Against Craft « Booklife ""Craft" today is not a counter to the Romantic vision of an artistic elite chosen by the Divine, it is a quasi-proletarian flinch often designed to protect one's work from being compared to art, thus protecting it (and one's ego) from its near-inevitable failure to stack up to the idea of art as a superlative. The craft metaphor also serves the production-driven processes of conglomerate publishing: books are published to fill slots and develop and extend categories on a mass scale, which militates against the individual nature of a piece of art. And yet, writers…

Back when I was an undergrad, we did a lab in the junior-level quantum class that involved making a dye laser. We had a small pulsed nitrogen laser in the lab, and were given a glass cell of dye and some optics and asked to make it lase in the visible range of the spectrum. My partner and I worked on this for almost the entire lab period, and got nothing more than the occasional faint flicker of a green beam. We got the TA to help us, and he couldn't do any better. The TA went to get the professor teaching the class, but he was helping other students with one of the other experiments (this…

Writing About Science, and Liking It. In the Pipeline: "I remember William Rusher, who used to publish National Review, writing about how he had to tell a colleague that "there is no concept so simple that I can fail to understand it when presented as a graph". That made me feel the two cultures divide, for sure. But it's perhaps not as stark as the classic C. P. Snow formulation: there are plenty of scientists who appreciate literature and the arts, and (as McPhee notes), there are plenty of people who know more about the humanities who find that they enjoy scientific topics once they're…

Tonight's Toddler Blogging features SteelyKid taking a picture of me taking a picture of her, while Appa does the forced perspective thing again: The "camera" in this case is the salt shaker that came with her kitchen playset. Which is a versatile object, serving also as a drinking cup: The beverage in question was "fish juice," squeezed from the green plastic fish you can just make out in her hand. She made us all drink some, despite the fact that it was, as she put it, "little tiny yucky." I'm a little amazed we got these, because at dinner a little while earlier, she slipped off a chair…

The title is a .signature line that somebody-- Emmet O'Brien, I think, but I'm not sure-- used to use on Usenet, back in the mid-to-late 90's, when some people referred to the Internet as the "Information Superhighway." I've always thought it was pretty apt, especially as I've moved into blogdom, where a lot of what I spend time on involves the nearly random collisions of different articles and blog posts and so on. It's also as good a title as any for this tab-clearing post, which consists of pointing out two pairs of articles that, in my mind at least, seem to have something to say about…

Atomic clock is smallest on the market - physicsworld.com "Researchers in the US have developed the world's smallest commercial atomic clock. Known as the SA.45s Chip Size Atomic Clock (CSAC), it could be yours for just $1500. The clock, initially developed for military use, is about the size of a matchbox, weighs about 35 grams and has a power requirement of only 115 mW. Not your everyday timekeeper, the team behind the clock claim that it could have varied and wide-ranging applications, from disabling bombs to searching for oil." (tags: science technology time atoms optics physics quantum…

While Kenneth Ford's 101 Quantum Questions was generally good, there was one really regrettable bit, in Question 23: What is a "state of motion?" When giving examples of states, Ford defines the ground state as the lowest-energy state of a nucleus, then notes that its energy is not zero. He then writes: An object brought to an absolute zero of temperature would have zero-point energy and nothing else. Because of zero-point energy, there is indeed such a thing as perpetual motion. This is really the only objectionable content in the book, but he certainly made up in quality what it lacks in…

Scientific Study Links Flammable Drinking Water to Fracking - ProPublica "The group tested 68 drinking water wells in the Marcellus and Utica shale drilling areas in northeastern Pennsylvania and southern New York State. Sixty of those wells were tested for dissolved gas. While most of the wells had some methane, the water samples taken closest to the gas wells had on average 17 times the levels detected in wells further from active drilling. The group defined an active drilling area as within one kilometer, or about six tenths of a mile, from a gas well. The average concentration of the…

If I get a review copy of a book that sounded interesting from a publicist, but it turns out I kind of hate the book, am I still obliged to read it and write it up for the blog? I'm not talking about the totally unsolicited review copies that turn up unannounced in my mail-- I feel no obligation to read those at all-- but a book where I replied to an email to specifically request a copy. On the one hand, they did send me something free, expecting some publicity in return. On the other, I suspect they'd be just as happy having me not post a review saying "The first three pages of this made me…

When I was looking over the Great Discoveries series titles for writing yesterday's Quantum Man review, I was struck again by how the Rutherford biography by Richard Reeves is an oddity. Not only is Rutherford a relatively happy fellow-- the book is really lacking in the salacious gossip that is usually a staple of biography, probably because Rutherford was happily married for umpteen years-- but he's an experimentalist, and you don't see that many high-profile biographies of experimental physicists. When you run down the list of famous and relatively modern scientists who have books written…

Shit My Students Write "Macbeth couldn't have loved Lady Macbeth because he was crazy and too busy hallucinating witches and stuff. Also, crazy people can't do it without going crazy midway through." (tags: academia education internet silly blogs literature) Budget Mix-Up Provides Nation's Schools With Enough Money To Properly Educate Students | The Onion - America's Finest News Source "Sources in the Congressional Budget Office reported that as a result of a clerical error, $80 billion earmarked for national defense was accidentally sent to the Department of Education, furnishing schools…

While I've got a few more review copies backlogged around here, the next book review post is one that I actually paid for myself, Lawrence Krauss's Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science, part of Norton's Great Discoveries series of scientific biographies. I'm a fan of the series-- past entries reviewed here include Richard Reeves's biography of Rutherford, Rebecca Goldstein's biography of Goedel, and David Foster Wallace on Cantor's work on infinity (which is less of a biography than the others). I'm not a huge reader of biographies, but I've liked all the books from this series that…

A little while back, Jonah Lehrer did a nice blog post about reasoning that used the famous study by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky, The Hot Hand in Basketball (PDF link) as an example of a case where people don't want to believe scientific results. The researchers found absolutely no statistical evidence of "hot" shooting-- a player who had made his previous couple of shots was, if anything, slightly less likely to make the next one. Lehrer writes: Why, then, do we believe in the hot hand? Confirmation bias is to blame. Once a player makes two shots in a row - an utterly unremarkable event…

Experimental physics as preparation for parenthood « Confused at a higher level "Before I became a parent, friends and strangers alike would tell me, "You have no idea how much your life will change with the arrival of a baby." I've found my transition to parenthood has been less disruptive than predicted. I credit that, in part, to being an experimental physicist. Here are five ways in which my experience as an experimental physicist helped prepare me to be a new parent." (tags: academia science blogs physics culture experiment confused-higher-level kid-stuff) YouTube - Kung Fooled When…

One of the perils of book reviewing, or any other form of literary analysis is putting more thought into some aspect of a book than the author did. It's one of the aspects of the humanities aide of academia that, from time to time, strains my ability to be respectful of the scholarly activities of my colleagues on the other side of campus. And it frequently undermines reviews of books that I've already read. A couple of good examples come from this Paul Di Filippo column for Barnes and Noble, where he reviews two books I've read, and one I haven't. I haven't actually read his comments on the…

The folks at Harvard University Press were nice enough to send me an advance copy of Ken Ford's new book, 101 Quantum Questions: What You Need to Know About the World You Can't See a few months ago. I've been too busy working on my own book to read any other physics books, though, so the actual book made it into print before my review. Better late than never, though. As the title promises, this is a book about modern physics written in Q&A format. It's presented as a list of questions about physics, such as "1: What is a quantum, anyway?" and "6: Why is solid matter solid if it is mostly…

Making Light: Epubbing the Backlist ""So," I said, "what the heck. Why not try republishing some of our short stories in electronic versions? All the cool kids are doing it...."             "Why not" included the fact that we didn't have electronic text versions of many of our stories. Stuff that only exists on a 3.5" Atari ST disk (or a 5.25" Atari 800 disk), and we think we saw the disk sometime in 1993, aren't easily converted to e-book formats. But, we're doing it. Fifteen stories so far (roughly half of our corpus), with more to come. These are promulgating across the world of e-…

Gary Williams: The greatest craze to hit College Park - The Washington Post "As soon as you first saw Williams, coaching AU from 1978 to 1982, you knew he was destined for great things. Or else, for a padded room. He was crazy. Good crazy. You would grab him for a quote as he strutted off the court, but your hand would slip because everything he wore was sopping wet. In 33 years, he has barely changed except somebody pruned his face and slipped a gray wig on him. The body's rail lean; he's still coaching on his haunches. Or he did until he hung up his straitjacket up for good this week." (…

In comments to yesterday's post about precision measurements, Bjoern objected to the use of "quantum mechanics" as a term encompassing QED: IMO, one should say "quantum theory" here instead of "quantum mechanics". After all, what is usually known as quantum mechanics (the stuff one learns in basic courses) is essentially the quantization of classical mechanics, whereas QED is the quantization of classical electrodynamics, and quantum field theories in general are quantizations of classical field theories. I think saying "quantum mechanics" when one talks about something which essentially has…

Maryland head basketball coach Gary Williams announced his retirement suddenly yesterday. He was a player at Maryland back in the 60's, and has been the coach there for 22 years, now. As I didn't start rooting for the Terps until I went there for graduate school in 1993, he's the only coach I've really seen them have (though I am, of course, aware of the Lefty Driesell years). This comes as a surprise, but then, he is 66, and has been doing this for a long time. And in recent years there have been a number of stories about his distaste for the AAU system that has become such a shady and…