzel | April 11, 2006One of the features I always like in the print edition of Seed is the lab notebook pictorial. Every month (or, at least, all three of the months that I've looked at the print edition), they publish a reproduction of a page or two from the lab notebook of a working scientist. It's sort of cool to see how they differ from one field to another, while remaining largely the same.
Back when I was doing the "A Week in the Lab" series of posts, somebody asked me about my own lab notebooks. I present here the reason why Seed is never likely to ask me to supply notebook pages for their monthly feature…
drorzel | April 11, 2006On a note related to the previous entry, Inside Higher Ed had a longer story about Carl Wieman leaving Colorado for Canada (following in the footsteps of his post-docs?), another guy putting his money where his mouth is:
First, he contributed $250,000 of his Nobel Prize award to the Physics Education Technology Fund supporting classroom initiatives at CU-Boulder. He hoped it would prompt other donations, but the momentum never materialized.
Last year, during his sabbatical, Wieman wrote 35 proposals for funding for teaching projects. All he got was one small grant from the National Science…
drorzel | April 11, 2006There's a nice profile of Randy Olson, the biologist-turned filmmaker behind A Flock of Dodos, which takes a hard look at both sides of the creationism wars:
The biologist, Randy Olson, accepts that there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth. He agrees that intelligent design's embrace of a supernatural "agent" puts it outside the realm of science.
But when he watches the advocates of intelligent design at work, he sees pleasant people who speak plainly, convincingly and with humor. When scientists…
drorzel | April 10, 2006Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog, and an excellente planne for a worke of grete literarye merit, including:
The dog-maysteres Tale: the dog-mayster (talle, curtel of greene), his dogge, and his companiounes do fynde an olde wool-quaye that semeth to be havnted by a foule spectre - one of them has those fancie new eye-lenses, the which she doth frequentli misplace - eventuallie they fynde that yt is John Gowere who maketh the appearaunce and similitude of a hauntynge in ordre to kepe the quaye closid, for he disliketh the noyse of woole shipmentes when he writeth hys lame poemes. They do…
drorzel | April 10, 2006One of the standard conservatarian responses to anyone suggesting government-funded universal health care is to start talking about how universal health care will inevitably lead to faceless, heartless bureaucrats denying or delaying treatment for stupid reasons. My response to these stories is "Who's supplying your health insurance? And how do I get on that plan?"
Through my employer, I have a pretty generous health plan, administered by one of the most highly-regarded health insurance companies in the region. And this week, for the second time in two weeks, they refused to cover my…
drorzel | April 10, 2006Inside Higher Ed takes a look today at a new survey about how students choose colleges. They make an effort to make the results sound surprising, but it's really about what I'd expect:
A survey of 600 students who scored over 1100 on the SAT, half of whom scored at least 1300, found that campus visits, parents -- moms more than dads -- word of mouth, and college Web sites are more influential information sources for college-bound students than rankings, guidance counselors, and teachers.
The report, conducted by Lipman Hearne, a marketing firm with many colleges as clients, found that the…