drorzel | March 4, 2006About my take on the critically important science question sweeping ScienceBlogs, the answer is Cowboy Bebop.
I'm cool with that. I get better theme music than any of the others.
(Totally scientific quiz here.)
drorzel | March 4, 2006Seed is meeting their contractual obligation as members of the American media by offering some science-based Oscars. This is a rare year in which I really don't care at all about the actual awards. I haven't seen any of the movies nominated for Best Picture, and I don't really have much interest in seeing any of them. The only reason I'll watch any of the telecast is to see what Jon Stewart does (my prediction: he'll be terrifically funny to his usual audience (liberal bloggers), and will completely lose the septuagenarian demographic that is the primary target for the Oscar telecast, and he'…
drorzel | March 3, 2006iTunes just threw up a pretty good set of songs that spans almost the full range of my four-and-five-star playlist:
"Solar Sex Panel," by Little Village.
"Mr. Brightside," by the Killers
"I Wish I Had an Evil Twin," by the Magnetic Fields
"Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat," by Bob Dylan
"Swing, Swing," by the All-American Rejects
"Flash," by Queen
"Buffalo Soldier," by Bob Marley
"Romeo and Juliet," by Dire Straits
"New Year's Day," by U2
"D.J. D.J.," by he Transplants
It needs a little soul (there are songs by Jackie Wilson and the Four Tops farther down), some alt-country (there's an Old 97's…
drorzel | March 3, 2006Via Matt McIrvin (whose earlier entry on "Nerd Bravado" is also a must-read), the best explanation I've heard so far of the whole "Why are there so few women in scinece?" debate: they got better jobs:
One of my students, we'll call him Bill, in an introductory computer science class said that he wanted to be a biologist when he grew up. What biologists had Bill met? They were all professors at MIT and about half of them had won the Nobel Prize. This is hardly an average sample of people who went to Biology graduate school! Fortunately, Bill was a tall good-looking fellow. He managed to score…
drorzel | March 3, 2006While I would like to be posting cool recipes (with pictures, even!), I'm currently on a somewhat restricted diet. This isn't a terribly serious post, and may slide over into "self-pitying," so I'll put the bulk of it behind the cut.
About a year ago, I had some stomach problems that were eventually identified as acid reflux. It went away with a little medication, and some minor lifestyle changes (getting more exercise, not eating right before bed), and everything was fine for a long period. Then, having been advised that losing weight would get rid of the problem entirely (and suspecting…
drorzel | March 2, 2006Dennis Overbye writes about popular NASA programs being delayed or cut in order to fund the Moon-and-Mars initiative and support the Space Shuttle/ ISS. Predictably, people who care about actual science are somewhat dismayed-- Gordon Watts serves as a nice example.
Fellow ScienceBlogger Chris Mooney has carved himself out a nice little niche writing about the Republican War on Science, and it would be really nice to be able to lump the warping of NASA in with that. You could even make a decent case, without having to swing too far into tinfoil-hat territory-- some of the missions that are…
drorzel | March 1, 2006I usually try to save this sort of thing for the weekend, but we're coming down to the end of the term, and today is an especially hectic day. Thus, a list of links that struck me as worth passing on:
First, Paul Kwiat on counterfactual computation at Cosmic Variance. I will get back to this, eventually, but for now, you can read about it from the horse's mouth, as it were.
Sticking with physics bloggers for a minute, we have Gordon Watts on the right way to be crazy. Kooks, take note.
Elsewhere on ScienceBlogs, RPM has some thoughts on what makes a good conference. I mostly agree with the…
drorzel | February 28, 2006Leonard Pitts has the scoop:
Allow me to share with you an epiphany. I think Fred Phelps is gay.
Not that I'd have any way to know for sure, and not that there's anything wrong with that. But it seems obvious to me that Freddie has spent a little time up on Brokeback Mountain, if you catch my drift. I'm thinking he's secretly into show tunes, interior decorating and man-sized love.
Via Grim Amusements
(Ordinarily, I wouldn't bother passing on this sort of cheap shot, but Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps is such a miserable piece of filth, I'll make an exception.)
drorzel | February 28, 2006I'm currently teaching our sophomore-level modern physics class, which is titled something like "Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Their Applications." We've finished with the basics of Special Relativity and abstract quantum theory, and have entered the mad sprint through applications (Union is on a trimester calendar, so classes end next week)-- three classes on atoms and molecules, three on solid state physics, two on nuclear and particle physics.
I've taught this before, so I have a rough idea of what I want to do in the remaining classes-- Wednesday is a lecture on semiconductor…
drorzel | February 27, 2006John Zogby, of the Zogby polling agency gave a talk on campus earlier tonight. I have to say, having heard him speak, that whoever came up with the word "wonk" probably had somebody like Zogby in mind-- he had poll numbers for absolutely everything he talked about, and for every single question he was asked afterwards. I spent a few minutes trying to think of a question that he wouldn't be able to answer with "I did some polling on that...," but didn't come up with anything.
He did have a couple of interesting comments, though, that I'll reproduce here for anyone who's interested:
The one…
drorzel | February 27, 2006OK, let's say you want to explain something really difficult, like counterfactual computation with quantum interrogation, but you don't want to actually sit down and do all that typing (let's say you have a big stack of lab reports to grade, or something). There's a way to pull this off.
What you do is, you put yourself in a superposition of states in which you explain and don't explain this phenomenon, and then don't touch your blogging software (that would constitute an observation, and collapse your wavefunction) for a day or two. When you come back, you'll find that an explanation has…
drorzel | February 26, 2006The following will be of interest only to people who were at Boskone, or who for some reason care deeply about what I did there, so I'll put the bulk of the text below the fold.
We arrived at about 3:00 Friday afternoon, parked in the hotel garage, and discovered that the trunk of my car would no longer stay closed. Happily, that didn't turn out to be an omen for the weekend, which otherwise went very well. I had a coil of rope in the trunk, that we used to tie the trunk shut, and that held until the next Friday, when I finally got around to having somebody fix the lock.
I had exam papers to…
drorzel | February 25, 2006Thursday was "Founders Day" at Union, and there were two major speaking events on campus. The official Founders Day address was given at lunchtime by Rev. Peter J. Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard Divinity School. That evening, there was a second talk, not officially associated with Founders Day, by Chuck D, of the rap group Public Enemy. At first glance, that seems like the sort of weird collision of speakers that you can only find on a college campus. The really strange thing, though, was that in an odd way, they both gave the same speech.
Gomes was pretty much…
drorzel | February 24, 2006The votes are in, and have been carefully tabulated by our bleary-eyed accounting firm (that is, me-- I would've posted last night, but I went to see Chuck D speak (because I'm down with the old-school rap), and he went on for more than two hours...) . What looked like a runaway victory for Michelson and Morley actually tightened up quite a bit, thanks to a late surge by Michael Faraday:
Michelson-Morley: 23
Faraday: 19
Rutherford: 10
Galileo: 9
Roemer: 9
Aspect: 8.5
Hertz: 3
Cavendish: 2.5
Newton: 2
Hubble: 2
Mössbauer: 1
A total of 89 people voted, 90 if you count the one write-in vote for…
drorzel | February 24, 2006A Dramatic Presentation of a Classical Analogue to the Quantum Zeno Effect
A Play in One Act:
John Boy: Good night, Mary Ellen.
Mary Ellen: Good night John Boy.
JB: Are you asleep?
ME: No.
JB: Are you asleep?
ME: No.
JB: Are you asleep?
ME: No.
Repeat several more times
Exeunt, pursued by a bear.
drorzel | February 22, 2006Buried beneath some unseemly but justified squee-ing, Scalzi links to an article about "counterfactal computation", an experiment in which the group of Paul Kwiat group at Illinois managed to find the results of a quantum computation without running the computer at all. Really, there's not much to say to that other than "Whoa."
The article describing the experiment is slated to be published in Nature, so I don't have access to it yet, but I'll try to put together an explanation when I get a copy. The experiment involves a phenomenon know as the "Quantum Zeno Effect," though, which deserves a…
drorzel | February 22, 2006Theory 1: "The Internet exists to make me look smart." --John Scalzi
A question for folks more computer-savvy than I: Whenever I cut and paste quotes from some other page into the editing window on Movable Type, quote marks and dashes get mangled into non-standard characters. They look just fine when I'm editing, but when I post they become weird strings of nonsense characters in the middle of the text.
How do I stop that from happening, other than going through and replacing every suspect character by hand? I generally edit posts on Firefox, but I might be cutting and pasting from other…
drorzel | February 21, 2006Pretty much every academic on-line has already commented on the New York Times piece on student email today. As usual, Timothy Burke says most of what I'd like to say:Much of the complaint recorded in the article also seems much ado about nothing. As Margaret Soltan observes, what's the big deal about answering the kid who wants to know about school supplies? It's almost kind of sweet that the student asks, actually. I get queries from junior high school kids who want me to do their homework for them, more or less: what does it cost me to be gentle and modestly accomodating in return? A few…
drorzel | February 21, 2006A couple of technical notes that may affect your reading and commenting experience:
1) The site developer has tweaked the RSS feeds to include links to the full post, and to the comments section. The comments links on some posts even appear to give a comment tally, which is pretty cool. Of course, implementing this may dump a huge number of old posts into your RSS feed. Sorry for the inconvenience.
2) The ScienceBlogs servers have been getting whacked by spam the last few days, which has led to some very sluggish loading, and some commenting problems. The development team (all one of him) is…