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.
Miscellaneous pop-culture items from the last couple of weeks:
-- I'm apparently a sucker for half-finished music, as I bought Dylan's Witmark Demos album a week or so ago, and Springsteen's The Promise, a collection of stuff recorded between Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, last night…
Earlier this week, I talked about the technical requirements for taking a picture of an interference pattern from two independent lasers, and mentioned in passing that a 1967 experiment by Pfleegor and Mandel had already shown the interference effect. Their experiment was clever enough to deserve…
Physics Buzz: It'll make you laugh; it'll make you cry. It's...Science!!!
A friend once told me that she never watches the Discovery Channel because she feels some sort of obligation to pay attention and retain the information being presented. I can see where she's coming from; science can be…
Fashion's been on our minds this week, what with the whole Rock Stars of Science thing rolling out yesterday, so this week we have SteelyKid modeling the latest in toddler headgear:
This was the culmination of a game that started with her putting her napkin on her head, and declaring it a hat. We…
I'm grading a big backlog of homeworks today, so I don't have time to do any really lengthy posts this morning. Thus, a poll question inspired by going through these homeworks:
You are doing a physics homework problem. How many significant figures do you report?survey software
While the class in…
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Mini-Me
"Fans of cheesy-bad movies will remember Mini-me as Dr. Evil's sidekick/mascot in the Austin Powers movies. Dr. Evil had his share of great lines ("the Diet Coke of evil"), but his true awfulness shone forth in his creation of Mini-Me. Mini-me was…
The big physics-y news story of the moment is the trapping of antihydrogen by the ALPHA collaboration at CERN. The article itself is paywalled, because this is Nature, but one of the press offices at one of the institutions involved was kind enough to send me an advance version of the article. This…
So, if you look at this picture:
You might be asking yourself "Why does Debbie Harry rate Secret Service protection?" But no, this isn't a photo from some alternate universe where the lead singer of Blondie went on to become leader of the free world, it's part of the Rock Stars of Science campaign…
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Business or Town?
"Tenured Radical's thoughtful post on elite presidential salaries got me thinking about the "run the college like a business" canard.
Most of the people who use that phrase, whether approvingly or damningly, haven't personally worked in…
(With apologies to Georg Cantor)
Theorem: There are an infinite number of stupid ways to park.
Definition: We define as stupid any parking method that places any fender of a car outside the legal lines bounding the space.
Proof:Consider a line L through the center of a legal parking space, parallel…
Fall term classes ended yesterday, officially-- my last class was Friday-- so I'm shifting over to spend more time working on the sequel to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, which involves talking to Emmy about relativity. Progress has been slower than last time, largely because the previous book…
An Open Letter to MFA Writing Programs (and Their Students) « Whatever
"So, MFA writing programs, allow me to make a suggestion. Sometime before you hand over that sheepskin with the words "Master of Fine Arts" on it, for which your students may have just paid tens of thousands of dollars (or…
The other night at dinner, SteelyKid kept demanding that we sing. As there's only so many times you can sing the alphabet in a row, I decided to mix it up a little, and sang her the first verse and the chorus of "The Wild Rover" (these lyrics are close to the ones I know, and here's a YouTube…
This is adapted from an answer to a question at the Physics Stack Exchange site. The questioner asked:
It seems that if the coherence length of a laser is big enough, it is possible to observe a (moving) interference picture by combining them. Is it true? How fast should photo-detectors be for…
The Shadow Scholar - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
"I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business…
We had freakishly good weather today, so I went outside to get some raking done. SteelyKid came out with me to help:
We also got some video of the Dinosaur Leaf Attack game we were playing, but YouTube is struggling with the file for some reason or another, so I can't post that. The important bits…
I just realized that I haven't posted anything about this week's Short Story Club entry, "Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory" by Paul M. Berger.This is largely because I don't have a great deal to say about it.
This is another "After the magic apocalypse" story, only this time…
Baubles vs. Hard Truths | Mother Jones
"Here's the problem: most plans to reduce the long-term deficit consist of three things: shiny baubles, smoke and mirrors, and actual deficit reduction measures. You want to minimize the former and emphasize the latter, and on that score I don't think…
SteelyKid and I are currently on our second pass through the Winnie-the-Pooh book my parents got her (which is identical to the one I had as a kid). We read one story every time she goes to bed, so that's one every night, and one at weekend nap times. She only sort of pays attention to the details…
slacktivist: Fix the deficit: Cure diabetes
"My grand scheme for long-term debt-reduction would improve the lives of tens of millions of people while saving everyone else a ton of money. It's an attempt to solve problems, rather than to luxuriate in enduring them and savoring the suffering they…
As mentioned in yesterday's post on ion trapping, a month or so back Dave Wineland's group at NIST published a paper in Science on using ultra-precise atomic clocks to measure relativistic effects. If you don't have a subscription to Science, you can get the paper for free from the Time and…
There's a new physics Q&A site from the folks at Stack Exchange, this one on physics. If you're not familiar with the format, it's a bulletin-board style site where you can post questions to be answered by other users, and people vote the answers up and down, so you can get a decent feel for…
Why Making Dinner Is A Good Idea | Wired Science | Wired.com
"Why does the microwave and frozen dinner inexorably lead to obesity? According to the economists, the cheapness of calories (both in terms of price and time) has led us to dramatically boost consumption. Food stops being something…
Here we see SteelyKid kicking back with Appa, among some of her many, many toys:
Navigating the living room is getting to be kind of difficult, what with all the blocks and cups and balls and other things strewn all over the place...
In other news, SteelyKid is in training to be a genius. Don't…
One of the many physics stories I haven't had time to blog about recently is the demonstration of relativistic time effects using atomic clocks. I did mention a DAMOP talk about the experiment, but the actual paper was published in Science (and is freely available from the NIST Time and Frequency…
I usually have ESPN on as background noise in the morning, but I turned it off today because their increasingly fulsome tributes to Veterans Day were getting on my nerves. I'm all in favor of honoring the sacrifices made by members of the military, but a little decorum would be nice at the same…
slacktivist: TF: Chairface Carpathia
"The villain Nicolae Carpathia probably reminds of more than any other is Chairface Chippendale, from one of my favorite episodes of The Tick -- a warped parody of superhero comics. Chairface, a supervillain, constructs a giant heat ray he plans to use to…
We've just recently completed pre-registration for Winter term classes, so I've been thinking a bit about why students do and do not sign up for things. Thus, a poll:
You are a college student considering an elective class in your major, and you see it has a lab. Your reaction is:survey software…
Having posted not one but two snarky political entries in recent days, I feel like I owe the Internet a couple of ResearchBlogging posts to make up for it. It's the last week of classes here, though, which means I have a lot of frantic work to do. Thus, a frivolous poll inspired by the cinnamon…
Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds - CNN.com
"Twinkies. Nutty bars. Powdered donuts.
For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate one of these sugary cakelets every three hours, instead of meals. To add variety in his steady stream of…
