drorzel | October 11, 2011Alternate title: I Have an Overdeveloped Sense of Responsibility, Which Is Going to Get Me in Trouble Someday.
So, it's October, which means the annual DonorsChoose fundraising challenge is upon us. I really don't have time to do a good job of this, but having raised a whole bunch of money for them in the past, I felt bad not participating. So, I planned to do an apologetic blog post saying "I'm too busy, but give to the challenge of one of these other blogs on ScienceBlogs." Only, it turns out, there aren't any ScienceBlogs bloggers signed up.
Then I said, "Well, I'll just steer people to…
drorzel | October 8, 2011This is primarily of note to a handful of family members, but it's the end of an era at Chateau Steelypips:
Well, two eras, I suppose, for the two items of furniture. The dresser dates from around 2002, and was bought when I first moved to Schenectady, so Kate would have a place for her clothes. I don't recall if it was before or after we were married-- I think before, but I'm not sure. It moved to Renssalaer and then Niskayuna with us, where it's been sitting in our spare bedroom.
The really noteworthy item, though, is the brown chair. My parents got two of these back in the early 1980's,…
drorzel | October 5, 2011If you want to know how stressed and busy I've been lately, you don't have to look any farther than the fact that I've totally fallen down on the shameless self-promotion front: I was on a radio show, and forgot to post about it here. I know, bad blogger, no pageviews...
Anyway, I talked about the fast neutrino experiment on the phone to Clay Naff, who runs the Science Odyssey show on KZUM in Nebraska, and he used it as part of this past weekend's show. My interview is in Part 1, and Part 2 is Alan Kostelecky, who is an actual expert on this sort of thing.
For some odd reason, it…
drorzel | October 4, 2011The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae." Ethan will presumably have a post with about a gigabyte worth of images in it shortly, or if you prefer your information in book form, you can read Richard Panek's The Four Percent Universe, which has lots of detail about what they did, including the rivalry between the different groups. As a bonus, the UK edition has a blurb from yours truly...
But that's not what you really want to know--…
drorzel | October 1, 2011I have been sufficiently out of it that I didn't realize the Nobel Prizes were due to be announced this coming week. Which means there's only a small amount of time to get my traditional betting pool set up...
So, here are the rules:
1) To enter, leave a comment to this post specifying the Prize category and the winner(s). For example, you might write "Physics, to Lee Smolin and Lubos Motl," or "Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, to Larry Summers and John Lott."
2) One entry per person per prize. That is, you can pick one and only one winner for the…
drorzel | September 29, 2011The JCC, where SteelyKid goes to preschool, is closed for Rosh Hashanah, so she's off at Grandma and Grandpa's for the weekend. They start doing a little more religious instruction at the preschool level, so we got to hear about Jewish theology, SteelyKid style:
It's the birthday of the world, so I'm going to Grandma and Grandpa's tomorrow. The world's going to be closed, because it's the birthday of the world!
With big wide eyes for the last sentence, to drive home the importance of the world's birthday. And later, when I said the words "Rosh Hashanah,"
Yeah! Rosh Hashanah! God created the…
drorzel | September 24, 2011There have been a lot of pixels spilled over this faster-than-light neutrino business, so it might not seem like something I should take time away from pressing work to write up. It is the story of the moment, though, and too much of the commentary I've seen has been of the form "I am a {theorist, journalist} so hearing about experimental details gives me the vapors" (a snarky paraphrase, obviously). This suggests that there's still room for a canine-level write-up going into a bit more depth about what they did and where it might be wrong.
So, what did those jokers at CERN pull this time?…
drorzel | September 23, 2011The final sentence of the neutrino paper that everybody is buzzing about:
We deliberately do not attempt any theoretical or phenomenological interpretation of
the results.
From a somewhat older work in physics:
Rationem vero harum gravitatis proprietatum ex phænomenis nondum potui deducere, et hypotheses non fingo. Quicquid enim ex phænomenis non deducitur, hypothesis vocanda est; et hypotheses seu metaphysicae, seu physicae, seu qualitatum occultarum, seu mechanicae, in philosophia experimentali locum non habent. In hac philosophia Propositiones deducuntur ex phaenomenis, et redduntur…
drorzel | September 20, 2011I'm looking at an email from my editor when Emmy wanders by the computer, sniffing around just in case a crumb of food has fallen on the floor in the last five minutes. "Hey," I say, "Come here and look at this."
"Look at what?"
"This:"
"It's the cover for my new book."
"A-hem."
"OK, fine, it's the cover for our new book. Anyway, what do you think?"
"Hey, that's not bad. I'm way better than that dog, though."
"Yeah, well, they didn't want to make the owners of inferior dogs jealous."
"Oooh. Good point. See, this is why I could never make it in marketing."
"It's Madison Avenue's loss, I'm…
drorzel | September 19, 2011I got a new comment on an old post asking an interesting question about thermodynamics:
I have a question that bears somewhat on this issue of keeping cars parked in the sun, cooler. You all know those accordion folded/aluminized shades you can put up inside the windshield and back window.
Seems to me putting them INSIDE is the wrong approach. They should be on the OUTside of the window acting as real shades and reflecting away the sun before it gets into the inside of the car.
This involves some of the same physics involved in the ever-popular issue of climate change, so it's worth talking…
drorzel | September 18, 2011As mentioned a while back, I'm experimenting with "active learning" techniques in my intro courses this term. Specifically, I'm doing a variant of the "Peer Instruction" method developed by Eric Mazur and others. There are a few complications imposed by our calendar/ class schedule, but I'm giving it a shot, and I thought I'd report on what I'm doing and how it's going, for the benefit of readers who are interested, and on the off chance that some of my readers who are in education can give some feedback/ tips/ whatever.
What I'm doing: The Peer Instruction method is based on shifting the…
drorzel | September 17, 2011Those of you who follow me on Twitter/ Facebook have been getting the occasional snippet of cute dialogue from SteelyKid over there. This one's a little too long for breaking into 140-character blocks, so while I wait for her to come downstairs so we can make pancakes, a cute SteelyKid story:
We play a surprising number of games whose goal is to convince her that I'm an imbecile, one of which is me "misremembering" the lyrics of songs like "The Wheels on the Bus." One day last week, we had the following exchange (more or less) in the car:
Me: So, the wheels on the bus go up and down, right?…
drorzel | September 15, 2011The current quasi-hiatus has the goal of preserving my sanity through reducing stress. Somewhat surprisingly, Thursday Toddler Blogging has actually been fairly stressful lately, because SteelyKid is mostly in a "no pictures" phase, which makes getting a usable shot of her a huge hassle. Which is why there was no toddler blogging photo last week.
This week, though, I got this shot which is well worth sharing:
The notable thing here is not just the cute toddler, but the figure in the sand at her feet, which you can just make out. This is a self-portrait of sorts, drawn on the sand playground…
drorzel | September 12, 2011In typical fashion, no sooner do I declare a quasi-hiatus than somebody writes an article that I want to say something about. For weeks, coming up with blog posts was like pulling teeth, but now I'm not trying to do it, it's easy...
anyway, that's why there's the "quasi-" in "quasi-hiatus," and having been reasonably productive in the early bit of the weekend, I have a few moments to comment on this column by Ben Goldacre about bad statistics in neuroscience. It seems lots of researchers are not properly assessing the significance of their results when reporting differences between measured…
drorzel | September 8, 20111 And the LORD looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
2 And the LORD said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
3 Make thee an ark, and this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred qubits, the breadth of it fifty qubits, and the height of it thirty qubits.
4 And Noah asked the LORD, What is a qubit?
5 And the LORD replied unto Noah, A qubit is a two-level quantum…
drorzel | September 6, 2011It's been a while since I did any ResearchBlogging, first because I was trying to get some papers of my own written, and then because I was frantically preparing for my classes this term (which start Wednesday). I've piled up a number of articles worth writing up in that time, including two papers from an early-August issue of Nature, on advances in experimental quantum computation (the first is available as a free pdf because it was done at NIST, and thus is not copyrightable). These were also written up in Physics World, but they're worth digging into in more detail, in the usual Q&A…
drorzel | September 6, 2011Classes for the 2011-2012 academic year start tomorrow, which means that blogging will come to a nearly complete stop. I have an exceptionally heavy teaching load this term (deliberately, because I'm developing a new course in the winter term, and FutureSibling! is due in November), and it's become clear that there are not enough hours in the day to fulfill all my professional and family obligations and still generate worthwhile content for the blog.
It's not a total shutdown-- I'll still be reading things, so there may continue to be Links Dumps, and I've got some book reviews in the queue…
drorzel | September 6, 2011
STAR WARS : The Solo Adventures (HD) - YouTube
There's a little Uncanny Valley thing going on with the characters, but this is still better than anything Lucas has put out in about twenty years. I'd definitely watch more of this.
The Chicago Blog: Playing poker with Parker: An interview with Brian Garfield
"Donald E. Westlake was a twentieth-century master of crime fiction. Under the name Richard Stark, one of his many pseudonyms, he penned the legendary Parker novels, including three just brought back into print by the University of Chicago Press this week: Butcher's Moon (1974), Comeback…
drorzel | September 5, 2011
Lance Mannion: Do video game avatars dream of digital sheep? or How Pac-Man can help prepare you to save the world
"From the Ghostbusters quote that opens the first chapter onward, hardly a page gets turned that doesn't include at least one 80s-themed Easter Egg. Cline takes some of the fun out of this by not letting us pick up the references on our own. He drops them whole into sentences and announces what they are right away. There are few "Oh, I get it" moments for us. It's like playing Trivial Pursuit the Eighties Edition with someone calling out the answers before you've finished…