I’m grading a big backlog of homeworks today, so I don’t have time to do any really lengthy posts this morning. Thus, a poll question inspired by going through these homeworks: You are doing a physics homework problem. How many significant figures do you report?survey software While the class in question uses some quantum ideas, […]
Month: November 2010
Links for 2010-11-18
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Mini-Me “Fans of cheesy-bad movies will remember Mini-me as Dr. Evil’s sidekick/mascot in the Austin Powers movies. Dr. Evil had his share of great lines (“the Diet Coke of evil”), but his true awfulness shone forth in his creation of Mini-Me. Mini-me was exactly how he sounds — a […]
Trapped Antihydrogen
The big physics-y news story of the moment is the trapping of antihydrogen by the ALPHA collaboration at CERN. The article itself is paywalled, because this is Nature, but one of the press offices at one of the institutions involved was kind enough to send me an advance version of the article. This seems like […]
Rock Stars of Science
So, if you look at this picture: You might be asking yourself “Why does Debbie Harry rate Secret Service protection?” But no, this isn’t a photo from some alternate universe where the lead singer of Blondie went on to become leader of the free world, it’s part of the Rock Stars of Science campaign by […]
Links for 2010-11-17
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Business or Town? “Tenured Radical’s thoughtful post on elite presidential salaries got me thinking about the “run the college like a business” canard. Most of the people who use that phrase, whether approvingly or damningly, haven’t personally worked in a college that was actually a business. I have — […]
The Diagonal Parking Theorem
(With apologies to Georg Cantor) Theorem: There are an infinite number of stupid ways to park. Definition: We define as stupid any parking method that places any fender of a car outside the legal lines bounding the space. Proof:Consider a line L through the center of a legal parking space, parallel to the lines bounding […]
Writing Relativity vs. Writing Quantum
Fall term classes ended yesterday, officially– my last class was Friday– so I’m shifting over to spend more time working on the sequel to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, which involves talking to Emmy about relativity. Progress has been slower than last time, largely because the previous book was written while I was […]
Links for 2010-11-16
An Open Letter to MFA Writing Programs (and Their Students) « Whatever “So, MFA writing programs, allow me to make a suggestion. Sometime before you hand over that sheepskin with the words “Master of Fine Arts” on it, for which your students may have just paid tens of thousands of dollars (or more), offer them […]
The Mild Grover
The other night at dinner, SteelyKid kept demanding that we sing. As there’s only so many times you can sing the alphabet in a row, I decided to mix it up a little, and sang her the first verse and the chorus of “The Wild Rover” (these lyrics are close to the ones I know, […]
How Do You See Interference Between Independent Lasers?
This is adapted from an answer to a question at the Physics Stack Exchange site. The questioner asked: It seems that if the coherence length of a laser is big enough, it is possible to observe a (moving) interference picture by combining them. Is it true? How fast should photo-detectors be for observing of the […]