drorzel | June 11, 2011
The National Oral History - Grantland
"The National Sports Daily, on the one hand, is a long-dead and short-lived newspaper that, for 18 months, between January of 1990 and June of 1991, attempted to cover sports in a way that no other American publication would, could, or had ever even imagined. On the other hand, the paper is emblematic of the parts of culture and media that were not yet ready to converge. Typewriters and satellites. Mexican titans of industry and American daily news. Content in too many forms. Born from an impetuous whim only a billionaire would call a business plan, the…
drorzel | June 10, 2011If you look at the schedule of events for DAMOP next week, you will see that there is a movie showing scheduled for Tuesday night: Real Genius. This seems like an excellent excuse to run a poll:
Real Genius is:survey software
While the meeting will largely involve quantum mechanics, this is a purely classical poll, so you can choose only one answer, not a superposition of multiple answers.
drorzel | June 10, 2011
Chuck Klosterman: How an obscure junior college basketball game in North Dakota made history - Grantland
"[S]omething crazy happened in this particular game.
In this particular game, a team won with only three players on the floor. And this was not a "metaphorical" victory or a "moral" victory: They literally won the game, 84-81, finishing the final 66 seconds by playing three-on-five. To refer to this as a David and Goliath battle devalues the impact of that cliché; it was more like a blind, one-armed David fighting Goliath without a rock. Yet there was no trick to this win and there was…
drorzel | June 9, 2011SteelyKid is in an intermittently shy phase right at the moment. Sometimes, she's really outgoing and shamelessly mugs for the camera, other times, well...
Of course, two minutes after hiding behind Appa and insisting that I not take pictures of her, she marched over and demanded to see the pictures on the camera.
We've had an extremely busy couple of days-- her day care was closed yesterday and today for a Jewish holiday-- so that's all I've got the mental energy for tonight. I almost forgot to past anything at all, but Kate reminded me, and I thought I had better head off the angry/…
drorzel | June 9, 2011While it is not yet officially summer, according to astronomers and horologists, it was approximately the temperature of the Sun here in Niskayuna yesterday, so de facto summer has begun. Accordingly, we have acquired a pool:
Of course, one of the main things you do with a pool is to sit next to it and read in the sun (note the conveniently positioned chair). Of course, then the question becomes "What do you read?
While the obvious answer is How to Teach Physics to Your Dog (now in paperback!), we got a good thread out of non-obvious suggestions for science-related "beach reading" last year…
drorzel | June 9, 2011One of the many things I've been occupied with the last few weeks has been arranging a reception at next week's Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (DAMOP) meeting. I was late in asking about the possibilities for this, so it won't make it to the printed program, which means I need to advertise by word of mouth. So:
What: An informal reception for people attending the DAMOP meeting who are associated with undergraduate institutions (i.e., small colleges, or non-Ph.D. granting universities), or thinking about pursuing a position at an undergraduate institution.
Why: Over the…
drorzel | June 8, 2011
Relevant data: Due date in early November, blood tests for Bad Things came back clear, and while we haven't gotten Official Word from the doctor, everything looked fine to the ultrasound tech yesterday. Gender is going to be a surprise, as it was with SteelyKid.
We told SteelyKid about it last night, and to the limited degree that she understands, I think she's excited. Last night at bedtime, I mentioned that she would need to give up her pacifier soon so the baby can have it, leading to the following conversation (more or less):
SteelyKid: "Mommy has a baby in her tummy, and it's going to…
drorzel | June 8, 2011A few years ago, we switched to the Matter & Interactions curriculum for our introductory classes. This has not been without its hiccups, among them the fact that there has been a small decline in the conceptual learning gains measured by the Force Concept Inventory, the oldest and most widely used of the conceptual tests favored by the Physics Education Research community. We've spent some time discussing whether this is a temporary glitch, due to the transition, or something inherent in the curriculum. (Our numbers are small enough that these results remain at the level of plural…
drorzel | June 8, 2011
What is morally off-limits in pop culture? | Music | The Big Questions | The A.V. Club
"What I can't relate to as I read the defenses written by Powers and Barthel is the implicit denial that anything might offend them. This is where the argument that morality always should (or can) be kept separate from artistic judgments falls apart for me, because while I instinctively side with the Non-Moralists, I know there are times when I must switch sides. It's difficult for me to believe that we all don't switch sides from time to time. This is not easy to admit, because acknowledging that…
drorzel | June 7, 2011I have to admit, I'm writing this one up partly because it lets me use the title reference. It's a cool little paper, though, demonstrating the lengths that physicists will go to in pursuit of precision measurements.
I'm just going to pretend I didn't see that dorky post title, and ask what this is about. Well, it's about the trapping and laser cooling of thorium ions. They managed to load thorium ions into an ion trap, and use lasers to lower their temperature into the millikelvin range. At such low temperatures, the ions in the trap "crystallize."
So, they've demonstrated that if you get…
drorzel | June 7, 2011Over at Dynamics of Cats, chief herding theorist Steinn has a post on what we know about how to teach physics:
To teach physics well, you provide an intensive, mathematically rigorous in-sequence series of classes.
You need at least two different parallel classes per term, each class a prerequisite for the succeeding class and coordinated syllabii for parallel and successive classes, providing an initial short review of the previous material.
You also need a parallel sequence of coordinated mathematics classes, such that the mathematics needed for a physics class are taught before it is…
drorzel | June 7, 2011
Career Advice: Advice for Grad Students - Inside Higher Ed
"Some of the greatest catastrophes in graduate education could have been avoided by a little intelligent foresight. Be cynical. Assume that your proposed research might not work, and that one of your faculty advisers might become unsupportive -- or even hostile. Plan for alternatives."
(tags: academia education science inside-higher-ed jobs)
Views: Telling It as It Is - Inside Higher Ed
"One of the stories on a recent episode of The MacNeil/Lehrer Report featured a 2010 graduate with a degree in anthropology who could only find a…
drorzel | June 6, 2011One of the tabs I opened last week and didn't have time to get to was this Clastic Detritus post about what it takes to get science stories in the media, which is (quoting Michael Lemonick):
I get it that a stories involving science need a little something extra to make it in a magazine like Time or even near the front pages of a mainstream newspaper. Or, put another way:
It should be surprising, important -- or weird and fun, failing the important.
I get it that the average non-scientist out there isn't going to take the time to read an article about "ordinary" science. I get it. Our…
drorzel | June 6, 2011The voting phase of the 3 Quarks Daily Science Blogging Prize has begun, and will run through Wednesday this week. Obviously, I voted for myself, but you should feel free to vote for whatever you like. Or just spend a week reading the 87 nominated posts. It's all good.
drorzel | June 6, 2011
Book Review: ESPN - WSJ.com
"The modest idea of Bill and Scott Rasmussen--a failed hockey broadcaster and his college-dropout son--ESPN is now, according to James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales, "the most important component of the Disney empire, worth more than the entire National Football League, worth more than the NBA, MLB, and the NHL put together." It is also a relentlessly vacuous admixture of forced humor, sentimentality and petty corruption. There is of course no contradiction here, but if there is any surprise on offer in "Those Guys Have All the Fun," an oral history of the network…
drorzel | June 5, 2011Why no blogging today? Among other reasons, because we went to the playground with SteelyKid. And this:
is a whole lot more fun than the Internet.
drorzel | June 5, 2011
Bulb In, Bulb Out - NYTimes.com
"Over the past few years, in conditions of strict secrecy, a multinational team of scientists has been making a mighty effort to change the light bulb. The prototype they've developed is four inches tall, with a familiar tapered shape, and unlighted, it resembles a neon yellow mushroom. Screw it in and switch it on, though, and it blazes with a voluptuous radiance. It represents what people within the lighting industry often call their holy grail, an invention that reproduces the soft luminance of the incandescent bulb -- Thomas Edison's century-old…
drorzel | June 4, 2011As I noted a while ago, I'm giving a talk at DAMOP a week from Tuesday with the title "What's So Interesting About AMO Physics?". This is intended as an introduction to the meeting as a whole, for new students or people coming in from other fields. The reason? I found a copy of the 2001 DAMOP program, which featured 270 talks and 293 posters. This year's meeting is almost twice as big: 477 talks and 548 posters. That's awfully daunting, so I'm going to try to provide an introduction/ guide to the meeting as a whole.
This, of course, requires me to know a little bit about a wide range of…
drorzel | June 4, 2011In past years, I have griped at length about the awful, maudlin dreck that Mike Resnick keeps putting on the Hugo ballot-- see this 2009 post for example. I think Abigail Nussbaum put it very well back in 2009, when she wrote of Resnick's "Article of Faith" from that year's short story ballot that "his greatest failing is and has always been the one encapsulated by "Article of Faith"--his ability to take a subject that underpins some of science fiction's seminal works, write his own spin on it which is neither innovative nor unusual nor particularly good, and send it out into the world…
drorzel | June 4, 2011
"Gone For Goode" | Homicide: Life On The Street | TV Club | TV | The A.V. Club
"Homicide is not The Wire. But, maybe because so many of the people who were central to its creative team had developed their skills somewhere else besides television, it was something that no one had ever quite seen on TV before: an experimental cop show. By definition, experiments don't always work, and among the reasons the show never became a popular success, there are some good ones. The editing, with its reliance on jump cuts, could be mannered, and so could the dialogue, which sometimes strained to be…