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Birth control rocks -- and should be free

This post is part of the Birth Control Blog Carnival put on by the National Women's Law Center. Yesterday I wrote about new Institute of Medicine recommendations regarding preventive health services for women that should be covered by all new health plans without requiring cost-sharing. One of the IOM's recommendations was that all FDA-approved contraceptive methods be available free of charge to women with reproductive capacity, and this was the one that attracted the most opposition. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 99% of women who've had sexual intercourse have used contraception.…

Demography, Destiny, and the Need for Family Planning Worldwide

The saying "demography is destiny" reportedly dates back to 19th-century social scientist Auguste Comte, and it's still popular among journalists. Earlier this year, for instance, Alan Wheatley of Reuters warned about the challenges Asian countries (especially Japan) will face as over-60 residents make up ever-larger shares of their populations. His article also touches on the challenges for countries that face the opposite problem: a large proportion of young residents, or "large cohorts of angry, unemployed young men" prone to causing turmoil. A recent Council on Foreign Relations report…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At the American Prospect, Justin Miller interviews Obama-era Labor Department officials on the future of worker protections under President Trump. Miller takes a behind-the-scenes peek at what it took to pass some of the Obama administration’s key labor rules, discusses the nomination of Andy Puzder to become the nation’s next labor secretary, and addresses rumors that the new administration might be gunning to abolish some Labor Department divisions entirely. Miller writes: Not surprisingly, Obama’s top labor alums express pride in the many worker protections they were able to put in place…

Disease outbreak guarantees: A proposal to build public health capacity in developing nations (rerun)

The Pump Handle is on a holiday break. The following, which was originally published on July 8, is one of our favorite posts from 2016. by Kim Krisberg In 2005, the World Health Assembly adopted a revised version of its International Health Regulations, a legally binding treaty among 196 nations to boost global health security and strengthen the world’s capacity to confront serious disease threats such as Ebola and SARS. A decade later, just one-third of countries have the ability to respond to a public health emergency. That’s why Rebecca Katz thinks it’s time to get creative. “How can we…

Follow Up on Partisan Hypocrisy Post

Okay, I looked up the actual 1995 law that was being debated by Congress (you can find much of that information here). Having done so, I have to admit that there's a much stronger case for hypocrisy on the part of the Republicans than the Democrats. The warrantless wiretapping provisions of the bill, it turns out, actually only dealt with emergency wiretaps - taps that are placed in an emergency, but which still require retroactive submission to a judge within 48 hours. If the judge does not issue the warrant retroactively, any evidence obtained in that search is inadmissable in court. That…

Federal Judge Grants Injunction on NSA Surveillance

Anna Diggs Taylor, come on down. You're the next contestant on Name That Activist Judge. Taylor, a Federal judge in Michigan's eastern district, has granted the plaintiffs' request for an injunction against the NSA's warrantless surveillance programs. That, of course, will mean she will immediately be branded a judicial activist, a liberal ideologue, and a terrorist sympathizer by the STACLU crowd (without any actual legal analysis of the opinion, of course; the mere fact that she did something they don't like is all the proof they need, facts and legal reality be damned). Read the full…

Dave's Solo Performance, Act 2

I thought I was done pummeling DaveScot's immeasurable ignorance on this issue, but then I saw this comment where he interjects his thoughts in bold. It's just astonishing how someone can be so wrong about virtually everything and be totally unaware of it. It's like the perfect storm of stupidity. And you're gonna love how he's backpeddling now. After the commenter informs him of what I've already told him, that even if you got a jury trial the jury could only decide on the issie of damages, not on the constitutional questions, he now says he knew that: This is my understanding as well. Uh,…

I'm a Basketball Fan, That's Why I Don't Like the NBA

Matt Yglesias has a fairly silly article denouncing the NCAA as a "celebration of mediocrity." Jason Zengerle takes issue with this, and provides a nice explanation of why college basketball is superior to the NBA on emotional grounds (and let me just note how happy I am to see our leading political magazines writing about something interesting for a change...). I prefer to take a different approach: in my opinion, what they play in the NBA is a bastardized and degenerate form of basketball, while the college game is closer to the true form of the game. I'll expand on this below the fold. The…

Late Start Live-Blogging

I passed on the first set of games in favor of playing some basketball with the usual lunchtime crowd, but made it home in time to see Bucknell finish up winning against Arkansas, and Northwestern State hit a wild three at the buzzer to beat Iowa. What state is that? That'd be Louisiana. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. Let's get back to it... 5:21: OK, one final note: The Burger King commerical with the giant chicken rodeo is the oddest thing I've seen in weeks. They're really cornered the market on hallucinatory spots about junk food, for whatever that's worth. I'm sure they're…

The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor - Chapter 2

The Bottleneck Years Chapter 1 Table of Contents Chapter 3 by H.E. Taylor Chapter 2 Externalities, May 11, 2055 When I got downstairs, Jon was sitting in one of the big deep chairs in the rec room, the bottle of wine on a low table in front of him. "I have an idea I want to bounce off you," he said, gesturing at the wine. "Okay, but first I have to tell you something." When he is not pushing some political theory, Jon is inclined to be judgemental, especially when it comes to Matt, but he surprised me by laughing when I told him why the marriage was off. "I warned him his prick would…

Jacoby on Atheism

Writing for The Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby offers a typically muddled argument against atheism. The column's title: “Atheism's Bleak Alternative”. Most of the column describes various atrocities perpetrated by secularists against religious people, particularly in England. But it's the last three paragraphs that really merit a response: What is at stake in all this isn't just angels on Christmas cards. What society loses when it discards Judeo-Christian faith and belief in God is something far more difficult to replace: the value system most likely to promote ethical behavior and sustain a…

Messier Monday: An Ancient Globular Cluster, M15

"When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old." -Mark Twain Welcome to yet another installment of Messier Monday, where each week, I'll pick one of the 110 Messier Objects -- deep-sky objects catalogued to avoid confusion for comet hunters -- to highlight for you. Image(s) credit: SEDS -- http://messier.seds.org/. So far, we've taken a look at a supernova remnant, a young open star cluster, and an active star-forming nebula, a testament to the great diversity of these faint, fuzzy objects that might be easily confused with a comet. Today…

2014 may be the warmest year on record

In early December I wrote a post called "2014 will not be the warmest year on record, but global warming is still real." The very first thing I said in that post is that I was going out on a limb. I also discussed whether or not one year mattered, and I discussed the nature of the phrase "X is the Yth warmest year on record," going into details on what "the record" is and how we measure this. I want to reiterate something very important that I mentioned then. Here, we are talking about a combination of measurements from the sea surface and the air just over the land (about where your head…

Who Won The New York Democratic Primary, and Why?

I don't know yet, but as soon as I do, I'll post that below. With 98.5% of the delegates counted, Clinton won 57.9% of the vote, Sanders 42.1%. This puts Clinton at 139 delegates, very close to my prediction of 137. Clinton closing in on 57%, or about 140 delegates. If that holds, this is pretty much of a shellacking for Sanders. Sanders out spent Clinton on ad buys, has campaigned heavily, and has set the expectations as a definitive win. This is Sanders home state (of birth, not representation). Yet he seems to have definitively lost. This will put Sanders even more behind in the…

Californians And Their Drought: New Poll

California voters feel increasingly squeezed by their drought, according to a new USC Donrslife/Los Angeles Times poll. September 11, 2015 — As one of California’s most severe droughts on record continues to worsen, more than one in three state voters say the drought has had a major impact on them and the lives of their families, according to results from the latest USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences/Los Angeles Times Poll. Thirty-five percent of California voters said the drought has had a major impact, 50 percent said it has had a minor impact, and 14 percent said it has…

We get email

By "we", I mean me and Richard Dawkins. I can't even imagine the volume of tripe that has to be flowing into his mailbox, but sometimes people send their important missives to both Dawkins and me (of course, I'm just an afterthought; the body of the letter is usually addressed to you-know-who). I've put the latest example below the fold—it is mildly amusing and definitely weird. The formatting of the text is exactly as received. Dear Richard, so easily you use the word "God" to spread your religious belief that He the Creator of All is simply a delusion. For to be an 'atheist' as you claim…

Venomous: How the Earth's Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry

You can read this book review, or you can just go HERE and listen to our interview with author Christie Wilcox. I promise you in advance that you will want to read her book! But, if you want to read the book review, here it is... Did you ever do anything that hurt, then you had to do it again and you knew it would still hurt, and you didn't like that? Like getting your teeth cleaned, or licking a nine volt battery. OK, maybe you didn't have to lick the nine volt battery, but you get my point. When I was working in the Ituri Forest, in the Congo, taking a walk in the forest was one of…

DI's New Contributor on Judge Jones' Ruling

The Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Division, also known as their blog, has a new writer. His name is Michael Francisco and he's a second year law student at Cornell. His first contribution to the ongoing diatribe against Judge Jones' ruling in the Dover case is the subject of this post. In his essay, Francisco beats much the same dead horse that the DI was beating even before the ruling came out, the entirely false notion that Judge Jones had no justification for ruling on the scientific status of ID. I will show that not only was he justifed in doing so, he had no choice but to do so…

The 9th Amendment Battle is Joined

Bill Wallo of Walloworld has joined my ongoing conversation with Rusty (see posts here and here) about the 9th amendment. Mr. Wallo is an attorney and a writer. Welcome to the fray, Bill. He begins: From the tenor of the discussion, Ed reminds me of me - way back in undergraduate school, after I'd taken a couple of constitutional law classes and everything seemed like a constitutional issue. For the record, I've never taken a constitutional law class and never been to law school. I did take one class on constitutional history as an undergrad back in the middle devonian period. He quotes my…

The ACLU and the NAMBLA Case

Much has been made of the fact that the Massachusetts chapter of the ACLU has taken on a case defending NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association, in a civil lawsuit arising from the kidnapping and killing of a 10 year old boy. There is no more controversial or emotionally-charged issue than this. NAMBLA is universally, and justifiably, viewed as a vile organization that advocates something that nearly everyone despises in the strongest possible terms. Unfortunately, that makes it a perfect target for demagoguery and superficial demonizing, and that is just what we have seen. One…

Weatherman Bob and the Green Screen

Weatherman Bob disappeared today. He was consumed, or maybe absorbed, by his Green Screen. A Green Screen is a screen, green in color, with special properties. A TV studio camera and the equipment it is hooked to replace the green screen with an imaginary background. So, a person who is not green can stand in front of the Green Screen and to the TV viewer it will look like the person is standing in front of something else. This is how weather reporters on TV ply their trade. They look like they are standing in front of a map of the region showing cold fronts and warm fronts and…

Are there more tornadoes because of global warming?

There are good reasons to believe that global warming leads to more storminess, but the exact nature of that transition is unclear and hard to measure. Part of the reason for this difficulty is that a given type of storm may become more likely under certain conditions caused by climate change, while a different kind of storm may become less likely, with the "storminess" overall increasing but doing so indifferent ways across time. Also, the most severe, and thus possibly the most important, weather events are infrequent so it is difficult to see changes over time with any statistical…

Is Solar Energy Totally Bogus or Something that Gives Hope?

I recently posted a simple Internet meme suggesting that if we subsidized solar energy like we subsidized fossil fuels that this could be good. I posted that on Google Plus an it engendered way over 300 comments, many of which attempted to explain, often rather impolitely, that solar energy was inefficient or in some other way bad. I'm pretty sure most of those comments come to us courtesy of the bought and paid for climate change denialist campaign, funded by Big Oil to the tune of many tens of millions of dollars to date. Most of the commenters were saying similar things, most of which…

The expected Powerline slapdown

Powerline. Round about these parts, that name is pretty much a synonym for stupid, and I see they're doing a good job of maintaining their reputation. You'd think they'd learn that whenever they step into the domain of science, their level of ignorance is even more palpably apparent than usual. Their latest embarrassment was prompted by an egregiously idiotic article from Michael Fumento, which catalogs an error-filled collection of so-called biases in science. The assrocket's conclusion? The moral of the story is that the leading scientific journals have been taken over by liberals who value…

Live Blogging Election 2012

I'll be jotting notes here. Feel free to jot notes in the comments. Bernie Sanders re-elected 6:22 PM Central: Virginia reporting good numbers for Obama. Larger turnouts than 2008 in VA. 6:54 PM Central: Senate: 30 DEM seats called, 37 GOP seats. Leaving the polling place today, there was a couple behind me. She said, "Well, that didn't take long." He said "And it was easy. I have a system." "What's the system." "If the person is an incumbent, I don't vote for them." Then, me, in my head "... idiot ..." More money spent this year in Minnesota's 8th district than in all races in that…

Ooops... we left all the children behind

"No Child Left Behind" was doomed to be a failure, because it was ill concieved, politically cynical, and underfunded. But like the War in Iraq, the Patriot Act and Tax Breaks for the Rich, and all the other initiatives of the Bush Administration that never should have happened, we have been saddled with this melt down of a policy for over a decade. "NCLB" was one of the first policies implemented by Bush. The evidence that the approaches developed under this policy have failed has been mounting for years, and the supporters of NCLB have been dropping like flies on no-pest strip. The…

California's Drought and California's Response

Last month, listening to NPR, I learned that Sacramento, California is struggling with the installation of water meters on homes. There were two things I learned, both ungood: 1) Sacramento was installing water meters on homes, meaning, that they hadn't been there all along. I found that astounding because water meters are the first line of defense in controlling water use. Charge people for the water and they'll pay attention to the drippy faucet, they'll be more likely to remember to turn off the sprinkler, maybe they'll think about investing in more efficient water-using appliances. Or…

Opposite Day: When the data in an ERV paper says the opposite of what the authors say

A paper was recently brought to my attention via a Creationist. It was the usual 'HAHAHA! Oh you silly Creationist! This paper says the opposite of what you think it says!', and I was going to write a blog post along that usual theme. Fazale Rana, 'Vice President' of 'Research and Apologetics' at Reasons to Believe said on Facebook: What happens when the best evidence for biological evolution becomes evidence for intelligent deign? Retroviruses, long thought to be junk DNA, play a role in regulating gene expression in the brain (link to ScienceDaily about the article) The article has some…

Recent Genre Fiction Reading: Schroeder, Buckell, Cole

I've gotten out of the habit of booklogging recently, which is sort of a shame, because it means I've also gone back to the problem that led Kate and me to start booklogs in the first place: people ask what I've been reading recently, and I can't remember... As a sort of corrective to this, though, here's a post lumping together short comments on my three most recent reads: Karl Schroeder's Ashes of Candesce (excerpt at Tor.com), Tobias Buckell's Arctic Rising (excerpt at Tor.com), and Myke Cole's Shadow Ops: Control Point (which isn't a Tor book, so they didn't do an excerpt). Ashes of…

Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen

This coming June will mark ten years since I started this blog (using Blogger on our own domain-- here's the very first post) and writing about physics on the Internet. This makes me one of the oldest science bloggers in the modern sense-- Derek Lowe is the only one I know for sure has been doing this longer than I have, and while Bob Park's "What's New" and John Baez's "This Week's Finds" have been around longer, they started out as mailing lists, not true weblogs. As such a long-term denizen of the Internet, I'm pretty much contractually obliged to have an opinion about Michael Nielsen's…

Quantitative Analysis of Bullshit in Physics Abstracts

Via Bee, we have the BlaBlaMeter, a website that purports to "unmask without mercy how much bullshit hides in any text." Like Bee, I couldn't resist throwing it some scientific text, but rather than pulling stuff off the arxiv, I went with the abstracts of the papers I published as a grad student, which I wrote up on the blog as part of the Metastable Xenone Project a few years ago. The abstracts, their scores, and some comments below: Paper 1: Optical Control of Ultracold Collisions: Near-resonant light is used to modify the collision dynamics of magneto-optically trapped metastable xenon…

(Sub)Genre Is a Marketing Convention

(Alternate Title: "Epic Fantasy Is What We Point to When We Look Down on Epic Fantasy.") I've been on a bit of an epic fantasy kick lately, evidently due to the thousand-ish pages of The Crippled God not being enough. This means that I was in a weirdly appropriate mental space to catch the recent furor over a fairly dumb NYTimes review of A Game of Thrones on HBO that said some snide things about the genre, particularly that women don't read it. Which has led to a lot of discussion of what epic fantasy is, and whether women read or write it. A lot of what's been said is dumb in various ways…

Is Psychotherapy Superstition?

[More blog entries about psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, anxiety, depression, parenting; psykologi, psykiatri, psykoterapi, ångest, depression, föräldraskap.] I recently had a book on popular psychology recommended to me and found it absolutely dire. And today's paper reports that most of Sweden's university programs for psychotherapists have been found to be substandard and will be closed down unless they improve dramatically. This has inspired me to write something about late 20th century psychotherapy, a.k.a. humanistic psychology, a movement that has been a background presence for…

The Psychology and Improbability of Shuffle Play

Kate and I went down to New York City (sans kids, as my parents were good enough to take SteelyKid and The Pip for the weekend) this weekend, because Kate had a case to argue this morning, and I needed a getaway before the start of classes today. We hit the Rubin Museum of Art, which is just about the right size for the few hours we had, got some excellent Caribbean food at Negril Village, then saw The Old Man and the Old Moon in a church basement at NYU (the show was charming, the space was stiflingly hot by the end). All in all, a good weekend. I drove back Sunday afternoon, and was…

REPOST: Horowitz vs ERV

This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P I dont trust them staying up at Blogger, and the SEED overlords are letting me have 4 reposts a week, so Im gonna take advantage of that! I am going to try to add more comments to these posts for the old readers-- Think of these as 'directors cut' posts ;) The beast... he has reemerged... Heres the link to the debate (Thank you Reggie!!) Yay! I finally feel better! Turns out I had a freak combination of a cold and allergies. So a few puffs of Flonase and a Claritin perked me right back up! Finally! So heres my pov from the '…

The Cherry Blossom Classic, Conclusion

Time for the big finale. The Monday morning game. Since I had already requested a bye for the final round, this was my last chance to make a respectable result. Here's how it went down. I was playing black. My opponent sported a rating of 1983. But he also had a formidable Russian name, and I figure that counts for another fifty points. He opened with 1. Nf3. Cagey! You're not quite sure what you're going to get with this. Maybe an English. Maybe a Reti. Maybe a transposition into a standard d4 or e4 opening. I decided to steer the game toward my normal Orthodox Queen's Gambit, and…

Judge Birch Hammers Congress and President

We hear constantly from conservatives about "activist judges" and how horrible they are. One of the grand ironies of the Schiavo case is hearing conservatives complaining that judges aren't being activist enough while still simultaneously complaining about activist judges. It's absolute proof that "activist judges" is a meaningless catchphrase that only really means "judges making rulings I don't like." We hear this catchphrase constantly from those who say that we must have more conservative judges on the court because they won't be "activist", yet in the Schiavo case conservative judges…

Rosenhouse on Dean on Lynn on ID

No, that's not a pyramid setup of the sort done at cheerleading camps or Iraqi prisons. One of the good things about blogs is the ability for response and counter response. In this case, Barry Lynn wrote an op-ed piece about ID; Darrick Dean wrote a critique of Lynn's article; and Jason Rosenhouse wrote a critique of Dean's critique. And now I'm writing a follow up to Rosenhouse's critique of Dean's critique of Lynn's article. Got it? Good. But I want to focus on this statement made by Dean: The Rev. Barry W. Lynn is executive director of the far left, anti-religion, anti-constitution - yet…

Gay Parents and the Religious Right

Here's yet another example of those "family values" we're always hearing about. In Florida in 1995, Judge Joseph Tarbuck ordered that Mary Ward's 11 year old daughter be taken out of her mother's custody and given to her father, based solely on the mother's lesbianism (as is normal in such cases, there was no evidence at all that Ward was a bad mother). In his decision, Judge Tarbuck says, "This child should be given the opportunity and the option to live in a nonlesbian world." He doesn't bother to mention that the father had spent 9 years in prison for killing his first wife in a custody…

Rowe Fisks Feser

Jon Rowe has a fairly good fisking of a post by Ed Feser on the alleged "unnatural" nature of any sexual act that is not intended for procreation. I think he gives Feser too much credit for coherency, though. Feser's argument is not terribly coherent. Here is Feser's argument in a nutshell: the sexual organs were designed specifically for the purpose of procreation and for no other purpose. Hence, any use of the genitals for any purpose other than procreation is "unnatural", not merely in the sense of being used for something other than its intended purpose, but in the far stronger sense of…

Yes, it's a Sports Post

If you're looking for something substantive today, you best move along to the next blog. I'm just not motivated to write anything serious today. But I did find out that the immortal Sports Guy has his own domain now and, since he quit being a writer for the Jimmy Kimmel show, he's posting stuff nearly every day. If you're a fan of sports, sarcastic humor, or both, this is a must-read every day. And in honor of him, my own thoughts on what has been the strangest NBA off season in recent memory. Burning Questions for Next Season 1. Who is the big winner in the Shaq v. Kobe steel cage death…

Bad Anti-Evolution Arguments Again

Remember that webpage I spent some time fisking the other day with the bad anti-evolution arguments? Well some of my readers went over there and engaged the writers directly and boy are they getting the runaround. The hand-waving is rather fascinating to watch. For instance, Rich Hughes gave a couple of rather detailed posts disproving specific claims made in the post and the Bill Tingley replied: You can go all day long about why you think Darwinism explains everything and Intelligent Design explains nothing. The point of my article still eludes you. No, Bill, the facts still elude you. For…

Messier Monday: A Diffuse, Distant Globular at the End-of-the-Marathon, M72

"Every star may be a sun to someone." -Carl Sagan Welcome back to yet another Messier Monday! Each week, we highlight one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the Messier catalogue: Charles Messier's legacy to comet-hunters and amateur astronomers, pointing out some of the most easily visible deep-sky objects as seen from our vantage point on Earth. Image credit: Yvett Bass (M1-M55) and Josh Sanford (M56-M110), via Dan Bruton of SFASU. Once-a-year, around the new Moon nearest to the vernal equinox, many amateur astronomers around the world attempt to view all 110 objects in the same…

Many Worlds, Many Headaches

So, I've put myself into a position where I need to spend a substantial amount of time thinking about weird foundational issues in quantum mechanics. This has revealed to me just why it is that not that many people spend a substantial amount of time thinking about weird foundational issues in quantum mechanics. Let's consider a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, of the type shown in the figure at left (click the figure to see the original source). A photon (or an electron, or an atom, or any quantum particle) enters the interferometer at the lower left, and is split onto two paths by a 50-50…

Teaching Science in SF

In a comment to my Worldcon wrap-up, "fvngvs" asks a question following up on the science in SF panel: So Chad, now that you've had some time to think about it, can you think of a list of books/stories with a really good treatment of science concepts? It's a good question, and deserves a full post in response. It also probably deserves better than to be posted on a Saturday morning, when nobody's reading, but oh, well. Anyway, the question stems from a question posed during the panel, asking for books or stories that do a particularly good job presenting some science concept or another. I…

Myths of Science Writing

I'm mired in lab grading at the moment, which is sufficiently irritating that I usually have to decamp to someplace with no Internet access, or else I spend the day blogrolling instead. Or, really, just hitting "Refresh" over and over on Bloglines, hoping that somebody in my RSS subscriptions has posted something new. A big part of the problem is that a large number of people have a badly mistaken view of science writing. I'm not sure where they get this from-- the first-year students in the intro course already have a fully developed case, but many of them claim not to have written lab…

Taking exception to Jake

I'm a little late to this tea party, since Jason Rosenhouse and Larry Moran have already trampled on the biscuits and kicked over the teakettle, but I have to register my disagreement with this polite and sincere article by Jake Young. It's got several elements that bug me badly. First of all, don't try to tell the New Atheists (insert obligatory detestation of the term here) what the New Atheists believe unless you've actually got some understanding of what the New Atheists believe. This is a mistake I'm seeing repeatedly now. The New Atheist Camp (for lack of a better term) asserts that…

The Consequences of Poor Science Popularization

You may be wondering whether the recent spate of blogging about science in popular media and peer review (by the way, you should definitely read Janet's two posts on these issues) has any connection to my talk next month at the Science in the 21st Century workshop. Yes, yes it does-- I figure that I'm going to be getting so little sleep in the next few weeks that I need as much of a head start as I can manage. Of course, this also means that I will continue to go on and on about this topic for a little while yet... The thing that I think is most critical here is to recognize that the poor…

Why Antibunching Equals Photons

In my post about how we know photons exist, I make reference to the famous Kimble, Dagenais, and Mandel experiment showing "anti-bunching" of photons emitted from an excited atom. They observed that the probability of recording a second detector "click" a very short time after the first was small. This is conclusive evidence that photons are real, and that light has discrete particle-like character. Or, as I said in that post: This anti-bunching effect is something that cannot be explained using a classical picture of light as a wave. Using a wave model, in which light is emitted as a…

The Full Seminar Experience

Avi Steiner emailed me with a set of questions that are too good not to turn into a blog post: Being a math/science major at a small liberal arts college, I unfortunately never get the "full" experience of a math/science talk. Since I do plan on eventually attending grad school, I thought it might be beneficial to get an idea as to what the aforementioned "full" experience is. Therefore, I present to you and your readers the following questions: 1. At what point in a group's/individual's research will they choose to give a talk? 2. What sort of questions are asked? 3. Are there any recurring…