I've seen the idea of an "Opposite Day" popping up lots of places in the political blogosphere (most recently from Big Media Matt and Will Wilkinson), and it sounds sort of cool. The idea is that you commit to writing blog posts on topics chosen by readers, taking the opposite position from what you would normally argue. The problem is, this really only works for people blogging about the humanities and social sciences, where you can sensibly argue both sides of any position, or invent entirely new sides at a whim. Us science types are a little more constrained by reality. We've got all these…

(For reasons unclear to me, Mixed States doesn't seem to pick up scheduled posts in the RSS feed, even after they're published. I don't know if other RSS aggregators have the same problem, but if you were wondering what happened to the promised True Lab Story, here it is.) A question from yesteerday's final exam, paraphrased slightly: Element X decays into Element Y with a half-life of 30 minutes. You are given a sample containing three times as many atoms of Y as X. If the initial sample was pure X, how long ago was it prepared? One student wrote: It seems like a lifetime ago... (He also…

(Series explanation here.) When I was in grad school, I worked in a lab with an incredibly high density of laser technology. We had not one but two Ti:sapphire systems, with 15 W argon ion lasers pumping Coherent 899 ring lasers, plus a pulsed YAG/ dye laser system, and a couple of miscellaneous diode lasers. The argon ion lasers drew a great deal of current, and required water cooling to keep them from overheating and suffering major damage. The lab provided circulating water at a regulated temperature (55 F), but wherever they were getting the water from, it had large amounts of clay in it…

Every good blog needs a signature recurring element. Dave and Greta have Casual Fridays, RPM has Double Entendre Fridays, Grrlscientist has Birds in the News, PZ has Say Mean Things About Religious People Days-That-End-In-Y, Orac has EneMan... I'm not organized enough to commit to posting things in a certain category on a specific day of the week, butlater today (through the miracle of scheduled posting) I'm going to roll out an intermittent series of posts based on True Lab Stories. As the original post says, these are not moral or uplifting tales. They won't necessarily have a coherent…

I'm with Kevin on this one: this whole "Pi Day" thing is just too dorky for words (I'm looking at you, Clifford...) However, as noted by Arcane Gazebo, it's also Einstein's birthday, which is an occasion much more worth commemorating. So celebrate as the man himself would have: invent a new theory of the universe while working at a boring and unchallenging job because you can't get an academic position. Or, possibly, divorce your wife and marry your cousin. It's all good.

The final exam for my class is today (9-11 am), so I'm a little preoccupied. After giving the test, I have to grade it, but then, I get a whole week of "vacation." The scare quotes are because of the multitude of things that need doing-- I have to prep two classes for next term, start assembling material for my tenure review, and do a bunch of work in the lab. It's not going to be restful. As a result, you get lazy blogging today. Here are some links that have caught my eye: First, on the science front, Dennis Overbye takes on quantum mysticism. I haven't seen What the #$!%* Do We Know?, but…

So RPM thinks he's all clever, with the Double Entendre Fridays-- he's not the only one who can game search engine traffic... If you're one of those philistines who doesn't like basketball go revel in nostalgia ("Cow... yup, yup yup.."), because we're all about the hoops this morning. It's that time of year again, when everybody rushes to fll out their brackets for the NCAA Tournament office pools, and we here at Chateau Steelypips are no exception: Of course, the Subject: line aside, I never win these things, because I always pick the teams I root for to go far-- I figure, why put my…

I'd be required to turn in my fan card if I didn't at least mention Syracuse winning the Big East Championship in one of the more improbable runs I've ever seen (the AP story is tarted up with ESPN graphics here). They looked dead heading into the tournament-- having lost by 39 to lowly DePaul barely a week earlier-- but won four games in four days by a total of eight points to defend their conference championship from last year. It's really hard to overstate how impressive Gerry McNamara's performance was in this tournament, though the sports media are going to do their damnedest to. I don't…

ScienceBlogs is well stocked with people who will comment at length on the latest news from biology or climate science, which is nice, because I don't usually feel moved to remark on those subjects. The large amount of quality commentary on those subjects does make me fell like I ought to make a point of commenting on physics-related news stories. Happily, there aren't nearly as many of those, so I can easily accomodate this with my relatively light posting schedule (light compared to some of my every-hour-on-the-hour colleagues-- don't you people have day jobs?). There were a few science-…

It's apparently PZ Myers's birthday, which has triggered an orgy of "happy birthday" posts on ScienceBlogs. It's so, so... LiveJournal. Still, everybody else is doing it, so, hey, man, happy birthday. Celebrate with some spicy baked cuttledfish: ("Mr. Squid" image from this page of weird Asian snacks.)

As a sort of cautionary counterpoint to the anecdote in my How to Tell a True Lab Story post, Derek Lowe has the story of somebody who pulled the same trick with a big commercial liquid nitrogen tank: The cylinder had been standing at one end of a ~20' x 40' laboratory on the second floor of the chemistry building. It was on a tile covered 4-6" thick concrete floor, directly over a reinforced concrete beam. The explosion blew all of the tile off of the floor for a 5' radius around the tank turning the tile into quarter sized pieces of shrapnel that embedded themselves in the walls and doors…

I'm generally sort of hesitant to take part in the various "meme" things that float around the Internet, because I'm just contrarian enough that it feels wrong to link to something just because everybody else is. Orac's got a good one, though, for a worthy cause. Recently, somebody tried to burn down the Holocaust History Project, an organization dedicated to fighting Holocaust denial on the Internet. This is a typically craven attempt to suppress facts through violence, by people who don't like the truth, and would prefer that nobody else know it, either. Happily, the attempt failed. At Orac…

Next term, I'm slated to offer one of our "Advanced Topics in Physics" upper-level elective classes. I was originally asked to do atomic physics, but looking at the syllabus and available texts, I decided I'd rather take a different tack, and agreed to develop a new course instead. I call myself an atomic physicist, and I go to the annual meetings of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (this year in Knoxville, whee!), but most of what falls under that heading these days is not what old-school guys would call atomic physics-- spectroscopy, atomic structure, etc. Most of what…

I'm not sure what I did to PZ Myers to make him draw my attention to Fred Hutchison, but whatever it was, I apologize. Mr. Hutchison is apparently a columnist writing for a web site run by Alan Keyes-- the right-wing kook for people who find David Horowitz to be a little too sedate-- and prides himself on his knowledge of science. In fact, he's currently taking great pride in "defeating" two professional scientists in email debates about relativity and global warming. He has also previously posted an amazingly loopy piece about how Einstein is wrong about everything. Now, it's been a bad…

Skot Kurruk explains the Best Picture result (below the fold, for those with sensitive ears): In the end, after all the talk of whether or not Hollywood (and, by laughable extension, our whole beknighted country) was ready to fully laud a film where rabbit-eyed cowboy Jake Gyllenhall happily takes it up the ass . . . the answer was a clear "Nope." We just weren't ready.

Via BioCurious, the Public Library of Science offers an op-ed titled Ten Simple Rules for Getting Published. The advice is aimed at biologists, but it's broadly applicable. I especially like: Rule 4: If you do not write well in the English language, take lessons early; it will be invaluable later. This is not just about grammar, but more importantly comprehension. The best papers are those in which complex ideas are expressed in a way that those who are less than immersed in the field can understand. Have you noticed that the most renowned scientists often give the most logical and simply…

Over at Jacques Distler's blog, someone has posted what strikes me as an eminently sensible system for solving the Trackback problem with the ArXiv. I attempted to post a comment to that effect over there, and got the following message: Your comment submission failed for the following reasons: You are not allowed to post comments. This is almost certainly a bug (maybe a browser conflict), not a deliberate act of malice, but it's kind of amusing. I'll reproduce the comment below the fold, and maybe somebody who is allowed to post comments can post it for me... There are ways to reduce…

There are active discussions among the ScienceBlogs bloggers and the folks at Seed about what features the main ScienceBlogs page ought to include. As you might expect, this has revolved around how best to draw traffic, both to the individual sites and in the aggregate. It occurs to me that people reading the site might have some useful advice to offer. So, if you read the main page at all, and have suggestions about how to improve it, here's an open thread for you to leave a comment. I'll pass along any particularly good ideas to the ScienceBlogs web design team.

There's a kerfuffle in the physics blogosphere these days over the somewhat arcane issue of TrackBacks to posts on the ArXiV, the commual preprint server where researchers can post drafts of the papers that they have submitted to research journals (or, if they're working in high energy physics, post a paper and then call it a day, without bothering with print publication). They've relatively recently begun accepting TrackBack links from certain blogs-- but only certain blogs. Raise your hand if you think that this is likely to cause a problem at some point... Now, take that hand, and pat…

At the Tor party at Boskone, Teresa Nielsen Hayden introduced me to Jim Kelly as "a reviewer." While technically somewhat accurate (I do occasionally post book reviews), and a better answer to "Why are you at this party?" than "I'm a guy with a web site," it made me feel a little guilty for shamefully neglecting my book log these past few months. Guilt is a wonderful spur to action, so I've posted a bunch of reviews over there this weekend, all of them at least vaguely related to Boskone: The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell Permanence by Karl Schroeder The…