drorzel | March 22, 2012"Hey, dude," the dog says, looking concerned. "We need to talk."
"Yeah? What's up?"
"Look, it's great that you're transcribing the human puppy's stories into Twitter and all, but I'm feeling left out. I've got my own Twitter account and all, but you hardly ever type any of my tweets any more. I have to do it myself, and it's hard to be witty when you have to type with your nose."
"I'm sorry. Is there something specific you'd like to tweet about?"
"Well, yeah," she says, in a tone like I've said something stupid. "I mean, obviously, we have a new book about relativity. And look at this…
drorzel | March 22, 2012
CourtVision by Kirk Goldsberry
Some shots are easier than other shots; that's a basic tenet of basketball. Many factors influence the probability of a field goal attempt resulting in a made basket, but one factor in particular has been mostly overlooked in basketball analysis: location. The most common shooting metric in the NBA is field goal percentage, which measures the percentage of field goal attempts that result in made baskets. Usually this metric is applied in a non-spatial way to describe how effective a given player or team is at "putting the biscuit in the basket." However,…
drorzel | March 21, 2012It's been a while since I did any ResearchBlogging posts, because it turns out that having an infant and a toddler really cuts into your blogging time. Who knew? I keep meaning to get back to it, though, and there was a flurry of excitement the other day about a Nature Physics paper proposing a way to search for quantum gravity not with a billion-dollar accelerator, but with a tabletop experiment. There's a write-up at Ars Technica, but that comes at it mostly from the quantum gravity side, which leaves room for a little Q&A from the quantum optics side.
Wait a minute, you said this is in…
drorzel | March 21, 2012
Drug smuggler? Victim of scholar envy? UNC prof in Argentine jail - Crime/Safety - NewsObserver.com
A 68-year-old UNC-Chapel Hill physics professor with three degrees from Oxford University is being held in an Argentine prison on charges of trying to smuggle two kilograms of cocaine. Paul H. Frampton, who holds the title Louis D. Rubin Jr. Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy, said in a telephone interview that he was arrested Jan. 23 at the airport in Buenos Aires after the drugs were found in his checked luggage en route to Raleigh-Durham International Airport. Frampton said he…
drorzel | March 20, 2012So, this is the new book from the authors of Why Does E=mc2?, covering quantum mechanics in a roughly similar manner. This book, or, rather, Brian Cox talking about some material from this book, created a bit of controversy recently, as previously discussed. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
The big hook here is that they set out to discuss quantum mechanics for a popular audience using a Feynman-type picture from the very beginning. This is an intriguing idea, and sort of appealing in the same basic way that Sakurai's famous graduate text in quantum mechanics and…
drorzel | March 20, 2012A couple of cool items in the promotion of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog:
-- A little while back, I spoke to Alan Boyle, who writes the Cosmic Log blog for MSNBC, who posted a very nice story about the book last night. Mainstream media, baby!
It also uses this very cool picture of Emmy and me in my lab:
(Many thanks to Matt Milless for taking that and a bunch of others.)
-- This weekend (either Saturday or Sunday, depending on where you are), I'll be on the Science Fantastic radio show, talking about relativity with Michio Kaku. There's a lsit of stations that carry it linked from that…
drorzel | March 20, 2012
Strange Quark Comics Mar 18, 2012
"Understanding doesn't matter. You've got to show confidence or no one will believe you're smarter than me."
Liberals Started the Culture War, and We Should Be Proud of Continuing It | Mother Jones
We tend to mock conservatives for endlessly keeping the culture war alive, but the truth is that it was we liberals who started it. We're the ones who, among many, many other things, banned school prayer, legalized abortion, fought for gender equality, and are currently pressing to legalize gay marriage. You'll be unsurprised to learn that I think we were right…
drorzel | March 19, 2012I'm trying not to obsessively check and re-check the Dog Physics Sales Rank Tracker, with limited success. One thing that jumped out at me from the recent data, though, is the big gap between the book and Kindle rankings over the weekend. The book sales rank dropped (indicating increased sales, probably a result of the podcast interview), while the Kindle rank went up dramatically. This suggests that people who listen to that particular podcast are less likely to buy new books on the Kindle than new books on paper.
This got me wondering, though, whether this was an anomaly, or a general truth…
drorzel | March 19, 2012
The Top Science Questions Facing America: 2012 Edition: New (71 ideas) - Customer Feedback for ScienceDebate.org
What do YOU think are the top science questions the candidates for president should answer? We've posted the original 14 from 2008, preceded by their question numbers, and users have added others. Vote for those you feel are most important, add comments, or add your own! Check back often to vote on the new questions.
At the PTA, Clashes Over Cupcakes and Culture - NYTimes.com
The Parent-Teacher Association's decision to raise the price of a cupcake at its monthly bake sale -- to…
drorzel | March 18, 2012Captain's Log, Stardate 031812
USS BabyPod
Lieutenant Commander The Pip reporting:
Hey, this space pod thing is pretty neat:
Wait, what? You mean I get to be in charge of this. All by myself?
That's so awesome!!! Woo-hoo!
I can fly it however I want! Look, Ma, no hands!
Whee!!!! This is the most awesome thing ever!
Thanks, big sister Space Commander SteelyKid!
drorzel | March 17, 2012I've done a bunch of publicity stuff for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, some of which frustratingly continue to not appear yet, but one thing from this week has gone live: a podcast interview on the Matt Lewis Show, where I talk about why and how I explain physics to the dog, and a little bit about why relativity is cool.
I continue to struggle a bit with the fact that relativity is a very visual subject-- most of the best explanations involve pictures, which aren't much help in an audio-only medium. I had trouble with this at Boskone, too-- when I was doing a reading, it was hard to…
drorzel | March 16, 2012A little more tab clearance, here, this time a few recent stories dealing with those elusive little buggers, neutrinos. In roughly chronological order:< /p>
The Daya Bay experiment in China has measured a key parameter for neutrino oscillation (arxiv paper), the phenomenon where neutrinos of one of the three observed types slowly evolve into one of the others. Mathematically, this is described as each of the three types we observe being an admixture of three more fundamental types. This mixing is described in terms of the sine of some "mixing angle," because physicists love geometry,…
drorzel | March 16, 2012While I was editing and posting the pictures for last night's family blogging, SteelyKid came in and said "Daddy, we watched [indistinct name] today, and they created their own story on the show. But I don't know how to do that."
"Sure you do, honey," I said. "You create stories all the time. You were telling me a story last night, something about bears in a cave. You can create stories if you want to."
That cheered her up, and after a little bit of negotiation about who was going to write on what, she created the following story:
That's a SpongeBob activity book that she got from I-don't-…
drorzel | March 16, 2012
[1203.1895] Classic Nintendo Games are (NP-)Hard
We prove NP-hardness results for five of Nintendo's largest video game franchises: Mario, Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Pokemon. Our results apply to Super Mario Bros. 1, 3, Lost Levels, and Super Mario World; Donkey Kong Country 1-3; all Legend of Zelda games except Zelda II: The Adventure of Link; all Metroid games; and all Pokemon role-playing games. For Mario and Donkey Kong, we show NP-completeness. In addition, we observe that several games in the Zelda series are PSPACE-complete.
Sixteen Things Calvin and Hobbes Said…
drorzel | March 15, 2012Yesterday was "Pi Day" (3-14, in the American style of writing dates), and while I personally find it kind of silly, The Pip took it to heart, using it as the occasion for his first rotation of π radians about his long axis. That is, he rolled from his back onto his stomach. Which is both good and bad: good, because it's a milestone, bad because now we can't leave him unattended on any flat, elevated surfaces.
Anyway, to mark the occasion, here's a picture of the two kids. With Appa for scale, even.
He's not in the porta-crib very often-- he prefers to be held so that he can "stand" on his…
drorzel | March 15, 2012Over at the Scholarly Kitchen, Kent Anderson complains about the uselessness of comments on journals:
Comments in online scientific journals have been notoriously poor -- either too much material of uneven quality or too little discussion to amount to a hill of beans. All too often, commenting has to be shut down because internecine and tiresome debates break out, creating more noise than signal. The best comments are scholarly, and borrow extensively from the form of letters to the editor.
After more than a decade and millions of blogs, it seems one main lesson practitioners are learning --…
drorzel | March 15, 2012There was a nice piece at Inside Higher Ed yesterday on the myth of more time:
A lack of confidence in one's abilities as a writer, researcher, speaker, etc. is at the root of the myth of more time. When a deadline looms, we become acutely aware of the imminent reception of our work by others. As graduate students, we often submit our work to advisors, etc. who are established scholars and who determine our progress towards a program milestone. Our awareness of this kind of appraisal, then, can be extremely pronounced as we work towards a deadline. As a result, we begin to doubt our abilities…
drorzel | March 15, 2012
Ask Moxie: Welcome to Moxie Madness!
Welcome to Moxie Madness 2012: Misery Poker Tournament! 64 mothering calamities go mano-a-mano in a single elimination tournament like you've never seen before. Only one mothering problem can be the champion... Vote for which problem is worse in a series of shoot-from-the-hip head-to-head matchups that will leave you breathless. First matchups start Thursday. Final Championship Match April 2. Are you ready to rumble?
DOJ vs. book publishers: Who cares if Apple and publishers are colluding to raise e-book prices? - Slate Magazine
A bit buried in last week…
drorzel | March 14, 2012One of the things that made me very leery of the whole Brian Cox electron business was the way that he seemed to be justifying dramatic claims through dramatic handwaving: "Moving an electron here changes the state of a very distant electron instantaneously because LOOK! THE WINGED VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE EINSTEIN-PODOLSKY-ROSEN PAPER!" On closer inspection, it's not quite that bad, though it takes very close inspection to work out just what they are claiming.
That said, though, it's fairly common to hear claims of the form "when two particles are entangled, anything you do to one of them…
drorzel | March 14, 2012
Top Five March Madness Predictions - Grantland
There are so many things you can count on every year that the tournament has lost almost all of its renegade charm. It's a product now. As such, it is required to be safe and reliable, the way we want all our products to be. You make peace with that, or you find another event to love. I choose to stick with this one. Therefore, here are five predictions of what will ensue over the next month. I present them, as always, For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Watching the demise of a once-mighty basketball super-conference - Grantland
All weekend,…