silliness
drorzel | October 28, 2009Here's an extremely dorky Dorky Poll topic. I can't believe I haven't used this one before:
What sort of particles do you prefer?(poll)
Choose only one.
drorzel | October 26, 2009I'm kind of in a fog today, which I'm choosing to attribute to airport lag (it can't be jet lag, because I didn't change time zones, but you get some of the same disorientation from spending too much time in airports and on planes), because the other option is incipient flu (half a dozen students in my classes have taken ill with flu-like symptoms, and been sent home or quarantined). I have too much to do to bag the whole day, though, so I'm going to resort to stealing a blog post topic from Chuck Klosterman.
In one of the essays in his new book Eating the Dinosaur, he writes:
Here's a…
drorzel | October 20, 2009I was up until almost midnight grading labs, and I have forty-odd grant proposals to read today, so I'm going to be unplugging from the Internet and working on, well, work. For entertainment while I'm paying for my procrastination, here's another two-word lyrics quiz. These two-word phrases each uniquely identify a pop song (I hope). If you know the song from the phrase, leave the answer in the commnets, and add a two-word phrase of your own for other people to guess.
The first three are left over from the last round:
up drivel
town predicts
wicked strict
unlovable hand
NYPD choir
stained-…
drorzel | October 17, 2009If you buy a loaf of bread, it comes in a plastic bag closed with either a metal twist-tie or a little plastic tab. Either of these may be re-used to close the bag again after you have used some of the bread.
If you buy a bunch of carrots, they generally come in a plastic bag that is closed with a little piece of tape. The tape is generally stronger than the material of the bag, making it really hard to remove the tape without ripping the bag open. And even if you do get the tape undone, it can't be re-used.
Why do they do that? I'm not any more likely to use the entire bag of carrots at once…
drorzel | October 14, 2009In the time that I've been at Union, I have suffered a number of lab disasters. I've had lasers killed in freak power outages. I've had lasers die because of odd electrical issues. My lab has flooded not once, not twice, but three different times. I've had equipment damaged by idiot contractors, and I've had week-long setbacks because the temperature of the room slews by ten degrees or more when they switch the heat on in the fall and off in the spring. I had a diode laser system trashed because of a crack in the insulation on a water pipe, that exposed the pipe to moist room air, leading to…
drorzel | October 14, 2009SteelyKid has a fever, and can't go to day care, so I'm staying home with her. This pretty much rules out significant serious blogging, so here's a poll to keep you amused:
Which of these threats is most threatening?(survey)
Choose only one.
drorzel | October 13, 2009The baseball playoffs are upon us, which means that most of the sports media are consumed with baseball talk. I find this faintly annoying, as I'm not really a fan of baseball. And, really, I can't be a fan of baseball, for the same reason that I can't be a conservative Republican activist-- I don't have the mental circuitry necessary to passionately believe self-contradictory things.
For example, being a baseball fan apparently requires one to simultaneously believe that a four-and-a-half hour game three hours of which are just players standing around scratching themselves is part of the…
drorzel | October 12, 2009Somebody should look to see if there's a correlation between the weather on the days of campus visits and the number of prospective students who apply/ enroll at a given school.
We had pretty decent weather-- cool but seasonal, sunny in the morning, clouding over in the afternoon-- for today's Open House. Last year, we had dreary rain at least one of the Open House days. I'd like to think that something as random and trivial as the weather wouldn't really influence a high school student's college decision, but then, I've heard stupider things...
drorzel | October 9, 2009Inspired by yesterday's post about the speed of light, a poll about c:
What do you think of the speed of light?(surveys)
So, how do you feel about the speed of light?
drorzel | October 7, 2009Prompted by working on lecture notes for Quantum Optics last night, a Dorky Poll about the mathematical formalism of photon number states
What's your favorite photon operator?(polls)
I know it's hard to pick, but choose only one.
drorzel | October 1, 2009"OK, thanks very much. I'll pick it up at six, or a little after." I hang up the phone. I can feel the dog's eyes on my back.
"So what was that about?" she asks.
"Oh, that was the Ford dealer," I say casually. "They're done with my car." The dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree a few days ago when I was leaving work-- all sorts of brake-related idiot lights, plus the odometer went completely blank. I spent the weekend driving a rented Kia.
"What was wrong with it?" she asks, with exaggerated casualness.
"Oh, you know, some problems with the wiring..."
"What kind of problem with the wiring…
drorzel | September 30, 2009I'm a little fried from yesterday's frantic running around, so while there are a couple of physics things I'd like to write about, I have neither the time nor the brainpower. So here's a silly little poll, prompted by the large amount of ice I go through at home (I'm trying to lose some weight, so I'm drinking a lot of ice water these days). How do you like your cold beverages to be served?
How do you like your drinks?(online surveys)
(It was that, or a rant about the silly faux-controversy over the Angels' post-game celebration, which is taking up wayyyy too much time on sports shows.)
drorzel | September 25, 2009We're working on moving SteelyKid from formula to milk (which isn't going all that well-- dairy seems to make her gassy). This has led me to switch over to cereal in the mornings, since we're buying milk anyway, which frees up the time otherwise spent waiting for the toaster.
Cereal-wise, I tend to alternate between Cheerios (which we also buy for SteelyKid) and Raisin Bran-- my parents never bought sugary breakfast cereal, so I never developed a taste for any of those things. Being the ridiculous geek that I am, I've noticed something about the relative amounts of milk and cereal I use for…
drorzel | September 22, 2009One of the errands I ran Sunday with SteelyKid was a run to the local Eddie Bauer outlet to pick up a couple more pairs of khakis for work (well, they're black, actually, but in style the same as the khaki ones). As is often the case, I ended up buying two different sizes-- not just because this was at a discount outlet store, but because of the inconvenient quantization of pants.
I have a collection of khakis in two different waist sizes. this is partly because I lost a whole bunch of weight back in the Bad Time when I had horrible stomach problems (much of which I've gained back), but also…
drorzel | September 14, 2009Over in Twitter-land, Eric Weinstein is visiting the AMNH at the same time as a bunch of Orthodox Jews, and takes the opportunity for a little Q&A:
Me: Excuse me, but how is the phylogenetic tree reconciled with Torah.
Modern Orthodox Man: Lorentzian time dilation. It's a head hurter.
This is an interesting attempt to square the six-day creation story with modern science, and raises one obvious question: How fast must God have been moving for the six days of creation to last 13.7 billion years?
This is veering into Built on Facts territory, but the relevant formula is:
For six days (5.…
drorzel | September 4, 2009(I think that's the right number...)
I've got a ton of stuff to do today, and it's the last Friday of summer, so here's a little light entertainment. As in previous editions, each of the two-word phrases on the list below should hopefully uniquely identify one pop song. If you think you recognize the song, post your guess in the comments, and post a two-word phrase of your own for other people to guess.
First, a few holdovers from the last round, which was all proper names:
a) Jean Content
b) Mojo Nixon
c) Billy Idol
d) Rocco Sifretti
While at least one of these people has recorded a song…
drorzel | September 3, 2009"...Can you name the six noble gases?"
As this could be no poser for an economic geographer, I rattled them off in their proper aristocratic order. "Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon, and -er- Radon. They were raised to the peerage in the eleventh year of England's George Fifth, and Neon was awarded the Order of the Seraphim by Gustav Sixth of Sweden for its compassionate service in guiding to bars and beaneries guys who roll into towns late at night."
-- from The Moon's Fire-eating Daughter by John Myers Myers
I used that as an opening quote (I can't remember the term for that-- "epigram…
ejohnson | August 19, 2009
In the event of a zombie epidemic, scientists have settled on an unambiguous plan for survival: be aggressive. Mathematicians from the University of Ottawa and Carleton University modelled the outcome of responses to zombie infection including quarantine, development of a cure, and "regular, impulsive" slaying of undead to reduce their numbers. The results of their analysis are summarized in a paper published in Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress, and reveal that only a swift and forceful attempt at eradication offers any hope to human civilization. We wonder if ScienceBlogs'…
drorzel | August 19, 2009Kate recently signed up for Facebook, and I was talking to her earlier about some of the options for wasting tons of time entertaining yourself with Facebook, and mentioned the ever-popular trivia quizzes and "personality tests" and the like. Of course, I had to caution her that most of the quizzes are really lame, because the people making them up don't know how to make a good quiz.
Making up good questions is a skill that takes time to master. The key elements that the people behind most Facebook quizzes are missing are good distractors-- the plausible-sounding wrong answers that lead…
ejohnson | August 18, 2009As reported in The New York Post, British botanists recently discovered a species of pitcher plant that consumes entire rats—not insects, rats. The plant was found atop Mount Victoria in the Philippines and has been named Nepenthes attenboroughii after Sir David Attenborough. Hapless rodents, like the one below, that stumble into its open mouth are dissolved by plant enzymes in what we can only imagine is a slow and horrific death.
As if we didn't have enough to worry about.