Nitpicker's Paradiso
pontiff | February 16, 2009A correspondent writes to me about a recent article in the APS News describingThe Top Ten Physics Stories of 2008 and notes a very troubling sentence:
Diamond Detectors
Work on the molecular structure of carbon continues to show great promise for quantum computing. This year scientists were able to construct a nano-scale light source that emits a single photon at a time. The team first removed a solitary atom from the carbon's otherwise regular matrix and then introduced a nitrogen atom nearby. When they excited this crystal with a laser, single polarized photons were emitted from the empty…
pontiff | January 22, 2009Part three in my continuing pedantic slow-as-molasses walk through Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell.
List of posts here: introduction, ch 1, ch 2.
SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can't talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don't want the book's main ideas to be spoiled, don't continue reading.
IDIOT ALERT: I'm in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I'm an idiot, please tell me why!
Having, in the past chapter (hopefully) convinced us that…
pontiff | December 30, 2008Moving on to Chapter 1 in my ongoing pedantic plodding through Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. See here for what this is all about. Note that I really am doing this as I read the book (I'm reading it really really slowly), so what I say here may be outdated by the time I get further into the book.
List of posts here: introduction, ch 1.
SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can't talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don't want the book's main ideas to be spoiled, don't continue reading.
IDIOT ALERT: I'm in no way qualified in most of the fields…
pontiff | December 1, 2007Researchers Dispute Notion That America Lacks Scientists and Engineers in the Chronicle of Higher Education is a fine example of how thinking that scientific or engineering degree's are like technical training degrees will lead you to say all sorts of funny things. Yep, it's another edition of Nitpicker's Paradiso.
The article begins with some fun stuff which is ripe for nitpicking:
At a hearing of a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives science committee, Michael S. Teitelbaum, vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, told lawmakers....
Federal policy encourages an…
pontiff | November 24, 2007Paul Davies essay in the New York Times on "Taking Science on Faith" is sure to raise some hackles from the science community. Me, I'd just like to point out how silly some of Davies arguments specifics are. Yes, its another edition of "Nitpickers Paradiso."
Davies begins with a mantra yelled by theists ever since science began getting things right and removing the need for supernatural explanation (here done valley girl style): "But, like, what you're doing must be taken, like, on faith because, like, why do you have, like, faith in science? Wah! Wah!" But lets skip ahead and not deal…