Philosophia Naturalis #10 is now up, providing all sorts of physics-bloggy goodness. I particualrly liked mollishka’s explanation of the Lyman-alpha forest and Scott Aaronson’s math-free explanation of Shor’s factoring algorithm is a classic, but there’s lots of good stuff there.
Month: May 2007
How to Survive the Tenure Process
Something old, something new, on the topic near and dear to every academic. The old is a post by Doug Natelson from a couple of weeks ago, giving advice on how to get tenure, as a response to the recent flurry of tenure discussions on science blogs. The new is an article by Lesboprof at […]
The Internet Is for Gluing Captions on Things
Via John Lynch, Fark brings us LOLPresidents: There’s some good stuff, along with the usual rubbish. I also liked this motivational poster:
To Automate or Not To Automate?
The Female Science Professor has a nice post about high and low tech data acquisition: An MS student has repeatedly questioned why he/she has to use a low-tech method to acquire, somewhat tediously, some data that could be acquired more rapidly with a higher-tech method. I say ‘more rapidly’ because the actual acquisition time once […]
Classic Edition: Master of None
A discussion in the back-channel forums reminded me about all the many things I’ve learned how to do badly in the course of my scientific training. My junior high shop teacher probably sprained something laughing the first time he heard that I was doing machine shop work as part of a research project, but it’s […]
Good Stuff Going to Waste
Somewhere between yesterday’s posts about uselesss junk and useful antiques, there’s this. The picture to the right is a tragedy in progress, though is might not look that way: It’s an FTIR spectrometer left behind by the previous occupant of my lab. It’s a top-of-the-line instrument, a Bomem DA-8 spectrophotometer, and a new one will […]
Dorky Poll: Useful Antiques
As sort of a counterpoint to the previous entry, here’s a more positive poll question: What’s the most useful antiquated tool you keep around? That is, what dusty old relic do you keep around because there’s no modern alternative that works as well for what it does?
Dorky Poll: Lab Relics
Welcome to the laboratory graveyard: This picture shows the back room in one of the labs, and most of the gear in it is broken or useless. There’s a computer that’s so old it has a 5 1/4″ floppy drive, the skeleton of a vacuum evaporator, a crappy student STM system, and an electrometer that’s […]
The Problem of Rankings
Matthew Yglesias has a couple of posts on opposition to the US News college rankings, the first noting the phenomenon, and the second pointing to Kevin Carey’s work on better ranking methods. The problem with this is, I think he sort of misses the point of the objections. Matt writes: All that said, the very […]
Physics News Backlog
Every day, a handful of physics news items pass through my RSS feeds, and every few days, one of them looks interesting enough that I check the little box to keep it unread, so I can comment on it later (I don’t blog from work if I can avoid it). Of course, most of the […]