A low-key True Lab Story, in honor of the previous post on knowing more about your experiment than anybody else. One of the first times I had to run my grad school experiment all by myself, I had trouble getting the discharge in the metastable atom source to light. I went through all the usual… Continue reading True Lab Stories: The Sound of Silence
Month: May 2006
Lead the World
Derek Lowe offers another Law of the Lab, and it’s a good one: Today’s law is: You are in real trouble if someone knows more about your project than you do. That’s a realization that hits people at some point in their graduate school career – preferably not much past the midpoint. It marks the… Continue reading Lead the World
Evaluate This!
Timothy Burke, my go-to-guy for deep thoughts about academia, had a nice post about student evaluations last week. Not ecvaluations of students, evaluations by students– those little forms that students fill out at many schools (not Swarthmore, though) giving their opinion of the class in a variety of areas. (Probably not entirely coincidentally, as this… Continue reading Evaluate This!
Ask a ScienceBlogger: Worst Technology Ever
The Powers That Be at Seed/ ScienceBlogs are initiating a new feature, cleverly called “Ask a ScienceBlogger,” in which they will pose one question a week to the group of us, and we’ll answer (or not) as we choose. The inaugural question was posted last night: If you could cause one invention from the last… Continue reading Ask a ScienceBlogger: Worst Technology Ever
Songs to Run Errands To
I’m going to be busy nearly all day today with our annual undergraduate research symposium on campus. I’m bribing some of my intro students to attend (five points on next week’s exam), and chairing a session, and judging the annual student research award, so it’s a full day. As a distraction (the best way to… Continue reading Songs to Run Errands To
Goddamn Tornadoes
For the record: I am well aware that the tornado ad for the History Channel is incredibly annoying. You may or may not have noticed the additional charming feature that it breaks links that it passes over, at least in some browsers (Opera and Safari). The dissatisfaction with the ad has been widespread and general,… Continue reading Goddamn Tornadoes
New Physics Blogs
Well, OK, they’re mostly not new, just new to me. I’m vaguely ashamed at having to rely on Sean Carroll to point out new blogs to me, especially since one of the authors comments here moderately regularly, but my defense is that unlike faculty at semester schools, who are winding things down, I’m right in… Continue reading New Physics Blogs
Step One: Change Disciplines
Dr. What Now? has a nice and timely post about helping students prepare for oral presentations, something I’ll be doing myself this morning, in preparation for the annual undergraduate research symposium on campus Friday. Of course, being a humanist, what she means by oral presentation is a completely different thing than the PowerPoint slide shows… Continue reading Step One: Change Disciplines
Mount Noun-More
Since people have asked about the outcome of the Mike and Mike “Mount Sportsmore” thing that kicked off yesterday’s post about iconic scientists, I made it a point to catch their final list today: Muhammed Ali Babe Ruth Michael Jordan Wayne Gretzky They specifically put Jackie Robinson off in a special category of his own… Continue reading Mount Noun-More
Lecture Notes Dump
Another set of Quantum Optics notes, dealing with entanglement, superposition, EPR paradoxes, and quantum cryptography. A whole bunch of really weird stuff… Lecture 11: Superposition and entanglement. Lecture 12: EPR “paradox,” introduction to Local Hidden Variables. Lecture 13: Local Hidden Variable theories, Bell’s Theorem/ Bell’s Inequalities. Lecture 14: Bell’s Inequality experiments. Lecture 15: Cryptography, quantum… Continue reading Lecture Notes Dump