The subject of the “spin” of the electron comes up again and again, so as pointed out in a comment, I really ought to do a post explaining what it is and how it works. As a bonus, this gives me the opportunity to do the dorkiest thing anyone has ever done with a cute-toddler […]
Month: July 2010
Links for 2010-07-26
YouTube – I Will Derive! Gloria Gaynor, meet Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton. Leibniz, Newton, Gloria Gaynor. (tags: video math music youtube silly education) Cocktail Party Physics: the nays have it “[W]hile browsing the science section on Amazon this weekend, looking for new or overlooked science books, I thought it might be fun to highlight […]
How to Teach Physics to Your Japanese Dog
The vanity search this morning turned up something I hadn’t seen before: That’s the Japanese edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I knew one was in the works, but hadn’t heard when it would be out. Of course, I can’t read any of it other than my own name (rightmost column of […]
Links for 2010-07-25
Why tenure won’t disappear, just shrink § Unqualified Offerings “1) Did you notice the part where I said I’d want a higher salary to compensate for having less security? Yeah. See, lots of people are willing to slave away in grad school and postdoc positions and adjunct positions in exchange for a shot at the […]
Why I Can’t Take Doctor Who Seriously
It was miserably swampy for most of the day today– when it wasn’t actually raining, it was so humid that you expects water to condense out of the air at any moment– so I spent a while sitting on the couch watching tv with SteelyKid. The best kid-friendly option seemed to be an episode of […]
Not Everything Is About CO_2
Climate change is a major crisis, don’t get me wrong, and it’s something that needs to be discussed extensively in both scientific and policy circles. We’re pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at rather too high a rate, and getting something done about that is a key priority. It’s possible, though, to take the obsession […]
Links for 2010-07-24
Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 040504 (2010): Room-Temperature Implementation of the Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm with a Single Electronic Spin in Diamond “The nitrogen-vacancy defect center (N-V center) is a promising candidate for quantum information processing due to the possibility of coherent manipulation of individual spins in the absence of the cryogenic requirement. We report a room-temperature implementation […]
Dinosaurs Are Too Easy
Earlier this week, there was some interesting discussion of science communication in the UK branch of the science blogosphere. I found it via Alun Salt’s “Moving beyond the ‘One-dinosaur-fits-all’ model of science communication” which is too good a phrase not to quote, and he spun off two posts from Alice Bell, at the Guardian blog […]
Quantum Mechanics Is Square: “Ruling Out Multi-Order Interference in Quantum Mechanics”
This week’s big story in physics is this Science paper by a group out of Austria Canada (edited to fix my misreading of the author affiliations), on a triple-slit interference effect. This has drawn both the usual news stories and also some complaining about badly-worded news stories. So, what’s the deal? What did they do […]
Real Math Doesn’t Use Calculators
The Dean Dad is worried about remedial math: In a discussion this week with someone who spends most of her time working with students who are struggling mightily in developmental math, I heard an argument I hadn’t given much thought previously: students who have passed algebra and even pre-calc in high school frequently crash and […]