If you'd like some, you know, physics from your physics blogs, here you go: Andrew Jaffe points out new results on neutrino oscillations from the MINOS group, providing new limits on the differences between the masses of different neutrino flavors. You can also read the Fermilab press release, which as a bonus contains some wonderful examples of stilted "quotes" constructed by cutting and pasting text from emails. I've recently become sort of tangentially (very tangentially) involved in efforts to detect both neutrinos and dark matter, so I'm a lot more interested in these sorts of stories…
How big a dork am I? Well, you can see from the graph at left, roughly thirty pounds less of a dork than I was at the beginning of the year... Hey, man, it's not science without graphs. So, as noted in passing in several other posts, I decided at the beginning of the year that I was going to make a serious effort to lose weight. In order for any such project to work, I need to give myself arbitrary and completely inflexible rules to work with-- the minute I start allowing exceptions to the rules, I start backsliding down the slippery slope, to mix a metaphor. One of those rules was that I…
I realize that I've been pretty bad about posting articles with explanatory physics content (even neglecting a couple of things that I promised to post a while back), but I have a good reason. All of my explanatory physics effort these days has been going into lecture writing, such as the two hours I spent Tuesday night writing up a lecture on the Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment. This Quantum Optics class is turning out to be a really interesting experience. It's a truism that you don't really find out what you know about a subject until you have to teach it to someone else. That's…
A couple of quick notes regarding physics stories that have caught my eye: 1) Like Doug Natelson, I'm surprised that there hasn't been more discussion about the PRL claiming to have seen vacuum birefringence. The idea here is that a group in Italy passed light through a huge rotating magnetic field (5 Tesla, or about 100,000 times the Earth's magnetic field), and found that the polarization of the light was rotated by a tiny amount. The effect is, I gather, larger than expected, which might be explained as the result of interactions between their laser photons, photons from the magnetic field…
Sean Carroll offers another installment of unsolicited advice about graduate school, this time on the topic of choosing what school to attend once you're accepted (the previous installment was on how to get into grad school). His advice is mostly very good, and I only want to amplify a few points here. Below the fold, I will list the three most important decisions you will make in choosing a graduate school: Choosing a research advisor. Choosing a research advisor. Choosing a research advisor. It might be a slight overstatement to say that the choice of advisor is the single most important…
Last Friday, before descending into fluff topics like a serious scholarly treatment of Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber posted about something really important: The Hugo Awards. Weirdly, I find myself in the position of having read all of the Best Novel nominees, and this months before the awards themselves are announced. This is unprecedented-- even the year that I voted for the Hugos, I didn't read all the nominated works. (I've read basically none of the short fiction nominees-- of which there are many-- but this is nothing new.) This obviously…
If you've ever read and been confused by computing theory books, you might appreciate the discussion of Turing machines at Good Math, Bad Math. Or, if you're already happy with the whole Turing machine thing, you might just like that post for the link to a Turing machine simulator applet. Either way, it's all good.
Two recurring issues regarding commenting: 1) There is some sort of a bug in the commenting software that occasionally causes comments to be rejected as lacking a valid email address, even when you have provided one. We think this is somehow related to the TypeKey registration required on some blogs, but it's hard to reproduce. The solution to this problem appears to be deleting the cookies on your web browser, and re-posting. If this happens to you, please email me (address in the Contact tab above), and tell me when it happened, what browser and OS you were using, and what other…
There was an interesting article on Inside Higher Ed yesterday about the idea of "Affirmative Action for Men." The piece was a response to an op-ed by Jennifer Delahunty Britz, an admissions officer at Kenyon College, where she talked about gender preferences in admissions, using the classic op-ed device of talking about a particular student she had rejected: Had she been a male applicant, there would have been little, if any, hesitation to admit. The reality is that because young men are rarer, they're more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they…
As the number of students taking physics who go on to major in physics is vanishingly small-- something like 3% of students in introductory physics take even one more class-- physics departments end up serving a number of different constituencies. There are students majoring in other sciences, future engineers, and then there are the pre-meds. For reasons I don't pretend to understand, the MCAT includes a section on physics. As a result, everybody who wants to go to medical school needs to take physics, so we teach a lot of future doctors (along with a lot of people I devoutly hope never to…
For technical reasons, it turns out that alkali metal atoms are particularly good candidates for laser cooling. Rubidium is probably the most favorable of all of them-- some atomic physicists jokingly refer to it as "God's atom"-- but all of the alkalis, even Francium, have been cooled and trapped. Of course, alkali metal elements are also the ones that explode when they come in contact with water. They're insanely reactive, so you have to be very careful handling them. As a result, they're usually shipped either in vacuum-sealed ampoules, or as chunks of metal packed in some oily liquid, to…
Classes start today for our Spring trimester, which is both the home stretch, and one of the most brutal academic death marches in the business-- we wind up running into June every year (last day of finals is June 7), well after most colleges are out of session. By the end of the term, the weather is nice, the students are cranky (because the weather is nice, and their friends at other school are all out), the faculty are cranky (because the weather is nice, the students are cranky, and their friends at other schools are all out), and everybody's sort of tip-toeing around, because the whole…
Orac beats me to commenting on today's depressing New York Times story about NCLB. It seems that, faced with strict "No Child Left Behind" requirements in reading and math, some schools are shifting things around so that their low-performing students take only reading and math: Rubén Jimenez, a seventh grader whose father is a construction laborer, has a schedule typical of many students at the school, with six class periods a day, not counting lunch. Rubén studies English for the first three periods, and pre-algebra and math during the fourth and fifth. His sixth period is gym. Because God…
Since you asked. Uncertainty is due to the answer to #7.
Just a quick note: When I talked earlier about the aesthetic superiority of college basketball, I wasn't thinking of last night's Memphis-UCLA game. Ye gods, what an ugly display. That set basketball back so far they should've replaced the rims with peach baskets at halftime. I think Memphis coach/ huckster John Calipari said it best: "We just couldn't make a basket," Memphis Coach John Calipari said. "Please make a basket. Make a free throw. Anything. Kick one in." It was vaguely consistent with my view of the game, in that Memphis was playing like an NBA team (one or two passes, followed…
In the New York Times newsfeed this morning, we have: First Rocket Is Lost by Space Company A private venture hailed as the beginning of a new age of cheap and reliable access to space suffered a setback yesterday when its first rocket was lost over the Pacific Ocean about a minute after liftoff. The rocket, called Falcon, was being launched from Omelek Island in the Marshall Islands by SpaceX, a company that has $200 million in contracts from the Pentagon, foreign governments and private companies to put small payloads in orbit. The company said Falcon was carrying an Air Force satellite.…
Reading Dylan Stiles's blog yesterday reminded me of a post I wrote last summer about how to approach student talks about synthetic chemistry. Since evil spammers have forced us to turn off comments to the old site, I'll reproduce the original below the fold: Summer days are here again, which means the return of the annual summer student research seminar. There's a local tradition of having all the students doing on-campus research give 15-minute talks to all the other summer students. In principle, I think this is a very good idea, as it gives the students some practice at public speaking,…
A reader emails to ask if I can make sense of this announcement from the European Space Agency: Scientists funded by the European Space Agency have measured the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field for the first time in a laboratory. Under certain special conditions the effect is much larger than expected from general relativity and could help physicists to make a significant step towards the long-sought-after quantum theory of gravity. Just as a moving electrical charge creates a magnetic field, so a moving mass generates a gravitomagnetic field. According to Einstein's Theory of…
My iPod apparently decided that I needed some slightly trippy stuff to go with the Flexeril and Darvocet I've been taking for my shoulder: "Fight Test," the Flaming Lips "Late in the Evening," Paul Simon "Just Like Honey," the Jesus & Mary Chain "Sunshine/ Nowhere to Run," Ride "See a Little Light," Bob Mould "Whole of the Moon," the Waterboys "Woo Hoo," the 5,6,7,8's "One Great City!" the Weakerthans "Psalm for the Elks Lodge Last Call," the Weakerthans "Do You Realize?" the Flaming Lips Of course, the next track was "Jesus of Suburbia" by Green Day, which was a bit of a mood change...
Matt Yglesias has a fairly silly article denouncing the NCAA as a "celebration of mediocrity." Jason Zengerle takes issue with this, and provides a nice explanation of why college basketball is superior to the NBA on emotional grounds (and let me just note how happy I am to see our leading political magazines writing about something interesting for a change...). I prefer to take a different approach: in my opinion, what they play in the NBA is a bastardized and degenerate form of basketball, while the college game is closer to the true form of the game. I'll expand on this below the fold. The…