A couple of guys goaded me into trying to dunk at the lunchtime basketball game today. “You’ve lost a lot of weight,” they said, knowing I’m a sucker for flattery, “You’ve got to be close.” So I tried, and much to my surprise, succeeded. It wasn’t what you’d call Jordanesque– I barely got the ball […]
Month: August 2006
Classic Edition: Advice to New Faculty
Classes for the Fall term start next week, which means that things are starting to gear up on campus. We’ve been sent our class rosters, and lists of new freshman advisees, and have started to have meetings about team-taught courses and department policies and the like. And, of course, the new faculty hired for this […]
True Lab Stories: Smells Like… Not Victory, That’s for Sure
(A couple of regular commenters will recognize this one…) Every working research lab has a sort of rhythm to it. There’s always a collection of background sounds, in a particular pattern, that indicates that the lab is functioning properly. When I was a post-doc, the pattern was something like three mintues of white noise (the […]
Pluto Is Not in Genesis
The American Institutes of Physics run an occasionally updated news feed, Physics News Updates, that I have in my RSS subscriptions. Yesterday, for some reason, it coughed up a squib about last week’s Pluto news, which starts: Just as in the Bible Adam achieved dominion over the objects of the earth by naming them, so […]
Real Clock Tutorial: Atomic Clocks
In yesterday’s post, I outlined the history of clocks starting from the essential feature of any clock, namely the “tick.” I ended by saying that the best clock you can possibly make is one based off the basic laws of quantum physics, using the energy separation between two energy levels in an atom to determine […]
On “Wussy” Songs
Chuck Klosterman is a dangerous author for me to read. Not just because it leads to me posting quotes that upset people, but because I like his writing in a way that tends to creep into my own writing. After he releases a new book, I have be be really careful when I blog about […]
Apples : Oranges :: New SAT : Old SAT
OK, they dumped the analogy questions ages ago, but for oldsters like myself, those are still the signature SAT questions… Inside Higher Ed has a piece today on the new SAT results, which expresses concern over some declines: Mean scores on the SAT fell this year by more than they have in decades. A five-point […]
How to Find People to Talk To
So, you’re interested in discussing politics or religion or other Deep Issues with other people. What do you do? You could go on the Internet, but you end up talking to, like, freaky physics professors and stuff, so you’d prefer to talk to real people face to face. You could randomly approach strangers, ask their […]
The Perilous Blogosphere
Medium Large has critical advice for all you websurfers. Of course, you didn’t need me to tell you that, because you already read Medium Large. Right? Right?
Real Clock Tutorial: History
Over at A Blog Around the Clock, Bora put up a sixteen part series of posts talking about clocks. Unfortunately, he was talking about biological clocks, which are a specific and sort of messy application, from the standpoint of physics. I talk a bit about clocks for our first-year seminar class, as a part of […]