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August Pieces Of My Mind #1

Reading Matt Ruff's new novel about black Americans in the 50s. Annoyed to find that nothing in the dialogue would sound out of place if spoken by a white American sci-fi fan in 2017. Feared 45 would be the sort who gets the trains running on time and starts wars. Actually can't get trains running at all, wars with TV hosts. Etymological misunderstanding in this novel. Ruff parses the name Braithwaite as Braith-white, when it is actually Brae-thwaite. There's this book about edible wild plants in Sweden named "Can you eat these things?" A more important question is "What population density…

November Pieces Of My Mind #1

Tree-house ruin near the old chapel cemetery on Skogsö. Fear me! I make bad puns in really, really bad Mandarin! One Celsius and sleet. I have to drive for four hours today, so I'm switching tyres first. Skänninge is dying. So many empty shop premises and housing properties. Facades flaking. Railway has cut off the eastern approaches to the town square. Last wave of investment in construction seems to have coincided with the mexibrick fad around 1970. Incomprehensible: the re... play I guess? Of Toto's "Africa" with a few hip-hop passages inserted. Why oh why? Why doesn't the Linköping…

Ten Years Of Blogging

I’ve been blogging for a bit more than ten years now, having started on 16 December, and today Aard turns nine! I was inspired to begin blogging by my wife who started in October 2005. She worked as a news reporter at the time, and journalists were early adopters in Swedish blogging. I was doing research on small grants and applying for uni jobs. In late 2005 we were living happily in a three-room apartment in a former council tenement, my son had just started school and my daughter was a baby. Things have changed a bit over these ten years as we've moved into middle age: both kids are now…

I'm Donating White Blood Cells

I've been a blood donor for over twenty years. The other day a doctor called me and asked me if instead of my normal quarterly donation, I'd be willing to give a few extra hours of my time along with a chunk of white blood cells. I said yes. There's this transplant patient at a hospital in Stockholm. Like all such patients this person, let's call her Joan (I have no idea what her real name is), is on immune suppressant drugs to keep her body from tossing out the transplanted organ. She now seems to have contracted a difficult infection. Unfortunately she's developed antibodies against run-of-…

Om lingalingalinalinga, kilikili

The laughing fellow on the left is Sanal Edamaruku, president of Rationalist International and atheist. The cranky old man in the robes on the right is Pandit Surinder Sharma, a self-described Tantrik Magician. The scene is in a studio on Indian television, where the magician is trying to kill the atheist with sorcery. Sharma had said he could kill anyone with sympathetic magic inflicted on a doll made of dough, and that he could accomplish this in a mere three minutes … so Edamaruku confidently offered himself as a victim. The old fake went on for hours and failed. After nearly two hours,…

'Functional Cure for HIV' sounds like it would be better as a 'HIV vaccine'

You all know me. There are two things I really love: Studying HIV Using viruses for gene therapy One would think I would be over-the-moon about the FDA approving human trials for a gene therapy to stop HIV. HIV! Gene therapy! YAY!! With HIV Cure as the Goal, Gene Therapy Research Expands When this line of research initially emerged, I WAS super excited: GMO in GMOs used to make GMO cells to treat HIV Go read that. Now, just to be clear, that was in no way a 'functional cure'. No one in that small trial was 'functionally cured'. But I still thought it was a great, creative step in a positive…

ERMAHGERD! ERVALANCH! ERVs in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder

ERMAHGERD! IM GONNA TALK ABOUT ERVS ALL WEEK!!! I have a love/hate relationship with the ERV-[insert brain/CNS disorder] 'connection'.  Labs from all over the world, with independent protocols and patient cohorts, see there is something going on with, for example, ERVs and multiple sclerosis.  So there is *something* going on there, we just arent sure what yet.  Sometimes I think the researchers are on the right track, and sometimes I think subsequent papers are a backslide, but *something* is going on. I am totally sympathetic to the folks who do research with brains and other precious body…

Building a better GMO virus for Hemophilia B

When youre trying to cure a genetic disease with a genetically modified virus, you dont have to get a perfect score. You dont have to cure everyone in the trial. You dont even really have to cure them-- Just make their lives a little easier, making it so that they can skip a few invasive procedures, or make it so that you can back off on some more aggressive traditional therapies. Teeny-tiny wins are still WINS. Not because we will take what we can get, but because we can modify those tiny wins and turn them into bigger and better wins. Take Hemophilia B, for example: The scientists in this…

HIVs controlled by HERVs

Technically, its the immune response to the HERVs that can control the HIVs, not the HERVs directly. :-D Ive written about the proposed connection between ERVs and HIV a couple times before-- Briefly, viruses do lots of things by accident.  Things just happen.  Sometimes viruses make us blind for no good reason, or give us cancer for no good reason, 'bad' things happen to us because of viruses we are infected with that are actually 'bad' for the virus too.  But when you are dealing with the population/infection numbers we deal with in virology, and all the blind randomness going on, 'bad'…

Nobel vs Nobel

Luc Montagnier was once one of Gods of Science. Dude was head of one of the groups of scientists who ultimately discovered HIV-1 was the cause of the AIDS pandemic. Wonderful science that amazes me-- The things they could do when we didnt know anything, when they didnt have the technology that I have-- Amazing. Im not the only one-- Montagnier got part of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008 for his part of the work. And then... something went wrong... As cataloged by Orac, Montagnier started pushing any number of absurd, if not blatantly anti-science agendas-- from homeopathy and autism woo,…

The Advent Calendar of Physics: Using Angular Momentum

Now that we've defined angular momentum, the next equation on our countdown to Newton's birthday tells us what to do with it: This is the Angular Momentum Principle, and as with energy and momentum before it, this relates the time derivative of the angular momentum (that is, how quickly it's changing its value) to a quantity related to the interactions with other objects, in this case the torque. So, why is this important? As with energy, with the proper choice of system, we can often ensure that there is no net external torque on the system, in which case the right-hand side of this…

The Innumeracy of Educators, or Mark Twain Was Right

"In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards." -- Mark Twain In last night's post about a school board member failing 10th grade standardized tests, I may have unfairly slighted our students. In response to a comment in which Rick Roach, the school board member who couldn't pass 10th grade math, implied that nothing on the test would be of any practical use, I wrote: As someone who quite regularly has to teach introductory physics to students who struggle with it because they have a shaky grasp of tenth-grade math, I'm really not any happier with the…

Scientific Commuting: The Data

A few months back, I did a post about estimating the time required for the different routes I take to work, looking at the question of whether it's better to take a shorter route with a small number of slow traffic lights, or a longer route with a bunch of stop signs. This was primarily conceived as a way to frame a kinematics problem, but I got a bunch of comments of the form "Aren't you an experimentalist? Where's the data?" Well, here it is: This is a histogram plot showing the number of times my morning commute fell into a given ten-second bin over the last couple of months. The blue…

The Evitability of History

As mentioned earlier in the week, I recently read Charles C. Mann's 1493 (see also this interview at Razib's place), which includes a long section about the colony at Jamestown. Like most such operations, the earliest colonists were almost comically incompetent, managing to nearly starve to death several times, despite being in an absurdly fertile region, and nearly running out of money on multiple occasions before they stumbled on the idea of tobacco as a cash crop (at which point they nearly starved again because all agricultural activity shifted to tobacco, and they needed to force people…

Links for 2011-08-06

Chuck Klosterman on Planet of the Apes and Project Nim - Grantland I'm a pretty massive Planet of the Apes fan, even though I'm never able to watch an entire Planet of the Apes movie without reading a magazine. It's definitely my favorite film franchise that's 80 percent boring. I really, really love the first 20 minutes of the 1968 original film, and I've probably rewatched that opening sequence a dozen times: I relate to Charlton Heston's character2 and adore the idea of gorillas riding horses while playing instruments that remind me of Jonny Greenwood's solo album. There are numerous…

Fringe Thoughts

Last week, I asked for advice on the show Fringe, because I need to be able to speak sensibly about it for the purpose of talking about parallel universes. I've been working through Janne's list of recommended episodes, watching on my laptop while SteelyKid goes to sleep, and have got up through the Season 3 premiere. So, what's the verdict? The three-word review is "Entertaining but maddening." Because it's pretty well done in an X-Files kind of way, but partakes of all the things that drive me nuts about the portrayal of science in fiction. The chief problem with this is that, in fine…

Roller Slide Physics Simulated

I really ought to be doing other things, but this roller slide business kept nagging at me, and I eventually realized I could mock up a crude simulation of the results. This led to the production of this graph: This looks pretty similar to the Tracker Video data from the previous post, which I'll reproduce below the fold, along with an explanation of the math that went into the model: The two graphs are qualitatively similar, other than, you know, the godawful Excel aesthetic of the simulation results graph. One line looks relatively straight, like motion at constant speed, while the others…

What Not to Say to a Pop-Science Author

(Note: This was not prompted by any particular comment. Just a slow accumulation of stuff, that turned into a blog post on this morning's dog walk.) It's been a couple of years now that I've been working on writing and promoting How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, so I've had a lot of conversations where the subject of writing a popular audience book on quantum physics comes up. I've had enough of these now that I can recognize a few different categories of responses, one of which drives me up the wall. I suspect that the same is true for most pop-science authors, so as a public service, let me…

101 Quantum Questions by Kenneth W. Ford

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…

Geophysics Locate Royal Halls at Borre

I had a meeting with my geophysicist buddy Immo Trinks of the National heritage Board the other day, and he showed me an amazing Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) survey from Borre in Vestfold, Norway. Borre is Norway's equivalent of Old Uppsala, with a large cemetery with huge barrows. One was obliterated by road workers in 1852, yielding a fairly well-preserved Viking Period ship burial of the Oseberg / Gokstad / Tune type, which sadly does not survive. Some copper-alloy metalwork from the grave gave the Borre Style its name, defined by knotwork with nicked ridges and Mickey Mouse heads. The…

Internet Public Perception of Sword Find

Monday's entry about the Djurhamn sword rocketed up the lists at the social bookmarking sites, and so Wednesday became the best day for traffic ever here at Aard. On an average day in the third quarter of this year, the blog saw about 650 unique visitors. For Wednesday, the number was 52,200. Someone to whom I owe thanks submitted the entry to Digg -- under the heading "Offbeat News", the section for entertainingly shaped carrots and blurry phonecam clips of poor dear Britney Spears' genitalia. Looking at sites that linked to the entry, I soon found with some amusement that the whole thing…

Trump Calls The Majority Who Voted Against Him Enemies And Losers In New Year’s Message?

More politics-via-fb I'm afraid. I wouldn't trouble you with this except people I know not only post it, but defend it. My headline could instead have been "a plea for toleration". Some... oh dear, I'm pleading for toleration, aren't I? So I'd better be nice and choose my words with care. Some website, "politicususa.com" wrote: President-elect Trump delivered a bizarre New Year's message where he claimed that the majority of voters who voted against him are his enemies and losers. Trump is indeed something of a loose cannon and I wouldn't have been especially surprised to see that he had done…

More empty posturing from Ruloff and Mathis

The producers of Expelled aren't exactly the brightest bunch. Their latest blog entry is a silly whine about me. Paul is one of the stars in the film EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed. He's probably remembering all of the things that he said on camera, when we interviewed him and faithfully recorded it all. That couldn't be making him feel very good. Their movie is doomed if they're relying on my star power to draw in the audiences … and I've noticed that all the early reviews found my performance so unmemorable that they failed to remember what I said. (Trust me, it's the only thing I'm…

Links for 2012-06-25

In which we look at the history of lunch, the breathtaking inanity of the NYTimes's Style section, what kills us then and now, the latest tempest in the blogging teapot, and some of the best songs from one of my favorite bands. ------------ Lunch: An Urban Invention As late as 1755, according to Samuel Johnson’s definition, lunch was simply “as much food as one’s hand can hold” — which, as Laura Shapiro, culinary historian and co-curator of the New York Public Library’s new Lunch Hour NYC exhibition, recently explained to me, “means that it’s still sort of a snack that you can have at any…

Links for 2012-05-18

The poor and their time are soon parted § Unqualified Offerings Why do I bring this up? I bring it up because I read this article about how the poor get trapped in a system that rains shit down on them. No, I'm not here to offer the poor advice on how to find good prices. They know far more about that than I do. Rather, I do this to point out that good decision-making depends in part on having the time and space to make a good decision, somethign that is harder if you are caught in Catch-22 situations, things that pile one nasty consequence after another onto the smallest of mistakes.…

Digging Starts at Sättuna

I've just sat down in a comfy chair on the top floor of our luxurious excavation headquarters at Tolefors. Phew! I am very happy after a first day of excavations at Sättuna where every little bit has fallen into place as planned. (Hope I don't hit a frickin' elk when I go to pick up stragglers an hour from now. [I didn't.]) After an uneventful two-hour drive this morning I came to Linköping and met up with my buddy and co-manager Petter. We loaded the County Museum's digging gear into his car, picked up our first British recruit Karen and drove to the site, where landowner Christer greeted…

Kosaka and Xie, take 2

This is my take 2. See here for my incautious take 1. Take 2 is not as interesting as take 1 - I no longer have an overall theme, and I don't feel inclined to contradict the take-home message. That reduces me to quibbling and a slight feeling of unease, though that may quite possibly be because I now feel biased against this paper for giving me a hard time. So, take their "We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific…

Sunday Chess Problem

This week I have another problem from Milan Vukcevich for you. It was published in 1998. The position below calls for white to move and mate in five. White has two main ideas in this position. One is to move his bishop to f4, with the plan of giving mate on d6. The other is to move his knight to f4, with the plan of giving mate on d5. For his part, black has two main responses to these ideas. By moving his bishop to f7, black prevents the knight mate on d5. And by moving his knight to f7, black prevents the bishop mate on d6. But here's the thing. Black's defenses obstruct each…

The Bottleneck Years by H.E.Taylor - Chapter 78

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 77 Table of Contents Chapter 79 Chapter 78 EcoCops, November 13, 2059 The next day the ecocops arrived. Edie and I were having breakfast, when they pulled up in the lane right below our window. Anna, as she liked to say, was "doing lady things" in the bathroom. There were three of them. They were polite. They apologized to Edie, but they wanted to talk to me -- alone. For the interview they took me downtown to the MacDonald building. We entered through an underground parking lot I hadn't even known existed. They took me up to a seventh floor…

The Bottleneck Years by H.E.Taylor - Chapter 71

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 70 Table of Contents Chapter 72 Chapter 71 Decision Point, February 23, 2059 At UNGETF things were getting worse. Our Earthside measures were not working. Methane and carbon dioxide levels were still rising. There were a lot of grim faces around. I put those concerns aside and turned my attention to Matt's sunbugs. Matt's multimedia files required an advanced and expensive Fraunhoeffer chemical synthesizer which the university did not have. A quick web check showed why. They cost over 5 million credits. I began to appreciate how Matt's money…

Robert O'Brien Trophy Winner: Les Kinsolving

As we come to the end of the month of April, it is once again time to award the Robert O'Brien Trophy (formerly known as the Idiot of the Month award) to a worthy recipient. This month's winner is Les Kinsolving, the Worldnutdaily's intrepid White House correspondent, for this screed about gays and the new pope. In this column, he lists a series of statements by gay rights organizations expressing their disappointment in the appointment of the stridently anti-gay Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope. At no point does he actually dispute the accuracy of anything in those statements, of course. The mere…

Have You Stopped Sodomizing Your Wife, Mr. Scalia?

Wow, I somehow missed this story. Justice Scalia was visiting NYU recently to receive an honor from the law school and while he was there he met with law students and had a question and answer session, as he always does. The NYU newspaper tells what happened: The Q-and-A opened with hostility as audience members expressed frustration with many of Scalia's opinions. In asking about Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v. Texas and his view that privacy is not constitutionally protected, Eric Berndt, a law student, shocked the crowd by asking, "Do you sodomize your wife?" Scalia refused to answer the…

Sandefur fisks Beckwith on the Cobb County Case

Timothy Sandefur has an excellent post at the Panda's Thumb fisking Frank Beckwith's article in Legal Times concerning the Cobb County decision. The crux of Beckwith's argument is that the ruling "presents a Catch-22 that makes it nearly impossible for religious citizens to remedy public policies that they believe are uniquely hostile to their beliefs." There are many problems with this argument and Sandefur nails several of them. I'd just like to expand on one point, which is the almost ubiquitous nature of such complaints and therefore desires for such a "remedy". Beckwith's argument is…

More WorldNutDaily Nonsense on the Boy Scouts

Joseph Farah has already won an Idiot of the Month Award (now called the Robert O'Brien Trophy) for his hypocritical and absurd arguments about the Boy Scouts and the ACLU. Now Hans Zeiger, intrepid Hillsdale College student and So-Con columnist-in-training (you can find his columns on about a half a dozen webpages that I've fisked in the past) seems to be bucking for his own award with this article in the WorldNutDaily. While Farah was up in arms over the decision by the Pentagon not to allow military bases to sponsor Scout troops, Zeiger is frothing at the mouth over a school district's…

Fred Hutchison, Renaissance fool

Please forgive me: you've probably all forgotten Fred Hutchison, the incredibly delusional right-wing paragon of hubris, but I've got to bring him up again. He wrote one of the more painful diatribes against evolution on Alan Keyes "Renew America" site (yeah, that Alan Keyes; you know we're deep in crazytown already) which I ripped up a while back. This is a guy who gets everything wrong, and wraps it all up in the most astonishingly pretentious, arrogant tone. Hutchison himself is a CPA. He thinks he has demonstrated that Darwin and Einstein were all wrong. That's right. He thinks he is a…

George Will on the Christian Martyr Pose

George Will has written a column saying many of the things I've long been saying about the tendency of some Christians to strike the martyr pose. I like the way he starts it: The state of America's political discourse is such that the president has felt it necessary to declare that unbelievers can be good Americans. In last week's prime-time news conference, he said: "If you choose not to worship, you're equally as patriotic as somebody who does worship." So Mark Twain, Oliver Wendell Holmes and a long, luminous list of other skeptics can be spared the posthumous ignominy of being stricken…

Creationists Take On Homo floresiensis

Kelly Hollowell is not the only one making absurd statements about the new Homo floresiensis find. Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis, sees her absurdity and raises it to outright idiocy in this interview with Agape Press. The way this is phrased is absolutely precious: Answers in Genesis founder Dr. Ken Ham says he is always amazed by the reactions of evolutionists whenever a new, so-called "humanoid" bone is found. Inevitably, he says, the evolution proponents say with the finding of a new fossil that creationists have lost their age-old argument with Darwinists. But Ham says this is…

Phillip Johnson and AIDS

Kevin Keith has written an absolutely devestating fisking of Phillip Johnson's latest bit of nonsense. In addition to being the Grand Poobah of the Intelligent Design movement, Johnson is also on the lunatic fringes of the AIDS issue (though as a law professor, he is profoundly ignorant of both subjects and therefore makes extremely silly errors of reasoning when discussing them). It's the standard Johnson screed. I think he just takes the same article and changes the enemy du jour from "the Darwinian establishment" to "the HIV establishment" or "the AIDS establishment". Phil Johnson is…

The Republicans' Temporary Gulag?

If this story is true....wow. That's all I can say. Wow. My 21-year old daughter disappeared from NYC last Tuesday afternoon when walking with friends through a park where no protest was being held -- and was held prisoner -- without being charged -- by the NYPD for three days. The first day and night she spent in an unsafe and inhumane facility at Pier 57 ("Little Guantanamo") provided by the Republican Party. Yes, it was managed by the Republican National Committee. It was leased by the RNC to hold political dissenters who disagreed with the Bush administration. The second two days, my…

Religious Extremism and Domestic Terrorism

The Associated Press reports: A religious fundamentalist was sentenced Thursday to five years in prison for plotting to blow up abortion clinics, churches he disagreed with and gay bars after a judge ruled he is not a terrorist under federal law. Stephen John Jordi, who was turned in by relatives and church members, received the minimum sentence after U.S. District Judge James Cohn decided not to treat him as a terrorist as the prosecutors requested. They had wanted Jordi to receive a sentence of seven to 10 years... Jordi corresponded with Paul Hill, who was executed last September for…

The Hamdi and Padilla Decisions

Not often do I read something on Southern Appeal with which I agree completely, but William Watkins post on yesterday's decisions is right on the money. My reaction to the decisions, like his, is decidedly mixed, but on the whole I was happy to see that most of the justices were not willing to allow the administration to do whatever it wanted regardless of constitutional protections just because there's a war going on. I'm a bit disappointed in the Padilla decision because it's one of those typical Rehnquist-type decisions that rely on the most irrelevant technicalities rather than on the…

The Healing Power of Beer

As noted here in the past, I had horrible stomach problems for a good chunk of last year. This was diagnosed as "Gastro-Esophageal Reflux Disease" or "GERD," which basically amounts to "Your stomach hurts." After a number of deeply unsatisfactory appointments with a gastroenterologist, and some tests about which the less said the better, it eventually got better, and I haven't had serious problems with it for a while now. Wednesday, I aggravated an old shoulder injury playing basketball. I separated both shoulders (at different times) playing rugby, back in the day, and every now and then I…

Increased Particle Masses and Terrible Press Releases

I've got a bunch of EurekAlert feeds in my RSS subscriptions, that I use to keep up with recent developments, because I need blog fodder. One of the really striking things about these is how extremely variable the quality of the releases is. Take, for example, the release headlined New particles get a mass boost, describing results from extremely precise measurements at Jefferson Lab: A sophisticated, new analysis has revealed that the next frontier in particle physics is farther away than once thought. New forms of matter not predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics are most…

USVI: The Ankle-Breaker Crab

The "Ankle-Breaker Crab" (Coenobita iversonii) is a species of carnivorous land crab found in the Caribbean Islands. It closely resembles the ordinary Caribbean hermit crab (Coenobita clypeatus), but is distinguished from its more common cousin by its habit of living in special titanium-reinforced shells, and its diet, which consists primarily of hikers. Coenobita iversonii are most commonly found at altitudes of 150 m or more above sea level, living in colonies of 100 or more in the underbrush near hiking trails. They are the only arthropod known to feed primarily on humans, and they hunt…

You Gripe About What You Know

Via PZ, a blog on biology and science fiction is griping that biology gets no respect, and links to a Jack Cohen article complaining that authors and filmmakers don't take biology seriously I was particularly struck by this bit: Authors, film producers and directors, special-effects teams go to physicists, especially astrophysicists, to check that their worlds are workable, credible; they go to astronomers to check how far from their sun a planet should be, and so on. They even go to chemists to check atmospheres, rocket fuels, pheromones (apparently they're not biology....), even the…

For Reference Purposes

The Female Science Professor has a post talking about types of reference letters. Much of what she says is fairly specific to letters relating to prizes or promotions, but some of her comments are perfectly applicable to the junior faculty job search letters I've been reading by the bucketload lately. Particularly worth noting are her categories of good letters: OK to good letter of reference: clear statement of how well (or not) the reference writer knows the person in question, and opinion with examples regarding research quality or potential in the context of the field. Best: The above,…

Mars and Venus in Grad School

It appears to be a good week for non-controversial posting, so while I'm making enemies, I might as well go all out... The recent call for book ideas from the Feminist Press has sparked an interesting discussion at Cocktail Party Physics, but I want to highlight one comment in particular: There is a lot more of a macho-subculture in the sciences than appears at first glance. For example, the quotes "Nobody gets an A in my class!" Or "You guys aren't cut out for the sciences." I don't know if you found those discouraging, but for young boys, those kinds of statements are challenges. They don't…

The Problem of Praise

The Cosmic Variance post that led to the Cult of Theory post earlier this week was really about a New York magazine article about the negative effects of praising kids for intelligence. It mostly concerns a study done by Carol Dweck, in which fifth-graders who were praised for being smart after an easy test were more risk-averse and scored lower on subsequent tests than students who were praised for working hard: Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. "Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control," she…

The Problem of Charles Murray

Charles "The Bell Curve" Murray is back with a three-part essay series on edcuation, published in The Wall Street Journal: Part I: The world is full of stupid people. Part II: Too many stupid people go to college. Part III: We should spend more money on the tiny fraction of people who are smart. (You can also find them on the American Enterprise Institute site, if the WSJ links rot.) Charles Murray bugs me, because he makes my life more difficult. Not because he's a bold iconoclast challenging the hidebound educational establishment, but because his writing on these topics has a smugly…

Scooped; or, The Making of "Suppression and Enhancement of Collisions in Optical Lattices"

The experiment described in the previous post was published in early 1998, but the work was done in 1997. This was the year when things really turned around for me in grad school-- the optical control paper was done in the summer 0f '94, and '95 and '96 were just a carnival of pain. Everything in the lab broke, was repaired, and then broke again. The lead guy on the lattice collision experiment was a post-doc named John Lawall, who really took charge. He completely re-vamped the lock system for the laser, and spent a huge amount of time re-doing the laser alignment for the trap and the…