Third of the five research categories within DAMOP that I talked about is Quantum Phenomena. This is a little bit of a catch-all, as there are a few different things going on in this area. They are all unified, though, by the fact that they end up making quantum mechanical effects manifest in some way, either as a means to an end, or just for the sake of showing that quantum mechanics is really weird. What do I mean "making quantum mechanical effects manifest?" Basically, demonstrating one of the essential elements that I talked about last year: showing the wave nature of matter,…

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Spiked Cities "Having followed [Richard] Florida on twitter for a while, I've noticed that his position goes beyond noting creative clusters. There's a general pro-urban, anti-suburban flavor to his thought. Add a few bike paths and a vibrant gay community, and you've pretty much found his recipe for growth. Florida's work strikes me as a really elegant way to contrast New York or Boston with, say, Detroit or Pittsburgh. It also reasserts, correctly, the importance of geography in the digital age. There's a distinct -- and acknowledged -- echo of…

SteelyKid's away at Grammy and Grampy's this week, so I can't take a Toddler Blogging photo for this week. I do, however, have this random artsy shot from last Saturday's trip to the Bronx Zoo: This is from the Children's Zoo section. She's going up the stairs to the upper platform, where there's a twisty slide inside a fake tree trunk. As you can tell, this is Serious Business. And there's your cute toddler fix for the week. Enjoy.

The second in the DAMOP research categories I talked about is "Extreme Lasers," a name I was somewhat hesitant to use, as every time I see "Extreme [noun]," I get a flash of Stephen Colbert doing air guitar. It is, however, the appropriate term, because these laser systems push the limits of what's possible both in terms of the pulse duration (attosecond pulses are common, with 1as = 0.000000000000000001 s) and the pulse intensity (1014 W/cm2 is a typical order-of-magnitude, and some systems get much higher than that). One of the main tricks for generating these ultra-short pulses is to do…

YouTube - âªWits with Neil Gaiman, Adam Savage, and Gollum: "I Will Survive"â¬â The Internet is a very, very strange place. (tags: silly internet video music movies television) Confessions of a Community College Dean: Yes, College is Worth It "One way to test the truth of the proposition that college isn't worth it is to observe elite behavior. Are applications to Stanford dropping? Is Harvard going begging? Are the Fortune 500 recruiting at public high schools across America? I didn't think so. The whole enterprise just smells to me like the latest variation on "let's privatize Social…

The first of the five categories of active research at DAMOP that I described in yesterday's post is "Ultracold Matter." The starting point for this category of research is laser cooling to get a gas of atoms down to microkelvin temperatures (that is, a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero. Evaporative cooling can then be used to bring the atoms down to nanokelvin temperatures, reaching the regime of "quantum degeneracy." This is, very roughly speaking, the point where the quantum wavelength of the atoms becomes comparable to the spacing between atoms in the gas, at which point the…

Out in Minnesota, Melissa expresses some high-level confusion over the preference for people with a small-college background: In the past few months, I have been involved in several conversations where someone mentioned that a particular faculty member or administrator was or was not an alum of a small liberal arts college (SLAC) in a manner that seemed to suggest their status as a former student of a SLAC (or not) clearly explained why the individual took the particular action or made the particular decision being discussed. (Generally the tone of the discussions has been that "good"…

Chuck Klosterman on Led Zeppelin's last stand - Grantland "4:52 to 5:24: brrrrrrringgggggg ... brrrrrrrrrringggggggg "Hello?" "Hi. Is this John Paul Jones?" "Yes. Yes it is. Why are you calling me in the middle of this song?" "I just noticed you had a telephone on your keyboard, so I thought I'd give you a buzz. Why do you need a telephone on stage?" "No reason. Sometimes I like to phone Peter Grant and inquire about our tax status before playing 'Trampled Under Foot.' Who is calling me, incidentally?" "My name is Gibson. I'm 22 years old, and I live in Texas. Many years from now, you will…

That's the title of my slightly insane talk at the DAMOP (Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society) conference a couple of weeks ago, summarizing current topics of interest in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics. I'll re-embed the slides at the end of this post, for anyone who missed my earlier discussion. I put a ton of work into that talk, and had a huge amount of material that I didn't have time to include. I'd hate for that to go to waste, so I'm going to repurpose it for blog content over the next week or so. It'll probably be about a half-…

But it doesn't move! | The Renaissance Mathematicus "All in all to believe in heliocentricity at the beginning of the 17th century was literally an act of blind faith and those that opposed it did so on solid scientific grounds and not purely out of some sense of religious bigotry as is often claimed by those who don't know their history of science." (tags: science history astronomy religion blogs)

On Saturday, we took SteelyKid to the Bronx Zoo. It was kind of hot, and she got a little over-tired by the end, but it had a lot of amazingly cute moments, too. And, unlike Sunday's trip to the beach, I brought my camera and shot a couple hundred pictures of various things. Including this shot of SteelyKid on Grandpa's shoulders at the start of the day: That's a keeper, all right. What was she looking at? Well, this happy couple: Hello, large predatory cat. And hello to you, too, Aslan. (These could probably be improved further with some slightly more sophisticated image processing-- the…

We spent Sunday morning introducing SteelyKid to one of my favorite places in the world, Jones Beach on Long Island. She was ok with the water until an unexpected wave sideswiped us and splashed her in the face, but enjoyed the sand quite a bit. And I got to swim in the ocean and body-surf on some reasonably good waves. I was too busy swimming to remember to snap cell phone pictures of SteelyKid at play, so you'll just have to use your imagination. A lot of liberal-ish bloggers will invoke the name of the city planner Robert Moses as practically a curse-- he's blamed for enabling "car culture…

"Hey, Dude, what'cha doin'?" "I'm checking out the dog drawings I commissioned for the book-in-progress. Here, take a look:" "Hey, wait just one minute. That looks like me!" "That's the idea. Since you're in the book, I thought it would be nice to have some pictures that look like you, rather than just a clip-art German Shepherd from Office." "I look kind of worried, dude." "Yeah, well, you get that look a lot when we're talking about physics." "Good point. So, was there a point to this, other than showing off the spiffy drawings an art student did for you?" "Sure. It's a reminder that I'm…

I kicked off the week with a grumpy post about the Guardian's flawed list of great non-fiction, so let's end the week with a slightly more upbeat take on the same basic idea. The New York Times did a slightly lighter list, asking their staff to pick favorite nonfiction. The lack of consensus is pretty impressive, but the list is still heavy with books that are famous-- even if you haven't read them (I mostly haven't), you'll recognize the titles. So, famous works of non-fiction are pretty well covered. Which leaves non-famous non-fiction as a decent bloggy topic. So: What are some of your…

(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of S.M., a Canadian government employee who would prefer not to be identified by name. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I work for one of Canada's three federal granting agencies (one, two, three). We get money from the federal government which we give to university resesearchers (i.e. professors). We…

Swans on Tea » Copy ... Riiiight "The argument that copyright takes away your right to say what you want is a bunch of bull. If you are using a copyrighted piece of work, they aren't your words, so any kind of protections for the originator of those words doesn't stop you from saying what you want to or the way that you want to. An uploaded someone else's performance isn't your expression. This is an issue of fair use and what constitutes infringement, not of free speech. The creator of an artistic/literary work has certain rights. It doesn't matter if they might benefit from the exposure…

SteelyKid is in a bit of a "no pictures" phase at the moment, which makes it kind of difficult to get weekly shots. Hence the run of Toddler Blogging pictures without Appa in them-- when we pick Appa up, she runs away. Thus, this shot with the color balance all wonky (I could do a better job of cleaning it up, but I'm lazy), because the flash hadn't warmed up yet, and she started freaking out before I could get a better shot. It does, however, show the finest balloon animal you can get from "Mr. Twisty," who does his act at the Greenmarket every now and then: That's a monkey climbing a tree…

A scientific theory hasn't really arrived until the cynical and unscrupulous find a way to use it to extract money from the credulous and gullible. This has posed a significant obstacle for general relativity, dealing as it does with gravity, which requires really gigantic masses to produce measurable effects. That makes it a little difficult to sell wacky general relativity-based schemes to people. Until now, anyway-- recent advances in atomic clocks have made it possible to see relativistic effects on a human scale. There was a really nice talk on this experiment in the fundamental symmetry…

(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Carl Knutson, who works for a company making online learning systems. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.) 1) What is your non-academic job? am the physics content project manager for an online homework and learning environment provider, Sapling Learning, located in Austin, TX. We offer online homework and tutorials for undergraduate…

Video Breakdown: Khan and Kinematics | Wired Science | Wired.com "So my quick take - Khan Academy is a textbook video. Are textbooks new? No. Are they the best thing for students? No. Should we ban textbooks in all forms? I don't think so. What about other aspects of Khan Academy videos? How are they based on content? I happened to take a look at Khan's 3 videos on intro to motion. Let me break down what I found." (tags: science education physics blogs dot-physics) Control Your Garage Door Opener with Your Smartphone The first step on the road to becoming Michael Westen. (tags: technology…