Science
drorzel | August 2, 2011Over Twitter, somebody pointed to this article on astronomy outreach (free PDF from that link), which argues that everybody else should stop trying to be Brian Cox:
I've known Brian for years and worked with him before his celebrity status went supernova. I would love to say "I told you so" to all the TV commissioning editors who rejected my suggestions to use him as a presenter. I suspect Brian fnds it as ironic as I do that TV companies now regularly put out adverts looking for "the next Brian Cox".
As much as I love Brian's work, I don't think we need any more like him at the moment.…
drorzel | August 1, 2011When I came up for my reappointment review three years into my professorial career, I was given a list of required materials to submit, which included a "statement of teaching philosophy." The same thing had been required for my job application, and at that time, I wrote about techniques and methods that had seemed particularly useful to me as a student (I had basically no teaching experience when I was hired), so for my reappointment, I wrote a statement looking back at what I wrote when I applied and talking about how I tried to incorporate those things into my teaching.
I passed the review…
drorzel | August 1, 2011As previously mentioned, I'm watching a little bit of Fringe in order to be able to talk sensibly about it later this week. I watch the Season 1 finale last night, and its treatment of parallel universes is about what I'd expect for tv, but being the obsessive dork I am, I got distracted from the big picture by a silly side issue.
There's a running joke for the first bit of the episodes about Walter trying to find various pieces of scientific equipment, only to find that Peter has appropriated them for some sort of personal project. One of these items is an electron microscope (presumably an…
drorzel | July 30, 2011I'm going to be talking to someone about treatments of parallel worlds in popular media next week, and as the only going mass media concern with a parallel-worlds plot seems to be the show Fringe, it would be helpful for me to be able to talk sensibly about it. Thus, two questions:
1) Where is the best place to look for an explanation of the show's mythology, particularly in the parallel worlds area?
2) Can you suggest a smallish (ideally single digits) number of episodes to watch to get the idea of how this plays out in the show?
I am aware that, the Internet being what it is, there will be…
drorzel | July 29, 2011We're having a birthday party for SteelyKid tomorrow, so I have a ton of stuff to do today. I may have something more substantive later, but for the moment, here are a couple of videos to enjoy. First, from the Minute Physics set of videos at YouTube, an explanation of why you have quantum physics to thank for sunny days:
There's a bunch of good stuff in the Minute Physics channel, so if you're looking for a way to kill time in small chunks, have at it.
And if you prefer your physics to be classical, this demo from Harvard has been making the rounds:
Isn't physics awesome? Of course it is.
pharyngula | July 28, 2011Oh, this is beautiful. Bill Nye (the Science Guy!) is being interviewed by a Fox News talking head who asks a surprisingly dumb question: Nye is talking about a volcano found on the moon, so he asks, "Does it go anywhere close to the climate change debate on earth?...we haven't been up there burning fossil fuels.". Bill Nye's eyebrows shoot up, he pauses very briefly, and you can see him recalibrating his brain so he can answer as he would to a perky little 5 year old. It's wonderfully amusing, and he does give a very good answer.
drorzel | July 28, 2011Unlike the previous post, this is not a rhetorical question that I will ask and then answer. I genuinely do not know the answer. I could Google it, of course, but I'd like to see if somebody reading this is able to deduce the correct answer from the available evidence.
So, here's the deal: as an attempt to recover from a rather sedentary couple of months due to computer-based work and some plantar fascitis kind of problem in my foot that's keeping me from playing hoops as much as I'd like, I'm spending a while each day on the exercise bike we have upstairs. While I do a bunch of reading of…
drorzel | July 28, 2011A while back, I explained how polarized sunglasses work, the short version of which is that light reflected off the ground in front of you tends to be polarized, and by blocking that light, they reduce the effects of glare. This is why fishermen wear polarized sunglasses (they make it easier to see through the surface of water) and why they're good for driving (they cut down on glare off the road ahead). I almost exclusively buy polarized sunglasses, because I like this feature.
But let's say you have a pair of polarized sunglasses that broke, because they were cheap to begin with (such as…
oracknows | July 28, 2011Once upon a time, there was quackery. It was the term used to refer to medical practices that were not supported by evidence and were ineffective and potentially harmful. Physicians understood that modalities such as homeopathy, reflexology, and various "energy healing" (i.e., faith healing) methodologies were based either on prescientific vitalism, magical thinking, and/or on science that was at best incorrect or grossly distorted. More importantly, they weren't afraid to say so.
Quacks did not think this good.
Then, sometime a few decades ago, supporters of quackery decided that they would…
drorzel | July 27, 2011There's a lot of stuff in the news lately about asteroids, what with the Dawn mission orbiting Vesta, and the talk of a manned asteroid mission as a possible future step for NASA. Prompted by this, I'm going to dip into the territory usually occupied by Matt and Rhett, and ask a somewhat silly question:
What size asteroid would you be able to throw a baseball into orbit, a la Bugs Bunny?
(Sadly, probably for copyright reasons, I couldn't quickly find a YouTube video of the cartoon where Bugs throws a baseball all the way around the world. But you can probably picture it, even if you're too…
drorzel | July 27, 2011For the past few years, astronomer and SF author Mike Brotherton has been running the Launch Pad Workshop, a program bringing interested SF authors to Wyoming (where he's on the faculty) to learn about modern astronomy. The idea is to teach writers the real facts about the weird and wonderful things going on in astronomy these days, so they can write better stories about astronomical objects and ideas, and reach a wider audience through fiction. This year's workshop just ended, and Brotherton has links to some of the presentations, and blogs about it from the attendees.
I really like this…
drorzel | July 25, 2011Via Bee, we have the BlaBlaMeter, a website that purports to "unmask without mercy how much bullshit hides in any text." Like Bee, I couldn't resist throwing it some scientific text, but rather than pulling stuff off the arxiv, I went with the abstracts of the papers I published as a grad student, which I wrote up on the blog as part of the Metastable Xenone Project a few years ago. The abstracts, their scores, and some comments below:
Paper 1: Optical Control of Ultracold Collisions:
Near-resonant light is used to modify the collision dynamics of magneto-optically trapped metastable xenon…
drorzel | July 22, 2011The final Space Shuttle landed the other day, leading to much lamentation over the end of the program, all over the Internet. It was absolutely choking my Twitter feeds for a while, which is mostly what I was thinking about when I re-tweeted this snide comment from Robert Lamb (though, to be fair, most of the people choking my Twitter feeds with Shuttle-related comments are space obsessives anyway, so it's not that new). I got a little grief for that over in locked LiveJournal land, so I thought I might as well say a bit more about it here.
While there is some part of me that feels a little…
kcollins | July 22, 2011Fed by the news media, our fascination and reverence for celebrities has reached shameless heights.
But when you add the element of royalty to the mix, celebrity worship can take off into the stratosphere, triggered even by an item as seemingly mundane as a dress.
This leaves me wondering -- and angered -- over what is happening to us and our priorities.
I'm referring most recently to the whirlwind North American tour this month of newly weds Prince William and Duchess Kate Middleton (a.k.a. Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge), who seem to be a wonderful couple committed to fostering…
drorzel | July 21, 2011It's really frickin' hot in much of the US. Fortunately, we have central air at home, A/C in the car, and convenient local businesses with air conditioning and free wi-fi. The inadequate HVAC systems in the Science and Engineering building on campus aren't anywhere near being able to cope with this, so I'm working from home or a cafe until the weather breaks.
I will, however, use this as a shameless plug to re-link a post from last year, where we scientifically tested whether it's better to leave your car windows open or closed on a hot day. The answer: if it's a short stop, closing the…
jrosenhouse | July 19, 2011The current issue of Scientific American has an article, by George F. R. Ellis, expressing some skepticism about the multiverse. Sadly, it seems that only the beginning of the article is freely available online. However, replies to the article by Alexander Vilenkin and Max Tegmark are available online. And since Tegmark so perfectly summarizes my own views about multiverses, I'd like to take a look at his remarks.
After a brief introduction Tegmark gets down to business:
By our universe, I mean the spherical region of space from which light has had time to reach us during the 13.7 billion…
drorzel | July 19, 2011A lot of pixels have been spent discussing this study of grade inflation, brought to most people's attention via this New York Times blog. The key graph is this one, showing the fraction of grades given in each letter category over the last fifty years:
Lots of effort is being put into trying to explain why the number of A's given out has increased so much over this time span, with most of it focussing on the last twenty years or so (see Mad Mike for a plausible but wrong explanation-- the fraction of students going on to graduate school isn't big enough to drive this). I think this is…
pharyngula | July 19, 2011The Atheists, Skeptics, & Humanists Team on Folding@Home, the distributed computing effort to calculate protein folding properties, is looking for your spare CPU cycles. Join them! It's a much more productive use of your computer than that silly SETI@Home project.
oracknows | July 17, 2011Note: I just got back from TAM; so if you happened to see a different version of this post somewhere else, now you know why.
Last week while I was at TAM, a study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). It is another beautiful example of how proponents of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) are able to spin even hugely negative results into something that supports CAM. Because I was at TAM, I didn't actually notice the article at first, but notice it I did eventually. Upon seeing it, my first question was: What on earth are the editors of NEJM smoking. Oddly enough,…
drorzel | July 17, 2011As many a thoughtless person has observed when learning what I do for a living, physics is really hard. But you may have wondered just how much harder is physics than other subjects? Well, now, we have a quantitative answer:
This is a shelf of books at the Burlington, MA Barnes and Noble, clearly showing that while it is possible to learn all about politics and philosophy in thirty seconds, understanding Einstein takes three whole minutes. So, relativity is at least six times more difficult than philosophy.
(This presumably explains why there are so many physicists who dabble in philosophy,…