March 6, 2006
There's a kerfuffle in the physics blogosphere these days over the somewhat arcane issue of TrackBacks to posts on the ArXiV, the commual preprint server where researchers can post drafts of the papers that they have submitted to research journals (or, if they're working in high energy physics,…
March 5, 2006
At the Tor party at Boskone, Teresa Nielsen Hayden introduced me to Jim Kelly as "a reviewer." While technically somewhat accurate (I do occasionally post book reviews), and a better answer to "Why are you at this party?" than "I'm a guy with a web site," it made me feel a little guilty for…
March 4, 2006
About my take on the critically important science question sweeping ScienceBlogs, the answer is Cowboy Bebop.
I'm cool with that. I get better theme music than any of the others.
(Totally scientific quiz here.)
March 4, 2006
Seed is meeting their contractual obligation as members of the American media by offering some science-based Oscars. This is a rare year in which I really don't care at all about the actual awards. I haven't seen any of the movies nominated for Best Picture, and I don't really have much interest in…
March 3, 2006
iTunes just threw up a pretty good set of songs that spans almost the full range of my four-and-five-star playlist:
"Solar Sex Panel," by Little Village.
"Mr. Brightside," by the Killers
"I Wish I Had an Evil Twin," by the Magnetic Fields
"Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat," by Bob Dylan
"Swing, Swing,"…
March 3, 2006
Via Matt McIrvin (whose earlier entry on "Nerd Bravado" is also a must-read), the best explanation I've heard so far of the whole "Why are there so few women in scinece?" debate: they got better jobs:
One of my students, we'll call him Bill, in an introductory computer science class said that he…
March 3, 2006
While I would like to be posting cool recipes (with pictures, even!), I'm currently on a somewhat restricted diet. This isn't a terribly serious post, and may slide over into "self-pitying," so I'll put the bulk of it behind the cut.
About a year ago, I had some stomach problems that were…
March 2, 2006
Dennis Overbye writes about popular NASA programs being delayed or cut in order to fund the Moon-and-Mars initiative and support the Space Shuttle/ ISS. Predictably, people who care about actual science are somewhat dismayed-- Gordon Watts serves as a nice example.
Fellow ScienceBlogger Chris…
March 1, 2006
I usually try to save this sort of thing for the weekend, but we're coming down to the end of the term, and today is an especially hectic day. Thus, a list of links that struck me as worth passing on:
First, Paul Kwiat on counterfactual computation at Cosmic Variance. I will get back to this,…
February 28, 2006
Leonard Pitts has the scoop:
Allow me to share with you an epiphany. I think Fred Phelps is gay.
Not that I'd have any way to know for sure, and not that there's anything wrong with that. But it seems obvious to me that Freddie has spent a little time up on Brokeback Mountain, if you catch my drift…
February 28, 2006
I'm currently teaching our sophomore-level modern physics class, which is titled something like "Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Their Applications." We've finished with the basics of Special Relativity and abstract quantum theory, and have entered the mad sprint through applications (Union is…
February 27, 2006
John Zogby, of the Zogby polling agency gave a talk on campus earlier tonight. I have to say, having heard him speak, that whoever came up with the word "wonk" probably had somebody like Zogby in mind-- he had poll numbers for absolutely everything he talked about, and for every single question he…
February 27, 2006
OK, let's say you want to explain something really difficult, like counterfactual computation with quantum interrogation, but you don't want to actually sit down and do all that typing (let's say you have a big stack of lab reports to grade, or something). There's a way to pull this off.
What you…
February 26, 2006
The following will be of interest only to people who were at Boskone, or who for some reason care deeply about what I did there, so I'll put the bulk of the text below the fold.
We arrived at about 3:00 Friday afternoon, parked in the hotel garage, and discovered that the trunk of my car would no…
February 25, 2006
Thursday was "Founders Day" at Union, and there were two major speaking events on campus. The official Founders Day address was given at lunchtime by Rev. Peter J. Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard Divinity School. That evening, there was a second talk, not officially…
February 24, 2006
The votes are in, and have been carefully tabulated by our bleary-eyed accounting firm (that is, me-- I would've posted last night, but I went to see Chuck D speak (because I'm down with the old-school rap), and he went on for more than two hours...) . What looked like a runaway victory for…
February 24, 2006
A Dramatic Presentation of a Classical Analogue to the Quantum Zeno Effect
A Play in One Act:
John Boy: Good night, Mary Ellen.
Mary Ellen: Good night John Boy.
JB: Are you asleep?
ME: No.
JB: Are you asleep?
ME: No.
JB: Are you asleep?
ME: No.
Repeat several more times
Exeunt, pursued by a bear.
February 23, 2006
This is your last chance to vote for your favorite experiment.
February 22, 2006
Buried beneath some unseemly but justified squee-ing, Scalzi links to an article about "counterfactal computation", an experiment in which the group of Paul Kwiat group at Illinois managed to find the results of a quantum computation without running the computer at all. Really, there's not much to…
February 22, 2006
Theory 1: "The Internet exists to make me look smart." --John Scalzi
A question for folks more computer-savvy than I: Whenever I cut and paste quotes from some other page into the editing window on Movable Type, quote marks and dashes get mangled into non-standard characters. They look just fine…
February 21, 2006
Pretty much every academic on-line has already commented on the New York Times piece on student email today. As usual, Timothy Burke says most of what I'd like to say:Much of the complaint recorded in the article also seems much ado about nothing. As Margaret Soltan observes, what's the big deal…
February 21, 2006
A couple of technical notes that may affect your reading and commenting experience:
1) The site developer has tweaked the RSS feeds to include links to the full post, and to the comments section. The comments links on some posts even appear to give a comment tally, which is pretty cool. Of course…
February 21, 2006
I really don't mean to turn the whole blog over to all algebra, all the time, but Richard Cohen's idiocy has proved to be a good jumping-off point for a lot of interesting discussions (and a surprising number of comments, links, and TrackBacks...). The other ScienceBlogs comment on the whole thing…
February 20, 2006
A couple of science-related items from the New York Times:
1) An article on the Cafe Scientifique phenomenon, in which scientists put on monthly get-togethers for the general public, where recent scientific research is explained in layman's terms. It's nice to be reminded that there's still…
February 20, 2006
(It's Presidents' Day, so remember to vote!)
Razib over at Gene Expression offers some thoughts on the algebra issue, in which he suggests some historical perspective: The ancient Greeks were not unintelligent, so the fact that many of us (rightly I believe) take symbolic algebra for granted as a…
February 19, 2006
A preliminary report on the standings in the Greatest Physics Experiment voting:Michelson-Morley: 13Faraday: 7 (including one vote in the Farady post)Roemer: 5Aspect: 4.5 (one indecisive person voted for both Cavendish and Aspect)Galileo: 3Rutherford: 3Cavendish: 1.5Hertz: 1 (in the comments to the…
February 19, 2006
We're back after a fun weekend at Boskone-- my various panels went well, and I got to meet, talk to, and hang out with some terrifically interesting people. I think the "Weird Quantum Phenomena" talk went rather well (it was scheduled as a half-hour talk, but there was nothing else scheduled for…
February 17, 2006
Another reminder that Republicans don't have a monopoly on offensive anti-science stupidity, from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who declares algebra useless in a column directed at a high-school drop-out. If, say, the school asked you for another year of English or, God forbid, history,…
February 16, 2006
The Top Eleven is now complete. Here's the full list of experiments, with links to my summaries:Galileo Galilei: ~1610: Discovery of the moons of Jupiter, and measurements of the acceleration of falling objects.Ole Roemer ~1675: Measurement of the speed of light by timing the eclipses of Io.Isaac…
February 16, 2006
Union College Physics and Astronomy Colloquium
Feb. 16, 2006
Speaker: Dr. Chad Orzel, Union College
Title: "Counting Atoms for Astrophysics: Atom Traps, Neutrino Detectors, and Radioactive Background Measurements"
Abstract: A new generation of neutrino and dark matter detectors is currently under…
