drorzel | April 9, 2006"Mint Flavorings" is quite prominent on the list (provided by my gastroenterologist) of foods that heartburn sufferers should avoid (along with pretty much anything else you might want to eat...).
If you go to the store to buy some over-the-counter heartburn remedy-- Maalox, Mylanta, whatever-- what's the one flavor that's most common? Mint.
Somebody explain that one to me.
drorzel | April 9, 2006Over at Bookslut, the Specfic Floozy takes another look at the subgenre (or possibly sub-subgenre) of "steampunk," which she defines thusly:
For the uninitiated, steampunk, a term that is prominently tossed around in the late '80s. is one of the many subgenres of cyberpunk (others -- some more tongue in cheek than others -- are sandalpunk, bronzepunk and stonepunk). Nikola Tesla and/or Charles Babbage frequently pop-up as characters, as do set pieces involving dirigibles, steam engines and, inexplicably, the Japanese. While the idea of meshing Victorian-esque machinery with future…
drorzel | April 9, 2006The New York Times Book Review section this week features a big two-page ad for the Penguin Classics/ NBA cross-promotion. This involves a handful (well, four-- a shop-teacher handful) of NBA/ WNBA stars promoting books in the Penguin line, the best of the lot being Dwyane Wade talking about Pride and Prejudice. You can get poster versions of the ads from the site, featuring tasteful black-and-white shots of the players reading their chosen books.
Of course, it looks sort of like they're promoting new editions of the books read by the players, a cross-marketing opportunity that, alas, still…
drorzel | April 8, 2006Since the previous batch of lecture notes were surprisingly popular, here's the next couple of classes worth:
Lecture 5: Stellar Interferometry, coherence, intensity correlation functions, Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment.
Lecture 6: Non-classical light, photon anti-bunching, single-photon interference.
Sadly, this exhausts the notes I had written in advance (what with one thing and another, I haven't written any new lectures this past week), which means I need to write at least three lectures this weekend, on the mathematical description of quantized light, coherent states of the…
drorzel | April 8, 2006It's kind of a dismal grey day today, so I find myself planning to spend a good chunk of the day working in the lab (which I haven't been able to do during the week, because of my teaching responsibilities). I have a student who's going to present a poster at DAMOP this year, and I need to do a few this weekend to make sure that he's got a reasonable chance of getting results.
As you might imagine, this has me thinking all sorts of sunny thoughts about the academic life, so here are a couple of links in that vein:
1) The Dean Dad has some thoughts on generational divides in the academy. As…
drorzel | April 7, 2006Hypothesis: The outcome of any pick-up basketball game depends more strongly on the match-up between the two worst players on each team than the match-up between the two best players on each team.
Argument: If the talent differential between the worst players is sufficiently large, then on defense, the better of the two is essentially free to double-team the other team's best player on every single possession, while the reverse is not true. Thus, the team with the single worst player is effectively playing four-on-five against the team with the second-worst player, and it's rare for the best…
drorzel | April 7, 2006Katherine Sharpe asked about the best science books ever, as a proxy for "what got you into science?" I wasn't able to give a really good answer to that question, but I will share a science-related anecdote from when I was a kid.
There's a good chance that this will come off as either painfully dorky or just plain cloying, so I'll put it below the fold, lest it damage my street cred.
(Shut up.)
When I was a kid, I watched a Nova special on dinosaurs-- it must have been in 1981 or so, when I would've been ten-- which presented the asteroid-impact theory of dinosaur extinction. The theory was…
drorzel | April 7, 2006Over at the new Seed blog, here on ScienceBlogs, Katherine Sharpe asks about the best science books ever (a topic that was also discussed at Cosmic Variance some time back.
I've been sort of swamped this week, but that's only part of the reason why I haven't responded. The main reason is a shameful secret:
(Below the fold... Isn't this suspenseful?)
The fact is, I don't read many pop-science books, and I never really have. I'm not sure why that was in the past, but these days, it just seems too much like work. Not "work" in the sense of being difficult, but "work" in the sense of "this is how…
drorzel | April 7, 2006Mark Chu-Carroll has a very nice discussion of what "extra dimensions" actually mean in theories like string theory. It's not the same thing that hack SF authors mean when they talk about "dimensions" in which the Nazis won WWII (that's "multiverse theory" or possibly "landscapeology" or possibly "late-night stoner bullshit"):
A better way to explain, but a slightly less intuitive one is to not separate dimensions quite so much. The set of dimensions in a space is the number of pieces of information that you need to identify a unique location in that space.
On a plane, you can put down a…
drorzel | April 6, 2006Via Peg Kerr's LiveJournal, an ABC News story that says we're living in a Jorge Luis Borges story:
So what is in the Gospel of Judas? It is a dialogue that claims to be a conversation between Jesus and Judas in which Jesus asks Judas to betray him.
(And of course, you just know it has a webpage...)
Uqbar, here we come...
drorzel | April 6, 20061) This week's Inforgraphic: Job and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
2) Music reviews containing sentences like: "[The new Flaming Lips record] frequently sounds like Steely Dan as heard from the other end of a machine shop."
Which reminds me, I need to go down to the machine shop...
(Yes, this is a fluff post, but I felt like I needed to post something a little less dyspeptic than the previous entry...)
drorzel | April 6, 2006As anybody who has read my comments on basketball knows, I have an intense dislike of the Duke men's basketball team, mostly due to their fans, who combine the arrogance typical of fans of a dominant program with a sort of snobbery regarding their own class and cleverness. This is particularly aggravating given the institutional contrast between Duke's status as an elite private university and their main competitors' status as larger, more diverse public institutions-- it pushes my class consciousness buttons, and makes their antics all the more annoying.
In a weird way, this has prevented me…
drorzel | April 5, 2006As someone who has derived a surprising amount of blog traffic from posting about weight loss, I feel like I really ought to say something about Alas, A Blog's case against dieting (which I first noticed via a Dave Munger comment). It's a comprehensive collection of data (with graphs, so it must be Science) used to argue that the current weight-loss mania is all a bunch of crap, summarized thusly:
1) No weight-loss diet has every been scientifically shown to produce substantial long-term weight loss in any but a tiny minority of dieters.
2) Whether or not a weight-loss diet "works," people…
drorzel | April 4, 2006With hoops season having wound down, we're slipping into that time of the year when I don't have anything to watch on tv. ESPN shows nothing but baseball, the NBA, and Mel Kiper, and there's very little on regular tv that's worth a damn. Happily, I have a pile of Netflix DVD's from back before basketball season started, and I watched a bunch of episodes of The Wire.
Well, most of a bunch of episodes, anyway. The third disc for Season One had a glitch, right at the very end of Episode Nine. Just as things were reaching a climax, the picture went all pixelated, and the sound disappeared, and…
drorzel | April 4, 2006The post title is a famous William Gibson quote, referring to the tendency of high-tech gadgets to be put to uses the manufacturers never expected. By "the Street," he meant people in general, with maybe a slant toward the sort of underclass element he focusses on in his books, but he might well have been referring to bored grad students. Witness Dylan Stiles and the Man-o-Meter, which assigns a numerical value to machismo, based on your skill at, in the words of one commenter, fellating a digital manometer.
We didn't get up to that much of this sort of foolishness in my lab, in part because…
drorzel | April 3, 2006If you're wondering about the slow posting hereabouts, it's because I'm spending a lot of time on my classes. Having a day job sucks that way.
I've mentioned before that I'm doing a senior-level elective class on Quantum Optics. This is very much an idiot experimentalist's approach to the material, but if you'd like a look at what I'm doing, here are my notes from the first four lectures (scanned into large PDF files, which I'm posting to the class Blackboard site, but will upload here as well, at least for a couple of classes):
Lecture 1: Dirac notation, state vectors, operators as matrices…
drorzel | April 3, 2006While I managed to correctly re-set the clock yesterday, in the process, I turned my alarm off, so I'm running late. Which means no lengthy science blogging this morning. Even running late, though, I can't pass over Fred Clark's message to the evangelicals who organized an anti-pop-culture rally in San Francisco:
Stop it. Just stop. Stop pissing on trees. Stop "reclaiming America for Christ." Christ already has a kingdom, an upside-down, mustard-seed kingdom without a flag. And while you people are so busy trying to create an alternative kingdom called "Christian America," the prostitutes and…
drorzel | April 2, 2006There's a little squib in the New York Times today about the return of the Dawn mission to visit a couple of asteroids, one of their little not-quite-a-full-story things in the "Week in Review" section of the print edition (we get the Sunday Times delivered, because I find it much more civilized to spend a lazy Sunday morning reading a physical newspaper than staring at a computer monitor). The mission was suspended several months ago due to cost overruns, and general budget tightness at NASA these days.
Following an appeal, it's been reinstated, with the launch date pushed back a year (…
drorzel | April 1, 2006With silliness running riot at ScienceBlogs, it's more important than ever to keep your fraud-detection skills sharp. Thankfully, the BBC is here to help, with a list of real news stories that sound like they might be hoaxes (via Making Light).
Unfortunately, they're mostly not very funny. A couple are just lame celebrity trivia. But it's the thought that counts.
(As far as actual hoax posts go, I sort of like jefitoblog's Idiot's Guide to Kenny G ("Is it his mellifluous playing or the beautiful songs that make the record so great? Heck, that's easy: Both!"). April Fool posts in general tend…
drorzel | April 1, 2006Because my bracket picks this year have been so uncannily accurate (tied for twelfth of 23 in the ScienceBlogs pool), I'm sure you're all dying to know what my predictions are for the Final Four games, if only so you can bet the opposite. The short version is: Florida over LSU in the title game. The reasoning behind this is below the fold.
First of all. let me say that I'm not picking this on the basis of personal preference. Actually, I've been waffling between supporting George Mason or LSU for the last week, on the grounds that they're the only teams that seem to be enjoying themselves (…