Nathan
lundblad | September 9, 2007Well, as a lot people seem to have written in my high-school yearbook, "it's been real."
I've enjoyed standing in for Dr. Oilcan and appreciate his gracious offer to have an experimentalist representative on his guest-blogging squad. As Aaron said, I don't know how he does it, but whatever juice he's on, he sets a high bar. The number of posts I had envisioned before I started outnumbers the actual number by about a factor of three, and I'm sure you're sad at the lack of six more book reviews and at least two interminable posts about rugby (Caltech rugby in particular). Maybe next…
lundblad | September 7, 2007Ah, what loyal citizen of California doesn't remember singing the state song, I Love You, California, every morning. Or was it saying the Pledge...my memory's hazy.
The reason I bring up state songs is not to bring up the ill-fated campaign to make "Born to Run" the New Jersey state song (this town rips the bones from your back; it's a death trap, it's a suicide rap; we've gotta get out while we're young.) but rather to point out that the state I currently work in (but do reside in; I'm taxed but not represented, myself) has its own state song, Maryland, My Maryland! Astounding, jaw-…
lundblad | September 7, 2007I should probably sneak in a few posts before Chad gets back. It's been a hectic week, as the time came for my current experiment (as it does for all experiments) where one stops futzing around trying to make things better, and takes the actual data, with an eye to moving on. This means that you want good, clean runs with lots of attention to detail (as opposed to the semi-qualitative exploration of parameter space, when you're first seeing an effect), and the first thing life-wise that suffers during this phase is blogging.
But the second-worst blog post in the world is the why haven'…
lundblad | August 31, 2007A little while ago, intrepid reporters from the Baltimore Sun dropped by my lab to investigate the newsworthiness of a paper (also on the ArXiv) that had just been published, about which I might talk a little bit before Chad gets back. Surprisingly, the article actually got published, complete with photo and great quotes.
I'm tragically not in the picture, as I was gone that day, but also wasn't an author on the paper; the data were taken last summer, before my arrival, which gives you an idea of the delay in this business between data, writing, and publishing. Highlights from the…
lundblad | August 30, 2007A long time ago, all you needed to think about and record the data you were interested in was a pen and some vellum, and maybe a few candles and a trusty manservant. Somewhere along the line, the chart recorder got invented, and when combined with the oscilloscope and those awful scope cameras, a whole new world of data recording and storage was available. Having one's own ENIAC was pretty helpful, too, especially once manservants (and really, all of bored-noble-of-means science) became gauche.
These days we're a little bit more sophisticated. Computers are indispensable parts of…
lundblad | August 29, 2007I'm here to depress you a little.
First off, we have the upcoming anniversary of Katrina, about which Jane Dark has a tough tale to tell:
The abandonment of a great city to time and tide is indeed both symptom and mark of empire on its downhill slide; it bears noting as well that pathetic, delusional and desperate regimes are equally an indicator of this decline.
I'm interested in what she has to say, but Ozymandias references are sooo AP English. She also disses on Stardust here, but I'm not touching that with a ten-foot Worldcon program.
Second, we have gender issues in physics…
lundblad | August 29, 2007But he's not cooler than me. Which is one of the things I thought of several times while reading Spook Country, his new novel. If you don't want the long version, here's the gist: it's decent, he's still pretty good, buy it in hardcover, move to Vancouver, buy a Powerbook, learn Mandarin, get hooked on benzos, run a startup involving art, and find yourself some new cocktails to drink.
Minor spoilers ahead, but no big ones.
I really wanted to love this one. Gibson's of course been a big part of my life since I was a wee one; Neuromancer is one of the few books I've been…
lundblad | August 24, 2007I'm off to Denver for a long weekend; two friends of mine are getting married (both PhD scientists, and exemplars of the two-body problem: one's doing a postdoc at Princeton, the other at MIT...) I get to wear a tux, which is nice, because no one looks bad in a tux. In fact, a tux makes all guys looks hot. I wish I owned one myself, or more properly, got invited to more events that would make owning one even remotely sensible.
I have a couple half-days to kill while I'm there...any recommendations for things to do in Denver when you're there?
Fiction for the plane: (I'm bringing some…
lundblad | August 23, 2007Some things I've noticed lately:
Anton Zeilinger (Vienna) has a blog. It's in German, but that shouldn't be a problem, right?
I found that out at Michael Nielsen's place, where he's started blogging again after a little hiatus.
In an effort to improve on my bibdesk+bibtex+folder-full-of-local-pdfs system, I've been playing around citeulike, Papers, and Nielsen's Academic Reader. Papers is crippled for physicists by its sole reliance on PubMed for metadata, but shows a lot of potential. I'm also definitely curious to see where Academic Reader goes as it grows; as it's being developed…
lundblad | August 18, 2007I see below that (in what comes as a total surprise) the string thread has already gotten lively. As an experimentalist doing quantum mechanics at the ultra-low-energy end, I don't have a strong opinion on string theory qua theory, and I really don't have a strong opinion on the sociology-of-theory business, beyond saying that I'm not a cynic, and that I find articles in the popular press about Str1ng Warzz a bit tacky.
I'm also not really qualified to weigh in: my only particle theory background was a year of QFT from a phenomenologist out of Peskin & Schroeder, and while I came…
lundblad | August 18, 2007While I'm sure there will be a lot of chatter around here in the next few weeks about the vacuum (or, God help me, vacua), I feel like I should lay the groundwork by talking about laboratory vacuum. I know I'm here to talk about cold atoms and the hot stuff going in in experimental physics right now, but I've spent a lot of time in the last couple days dealing with vacuum, and I want to tell you about it.
If you want to do most sorts of atomic physics experiment, it's essential that you isolate what you're interested in studying (atoms) from stuff that will either knock those atoms away,…
lundblad | August 17, 2007Well, I just flew in from DC, and boy, are my arms tired. But seriously, folks....
It's a fine thing to be asked to guestblog by the eminent Dr. Oilcan, and I'll do my best to entertain you sporadically over the next few weeks. Like he said, I first met Chad back in his Usenet days, which was back in my Usenet days as well. That's obvious, yeah, but it's key that we both refer to time on Usenet as long past. I haven't read or posted to a newsgroup in five years, and even then my interest had been pretty much dead for a couple years.
I first encountered Usenet as a wide-eyed…
drorzel | August 16, 2007As mentioned several times hereabouts, Kate and I are headed to Japan on Saturday, where we'll be spending three weeks touring around and attending the World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama. We will have at least some Internet access, and I may post the occasional travel update from Japan, but I'm not going to try to schedule three full weeks worth of posts to keep the blog going during my absence.
If, for some strange reason, you find that you are wholly dependent on Uncertain Principles for your computer-based entertainment needs, have no fear-- I'm not going to leave you totally…