Search Content

Displaying results 78751 - 78800 of 87950

Hugo Nomination Recommendations?

I'm leaving today for the AAAS meeting in DC, where I'll be through the weekend. The AAAS works much differently than the physics conferences I'm used to, most notably requiring speakers to upload their presentation several days ahead of time. This means that my usual night-before-a-talk process of fiddling with my slides is right out. I mean, I could fiddle with my slides, but any changes won't be reflected in the pre-uploaded ones I'll get to do the actual talk, so what would be the point? This puts me in the unusual (recently) position of having some time available to read fiction. I'm 50-…

A Not Entirely Original Observation About Popular Music

I picked up a few albums off "Best of 2010" list a few weeks ago, and have been listening to them on shuffle play a lot. These included Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Which is kind of a rough one for shuffle play with SteelyKid in the house-- I keep having to skip tracks when she comes into the room. And I eventually deleted whatever the track is with the interminable Chris Rock bit at the end, because, really, I don't need that. Anyway, the observation promised in the title is this: Kanye West is a really good producer. As music, most of these tracks are really impressive--…

Links for 2011-02-06

Evolution in Science Education - Bill Nye on Evolution in Science Education - Popular Mechanics "Science education: We should support it. Especially elementary school science. Nearly every rocket scientist got interested in it before they were 10. Everybody who's a physician, who makes vaccines, who wants to find the cure for cancer. Everybody who wants to do any medical good for humankind got the passion for that before he or she was 10. So we want to excite a new generation of kids--every generation--about the passion, beauty and joy--the PB&J--of science. These anti-evolution people…

The Quota System

They say that, in writing, you should steal from the best. Or, failing that, whoever's convenient. Like, say, John Scalzi. I made a little headway on the book-in-progress over the weekend, which is nice. The problem is, the words I wrote on Saturday were the first new text generated since Tuesday the previous week. Not the one four days earlier, the one the week before that. This is obviously unsustainable if I'm going to finish the book-in-progress in finite time, so I am, effective immediately, copying John's writing quota system: No Internet for me on any given day(*) until I write…

Fredette-apalooza

SteelyKid is off spending the weekend with her grandparents, so Kate and I went out to a nice restaurant last night (we love SteelyKid dearly, but miss eating in restaurants without a kids menu). I was kicking myself for forgetting to set the DVR to record a basketball game, though. Not the Duke or Kentucky games on ESPN, but the much more Mid-Majority friendly BYU-Vermont game up the road, on the local cable system. Why? Because the game was being played in Glens Falls as a tribute to Jimmer Fredette, BYU's star point guard, and a local legend. Fredette started to get national attention…

Rapture of the Deep

In preparation for my trip to the Caribbean next semester, I spent this weekend taking a class to learn how to SCUBA dive. My class and I learned all about the necessary equipment, what to do in emergency situations, and how to stay safe while SCUBA diving. We also learned about the physics of pressure, volume and density, so that we could better understand what happens when you descend into the deep. This inevitably led to a conversation about Nitrogen narcosis. Nitrogen narcosis, or "rapture of the deep", is a condition in which the symptoms resemble those due to intoxication by alcohol.…

Links for 2010-11-03

Motorcycle tablecloth trick: could it be done? | Wired Science | Wired.com "After watching this episode, a colleague had a great question: "How fast would the MythBusters have to go to make this trick work?" Interesting. In their last attempt, they had the motorcycle going around 100 mph. It did't work, but some of the stuff did stay on the table. What if they went faster? Could it work?" (tags: science physics video blogs dot-physics education outreach culture television) Confessions of a Community College Dean: Culture of Poverty My disregard for the Charles Murray line of argument is…

Links for 2010-10-17

It's Time To Forgive George Lucas "I cannot defend the prequels, despite their many laudable qualities: often wonderful if no longer industry-defining special effects; Jedi Knights that are warriors to be feared and respected; a glimpse of a splendid Republic of majestic alien races, a galaxy worth fighting for. What I can say now, after rewatching the best film of the series on the occasion of its 30th anniversary, The Empire Strikes Back, is that George Lucas is directly responsible for one of the things that has given me the greatest, most quantifiable joy (if by "money spent" alone) in…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in the South

One of the things I've been stressed about lately is next week, when I'm making a trip to the South, specifically Georgia and Alabama. As I mentioned here earlier, the original inspiration was a get-together with friends from college for the Florida-Alabama football game next Saturday, but it seems a shame to go all that way and not do something book-related, so I have arranged to give four talks in two days. Two of these are research colloquia, but the other two are public lectures that might be of interest to readers of this blog or How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: First, on Wednesday,…

The Ethics of Santa

Janet has a post grappling with the ethical implications of telling children about Santa Claus. SteelyKid is too young for this to be an issue yet, but on this issue, like many others, I turn to my favorite literary philosopher, Terry Pratchett: "All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable." REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little--" YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE…

Links for 2009-12-21

Make it Sir: Star Trek's Patrick Stewart to be knighted | SCI FI Wire Sadly, William Shatner is not British. (tags: sf silly television movies theater world awards) Are Texas' auto safety inspections worth the hassle? | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Latest News "Texas is one of 19 states left that require a periodic safety review - down from a peak of 31 states in the 1970s. The District of Columbia recently disbanded its inspection program because of high costs and a lack of evidence that the inspections saved lives. There is no serious discussion about eliminating Texas…

Links for 2009-11-01

Another dumb article on why spaceflight is bad for you -- KarlSchroeder.com "But really, people, think! This doesn't mean that space flight is intrinsically dangerous. It means that badly shielded tin-can environments that aren't spun for gravity are a bad idea. And that is quite a different conclusion." (tags: space science sf economics blogs karl-schroeder) Giants' Danny Clark Chose to Go Green With a Smart Car - NYTimes.com "[T]he glances turn to stares and smiles when he parks his 1,600-pound vehicle and his 6-foot-2, 245-pound body emerges from behind the wheel. "That's when the…

Links for 2009-10-29

Sexist Beatdown: The Happy Hooker, Or Why Doesn't Steven Levitt Suck Dick For a Living? - The Sexist - Washington City Paper "[E]ven though our two Steves are really brilliant economists, they just can't figure out why most of us women don't want to have sex for tons and tons of money. Why aren't more women successful prostitutes?, Levitt and Dubner ask. Is it because: a) They don't like sex; b) They hate men; c) They're kind of dumb; d) All of the above. If you guessed D, you are probably either Steven Levitt or Stephen Dubner. (Thanks for reading, guys!)" (tags: sex…

Early Review of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog

One of the photo caption contest winners, Nick O'Neill, has finished his galley proof, and posted an early review of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Casual physics intro books are quite possibly the hardest subgenre of physics books to write. Textbooks and further upper-level reading have expectations both of what you already know and how quickly you should pick up new material. Generally, those who pour through these types of books will read and reread until they've figured things out, regardless of how well the text actually explains things. Casual intro books, on the other hand, exist…

links for 2009-05-01

theweaselking: Never trust a marsupial. (tags: silly video animals) Do You Have Swine Flu? Because you need confirmation from the Internet. (tags: silly medicine internet) Jacks of Science » Blog Archive » Learning Science through Comic Books, A List "Reading textbooks gives me scary flashbacks of my days as an undergraduate (about 2 weeks ago). I did a little research on the internet and supposedly there are these things kids are calling "light reads" that make reading fun again. Comic books/Graphic novels are the pinnacle of fun, so I put together a quick list of illustrated reading…

Strunk and White Is Not for You

I tagged Geoffrey Pullum's rant against The Elements of Style for del.icio.us a few days back, because it struck me as interesting, but I didn't have time to say more. In the subsequent days, I've seen a bunch of "Preach it, Brother Pullum!" responses, most recently from revere. I've also received the copyedited manuscript of the book-in-production, so I've been thinking a bit about grammar and style in my own writing. Most of the pro-Pullum responses I've seen seem to me to be missing the point. Or, rather, they're criticizing the book because it's not very good as an absolute and…

Testing the Fine Structure Constant: The More Things Change, the More They Don't

Via the arxiv Blog, a review article has been posted by the Haensch group with the title"Testing the Stability of the Fine Structure Constant in the Laboratory." The fine structure constant, usually referred to by the symbol α is a ratio of fundamental constants-- the electron charge squared divded by Planck's Contant times the speed of light (e2/hc)-- and usually assumed to be constant. Some beyond-the-Standard-Model theories of physics, though, include effects that could cause this ratio to change over time. For this reason, people have been looking to see if the fine structure constant is…

links for 2009-04-15

EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect "If you indeed instituted the calls to flatten out the federal tax distribution, the influence of state and local taxes would leave you with an incredibly regressive tax structure, not a slightly less progressive tax structure. Which is something to keep in mind next time you read a Wall Street Journal columnist attacking the soak-the-rich qualities of the federal income tax system." (tags: blogs politics economics class-war ezra-klein) Levitation and diamagnetism, or: LEAVE EARNSHAW ALONE!!! « Skulls in the Stars "Itâs hard to tell if the author…

links for 2009-04-11

How hostage negotiations work. - By Christopher Beam - Slate Magazine "What, exactly, does a hostage negotiator do? Wear down the captors. Negotiating strategies vary depending on the demands, the time of day, the hostage-taker's sanity, and a million other factors. (For example, you might want to send in a SWAT team right away if nightfall is approaching or if the person starts randomly killing hostages.) But in general, the negotiator's job is to run down the clock. That gives the hostage-taker time to calm down, and it gives cops time to figure out the best way to make a "tactical entry…

Social Media and the Animal Kingdom

I'm putting the finishing touches on Monday's lecture notes when the dog comes into the library, looking concerned. "Shouldn't I be doing something to promote the book?" she asks. "Since it won't be out for another nine months, I don't think it's that urgent." "But aren't there more Internetty things I could be doing?" "Well, you make regular appearances on the blog, and you've got plenty of friends on Facebook. I suppose you could Twitter." She draws herself up very haughtily. "I am a dog. I do not twitter." "Beg pardon?" "I'm not some stupid bird, fluttering around twittering all the time…

Contest: Stupidest Word Template?

I needed to generate an electronic recommendation letter for a former student yesterday, and printing the letter on paper and scanning the paper copy seemed a little too... 1998 to be worth doing. As a result, I spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling around with Microsoft Word to come up with a template that looked like the official department letterhead. Of course, there's nothing in the many pre-installed templates that could easily be modified to suit, because Microsoft employees have the aesthetic sense of a syphilitic squirrel, but I was surprised to discover just how many absurdly…

Book Report: Slouching Toward Production

The Book-in-Progress is slowly but surely moving toward being the Book-in-Production. There isn't an officially official date yet, but I've gotten what should be the last round of edits, and been told that it should be out this fall, just in time for holiday gift-buying. Between the book and my class, I don't have a great deal of spare mental energy for blogging. Here are a few notes from the ongoing book work, though: I am amused to discover that the official way to enter a cross-reference is to put "Page XXX" in the text. Not the page number, mind, the exact string "Page XXX." I'm told…

links for 2009-02-04

Bruce Springsteen misreads the national mood in his halftime performance. - By Stephen Metcalf - Slate Magazine A desperately stupid article about the Super Bowl halftime show (tags: politics stupid society sports music) PHD Comics: Not a good sign "I should be done in a year..." (tags: academia comics silly) Doing Physics is a two level system « Shores of the Dirac Sea Oscillatory solutions are the worst. (tags: physics blogs academia silly quantum) The Quantum Pontiff : Teleportation Between Separately Trapped Matter Qubits Lots of news about the Chris Monroe's group teleporting…

Message from APS: Support Science Funding

The American Physical Society has sent out another of its email alerts encouraging people to write to Congress in support of more funding for science. Actually, they're urging people to send two messages: a thank-you to Speaker Pelosi for the generous science funding in the House stimulus bill, and a letter to your Senators asking for more funding. The explanation from the message: As you may be aware, the U.S. Congress is currently formulating a stimulus package to help spur the recovery of our economy. In addition to the tax cuts in the draft packages being discussed, the packages include…

links for 2009-01-28

Mike the Mad Biologist : To Restore Science to Its Rightful Place, We Need to Redefine Elitism "Our Benevolent Seed Overlords ask "What is science's rightful place?" which refers to a line from Obama's inaugural address where he vowed to "restore science to its rightful place." Since ScienceBlogling Jake discussed the importance of basing policy on evidence--as well as correctly recognizing that the method we use to solve problems does not shed much light on whether we should address those problems in the first place--I want to bring up one problem that science faces: it is, to a great…

Pop-Science Book Racing

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean writes: You know what the world really needs? A good book about time. Google tells me there are only about one and a half million such books right now, but I think you'll agree that one more really good one is called for. So I'm writing one. From Eternity to Here: The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time is a popular-level book on time, entropy, and their connections to cosmology, to be published by Dutton. Hopefully before the end of this year! Dammit! Now it's a race to see whose pop-physics book will be out first. The approximately final draft of my…

links for 2008-12-30

The Quantum Pontiff : A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Introduction "Gladwell's books are fun, but I find myself often disagreeing with his analysis, so I thought it would be entertaining to take my time reading his latest and jot down my thoughts as I progress. " (tags: science social-science society culture medicine books) Throwing a football with air resistance - angle for maximum range | Dot Physics "When throwing a football, there is some air resistance this means that 45 degree is not necessarily the angle for the greatest range. Well, can't I just do the same thing as…

Recent Reading

I was up late watching my Giants play the Carolina Panthers (they won in OT-- now you see the importance of Brandon Jacobs), and today is a Baby Day, so I have no deep thoughts to blog. So here are some quick comments on recent reading: The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson. This is the concluding volume of the Mistborn trilogy, and reading it confirms that he was the right choice to finish the Wheel of Time. This book takes a huge, complicated plot, and brings all the various pieces together for a satisfying conclusion. He also does a nice job of complicating the set-up from the original…

Fines Doubled in Work Areas

This year's DAMOP meeting is in State College PA, which has good and bad points. It's not exactly a tourist Mecca, but then that means I won't feel bad spending all day in physics talks. It's also probably relatively cheap, unlike Calgary last year. But the most important feature of the location is that it's in western Pennsylvania, meaning I get to drive to it. This is good because I like driving, and because it keeps me out of airports and airplanes. It's bad because the meeting ends on Saturday morning, and there's a baby shower for FutureBaby on Sunday. In Boston. So, I'll be spending my…

FutureBaby Chronicles: Open Pseudonym Thread

Kate and I have been discussing possible names for FutureBaby when he or she ceases to be a baby in potentia and becomes an ActualBaby. We've also talked a bit about the issue of FutureBaby's Internet identification-- specifically, whether I should refer to him or her by name in the eventual blog posts (and oh, yes, there will be blog posts...), or adopt some sort of pseudonym to preserve a tiny bit of privacy in this Google age. At the moment, we're leaning toward adopting a pseudonym for blog-reference purposes. Which raises the important question that I will throw open to you, oh wise and…

Notes Toward "Science in the 21st Century"

The organizers of the Science in the 21st Century conference at the Perimeter Institute have started to collect talk abstracts for the meeting. Actually, they started a couple of weeks ago, but I'm a Bad Person and haven't gotten around to writing anything for them yet. It doesn't help that this sort of thing is outside my normal range of talks, which has been strictly physics-based. This broader public intellectual stuff isn't something I have a great deal of experience speaking about. I do write in that vein here, though, and since blogging is my obvious subject for this, I might as well…

Uncomfortable Questions: Particle Physics

Stephen asks: Why do you try to hide your secret desire to be a high-energy particle physicist? Heh. Seriously, honestly, I have no desire whatsoever to be a high-energy particle physicist. I wish I had a somewhat better understanding of particle physics, becuase that way I would have an easier time reading a lot of news stories and Cosmic Variance comment threads, but particle physics is not for me, for a variety of reasons. The main reason is really that I like doing table-top physics. I like knowing that all of my apparatus is in one place, and under my direct control. I don't have to…

Specialist Mark Wilkerson: Conscientious Objector

A couple of days ago, I heard this href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5746173">interview on NPR, with Steve Inskeep.  Inskeep was interviewing href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/01/ap/national/mainD8JRRH080.shtml">Spc. Mark Wilkerson, just before he turned himself in for having gone AWOL. Wilkerson served one tour of duty in Iraq, but refused to go back.  He sought  CO status, but was told it would take a long time before his status would be reviewed.  Apparently, he was told to go ahead with his redeployment, and they would let him know later…

Planning the perfect shot

Aphaenogaster woodland ants disperse a bloodroot seed. This image materialized in my head a couple months before I actually set it up. My photographs fall into two categories: incidental shots I happen upon by chance, and premeditated images mapped out in advance. There's not much to say about the first type. I wander about in the woods as another camera-toting tourist, and sometimes I get lucky with an interesting subject. A naturalist's eye and a basic ability to operate photographic equipment suffice to produce usable photos. As my photographic career progresses, though, more of my…

Friday Beetle Blogging: Penthe pimelia

Penthe pimelia (Tetratomidae) Illinois, USA A couple years back I was working on the Beetle Tree of Life project as a molecular phylogeneticist. My main responsibility was to gather DNA sequence data for several hundred beetles distributed across the spectrum of Coleopteran diversity. As I'm not a Coleopterist, I spent most of my time lost in a befuddled daze of incomprehensible taxonomy. There are so many beetles. The larger families each hold more species than all of the vertebrates combined. Think about all the mammals and birds you know- the warblers, the polar bears, the shrews, the…

Crazier than Ken Ham?

It's hard to believe, but yes, there are Christians who are even worse than Ken Ham, and even more ignorant. Here's one: Pastor Don Elmore of Union, Kentucky. He's written a revealing screed against Answers in Genesis. It starts gently enough, chatting about their rapid growth and praising AiG for their work against those wicked evolutionists. And then it goes off the rails. I am aware of the forces supporting "Answers in Genesis", these being the same powers that are supporting similar multi-cultural anti-Christian organizations such as Alpha, Promise Keepers, The Full Gospel Businessmen's…

Photo gallery update: now listed by subfamily

By request, I have now organized the ant photos by subfamily.  This mimics the arrangement from the old site.  For the smug-muggers out there who want to know how it works, I basically set up an "old journal" gallery and put the genus names and links into the caption box.  I used CSS to set all photos to align right. Also, the Recent Photos feed on my blog (in the right sidebar) has been changed to show new uploads to alexanderwild.com.  That way you can keep an eye on new material as it goes up.  If that's your thing. Finally, for good measure, below the fold is the full ant genus-by-…

New Study: Older Ants are Better Workers

Pheidole dentata, older worker with larva. A study out in pre-print by Muscedere, Willey, and Traniello in the journal Animal Behaviour finds little support for a long-held idea that worker ants change specializations to perform different types of work as they age.  By creating colonies out of different age classes in the ant Pheidole dentata, the researchers showed that older workers were good at pretty much everything, while younger ants performed only a few tasks, but did those less efficiently.  Here is the abstract: Age-related task performance, or temporal polyethism, is a prominent…

Horrific Australian Bush Fires, a way to help, and a chance at a t-shirt

"Have you been following what's happening in Australia?" That was the question I asked my morning class, even though it has nothing to do with the topic of the day's session. I was very pleased to see most of the heads nod and the hands raise in answer to my question. My students knew that the Australian state of Victoria is being devastated by wildfires that have killed at least 181 people and untold numbers of livestock. The fires have turned to ruins whole towns, with people trapped and unable to flee in time. It's awful to contemplate, but there is strong reason to suspect that at least…

Society for Neuroscience (SfN) Will Go On

This message has now appeared on the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting site: UPDATE: Southern California Fires & Annual Meeting As Neuroscience 2007 approaches, SfN is monitoring the fires in the greater San Diego County area very closely and we continue to be in regular contact with area officials. While the situation is a tragedy for the affected outlying communities, we have been assured that the convention center, downtown areas, and airport remain open and are not at risk, and that Neuroscience 2007 is not expected to be significantly affected when it kicks off on November 3.…

Orac needs a movie deal. . .

. . .or a spread in Playgirl. Huh? Orac has a nice essay today for your Christmas Eve reading about a USA Today article yesterday by Liz Szabo that called out celebrities for their pseudoscientific proclamations and advice entitled, "Are celebrities crossing the line on medical advice?" So that's where I came up with this thought: it would be great if some folks who talked science-based sense became celebrities so they'd at least have the same platform to counter people like Jenny McCarthy. On his comment thread, I suggested that we can only hope that Orac someday gets a movie deal and…

Hawai'i: doing the right thing

What's not to love about Hawai'i? Well, Honolulu's a bit much, but the island state as a whole seems to understand what it's going to take to beat this whole global warming thing. It just put into a law a requirement that beginning in 2010, all new homes must incorporate solar water heaters. In so doing, Hawai'i becomes the first state in the union to join the solar water heater bandwagon. It follows Israel, where 90% of homes already have them. It turns out that, if you happen to live somewhere with plenty of sunshine, solar water heaters make so much sense you'd have to be an idiot not to…

Whither the ice caps?

Are the ice sheets about to melt away? Andrew Revkin of the New York Times offers a news story and a blog post that explores what the scientists trying to answer the question have to say. Both are worth reading, but I found the "Dot Earth" blog post, which is just as journalistically sound as the "official" story, more interesting. The headline on the blog post is an excellent summary: "Melting Ice = Rising Seas? Easy. How Fast? Hard." For those with even less time than I have to keep up with the flood of information on this more critical question, here are the highlights from Revkin's blog:…

The depths to which creationists will sink

A paper speculating on the mechanisms responsible for the origin of life on Earth gets retracted, 52 years after it was published. Why? Because the author, a secular chemistry professor at Brooklyn College, is tired of creationists using it to support their arguments against evolution. How sad. In his letter to American Scientist, where the paper was published in 1955, Jacobson writes that he discovered some errors in his paper: Retraction this untimely is not normally undertaken, but in this case I request it because of continued irresponsible contemporary use by creationists who have…

Tip -toe through the tipping points

It's the big question that bedevils climate science and politics: how close are these "tipping points" beyond which things get very bad very fast? Tim Lenton of the Laboratory for Global Marine and Atmospheric Chemistry at the University of East Anglia doesn't have any definitive answers, but he makes a valiant effort to explain what we do know in a new essay, "Tipping points in the Earth system." A properly peer-reviewed version is in progress, but for sheer background info, it's already required reading here on the Island. Lenton has made a career of exploring some of the more extreme ideas…

Why are we here?

It's Friday. Time for some idle musing. A former director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator, one Burton Richter, has written an intriguing little essay on the allegedly sorry state of affairs in particle physics. Richter's main thesis is that there's too much "theological speculation" going on in the high-energy and cosmology labs these days. He defines such thinking as "the development of models with no testable consequences" as opposed to proper, Popperian, falsifiable theorizing. That seems to a common theme among many observers, what with all the dissing of string theory. (See the…

The Voice of Reason in the AIDS Crisis

I will second David Ng's plea for everyone to watch or read the farewell speech of the outgoing UN ambassador for AIDS, Stephen Lewis. It's a rare combination of passion and reason, one that should leave every civilized person seething at what can best be described as a colossal failure of democracy's promise. Lewis' speech is a 16-part list of axioms that too many politicians and bureaucrats have ignored for years. Each one is there primarily because public and government sentiment have abandoned the accomplishments of science and rationalism in favor of prejudice and dogma. At the top is an…

Too sexy for my press release

Having worked as a communications officer for more than one scientific outfit, I can sympathize with the outreach guys at the University of Leicester. But methinks they took their attention-grabbing-headline lessons a bit too seriously. A story making the rounds of the science PR wires today asks: What do Racquel Welch and quantum physics have in common? The answer is not a whole heckuva lot. The research they're trying to interest journalists in writing about involves zero-point energy, that mysterious quality of even a vaccuum to hold a measurable level of activity at the subatomic level.…

Tuning a Guitar, Problematically

Today in my recitation we discussed several problems in acoustics. One of them involved beats. This happens when two tones which are very close in pitch are played at the same time. There's a demonstration on the Wikipedia article. I'll solve the problem here since if it confused people in class there's probably people googling it. It's an easy problem, the difficulty comes from a lack of clarity in this section of the book. This problem is Young and Geller 12.54: A violinist is tuning her instrument to concert A (440 Hz). She plays a note while listening to an electronically generated…

Saturday Goofing Off

A quick Olympic question: How would a native of China pronounce the j in Beijing? All the commentators pronounce it like the J in the French je suis, but I've heard that in China the pronunciation would be closer to the J in jingle. I have no idea if this is true, and I'm not at the university now so I can't just ask one of my Chinese friends. Anyone know? Now how about some short items from around the web, which I particularly enjoyed. Here's Swans on Tea and our own Chad Orzel on the (lack of) menace of radioactive bananas and granite countertops. Here's Cocktail Party Physics on the age…