Everybody should read today’s Medium Large. In fact, you should read Medium Large every day. Why aren’t you?
Month: April 2006
Alea Iacta Est
The official letter from the department requesting the formation of an ad hoc committee for my tenure review was sent in yesterday. This is the official start of the process– I’m still a little fuzzy on the timeline from here out, but by September, I’ll have to provide the committee with a huge amount of […]
Random Ten
I’m not feeling especially inspired, blog-wise, this morning, and I’ve got another couple of busy days on tap, so you get the fall-back post of the uninspired blogger: Ten random tracks from my iTunes library (the four-and-five-star playlist), with commentary. I’m tempted to just steal Kate’s musical range idea, but she thought of it first, […]
Rawr!
I retain just enough of my childhood fascination with dinosaurs to be interested in a headline like “A Meat Eater Bigger Than T. Rex Is Unearthed”. Of course, most of the information you would really want is right there in the headline: New dinosaur species, really big, carnivorous, next story please. Subsequent years of scientific […]
Poetry About Physicists
Reading this article reminds me that I forgot to talk about the poetry reading from a few weeks ago. In lieu of a regular colloquium talk one week this term, we co-hosted a poetry reading by George Drew, a local poet with a book of physics-themed poems. There are some sample poems on that site, […]
New Frontiers in Spam
I just got a link-pimping piece of spam that suggests they’re improving the targeting algorithm for Subject: lines: Subject: hep-th index update (For those not in the know, hep-th is the High Energy Physics- Theoretical category on the porn server.) It’s still a “close, but not quite,” as I read hep-th about as well as […]
News, Sports, and Information
Two items from the sports pages this morning: 1) Not really a sports story, but I saw it first on ESPN: two Duke lacrosse players have been indicted. It really doesn’t deserve a whole “CSI: Durham” post, because it’s a sealed indictment, so there’s basically no real information. But if you’re following the story, there’s […]
Lecture Notes Dump
For those following along with my Quantum Optics class, here’s a bunch of lectures about photons: Lecture 7: Commutators, simple harmonic oscillators, creation and annihilation operators, photons. Lecture 8: Coherent states of the electromagnetic field. Lecture 9: Number-phase uncertainty, squeezed states, interferometry. Lecture 10: Photon anti-correlation revisited, beamsplitters and vacuum states. This material, unsurprisingly, produced […]
The String Theory Diet
Are you unhappy with the way you look? Feel like you’re carrying around some large extra dimensions? Want to compactify your manifold before the summer conference season gets here? If you answered “Yes!” to any of those questions, then you’re ready for the String Theory Diet! Each rich, satisfying meals of eleven-dimensional noodles, and watch […]
A Nice Day for Not Blogging
That’s what yesterday was, at least. It was a gorgeous spring day here, which we spent mostly outside, first doing some errand-running, and then some lounging in the sun reading and napping. I didn’t even try to keep track of what was posted on other blogs, and I didn’t miss it all that much– it […]