drorzel | June 22, 2011A lot of people who rail against popular music (hipsters, classical music snobs, etc.) will cite the mere presence of one or more saxophones in a song as evidence that it sucks, as if saxophones are inherently evil. I've never really understood this attitude, and wonder how widespread it is. Thus, a poll:
Saxophone solos in popular music are:Market Research
(The proximate cause of this was some clueless ranting on a pseudonymous LiveJournal, and the recent death of Clarence Clemons, but it's something I've wondered about for a long while, and been keeping in reserve for a day when I needed…
drorzel | June 22, 2011p>(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Brad Holden, of the University of California Observatories (which, OK, is affiliated with an academic institution, but this is not a traditional faculty-type job). 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 am an astronomer at an observatory, specifically the University of California Observatories. Our…
drorzel | June 22, 2011
About SETIstars.org | SetiStars Blog
"SETIstars is an initiative by the SETI Institute to recognize and rally support from the community to help fund the SETI Institute's operations and that of the Allen Telescope Array. It serves as a place to galvanize community action with clearly defined fundraising goals as well as a place to engage with and recognize supporters and contributors to the SETI Institute -- both financial and non financial. We are starting with a simple site with a clear mandate: raise funds from the community to help bring the ATA back on line. But this is just the…
drorzel | June 21, 2011Josh Rosenau has a post about the supernatural, spinning off recent posts about a recent Calamities of Nature webcomic. Josh makes a point that I think is valid but subtle:
The issue with the supernatural is not whether it's part of the universe, but whether it is bound by the same laws as all the other elements of the universe. The bizarre claim about ghosts is that they somehow obey some laws but not others, for no obvious reasons.
Something supernatural could, in principle, interact with the universe sometimes but not at others. If it is operating outside of natural laws, that doesn't…
drorzel | June 21, 2011Via Inside Higher Ed, a professor in New Jersey took the whole social media thing to the next level:
A Fairleigh Dickinson University physics professor is in custody for allegedly running a prostitution website involving about 200 women and more than 1,200 johns, police said Monday.
David Flory of New York City, who teaches on the FDU-Metropolitan campus in Teaneck, was arrested Sunday while sitting in a Starbucks in Albuquerque, N.M., said Lt. William Roseman of the Albuquerque police. Flory, who ran the site mostly from New York, owned a vacation home in Santa Fe, N.M., Roseman said.
Flory…
drorzel | June 20, 2011While I was off at DAMOP last week, the Guardian produced a list purporting to be the 100 greatest non-fiction books of all time. Predictably, this includes a tiny set of science titles-- five in the "Science" category, two under "Environment," and one each under "Mathematics" and "Mind." And that's being kind of generous about the boundaries of science.
This sort of thing is so depressingly common that it's almost hard to be outraged about it any more. Almost. Because, really, your list has room for Herodotus, but not Galileo or Newton? The modern world owes vastly more to the early…
drorzel | June 20, 2011
Minneapolis
"[Don] Rawitsch, a lanky, bespectacled 21-year-old with hair well over his ears, was both a perfectionist and an idealist. He started dressing as historical figures in an attempt to win over his students, appearing in the classroom as explorer Meriwether Lewis.
By now he'd made it through to the western expansion unit, and he had in mind his boldest idea yet.
What he had so far was a board game tracing a path from Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The students would pretend to be pioneer families. Each player would start with a certain amount of money…
drorzel | June 19, 2011My parents came up today to go out for dinner for my birthday/ father's day. On the way home, SteelyKid announced that she wanted to go to a playground. We explained that first we needed to go home and get Emmy, and then we would see about going to a playground. SteelyKid then suggested that we bring Emmy in the car with us to the playground, and I said "Well, we'll ask Emmy."
When we got home, I let Emmy outside before SteelyKid came into the back yard. When she saw Emmy was out, she ran right over, calling "Hey, Emmy, you want to go to the playground?"
Then she answered herself, in a…
drorzel | June 19, 2011
Why The Atlantic's Article On New Age Medicine Is Wrong - Matthew Herper - The Medicine Show - Forbes
"What bothers me most about Freedman's argument is that he comes so close to being right. I actually agree that the success of alternative medicine is the result of mainstream medicine's failure. But it's not that alternative medicine is preventative but mainstream medicine is not. It's that mainstream medicine, especially with health insurance and care models that restrict the amount of time patients spend with doctors, has abandoned the power of ritual in making people feel better."
(tags…
drorzel | June 18, 2011Today was my birthday, one of the integer-multiple-of-ten ones that's supposed to be a milestone. And, really, to the extent that it does prompt self-reflection, it's nice to be reminded that the last several decades have been pretty good to me: I've got a really good job, a great family, and the whole nice-house-in-the-suburbs life that a middle-class American of my generation is supposed to be going for.
Interestingly, while we did go to a birthday party today, it wasn't mine-- one of SteelyKid's friends from day care turns three in a couple of days, so we went to a party for her at a local…
drorzel | June 17, 2011Alternate, More-Interesting Post Title: Attack of the Vampire Physicists.
I realized today that the only time I have been outside during daylight hours on this trip to Atlanta was during the brief walk down the platform to the airport entrance. This is only a little unusual for a DAMOP-- the Marriott Marquis is connected to a small mall by an enclosed walkway, so it was possible to leave the hotel and grab lunch in the food court without having to set foot outside. Other than that, I only left the hotel to go to dinner Tuesday and Wednesday, and that was on the late side, and hardly counts.…
drorzel | June 16, 2011Kate here while Chad is at DAMOP, with this week's Toddler Blogging.
What, you may ask, is SteelyKid counting on her fingers?
In fact, she is counting down to . . .
Takeoff!
drorzel | June 16, 2011One of the odd things about going to conferences is the unpredictable difference between talks and papers. Sometimes, when you go to a talk, you just get an exact repetition of what's in the paper; other times, you get a new angle on it, or some different visual representations that make something that previously seemed dry and abstract really click. And, of course, sometimes you get new hot-off-the-apparatus results that haven't made it into print yet.
Maddeningly, there doesn't seem to be any way to know in advance which of these things you're going to get from the title and abstract. It…
drorzel | June 15, 2011Tuesday at DAMOP was dominated by my talk. Well, in my mind, at least. I suppose people who aren't me saw other interesting things.
OK, fine, I did go to some other sessions. I would link to the abstracts, but the APS web site is having Issues this morning.
In the Prize Session that always opens the meeting, Gerry Gabrielse from Harvard gave a really nice talk about his work on measuring the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron. This is the "g-factor" that I've cited before in calling quantum physics the most precisely tested theory in the history of science. Gabrielse is the guy behind…
drorzel | June 14, 2011That's the title of my talk this morning at DAMOP, where I attempt the slightly insane feat of summarizing a meeting with over 1000 presentations in a single 30-minute talk. This will necessarily involve talking a little bit like the person reading the legal notices at the end of a car commercial, and a few of the guide-to-the-meeting slides will have to flash by pretty quickly. Thus, for the benefit of those who have smartphones and care about my categorization of talks, I have put the slides on SlideShare in advance, and will embed them here:
What's So Interesting About AMO Phyiscs?…
drorzel | June 13, 2011You may or may not have noticed that I've been making a concerted effort to do more ResearchBlogging posts explaining notable recent results. I've been trying to get at least one per week posted, and coming fairly close to that. I've been pretty happy with the fake Q&A format that I've settled into, and while they're time-consuming to write, they're also kind of fun.
This past week, alas, was kind of brutal, as I was doing a ton of reading in preparation for my DAMOP talk tomorrow, which, in retrospect, is kind of insane, and SteelyKid's day care being closed for two days didn't help (…
drorzel | June 13, 2011Right around the time I sent in the manuscript for my own book explaining relativity to Emmy, I got an email offering me a review copy of The Manga Guide to Relativity, part of a series of English translations of Japanese comic books explaining complicated concepts in a friendly way. That was clearly too good a wind-down read to pass up.
Like other books in the series, this sets up a manga-type plot that just happens to require introducing relativity. In this case, on the last day of school at Taigai Academy, headmaster Rase Iyaga makes a surprise announcement: that he will throw a dart at…
drorzel | June 13, 2011
Maru the Cat does dimensional analysis : Built on Facts
"Here is a picture of (I think) Maru the cat playing in a bag. He loves bags.
Here is the same picture of Maru, at half the size:
Now imagine that Maru is a physicist and the pictures are not pictures but instead windows into the universe he occupies, separate from ours with (possibly) its own unique set of physical laws. The only difference between the two universes is that one has the lengths of everything reduced by a factor of 2.
Can the parallel versions of Maru tell which universe they're in - the smaller or the larger? "
(tags:…
drorzel | June 12, 2011I've heard a lot of buzz about The Quantum Thief-- see, for example, this enthusiastic review from Gary K. Wolfe, so I was psyched when it finally became available in the US a little while back. Of course, the down side of this sort of buzz is that it's almost impossible to live up to the promise.
the thief of the title is one Jen Le Flambeur, who is in prison when the novel starts. But not an ordinary prison-- the Dilemma Prison, in which infinite replicas of the minds of the imprisoned find themselves in little glass cells which open to reveal one other prisoner. Each of the prisoners has…
drorzel | June 12, 2011It was the sort of mid-June morning that global warming deniers dream of: cold and threatening rain. the rain held off until all the speakers had spoken, all the graduates had done their walk across the stage, and all the degrees had been passed out. That's as much as you can ask for, really.
through a quirk of teaching schedules, I actually knew fewer people in this graduating class than most others-- I didn't teach the big intro courses in their first year, so I didn't see the usual crop of would-be engineers. I've seen this year's physics graduates a lot, though-- I've had them all in…