silliness
drorzel | August 18, 2011I've moved on to the second of three academic writing projects I wanted to work on this summer (yes, I know I'm rapidly running out of summer...), which is a sort of review article on which I will be the only author. This creates an awkward situation in the introductory material, because it just feels wrong to use the first-person singular pronoun in an academic context. This is not a new problem for me-- my advisor pointed out that the only place I used "I" in my Ph.D. thesis was in the acknowledgements-- and other people have the same issue, so this seems like a perfect topic for a poll:…
drorzel | August 3, 2011In the "ideas I wish I'd thought of first" file, the Canberra Times has an op-ed comparing politicians to quantum objects, because they seem to hold contradictory positions at the same time, and are impossible to pin down. It garbles the physics a little, and is very specific to Australia, though, so let's see if we can do a little better at identifying quantum properties of US politicians.
Duality: Quantum physics tells us that all objects in the universe have both particle-like and wave-like properties, and which you observer will depend on the design of your experiment. Similarly, quantum…
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 18, 2011(A white house, Niskayuna, NY) Negotiations stalled for the 125th consecutive minute, dashing early hopes that a compromise might be reached in the tense talks that have gripped this otherwise quiet suburban neighborhood.
As the crisis enters its third hour, both sides reiterated their long-standing positions. "It's 8:45pm, MythBusters is over, it's time to go to bed," said a spokesperson for the administration of Chad Orzel and Kate Nepveu. "Let's go upstairs, read some books, and go to sleep."
"I no WANNNNA!!!" replied SteelyKid, the final syllable rising to a pitch that only neighborhood…
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,…
drorzel | July 15, 2011Prompted by this and this, among other things, one of the critical questions of the modern age:
Harry Potter is a:
Magic is a classical phenomenon, no matter what you may have heard, so you can choose one and only one option.
drorzel | June 23, 2011A scientific theory hasn't really arrived until the cynical and unscrupulous find a way to use it to extract money from the credulous and gullible. This has posed a significant obstacle for general relativity, dealing as it does with gravity, which requires really gigantic masses to produce measurable effects. That makes it a little difficult to sell wacky general relativity-based schemes to people.
Until now, anyway-- recent advances in atomic clocks have made it possible to see relativistic effects on a human scale. There was a really nice talk on this experiment in the fundamental symmetry…
drorzel | May 27, 2011Union operates on a trimester calendar, with three ten-week terms (September-November, January-March, April-June), rather than the two 14-15 week semesters used by most other colleges and universities. This has some advantages in terms of flexibility-- even science and engineering students get to take terms abroad, which is harder to swing in a semester system-- and some disadvantages in terms of scheduling-- we run much later than most other schools (the last day of classes is next Friday), which closes our students out of a lot of summer programs that begin in early June.
As you can imagine…
drorzel | May 23, 2011As I have admitted previously, I have a fondness for tv shows about UFO's, the loonier the better. So, when I learned that there was a show called When Aliens Attack airing last night on the National Geographic channel, I was all over that. I'm happy to report that it did not disappoint-- it brought the crazy, in exactly the manner I was hoping for.
The premise of the show is a look at what would happen if aliens turned up on Earth, and turned out to be hostile. It claims to be a look at military contingency plans for dealing with an alien invasion, though the "plans" in question seem to be…
drorzel | May 2, 2011Over in Scientopia, Janet notes an interesting mis-statement from NPR, where Dina Temple-Raston said of the now-dead terrorist:
[O]ne intelligence officials told us that nothing with an electron actually passed close to him, which in a way is one of the ways they actually caught him.
As Janet notes, this would be quite a feat, given that electrons are a key component of ordinary matter. But for the sake of silly physics blogging, let's take this seriously for a moment. Suppose that Osama bin Laden really could make himself utterly devoid of electrons: would that be a good way to hide?
To…
drorzel | April 27, 2011Union's edition of the chase-each-other-with-Nerf-guns game Humans vs. Zombies kicks off next week, and has prompted some discussion of whether this is just a harmless way of blowing off steam, or an existential threat to the core mission of academia. While some of this has been vaguely entertaining, it ignores the really important question:
Who would win:online surveys
We're talking classical movie-type zombies, here, not Schrödinger cats that are alive and dead at the same time, so you can only choose one answer at a time.
drorzel | April 17, 2011A very silly musical poll question, brought to you by the local classic rock station's music selection this morning:
Which of these makes more sense:online surveys
On an unrelated note, it's deeply unfair that sleeping really late puts SteelyKid into a worse mood than not getting enough sleep does.
drorzel | April 10, 2011Once upon a time, there was a beautiful young girl from a family of modest means, who received a spiffy new jacket as a gift. It was bright red, and had a big warm hood that she could pull up over her head when she didn't feel like combing her hair. She was so pleased with this jacket that she wore it around all the time, even in the summer, and because of this, everybody called her "Red Hood," even her teachers.
One day, she decided to go visit her grandmother, who lived on the other side of the deep dark woods. Her mother said, "As long as you're going to Grandma's house, take her this…
drorzel | April 1, 2011Another day, another snowfall. Sigh. Thus, a poll:
Snow on April 1 is:online survey
Snow, even in springtime, is depressingly, boringly, classical, so you may choose one and only one option, not a quantum superposition of multiple answers.
drorzel | March 23, 2011I am less enthralled by the "molecular gastronomy" thing than someone with my geek credentials ought to be. As a result, I was a little disappointed when I clicked the link (from Jennifer Ouellette on Twitter) to this Wired story about a new tv show called Marcel's Quantum Kitchen. Because, you know, there are much more fun things that the combination of "Quantum" and "Kitchen" could evoke:
A kitchen whose dishes all come in discrete and indivisible portions. You can't eat half and take the other half home-- it's all or nothing...
You can either know what you're making, or how long it will…
drorzel | March 18, 2011This year's NCAA tournament is being spread over four tv networks, so that every game is shown in its entirety. Previously, you got whatever game was deemed to hold the most interest for your region of the country, plus occasional looks in at games elsewhere, that usually managed to miss the most exciting bits. For a hoops junkie like me, this was fantastic, with the only problem being how to manage to overload. I eventually settled on switching channels every time whatever game I was watching went to a commercial, so I got to see a bit of everything.
I was struck, though, but just how often…
drorzel | March 16, 2011I got home very late last night after my talk in New Paltz, the cold that I've been developing for the last week has hit full strength, and I'm giving an exam this morning. So here's something completely silly:
Which sister do you prefer?Market Research
For bonus points, guess which of these songs I have on my iPod.
drorzel | March 14, 2011Even though the really important Final Four has already been decided, the Division 1 NCAA basketball championship starts this week, which means it's time to fill out your championship brackets. And so, as usual, I present the guaranteed-can't-miss-sure-thing method of picking the winner based on the rankings of Ph.D. programs in physics (excerpt displayed; click for the full bracket):
OK, maybe there are a few bugs yet to be worked out with this method...
drorzel | March 8, 2011It's the last week of the winter term here, so here is a totally serious and important music-related poll question:
Which do you prefer?survey software
(OK, maybe the end-of-term craziness is making me just a tiny bit punchy...)
drorzel | January 20, 2011A pretty straightforward question: Which prime number do you like the best?
What's your favorite prime number?online surveys
This is a purely classical poll, so you only get to choose one favorite, not a superposition of multiple numbers. Your selection is legally binding, so choose wisely!
(There's actually a point to putting this up today, beyond providing some cheap and easy blog traffic... I'll explain later.)