January 16, 2009
Emptywheel » This Miracle Brought to You by Americaâs Unions
"They're calling it a miracle--the successful landing of a US Airways jet in the Hudson and subsequent rescue of all 155 passengers. They're detailing the heroism of all involved, starting with the pilot and including cabin crew, ferry…
January 16, 2009
A number of people have commented on the big New York Times article about the new intro physics classes at MIT:
At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required -- classical mechanics and electromagnetism -- but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round…
January 16, 2009
This week, SteelyKid shows that she takes after her parents:
"I like books!" she says.
Granted, her liking of books at this stage is not so much about the reading (if you look closely, you can see that she's holding it upside down), and more about the fact that the pages make crinkling noises as…
January 15, 2009
Simple Checklist Makes Surgery Safer - NYTimes.com
"The researchers reviewed the outcome of 7,688 patients who were undergoing noncardiac surgery at the hospitals. About half the patients had surgery before the checklists were adopted, and half after. At the end of the study, the average death…
January 15, 2009
Over at Dot Physics, Rhett is trying to learn his students' names:
I have students sitting at tables (in this class and in labs). As they are working on something, I go around and write down who is sitting where. Yes, this means that you have to actually ask each student what their names is (I hate…
January 15, 2009
Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean writes:
You know what the world really needs? A good book about time. Google tells me there are only about one and a half million such books right now, but I think you'll agree that one more really good one is called for.
So I'm writing one. From Eternity to Here: The…
January 14, 2009
slacktivist: Gerbils and polar bears
"What I'm trying to say here is a bit tricky, because it involves to some extent comparing those Palin supporters to Grandin's neurotic gerbils, and I don't suppose anyone likes being compared to neurotic gerbils. And it probably doesn't help that I'm…
January 14, 2009
A few years ago, the after-dinner speaker at the DAMOP conference banquet was Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger. As I wrote at the time, I think it's safe to say that he didn't make a positive impression on the audience. It also sparked a rather lively discussion afterwards, that some…
January 14, 2009
If you've been a student or faculty member at an American college or university in the past twenty years or so, you've almost certainly run across student course evaluation surveys. They're different in detail, but the key idea is always the same: toward the end of the term, students in every…
January 14, 2009
So, a month or two ago, I started occasionally getting an error message from iTunes, saying that it was unable to save the library file because the disk was full. This seemed improbable, but when I checked, the C: drive did, indeed, have very little space left. I deleted some stuff, restarted (…
January 13, 2009
Haidinger's brush: the unknown sense
"Yes !!! With some effort you can learn to see what remains invisible to most people! Without the help of any instrument you will be able to tell not only if the light you look at is strongly polarized or not, but also if it is linearly polarized or circularly…
January 13, 2009
Over at Built on Facts, Matt Springer is easing his way back into blogging by asking "What is Science?". He offers a simple one-sentence definition:
Science is the testing of ideas.
That's all. Every technicality I can think of is avoided so long as the person doing the science is honest. Create…
January 13, 2009
The scare quotes in the title are to distinguish "Modern Physics" classes like the one I'm teaching this term from modern physics as a general subject, which, of course, all right-thinking people should study in depth. The question comes from a comment by Coriolis on last week's post about what "…
January 13, 2009
Or, Brian Greene Writes a Kid's Book...
This is a very odd book. It's printed on boards, like a book for very small children, but the story is a bit beyond what I would imagine reading to a normal kid of the age to want books of that format. It's too short and simple, though, to have much appeal to…
January 12, 2009
A&M bases bonus on student input | Bryan/College Station, Texas - The Eagle
""I've never had so much trouble giving away a million dollars," Chancellor Mike McKinney said, laughing.
That's because he's never spent it like this. McKinney plans to give up to $10,000 bonuses to instructors based…
January 12, 2009
This is of interest to approximately eight people in the entire world, but SteelyKid got her first taste of "yellow vegetables" this weekend (step three on the road to solid food, after rice cereal and oatmeal cereal). Which provided a nice opportunity to play with the digital video camera we got…
January 12, 2009
There's been a fair bit of press for the article Subtracting photons from arbitrary light fields: experimental test of coherent state invariance by single-photon annihilation, published last month in the New Journal of Physics, much of it in roughly the same form as the news story in Physics World…
January 12, 2009
There was a mix-up in textbook ordering for this term (entirely my fault), and the books for my modern physics course were not in the bookstore when the term started. I made a spare copy available in the interim, and also half-jokingly suggested buying it from Amazon rather than waiting for the…
January 12, 2009
Somebody really needs to arrange a game between the Giants and the Titans, so they can have an inept-off. Tennessee thoroughly outplayed Baltimore in just about every way, but coughed the ball up twice on stupid plays (LenDale White carrying the ball like the proverbial loaf of bread, Todd Heap…
January 11, 2009
The ScienceBlogs upgrade is now complete, so I'm typing this in an entry box that looks different that it used to, and my text is appearing in an ugly font. There are no clearer indications of progress, at least as defined by the software industry.
I had had big plans to get out in front of things…
January 9, 2009
SteelyKid says, "Yay, Movable Type Upgrade!"
ScienceBlogs as a whole is having some work done under the hood, upgrading the back end that we use to manage all the blogs. The system is highly customized, so it's going to take a while-- the site will be static (in the sense of "not changing," not "…
January 8, 2009
Lin leads Harvard to 82-70 upset over No. 17 BC - College Basketball - Rivals.com
Score one for the smart kids. Don't talk to me about Maryland.
(tags: sports basketball)
Michael Nielsen » Three myths about scientific peer review
"The myth that scientists adopted peer review broadly and early…
January 8, 2009
A couple years ago, we revised the General Education requirements at the college to require all students to take a "Sophomore Research Seminar" in their second year. These classes are supposed to be writing-intensive, and introduce students to the basics of academic research. The specified course…
January 8, 2009
Over at the theoretical physics beach party, Moshe is talking about teaching quantum mechanics, specifically an elective course for upper-level undergraduates. He's looking for some suggestions of special topics:
The course it titled "Applications of quantum mechanics", and is covering the second…
January 8, 2009
In the "uncomfortable questions" comment thread, Thony C. suggests:
You say you're teaching "modern physics" so how about a running commentary on the stuff your teaching?
That's a good suggestion, and I'll start posting some sketchy reports soon. First, though, Bora asks:
What is un-modern physics…
January 8, 2009
My senior thesis student this year came to my office today to ask a question as he's starting to work on writing his thesis. I've given him copies of the theses of the last couple of students to work in my lab, and asked him to start on a draft of the background sections. He was worried that he…
January 7, 2009
The Quantum Pontiff : Relatively Right in Front of Your Nose
"In other words, there is a reference frame in which what is "right under your nose" is far far away, and just seconds after the big bang (let's ignore cosmology for now.) "
(tags: science physics blogs relativity)
The Best Jobs in…
January 7, 2009
I get tons of all-campus email, and more and more of these seem to be of the form "Please see the attached Word file, containing a plain text document with minimal formatting that could just as easily have been pasted into the body of the message." Happily, I have my campus email forwarded to my…
January 7, 2009
In response to the call for uncomfortable questions, Jason Failes asks:
What's the best evidence for the Big Bang theory?
The more I read about it (25 years ago to present), the more contrived, ad hoc, and retro-dictive it seems.
At this point, what would falsify the Big Bang theory?
What would…
January 7, 2009
In the uncomfortable questions thread, David White asks:
Ever entertained the notion that attacks on true science from the muscular political creationism/ID lobby might be vitiated by exposure of their great and inexplicable theological flaw (gasp!) dating all the way back to William Paley?
Not…
