Chad Orzel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College in Schenectady, NY. He blogs about physics, life in academia, ephemeral pop culture, and anything else that catches his fancy.
After a short post-March Meeting lag, Physics World is back to announcing really cool physics results, this time highlighting a paper in Nature (subscription required) by a French group who have observed the birth and death of photons in a cavity. I'm not sure how it is that the French came to…
From the first invention of human language right up to the present moment, there has never been an instant when "He did it first" was a winning argument.
Counterexamples?
Is this video a deplorable example of cruelty to animals, or an entertaining way of dealing with bushy-tailed vermin?
(It's unquestionably the work of somebody with way too much free time. It's much simpler to just let the dog out back, and let her chase the squirrels out of the yard. Though she…
Announcing the first round games of the Orbit Region of the 2007 Science Showdown: These games match central physics concepts against one another, in a bid to determine the greatest physics idea, which will eventually face and humiliate ideas from other fields of science.
I'll be announcing the…
The BBC has done a poll about unread books, and found some results that at first might appear surprising:
Some 35% of those who bought or borrowed Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre's story of a US high school massacre, admitted not finishing it.
The figure was 32% for the fourth instalment in the…
Posting has been basketball-heavy of late because, well, there isn't much else going on that I find all that interesting at the moment. More importantly, though, it's the Season of the Bracket...
I'm not the only one affected, of course, though many people who don't care about hoops have to find…
John Scalzi is announcing the launch of a new "collaborative short fiction" site, Ficlets:
What does "collaborative short fiction" mean in this case? Simple: You, as a writer, post a very short (not more than 1,024 characters) piece of fiction or a fiction fragment on the Ficlets site. People come…
The winners of the 2007 Intel Science Talent Search have been announced. First prize goes to physics, as is right and proper:
Mary Masterman, 17, of Oklahoma City, submitted a physics project to the Intel Science Talent Search describing the spectrograph system she built for $300 at home (…
... is blogging about basketball.
Of course, this was inevitable, because college basketball is inherently a liberal sport. There's no sports analogue for welfare and affirmative action better than the "atuomatic bid" system that allows small conference champions into the NCAA tournament, giving…
As threatened in passing earlier, I went through the NCAA Tournament field, picking the games based on the ranking of Ph.D. programs in Physics (I set the "Scholarly quality of program faculty is high" weight to 5, and left everything else off). I entered it on Yahoo, which provides a spiffy PDF…
The New York Times offers an article profiling Terence Tao, mostly focussing on his child prodigy background:
Dr. Tao has drawn attention and curiosity throughout his life for his prodigious abilities. By age 2, he had learned to read. At 9, he attended college math classes. At 20, he finished his…
With the annual Office Pool Season now open, lots of people are queueing up to offer advice on how to fill out the bracket sheets for our national foray into illegal gambling:
Inside Higher Ed offers a bracket based on graduation rates, with a Final Four of Florida, Virginia, Michigan State, and,…
As part of one of my intermittent attempts to be a better person, I've given up atheist-baiting for Lent. And let me tell you, it isn't easy.
I would be remiss in my blogging duties, though, if I didn't point out Rob Knop's recent posts about religion and science. The first is about being a…
We've got unjustified judicial firings, secret prison networks, and unauthorized wiretaps-- all good, solid scandals based on important ethical principles. Meanwhile, in Israel...
Israel has recalled its ambassador to El Salvador after he was found drunk and naked apart from bondage gear.
Reports…
If you can't figure out basketball, but are looking to get in on the excitement of filling out bracket sheets and arguing about seeds, well, the boys at the World's Fair have got just the thing for you...
The Science Spring Showdown 2007
That's right, they've got brackets set up for the ultimate…
There's been a lot of commentary already about how the NCAA selection committee short-changed the smaller conferences. Only six small conference teams got at-large bids this year, half the number from a few years back.
This actually understates the problem, though. Not only dis the committee take…
So, the NCAA brackets are out. Syracuse got left out of the field, which is what Jim Boeheim gets for sneering at the selection committee in public. And also for not playing a game outside the state of New York until late January...
Maryland, at least, is in, seeded #4 in the St. Louis region,…
Everybody and their brother is doing the "which Significant SF books have you read?" thing today, so I might as well play along. The list is below, and just because I'm lazy, I've opted to strike out the ones I haven't read, rather than bolding the ones I have. It's less typing that way.
There are…
A good weekend for science in the Sunday New York Times, with a nice magazine article about dark matter and dark energy, and also a piece about the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), inexplicably located in the Book Review section (the article, that is, not the aliens).
It's probably…
The site was silent yesterday because Kate and I drove down to The City to surprise my grandmother and father (her birthday was yesterday, his is Tuesday), and see a Broadway show (about which more later, maybe). That means a slight delay in the accolades for some little guys, but fortunately only…
Stealing a topic from sports radio: Dick Vitale is a finalist for the Basketball Hall of Fame. Should he get in?
Much as I hate the guy, I think I have to say yes. He's an absolutely terrible game announcer at this point-- more often than not, he's so busy babbling about other teams, other sports,…
Light blogging today, because I'm having muscle spasms in my neck and shoulder again. Blogrolling and typing aggravate that, so there will be minimal posting for the rest of the weekend.
To fill a bit of space, though, here's a call for music recommendations: I bought a whole slew of Crowded House…
Karma is a bitch.
I left work a little early yesterday, because I saw that both Maryland and Syracuse were playing at 2:00, on ESPN networks, and I was finished with my meeting in time to catch most of the second half. Not only did I get home to find that the Maryland game was only on pay-per-view…
Hamish Johnston is live-blogging like a pro, and has entries on invisibility, buckets of BEC, biophysics, and the toy show.
Travis Hime knows more than you do about superconducting qubits.
And that's it for the moment.
I'll post a March Meeting update later, but if you like your conferences a little more wide-ranging, Ethan Zuckerman provides extensive reporting from the TED Conference. The speakers range from Steven Pinker and Murray Gell-Mann to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, so there's a little something for everyone.
This idea is stolen from Colin Cowherd, a pinhead on ESPN Radio, but even a blind pig finds the occasional acorn. I'm going to list a bunch of abbreviations below, and you tell me which are the initials of conferences in Division I basketball, which are agencies of the US Government, and which…
Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake Young has an anti-tenure post that repeats one of the classic mistaken arguments:
1) Tenure supports bad teachers as much as it supports unproductive researchers. I can't tell you the number of bad lecturers that I have had over the years. It has to be like 90%. Science…
Lest it be said that I never say anything nice about anyone from Duke, let me second Dave's recommendation of Al Featherston's article about coaching consistency at the Duke Basketball Report. It being a Dukie publication, he goes on rather too long about the greatness of Mike Krzyzewski, but the…
Two more automatic bids handed out last night:
Central Connecticut: The Blue Devils beat Sacred Heart in a battle of small Connecticut schools, winning the Northeast Conference title behind 25 points from Javier Mojica. The high-profile UConn Huskies lost to Syracuse yesterday in the Big East…
