drorzel | March 23, 2006(Series explanation here.)
The lab I worked in in grad school contained a bunch of miscellaneous objects whose purpose was a little hard to discern. One of the oddest was a big heavy acrylic lens. It was probably an inch thick, and two or three inches in diameter, and had four screw holes around the outside edge. It wasn't a terribly good lens, but it was a lot better than you would've expected from the origin story.
(More after the cut.)
The experiments we were doing required ultra-high vacuum, despite a fairly high gas load, so we had a variety of big vacuum pumps. One of the pumps we used…
drorzel | March 23, 2006I feel a little guilty for catering to the whims of Internet perverts in the previous entry, so here are a couple of new science-y blogs worth taking a look at:
First, via Derek Lowe, is the blog of chemistry grad student Dylan Stiles. There's lots of highly geeky material, with lots of little diagrams showing various stages of synthesis, but there's some fun stuff as well, including a recurring feature on sketchy things found in the stockroom. It's a good blog if you're nostalgic for the carefree days of grad school.
(If the Powers What Is want to find some more physical-science types for…
drorzel | March 23, 2006One of the nice things about the move to ScienceBlogs is that I gained access to a much better stats package than we had for Steelypips. In particular, I can now look at the keywords that bring people to my site (for steelypips, I could only get keywords for the domain as a whole, which meant that my blog traffic was swamped by Kate's NetHack site.
On ScienceBlogs, though, I can easily find the odd search queries that have brought people to the site. Which is both depressing (the #4 result is "pharyngula," which really puts things in perspective...), and sort of interesting ("deep attachment…
drorzel | March 22, 2006I'm not taking as much heat as the other two amateur taxonomists on ScienceBlogs, but I'll also throw the topic open for suggestions. So, if I left your favorite sub-field of physics out of my Geek Taxonomy, drop me a comment suggesting a field that I left out, and what I ought to say about it. ( They needn't be serious.) If I get any good suggestions, I'll post an updated Taxonomy of Physics incorporating the suggestions.
If you have strong opinions about sub-fields of biology or anthropology, be sure to weigh in over at the Daily Transcript or Afarensis.
drorzel | March 22, 2006Writing the previous post about religion reminded me that I never did comment on the two student panels on religious matters that I went to a couple of weeks ago. The details aren't terribly important, but they provide some local anecdotal support for Sean's demographic point.
(Alternate post title: "I Believe the Children Are Our Future")
The two events were panel discussions featuring students talking about "Growing up X in America" where "X" is a religion of your choice. I missed the first two (X="Muslim" and X="Jewish"), because they fell during a hellishly busy part of the term for me,…
drorzel | March 22, 2006Eszter at Crooked Timber points to some public speaking tips she wrote. Some of the advice is fairly specific to the academic conference setting, but it's all excellent.
In the Crooked Timber post, she emphasizes problems with people going over their allotted time, and mentions in passing session chairs who let them. This reminds me of one of my favorite physics conference anecdotes, reproduced after the cut:
At DAMOP a few years back, a certain guy who we'll call B., just to have a convenient name, was giving a talk in a session chaired by C., a guy from NIST (not me). The talk was..., well…
drorzel | March 22, 2006Via a mailing list, the Top 1000 Books in the US, ranked in order of library holdings. The Top 25 (after the cut):
Bible [various] Library holdings: 796,882
Census [various] United States Library holdings: 460,628
Mother Goose Library holdings: 67,663
Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri Library holdings: 62,414
Odyssey Homer Library holdings: 45,551
Iliad Homer Library holdings: 44,093
Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain Library holdings: 42,724
Lord of the Rings [trilogy] J. R. R. Tolkien Library holdings: 40,907
Hamlet William Shakespeare Library holdings: 39,521
Alice's Adventures in…
drorzel | March 21, 2006Kevin at No Se Nada has a post up about Nobel laureate Carl Wieman leaving Colorado, and how it relates to the role of college athletics at an educational institution. (Check his comments for a special bonus Carl Wieman anecdote.)
Probably coincidentally, Timothy Burke at Swarthmore also has a post today about the role of college athletics. Burke is my go-to guy for deep thoughts on the mission of academia, particularly in the small college context, and this piece is typically excellent:
I noted that it's fairly odd in a way that so much fervor gets put into the debate over whether the…
drorzel | March 21, 2006Alex Palazzo offers a taxonomy of biologists, and takes some heat in the comments for leaving people out or mischaracterizing subdisciplines. This reminded me that I did a similar post about physics quite some time ago-- almost four years! That's, like, a century in blog-time...
I'll reproduce the geek taxonomy after the cut, and clean up a few rotted links.
Geek Taxonomy
So, what, exactly, is it that I do for a living? (Other than come in to work every morning and respond to disgruntled emails about the grades I hand out, that is...). Depending on the context, I have a bunch of different…
drorzel | March 21, 2006So, how's my winning NCAA strategy going, you ask? Shut up, I reply.
Well, OK. I'm currently in a four-way tie for tenth place in the ScienceBlogs pool (of 23) on Yahoo. Of course, unlike some gloating people, all four of my Final Four picks are still alive... I still don't have much chance of catching the other people ahead of me.
So, for the record: Deliberate ignorance is a losing strategy. Hear that, Kansas and Ohio?
drorzel | March 21, 2006Janet Stemwedel over at Adventures in Science and Ethics has a new post on experiment vs. theory:
Someone makes a comment about hot water making ice cubes faster than cold water. Someone else, familiar with thermodynamics, explains in detail why this cannot be the case. No actual ice cube trays risk harm, since none are ever deployed in resolving the dispute.
I loves me some thermodynamics. But, why not clear some space in the freezer to do a side-by-side comparison of the ice cube tray filled with hot water and that filled with cold water? Doing an experiment certainly doesn't preclude…
drorzel | March 20, 2006Question on the evaluation form:
If there was a writing component in this laboratory, please comment on the attention given to it with respect to the improvement of your writing
Student response:
Dude, my writing totally improved.
And so, we close the book on another academic term...
drorzel | March 20, 2006To say I'm a lapsed Catholic would be an understatement. I haven't set foot in a church in years, other than for a couple of weddings. I've never cared for parts of the official doctrine, and I think they blew it when they made Giblets Pope. In terms of general attitude toward religion, I'm sort of an apathetic agnostic-- I don't know if there's a God, and I don't much care.
And yet, I make at least some effort to not eat meat on Fridays during Lent. I don't do all that well, because I'm a little absent-minded (I usually forget it's Friday until I'm halfway through a cheeseeburger), but I do…
drorzel | March 18, 2006I want there to be a non-prescription anti-inflammatory drug that doesn't seriously screw up my stomach. One of you med-chem types get on that, will you?
Background: Last year about this time, I had severe muscle spasms in my neck and shoulder that led to a 2am trip to the emergency room. A combination of muscle relaxers (Flexeril) and ibuprofen dealt with the problem fairly quickly, but I've had minor recurrances ever since. Those, too, have generally been fought off with a handful of Advil.
Advil is, unfortunately, on the list of Things Not to Ingest for my stomach at the moment. Which…
drorzel | March 17, 2006I passed on the first set of games in favor of playing some basketball with the usual lunchtime crowd, but made it home in time to see Bucknell finish up winning against Arkansas, and Northwestern State hit a wild three at the buzzer to beat Iowa. What state is that? That'd be Louisiana. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.
Let's get back to it...
5:21: OK, one final note: The Burger King commerical with the giant chicken rodeo is the oddest thing I've seen in weeks. They're really cornered the market on hallucinatory spots about junk food, for whatever that's worth. I'm sure they're…
drorzel | March 17, 2006So, the big question in college basketball yesterday, "Can Syracuse sustain their Big East Tournament run through the NCAA's?" was answered with a resounding "No." They made a decent run at it, but Gerry McNamara didn't have any legs left, and went without a field goal for the first time in his career. Terrence Roberts played well, but he and Darryl "Flippers for Hands" Watkins were overmatched on the glass, and A&M pretty much controlled the game from start to finish.
I feel terrible for McNamara, as he really couldn't play, and is kind of down on himself:
"I feel great about it,"…
drorzel | March 17, 2006While chasing links for a religion-in-politics post that may or may not get posted (my opinions on the subject are aggressively moderate, and while I could use the traffic, I don't know that I want the headache), I ran across the swear-to-uphold quote again. PZ cites an unsourced blog post for the story, reproduced in its entirety here:
On Wednesday, March 1st, 2006, in Annapolis at a hearing on the proposed Constitutional Amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at AU, was requested to testify.
At the end of his testimony, Republican Senator Nancy Jacobs said: "Mr…
drorzel | March 16, 2006If you'd like some actual science from your ScienceBlogs, here's the big news in the physical sciences today: The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) team has released a bunch of new data on the latest observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation. This is the relic radiation from the Big Bang whose temperature fluctuations tell scientists something about the distribution of matter in the universe several billion years ago, very shortly after the Big Bang.
Detailed analysis of these data provides some of the tightest constraints on our current models of the early universe…
drorzel | March 16, 2006All right, we're back from our walk, and Emmy is very proud of the way she taunted the big scary German Shepherd up the road, so it's back to the games.
5:53 Marquette's three-point ace Steve Novak misses an open shot with eight seconds to play, and it's all over but the intentional fouling and free throws. The Big East is now 0-2. Montana's win over Nevada has also gone final. That's it for the afternoon games, and may be it for today's live-blogging (as Kate will probably want her computer back...)
5:51 Alabama is playing like they've never seen a full-court press, Marquette is playing like…
drorzel | March 16, 2006One of the few perks of working in academia is that I can take the occasional day off for no reason at all. I handed in my grades yesterday, and spring beak starts Monday, so I can feel free to take the afternoon off to sit on my ass and watch some basketball. And bring back First Round Live-Blogging. I'm sure this will drive all kinds of traffic...
3:17: BC wins the second overtime 14-2, and thus the game. The crowd started taunting them with the "over-rated" chant in the last few seconds, which has got to piss them off. Meanwhile, Tennessee has an early lead in the most anticipated 2-15…