polls
drorzel | July 14, 2009Inspired by one of yesterday's easy questions, a pop quiz for you. The figure below shows a Michelson Interferometer:
A laser falls on a beamsplitter, which allows half of the light to pass straight through, and reflects the other half downward. Each of those beams then hits a mirror that reflects it directly back where it come from. The beams are recombined at the beamsplitter, and then fall on the viewing screen at the top of the figure.
When we add together the light from the two paths, we find that if the lengths of the two arms (that is, the distance from beamsplitter to mirror) are…
drorzel | July 8, 2009I've got a couple more things to say about Unscientific America, probably, but I opted for some more David Foster Wallace last night, and don't feel like typing them up now, so I'll give you all a break. Anyway, what you're really here for is the baby and dog stuff, so here's another poll question from Emmy:
Cats are(survey)
(I think you should be able to choose multiple answers to this one, but I'm not 100% sure I set it up right.)
drorzel | July 2, 2009SteelyKid's nearly over her coxsackie virus, but has just enough spots left that we can't take her to day care. Which means another day of baby wrangling, and another poll question chosen by the dog:
What is the biggest single threat to your household security?(surveys)
Emmy is convinced that we're insufficiently serious about home defense.
drorzel | June 30, 2009Over at Confused on a Higher Level, Melissa has been thinking about undergraduate research:
As a member of the Physics and Astronomy Division of the Council of Undergraduate Research (CUR), over the past few months I've gotten several e-mails about the effort by CUR, the Society of Physics Students, the American Astronomical Society, and the American Physical Society Committee on Education to adopt a statement on undergraduate research. The CUR statement reads as follows, "We call upon this nation's physics and astronomy departments to provide, as an element of best practice, all…