drorzel | November 18, 2011One of the more reasonable criticisms of the OPERA result showing neutrinos apparently moving faster than light was that they were claiming 20-nanosecond resolution on the timing of a neutrino pulse that was 10000 nanoseconds long. They got their timing by doing fits to the shape of the whole pulse, as described in that link, and there's always a little bit of alchemy in that sort of process, but they had big long pulses because that's what the accelerator at CERN that served as the source of the neutrino beam provided.
After the original annoucnement, they got the neutrino beam reconfigured…
drorzel | November 17, 2011I haven't sorted out yet how I plan to handle Thursday Toddler Blogging given that the original reason for it being on Thursday was because SteelyKid was born on a Thursday. The Pip, on the other hand, was born on a Monday. Should I do two cute-kid photos a week? Move it to Friday Family Blogging and try to get pictures of both of them? It's all just so complicated...
... it just wears me out.
We're almost done with this term from Hell, though-- I gave the final exam for one of my two classes this morning, and the other will be on Monday, so I'll make a final decision next week. In the…
drorzel | November 17, 2011The water heater for Chateau Steelypips is significantly older than the usual useful life for such devices, and it's really started to show. I'm getting pretty sick of lukewarm showers, so we probably need to replace it.
As a good squishy liberal type, I of course want to replace it with something more efficient, and there are claims out there that the best way to go for efficiency is with the "tankless" models (a gas one, in our case, so we can still have hot water when/if winter weather takes out our electricity). Of course, there's a lot of contradictory information out there. The usually…
drorzel | November 12, 2011"Seriously, Daddy, I'm awake for like one hour a day, and you're going to spend it taking my picture?"
"You're going to post this on the Internet, aren't you?"
"Then again... If I play this right, I can use this technology to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!"
(Those two shots are taken with my cell phone, while he was propped up on my knees after his afternoon feeding. For reference, here's a picture of SteelyKid propped up on my knees in more or less the same manner:
(Oh my God, she's huge!)
drorzel | November 12, 2011Someone from the American Astronomical Society ran across the Project for Non-Academic Science posts here, and is looking for someone to participate in a career panel at their upcoming meeting in Austin, TX:
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) Employment Committee is hosting a panel discussion at our annual AAS winter meeting in Austin on current issues related to the postdoc job market, with a focus on the increase in post-doc type positions without a corresponding growth in potential permanent academic positions. The session will be on Wednesday, January 11th from 10-11:30 am. They are…
drorzel | November 11, 2011Actually, The Pip came home last night, but the whole process was too hectic to take any decent pictures, let alone blog about it. We got some quiet time this afternoon, though, when SteelyKid had been packed off to day care, which let me take some good shots of The Pip chillin' in his crib:
This is the same porta-crib, by the way, that big sister SteelyKid posed in last week, so you can fairly directly compare the two. And, of course, Appa is there as a reference.
It's probably an illusion, given that he doesn't exactly have complete control of his movements, but he certainly gave the…
drorzel | November 10, 2011I've been incredibly busy this term, but not so busy I couldn't create more work for myself. Specifically, by writing an opinion piece for Physics World about the FTL neutrino business, that just went live on their web site:
The result quickly turned into one of the most covered physics stories of the year, with numerous articles in magazines, newspapers and on television asking whether "Einstein was wrong". Just as quickly came numerous physicists denouncing the media frenzy, with Lawrence Krauss from Arizona State University and Cambridge University cosmologist Martin Rees both calling the…
drorzel | November 9, 2011How awesome is The Pip? So awesome he glows:
OK, that's really just a phototherapy light because he's a little jaundiced (SteelyKid had the same thing when she was just born, though I don't remember the light being brought to the room with her). It makes him look like he glows in the dark, though. Possibly because he acquired superpowers through unwise experiments with comic-book radiation.
All is basically well, here. Both SteelyKid and The Pip have thoroughly charmed all the nurses at the hospital-- her through cute chatter and general bounciness, him through eating like a champ and…
drorzel | November 7, 2011As of 4:35 this morning, Chateau Steelypips has a new member (though not yet resident, for a couple more days):
This photo, with the traditional sky-bison for scale is our new baby boy, David Nepveu Orzel, henceforth to be referred to on the blog as "The Pip." Because "SteelyKid and The Pip" sounds like a crime-fighting duo to be reckoned with, it fits with the old domain-name scheme, and it's obviously a nickname, unlike the two other contenders, both of which were based on real-ish names suggested by SteelyKid ("Porter," short for "Transporter," which was SteelyKid's first suggestion of a…
drorzel | November 5, 2011I sent in the page proofs for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog this week, and by way of celebration, I went out and helped boost the economy by buying some consumer electronics:
Yes, I now have an iPad. Just one with wi-fi, not the 3G version, because we already send Verizon enough money, and if I need instant access to my email absolutely anywhere, I've got an Android phone. But I like shiny things, and this is pretty darn shiny (even if I'm hampered by it needing an immediate software update that's taking six hours).
Anyway, I have a few ideas about what to put on this, and SteelyKid…
drorzel | November 3, 2011This weekend, we did a little more furniture-moving to prepare for the imminent arrival of FutureSibling!, which included moving SteelyKid's black chair upstairs into her room, and putting the portable crib back in front of the fireplace in the living room. Unsurprisingly, she wanted to get in it; surprisingly, she allowed me to take a picture of her lying down in it:
(Not the best shot, but she didn't hold still for long. Check out the spiffy Halloween shirt, too...)
For reference, here is more or less the same pose, 161 weeks ago. Good Lord, she's gotten huge.
drorzel | November 1, 2011This coming June will mark ten years since I started this blog (using Blogger on our own domain-- here's the very first post) and writing about physics on the Internet. This makes me one of the oldest science bloggers in the modern sense-- Derek Lowe is the only one I know for sure has been doing this longer than I have, and while Bob Park's "What's New" and John Baez's "This Week's Finds" have been around longer, they started out as mailing lists, not true weblogs.
As such a long-term denizen of the Internet, I'm pretty much contractually obliged to have an opinion about Michael Nielsen's…
drorzel | October 27, 2011A couple of cell-phone pictures from last weekend, on an early-evening run to one of the local playgrounds. The sun was pretty well down when SteelyKid decided she wanted to climb on the giant rope climbing structure they have. she's gone on this before, but it's never lasted long, so we figured, why not?
(It's blurry because of the low light-- I brightened it massively in GIMP.)
She's gotten considerably bolder and more agile since the last time she went on this. And it got even better:
That's right, at one point she was over my head. And about five feet away horizontally, with a network…
drorzel | October 26, 2011
"I work around the clock-- 1043 Planck times per second-- providing the gravitational attraction to hold this galaxy cluster together. And some baryonic cosmologist wants to explain me away as a modification of Newtonian gravity?
"I have been silent for 13.7 billion years, but no more.
"I AM THE 96%"
(Original Pandora Cluster image from NASA)
drorzel | October 23, 2011It's been a while since I posted anything science-y, and I've got some time between flipping pancakes, so here's an odd thing from the last few weeks of science news. Last week, there was an article in Nature about the wonders of string theory applied to condensed matter physics. This uses the "AdS/CFT" relationship, by which theorists can take a theory describing a bunch of strongly interacting particles in three dimensions (such as the electrons inside a solid), and describe it mathematically as a theory involving a black hole in four dimensions. This might seem like a strange thing to do,…
drorzel | October 20, 2011SteelyKid was in an exceptionally happy mood the other night, and so I not only got the silly face shot from the previous post, but also this more traditional Toddler Blogging picture, with Appa, no less:
All together now: Awwwwwww....
Appa, you may or may not recall, has served as our standard length reference for our weekly series of SteelyKid photos. Only not so much with the weekly, for the last little while, and not so much with Appa for a longer while...
We got this one, though, and oh my God, she's gigantic. This, for reference, is the very first Appa-for-scale picture, from 2008. We…
drorzel | October 20, 2011I've been too busy to really work on the DonorsChoose fundraiser this year, but it's worth taking a little time to mention this opportunity: Starting today and running through Saturday midnight, the DonorsChoose board will match donations to the Science Bloggers for Students fundraiser. thus, a $5 donation becomes $10, $10 becomes $20, and, well, you know how to multiply by two.
So, since you're quick with arithmetic, why not throw a couple of bucks to DonorsChoose, to help the next generation learn to do addition and multiplication, and eventually multivariable calculus? Such as, say, this…
drorzel | October 16, 2011In a lot of ways, the OPERA fast-neutrino business has been less a story about science than a story about the perils of the new media landscape. We went through another stage of this a day or two ago, with all sorts of people Twittering, resharing, and repeating in other ways a story that the whole thing has been explained as a relativistic effect due to the motion of GPS satellites. So, relativity itself has overthrown an attack on relativity. Huzzah, Einstein! Right?
Well, maybe. I'm not quite ready to call the story closed, though, for several reasons. First and foremost is the fact that…
drorzel | October 15, 2011Because it's been a while since I posted a cute toddler picture, and because SteelyKid actually let me shoot some pictures of her yesterday for the first time in a while. Here she is, playing with Legos:
Of course, building giant towers is only half the fun of playing with Legos:
What goes up, must come down...
drorzel | October 12, 2011Tuesday was the last day of the fifth week of classes (out of ten; for reasons that passeth all understanding, we started on Wednesday, so all the week-based deadlines fall on Tuesday). Accordingly, it seems like a decent time for an update on the active learning stuff I've been doing in my classes.
Each class has had one exam at this point, and a handful of labs. In the regular intro class, we're in Chapter 5 of Matter and Interactions, about to do curving motion, and in the integrated math-physics class, which only does half a term of physics, we're just dealing with non-constant forces,…