polls
drorzel | May 31, 2010Today is Memorial Day in the US, which is a holiday to honor the dead of our various wars. It's also the traditional start of summer-type activities, and most people spend it at cookouts and parades and that sort of thing. I say "most people," because our trimester calendar means that we're still in session, and today is a class day like any other, except most of the administrative staff are taking the day off.
In honor of this, a poll:
Which of the following holidays is most annoying to have to spend at work?online survey
The serious options in the poll are all official holidays that are…
drorzel | May 25, 2010I'm going to be spending the bulk of today in transit between Albany and Houston, with a layover in Orlando (whee!), so here's a pair of related poll questions for you to consider:
The most enjoyable way to travel between two cities in the continental US is:customer surveys
The least enjoyable way to travel between two cities in the continental US is:Market Research
I think the answers are pretty clear, but I'm interested to see what other people think about the subject.
drorzel | May 20, 2010I'm home with SteelyKid today, because Shavuot is important enough to close the JCC for two days. This will mean essentially no Internet for me, as it's difficult to type when you're lying on the floor being jumped on by a toddler.
As a filler post, let me take a cue from Making Light and offer you some analogies:
Quantum Mechaincs is to Newtonian Mechanics as:survey software
Choose only one, and be prepared to defend your choice in an essay of no more than 500 words, using examples drawn from the reading.
drorzel | May 12, 2010No Links Dump today because a combination of work and a nasty cold kept me off the Internet most of yesterday. Here's the moral equivalent, though: a poll question brought to you by the letters "U" and "K" and the song "Gimme Sympathy" by Metric:
Who would you rather be?online surveys
The song is unclear on exactly what criteria you should be using to judge whether you'd rather be the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, so feel free to invent whatever criteria you like. Feel free to explain them in the comments, as well.
And I suppose there's no way I can stop you from complaining that Elvis/…
drorzel | May 9, 2010One of my many character weaknesses is a fondness for the kooky UFO programs run on the History Channel and other educational cable networks. The nuttier the better-- there's something about the credulity and self-delusion displayed by the "researchers" they trot out that I find really hilarious.
I have to say, though, that they've outdone themselves with this new Ancient Aliens series. To the point where it almost has to be a put-on-- last week, they had a pudgy guy with wild eyes stating that stone obelisks around the world were really receivers in a global energy distribution network based…
drorzel | May 6, 2010Tomorrow is the annual Steinmetz Symposium at Union, where students who have done some sort of research present their results. Which means that today there are a lot of students fretting about having to give a public presentation tomorrow.
Just to remind them that there are worse things than giving a research talk to a fairly sympathetic audience, here's a poll about scary things:
Which of these things frightens you the most?Market Research
So, you see, it could be a lot worse...
drorzel | May 4, 2010As James Nicoll is fond of saying, context is for the weak. So here's a context-free poll regarding the reporting of election results:
Releasing a rank-ordered list of candidates with vote totals after a contested election is:online survey
If you'd like to explain what context you might imagine this to have in the comments, that could be fun to see.
drorzel | May 3, 2010Voting has closed on the Laser Smackdown poll, with 772 people recording their opinion on the most amazing of the many things that have been done with lasers in the fifty years since the invention of the first working laser (see the Laserfest web site for more on the history and applications of lasers). The candidates in the traditional suspense-building reverse order:
Lunar laser ranging 22 votes
Cat toy/ dog toy/ laser light show 41 votes
Laser guide stars/ adaptive optics 46 votes
Holography 47 votes
Laser eye surgery 53 votes
Optical storage media (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray) 60 votes
Laser frequency…
drorzel | May 2, 2010With over 700 votes cast in the Laser Smackdown poll in honor of the 50th anniversary of the laser, laser cooling has opened a commanding 20-vote lead in the race to be the Most Amazing Laser Application of All Time. If you prefer one of the other options, you have only six hours left to change the final outcome:
Which of the following is the most amazing application of a laser?Market Research
Voting will remain open until midnight, with the ultimate winner announced on Monday, May 3rd. So get reading, and get voting. One vote per computer per user, please-- this is Serious Science.
drorzel | April 30, 2010I'm off to Williamstown this afternoon, to talk about research and alsoHow to Teach Physics to Your Dog. If you need blog-based entertainment, though, here are some shiny new radio buttons for you to click:
You're a beam of light: quick, what's your polarization?online survey
I won't offer a personality analysis based on these results, but after enough people vote, we will be able to determine the angle between this blog's readers and the horizontal. So that's something. Of course, it would require several more polls for full quantum state tomography...
(If you're new here, or ok with old…
drorzel | April 30, 2010We're just over 600 votes in the Laser Smackdown poll in honor of the 50th anniversary of the laser, as of early Friday morning. I notice that it has moved off the front page of the blog, though, so here's another signal-boosting repost, just so we have as many votes as possible, to establish maximum scientific validity when we declare the winner the Most Amazing Laser Application of All Time
Which of the following is the most amazing application of a laser?Market Research
Voting will remain open until next Sunday, May 2, just two days from now, with the ultimate winner announced on Monday,…
drorzel | April 26, 2010As of 1:45 Monday, 217 people have cast votes in the Laser Smackdown poll. That's not bad, but it's currently being handily beaten by the 271 people who have voted for a favorite system of units.
The nice thing about using actual poll services for this sort of thing, though, is that I can re-post the poll to boost signal a little. So, here it is again, a list of the twelve most amazing laser applications suggested by my wise and worldly readers, with links to short explanations of the pros and cons of each:
Which of the following is the most amazing application of a laser?Market Research…
drorzel | April 26, 2010I'm currently enjoying the high, thin whistle of an impending deadline, so here are a couple of poll questions about infuriating behaviors to pass the time. The first is about people:
Which of these is more infuriating to read/watch/hear?online surveys
The second about presentations:
Which of these talks is more infuriating to listen to?Market Research
My answers to these are probably a big part of why I sometimes have trouble with the Internet and the people on it. I'm interested to know what other people think, though. And while the polls themselves are binary choices, feel free to leave…
drorzel | April 23, 2010In 1960, the first working laser was demonstrated, and promptly dubbed "a solution looking for a problem." In the ensuing fifty years, lasers have found lots of problems to solve, but there has been no consensus about which of the many amazing applications of lasers is the most amazing.
Now, in 2010, as we celebrate the anniversary of the laser, we finally have the technology to definitively answer the question: radio-button polls on the Internet!
Which of the following is the most amazing application of a laser?Market Research
Each of the choices above links to a post I wrote here giving you…
drorzel | April 22, 2010I wanted to test whether I can put links into PollDaddy poll items for the Laser Smackdown wrap-up tomorrow, so I needed a test poll. But, of course, if I'm going to go to the trouble, I might as well post it, so here's a dorky poll inspired by the fact that the book I'm using for Quantum Mechanics this term uses CGS units:
What's your favorite system of units?online surveys
It was inspired by a quantum book, but it's a classical Internet, so please choose only one. Or leave a comment to complain about the absence of your preferred choice.
drorzel | April 16, 2010Around 470 people voted in yesterday's optics quiz. I continue to be amazed at the power of radio button polls to bring people into the blog.
As of early Friday morning, the correct answer is solidly in he lead-- 63% of respondants have correctly replied that the image remains intact, but is half as bright. You can see this fairly easily by looking at a traditional ray diagram of the image-forming process (re-drawn slightly from yesterday's picture, to get the arrows right):
The arrows in this picture show the paths followed by three different rays of light that all leave from the tip of the…
drorzel | April 15, 2010I was starting to type up the next Laser Smackdown entry, when it occurred to me that this was a good point to talk about a neat little thing from optics. It further occurred to me that this would be a good poll/quiz topic, to see what people think before I give you the real answer.
So, here's the scenario: You have a brightly illuminated object, the canonical example being a vertical arrow (it could also be a shadow cast in a beam of light). You take a lens, and put it in front of the arrow, projecting an image of the arrow on a screen, like so:
As you can see from the picture, the image…
drorzel | April 14, 2010I won't attempt to explain the chain of reasoning that led to this topic this morning. The poll itself doesn't need much explanation, though: As any geek knows, the tv show(s) CSI: Descriptive Subtitle rely heavily on fake technologies. which of these would you most like to be real?
Which imaginary technology from CSI would you rather have?online surveys
Yes, I have read the relevant xkcd comic. Personally, I lean toward the image enhancement, because if we had their image processing capability attached to the Hubble, we'd be mapping continents on Earth-like planets in the Andromeda Galaxy.…
drorzel | April 13, 2010I am currently on a committee looking to set some standards for technical writing in the introductory engineering sequence (which means the first two terms of physics, as they constitute 50-67% of the classes common to all first-year engineers). One of our jobs is to come up with a list of skills that we want to particularly emphasize in student writing in the first year.
I've already sent this query to my colleagues, who are the votes that really matter, but this seems like a worthy subject for a blog poll. If nothing else, it will be interesting to see if my wise and worldly readers prefer…
drorzel | April 7, 2010I'm still getting things squared away after my blogging break, but as a step on the way back toward normal programming, here's a Dorky Poll: What kind of numbers do you most like to work with?
What kind of numbers do you like best?online surveys
You can only choose a single answer, which I'm sure will come as a disappointment to many of those favoring the later options. You could always vote a second time from a different computer, though...