drorzel | June 3, 2011It's been a long and brutally busy week here, so I really ought to just take a day off from blogging. But there's a new paper in Science on quantum physics that's just too good to pass up, so here's a ReasearchBlogging post to close out the week.
Aw, c'mon, dude, I'm tired. What's so cool about this paper that it can't wait until next week? Well, the title kind of says it all: they measured the average trajectories of single photons passing through a double-slit apparatus. By making lots of repeated weak measurements at different positions behind the slits, they could reconstruct the average…
drorzel | June 3, 2011
Practical Tips on Writing a Book from 23 Brilliant Authors | NeuroTribes
More or less what you would expect: idiosyncratic, largely contradictory, but with a few general patterns.
(tags: writing books business publishing blogs science)
drorzel | June 2, 2011I didn't post anything to acknowledge Memorial Day this past Monday, because Union doesn't take the day off, so it was just another Monday around here, albeit with fewer stores and restaurants open than usual. SteelyKid was at Grandma and Grandpa's for the weekend, though, and celebrated by going to the annual parade. Which was enough of a hit that she was still marching around on Tuesday when she came home:
Where was she marching to, you ask?/p>
Why, to the pond, to throw leaves in:
What's that got to do with Memorial Day? Nothing. But it's fun, so there you go.
(No Appa picture today…
drorzel | June 2, 2011This is the alst week of the academic term here, so I've been crazy busy, which is my excuse for letting things slip. I did want to get back to something raised in the comments to the comments to the Born rule post. It's kind of gotten buried in a bunch of other stuff, so I'll promote it to a full post rather than a comment.
The key exchange starts with Matt Leifer at #6:
The argument is about why we should use the usual methods of statistics in a many-worlds scenario, e.g. counting relative frequencies to estimate what probabilities we should assign in the future. It is not simply about…
drorzel | June 2, 2011(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of George Farrants, a freelance translator (and occasional marathon runner, as seen in the picture). 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 as a freelance translator from Swedish and Norwegian into English. I try to specialise in scientific, medical and technical texts, but I accept texts from many…
drorzel | June 2, 2011This morning's Links Dump included a post from Mad Mike and an entire blog on improving academic posters. For those not in the sciences, one of the traditional means of communicating research results is at a poster session where tens to hundreds of researcher each prepare a poster (usually 3'x5' or thereabouts) about their project, hang them up, then stand by them to answer questions.
Mike and the Better Posters bloggers have some very good tips on graphic design for the benefit of the scientists "gamely trying to not look depressed at the complete lack of attention their posters are…
drorzel | June 2, 2011
Mpemba's baffling discovery: can hot water freeze before cold? (1969) | Skulls in the Stars
""My name is Erasto B Mpemba, and I am going to tell you about my discovery, which was due to misusing a refrigerator."
With those words, Tanzanian student Erasto Mpemba entered scientific history, and also sparked a scientific mystery and controversy that remains ongoing today, some 40 years later!
The phenomenon Mpemba found is now known as the Mpemba effect, and is the very counterintuitive idea that, under certain circumstances, a quantity of very hot/boiling liquid can freeze faster than an…
drorzel | June 1, 2011In just under two weeks, I'll be giving an invited talk at DAMOP (that is, the annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society) that is intended to serve as an introduction to the meeting for new students or physicists from other fields. My plan is to pick 3-4 areas and give a quick summary of those subfields, highlgihting a few invited talks in that area from the full program.
My background is in cold-atom physics, so obviously I have a good idea of what's what in those areas, and I follow things like quantum information and precision…
drorzel | June 1, 2011One of the interesting things about reading David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics was that it paints a very different picture of physics in the mid-1970's than what you usually see. Kaiser describes it as a very dark time for young physicists, career-wise. He doesn't go all that deeply into the facts and figures in the book, but there's plenty of quantitative evidence for this. The claim of the book is that this created a situation in which many younger physicists were pushed to the margins, and thus began to work on marginal topics like quantum foundations, which thus began be be…
drorzel | June 1, 2011(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Jennifer Saam, who translates between different departments at a medical diagnostic laboratory. 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 a medical science liaison at a medical diagnostic laboratory.
I work in the medical services department and this department maintains the scientific integrity for the…
drorzel | June 1, 2011
I've Gone and Done It Now: What It's Like Without the Muslim Headscarf « Inner Workings of My Mind
"I experimented last week. I took off my hijab - the headscarf many Muslim women wear to cover their hair.
I have been wearing a headscarf when I leave the privacy of my home for 25 years, since I was 17. That's a long long time in human years.
I took my hijab off during a recent trip to Europe. I wanted to know what it would feel like. I wanted to know how people's perceptions of me would change and how my perception of myself would change."
(tags: culture world religion society blogs gender…
drorzel | May 31, 2011A bunch of people I follow on social media were buzzing about this blog post yesterday, taking Jonah Lerher to task for "getting spun" in researching and writing this column in the Wall Street Journal about this paper on the "wisdom of crowds" effect. The effect in question is a staple of pop psychology these days, and claims that an aggregate of many guesses by people with little or no information will often turn out to be a very reasonable estimate of the true value. The new paper aims to show the influence of social effects, and in particular, that providing people with information about…
drorzel | May 31, 2011I heard David Kaiser talk about the history of quantum foundations work back in 2008 at the Perimeter Institute, and while I didn't agree with everything he said, I found it fascinating. So when I heard that he had a book coming out about this stuff, How the Hippies Saved Physics, I jumped at the chance to get a review copy.
This is, in essence, a book-length argument that I owe Frijtof "Tao of Physics" Capra, Gary "Dancing Wu Li Masters" Zukav, and even J*ck S*rf*tt* a beer.
The book expands on things that Kaiser said in that PI talk (which was really good-- you could do worse than to spend…
drorzel | May 31, 2011(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Adam DeConinck, who works at a company providing supercomputing resources. 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 as a systems engineer at R Systems, a company that provides high-performance computing (HPC) resources to the commercial and academic research communities. We own and operate a number of…
drorzel | May 31, 2011
Richard Dansky » Seven Questions That Need To Be Asked About Writing About Writing
"1-Why do so many writers spend so much time writing about writing?
Because deep down, many of us are still in thrall to the delightfully archaic notion of "Write What You Know" - which, in some form or other has been zombified since the first writer picked up a travel guide and said, "Gee, I guess I don't have to go to Sasketchewan to write this thing after all[i]". And since we all write, we all theoretically know about writing - as opposed to, say, the history of the Adams-Onis treaty, string theory, or…
drorzel | May 30, 2011Last week's post about the Many-Worlds variant in "Divided by Infinity" prompted the usual vigorous discussion about the merits of the Many-Worlds Interpretation. This included the common objection that we don't know how to obtain the probability of measurement outcomes in the Many-Worlds Interpretation.
This is one of those Deep Questions that lots of people expend lots of time talking about, and I can never quite understand what the problem is. How do we obtain the probability of events in the Many-Worlds Interpretation? Using the Born rule, of course: the probability of a particular…
drorzel | May 30, 2011(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Matthew Schlecht, a chemist by training who runs his own technical translation service, Word Alchemy Translation. 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 a free-lance technical translator working into English from Japanese, German, French, Spanish and occasionally Russian, in the areas of chemistry,…
drorzel | May 30, 2011I had intended last Wednesday's post on the Many-Worlds variant in Robert Charles Wilson's Divided by Infinity to be followed by a post on the other things I said when I did a guest lecture on it for an English class. What with one thing and another, though, I got a little distracted, and I'm only getting around to it now.
Anyway, this was a guest lecture for a class on Science Fiction taught by a friend in the English department. To give you an idea of the stuff they covered, here's the "required books" list from the syllabus:
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction. (VBFSF)…
drorzel | May 30, 2011
Guest Post from Author Nick Mamatas: "The Writer's Life: Actually, It's Awesome!" « Suvudu - Science Fiction and Fantasy Books, Movies, Comics, and Games
"In my new book Starve Better, I talk about writing short subjects--both fiction and non-fiction--with an eye toward writing effectively and efficiently and making some money. Not good money so much as fast money. Relatively fast anyway, if slower than a weekly paycheck. For ten years I played the full-time freelance game before deciding to take a full-time job, and though I love predictable cash flow and dental insurance and paid time…
drorzel | May 29, 2011I mentioned it on Twitter already, but it's probably worth a mention on the blog (not that they really need my traffic): Once again, 3 Quarks Daily is collecting nominations for its science prize:
As usual, this is the way it will work: the nominating period is now open, and will end at 11:59 pm New York City Time (EST) on May 31, 2011. There will then be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese,…