It’s nearly time for classes to resume, which means it’s time for a zillion stories about Beloit College’s annual Kids These Days List, listing off a bunch of things that this year’s entering college class, who were mostly born in 1992, have always taken for granted. A sample: 1. Few in the class know how… Continue reading The Science Mindset List
Month: August 2010
Why Antibunching Equals Photons
In my post about how we know photons exist, I make reference to the famous Kimble, Dagenais, and Mandel experiment showing “anti-bunching” of photons emitted from an excited atom. They observed that the probability of recording a second detector “click” a very short time after the first was small. This is conclusive evidence that photons… Continue reading Why Antibunching Equals Photons
Links for 2010-08-20
An 18 Billion Mile Journey is almost complete! : Starts With A Bang In honor of the upcoming completion of Neptune’s first full orbit since its discovery, a discussion of how it was found. (tags: science astronomy planets blogs starts-with-bang) Fixing a Hole: The Beatles’ Imaginary Post-1970 Albums, Part 1 | Popdose “I’m actually quite… Continue reading Links for 2010-08-20
Thursday Toddler Blogging 081910
Many of SteelyKid’s first words have been transportation-related (“Truck! Vroom Vroom!”), which makes the four-level wooden parking garage she got from her Aunt Erin even more awesome. And it’s pretty awesome: As you can see, she grasped the idea almost immediately. That’s from last night, after we got it put together. Below the fold, you… Continue reading Thursday Toddler Blogging 081910
Media Skills for Scientists
Everybody’s favorite science-and-politics blogger has posted a video clip showing part of what’s wrong in science communication. It’s a clip from the BBC from last December, featuring one of those head-to-head quasi-debates about “Climategate” between Prof. Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia and political consultant Marc Morano, who has made himself a nice… Continue reading Media Skills for Scientists
Waves: Moving Without Going Anywhere
At the tail end of Tuesday’s post about wind and temperature, I asked a “vaguely related fun bonus question:” If the air molecules that surround us are moving at 500 m/s anyway, why isn’t the speed of sound more like 500 m/s than 300 m/s? This is another one that people are sometimes surprised by.… Continue reading Waves: Moving Without Going Anywhere
The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the ______
Kevin Drum posts about the latest outrage from the airline industry: To summarize, then: (1) Airlines spent years hassling customers about their carry-on bags and persuading them to check their luggage instead. (2) After that finally started to work, they suddenly began charging for checked luggage. (3) As customers scurried to adapt once again, overhead… Continue reading The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the ______
Links for 2010-08-19
slacktivist: Please forgive me for the actions of extremists I have never met who commit acts of violence that I have never advocated “As a white male Baptist, it is my duty today to denounce the violence perpetrated by Patrick Gray Sharp, 29, who yesterday attacked the police headquarters in McKinney, Texas, in a heavily… Continue reading Links for 2010-08-19
Poll: Working Late
Daniel Lemire has a new blog post arguing that working long hours is stupid. This collided with Bee’s Backreaction post on what keeps physicists up at night, included in this morning’s Links Dump. This got me to thinking about academic work habits, which led to the following poll: How long will you keep working, continuously,… Continue reading Poll: Working Late
1491 by Charles C. Mann
We picked up a used copy of Charles Mann’s pop-archeology book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus a while back. I didn’t read it at the time, because I was a little afraid that it would be rather polemical in what I think of as the Neil Young mode– wildly overstating the awesomeness… Continue reading 1491 by Charles C. Mann