Science
oracknows | January 20, 2010If you ever want to get a sense of the scale of the universe and how insignificant our little planet is compared to the scope of it all, here's something really cool to put things in perspective, courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History's Astronomy Picture of the Day:
It'd be really cool if it were physically possible to travel that fast and see what this video shows. It really is amazing, this universe of ours.
drorzel | January 20, 2010The previous collection of things everyone should know about quantum physics is a little meta-- it's mostly talking up the importance and relevance of the theory, and not so much about the specifics of the theory. Here's a list of essential elements of quantum physics that everyone ought to know, at least in broad outlines:
1) Particles are waves, and vice versa. Quantum physics tells us that every object in the universe has both particle-like and wave-like properties. It's not that everything is really waves, and just sometimes looks like particles, or that everything is made of particles…
drorzel | January 20, 2010Derek Lowe has a post talking about things biologists should know about medicinal chemistry. It's a good idea for a post topic, so I'm going to steal it. Not to talk about medicinal chemistry, or biologists, of course, but to talk about my own field, and what everyone-- not just scientists-- should know about quantum physics. Not just humans, either-- even dogs should know this stuff.
1) Quantum physics is real. Probably the hardest quantum idea to accept is the notion of vacuum energy and "virtual particles"-- stuff appearing out of empty space, then disappearing again seems almost too weird…
drorzel | January 20, 2010The college bookstore has set up a display table right at the front of the store with a bunch of copies of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, which is kind of a kick. Some of my students asked me about it in lab yesterday.
The big news, though, is that the Associated Press review ran Monday. I've known they were working on one for a while, now, but didn't see it before it went live. It's not a great review-- it ends "For people who are smarter than the average mixed-breed dog, this might be a good way to learn about the nature of microscopic particles. But I'm waiting for Orzel to write…
grrlscientist | January 19, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Have you read an especially good essay about science, nature or medicine lately? If so, why not share it with the world by submitting the URL for this essay to a blog carnival designed to share excellent writing with others? You don't need to be the author of an essay to submit it for consideration, and this is one way that blog carnivals grow in size and influence: by sharing with others.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog…
drorzel | January 19, 2010Consider the air around you, which is hopefully at something like "room temperature"-- 290-300 K (60-80 F). That temeprature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the moving atoms and molecules making up the gas. At room temperature, the atoms and molecules in the air around you are moving at something close to the speed of sound-- around 300 m/s (give or take a bit, depending on the mass).
If you're a physicist or chemist looking to study the property of these atoms and molecules, that speed is kind of a nuisance. For one thing, the atoms and molecules tend not to stick around long enough to…
drorzel | January 19, 2010Consider the air around you, which is hopefully at something like "room temperature"-- 290-300 K (60-80 F). That temeprature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the moving atoms and molecules making up the gas. At room temperature, the atoms and molecules in the air around you are moving at something close to the speed of sound-- around 300 m/s (give or take a bit, depending on the mass).
If you're a physicist or chemist looking to study the property of these atoms and molecules, that speed is kind of a nuisance. For one thing, the atoms and molecules tend not to stick around long enough to…
drorzel | January 18, 2010A comment on the earlier poll asked about regular series of departmental talks, which the author called a department seminar. We have such a series of talks, bringing in roughly one outside speaker per week, but we call it a colloquium. This calls for a poll to settle the question:
An academic department has a talk by an outside speaker once a week. This is called:(surveys)
If you have a particular reason for preferring one or the other, please feel free to explain it in comments.
drorzel | January 18, 2010Before leaving Austin on Friday, I had lunch with a former student who is currently a graduate student at the University of Texas, working in an experimental AMO physics lab. I got the tour before lunch-- I'm a sucker for lab tours-- and things were pretty quiet, as they had recently suffered a catastrophic failure of a part of their apparatus.
Of course, there are catastrophic failures, and then there are catastrophic failures. Some dramatic equipment failures, like the incredible exploding MOSFET's when I was a post-doc, are just God's way of telling you to go home and get a good night's…
drorzel | January 18, 2010The always interesting Timothy Burke has a post on the economics of conference attendance, inspired by Brian Croxall's essay about why he didn't attend the MLA. The key problem for both of them is that the way the academic job market is structured inn the humanities forces job seekers to attend the MLA for "screening interviews," used to cut a long list of applicants down to the three or so who will be invited to campus.
This is almost a two cultures moment, because this isn't the situation in my part of academia. It's not that the job market is any better, but there isn't the same automatic…
drorzel | January 17, 2010Of special interest to Ohio-type readers: I'm scheduled to do an interview tomorrow, Monday the 18th with Jim Scott of WLW AM in Cincinnati. I'm scheduled to call in at 9:50 am, which looks like it's after the regular show hours, and thus probably a taped interview. It says LIVE in the schedule I was sent by my publicist, though, so I'm not quite sure.
Anyway, if you're in the right area to pick this up, you might want to tune in to hear what I sound like on the radio. It looks like they have interviews archived on the web site, so I'll be spending a little time tonight listening to a few,…
grrlscientist | January 17, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
awild | January 17, 2010
Surfing around the bookstores this morning I see that the much-anticipated Ant Ecology book is out. At $129.00 it's not something the casual reader is liable to pick up. Nonetheless, Ant Ecology is a beautiful volume reviewing the state of the field, and scientists who work on ants should probably own a copy. Or at least get one on time-share.
The book is a collection of 16 chapters edited by Lori Lach, Kate Parr, and Kirsti Abbott. There's a mellifluous forward by Ed Wilson, but then, most ant books have a mellifluous forward by Ed Wilson. Ant Ecology's real strength is that each chapter is…
drorzel | January 17, 2010The Barnes and Noble store finder finally indicated the presence of copies in the local stores yesterday, so we made a trip down to the Colonie Center, where they had a half-dozen face out in the Physics section, and probably 15-20 on the new releases table. Woo-hoo!
(Now I can shift to fretting that they've got too many in the local stores, and will end up returning most of them...)
Anyway, if you're in the Albany area, and want a copy, they have them in Barnes and Noble now.
Miscellaneous other items:
A nice plug from Derek Lowe
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog catches the eye of another…
drorzel | January 17, 2010A couple of nifty bits of news from the British Commonwealth:
The BBC's Magazine Monitor blog noted my Seed article.
Better yet, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog makes Smriti Daniel's list of "the best books to emerge in 2009" in the Sunday Times of Sri Lanka. The other books on the list: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple, Drood by Dan Simmons, and Unseen Academicals by some guy named Pratchett. That's pretty awesome company to be in...
So…
razib | January 15, 2010The Price of Casino-Like Finance Is Higher Than We Think:
However, Maxine suspects that the longest term and most severe damage from the finance casino will not be from government deficits required to shore up too-big-to-fail banks and insurers. It will be from two powerful, long-standing price distortions that have distorted the composition of our labor force and the mix of human capital within it. The first distortion is the past diversion of some our best technical and mathematical minds away from physics, engineering, biology, chemistry, and, yes, even economics, to financial modeling,…
grrlscientist | January 15, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Have you read an especially good essay about science, nature or medicine lately? If so, why not share it with the world by submitting the URL for this essay to a blog carnival designed to share excellent writing with others? You don't need to be the author of an essay to submit it for consideration, and this is one way that blog carnivals grow in size and influence: by sharing with others.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog…
bioephemera | January 14, 2010BldgBlog has a great post featuring Noah Sheldon's photographs of the decaying, abandoned Biosphere 2.
From BldgBlog:
"The structure was billed as the first large habitat for humans that would live and breathe on its own, as cut off from the earth as a spaceship," the New York Times wrote back in 1992, but the project was a near-instant failure.
Scientists ridiculed it. Members of the support team resigned, charging publicly that the enterprise was awash in deception. And even some crew members living under the glass domes, gaunt after considerable loss of weight, tempers flaring, this…
drorzel | January 14, 2010Even when I'm on the road, I continue to be obsessed...
A nice review at Lean Left that really gets Emmy's role in the book:
The dog asks clear questions and Orzel uses those interjections well. They very often serve as a way to clarify, or to bring up questions that the readers probably has, or to deal with obvious tangents. It is a very effective tactic and it serves to lighten the prose at strategic times in the discussion. The dog' voice is skeptical, wise, incredulous and smug (and bloodthirsty. Much of the time, the dog is attempting to use physics to hunt down and, one presumes,…
pontiff | January 13, 2010Missed this over the break: a facebook note about the future of funding of the arXiv. The post points to two documents of interest, the first a statement about support:
...We intend to establish a collaborative business model that will engage the institutions that benefit most from arXiv -- academic institutions, research centers and government labs -- by asking them for voluntary contributions.
and also a handy dandy FAQ about the changes.