One of the odd things about going to conferences is the unpredictable difference between talks and papers. Sometimes, when you go to a talk, you just get an exact repetition of what’s in the paper; other times, you get a new angle on it, or some different visual representations that make something that previously seemed […]
Month: June 2011
DAMOP Day 1
Tuesday at DAMOP was dominated by my talk. Well, in my mind, at least. I suppose people who aren’t me saw other interesting things. OK, fine, I did go to some other sessions. I would link to the abstracts, but the APS web site is having Issues this morning. In the Prize Session that always […]
What’s So Interesting About AMO Physics?
That’s the title of my talk this morning at DAMOP, where I attempt the slightly insane feat of summarizing a meeting with over 1000 presentations in a single 30-minute talk. This will necessarily involve talking a little bit like the person reading the legal notices at the end of a car commercial, and a few […]
ResearchBlogging by Proxy: Physics on “Coherent Light Scattering from a Two-Dimensional Mott Insulator”
You may or may not have noticed that I’ve been making a concerted effort to do more ResearchBlogging posts explaining notable recent results. I’ve been trying to get at least one per week posted, and coming fairly close to that. I’ve been pretty happy with the fake Q&A format that I’ve settled into, and while […]
The Manga guide to Relativity by Nitta, Yamamoto, and Takatsu
Right around the time I sent in the manuscript for my own book explaining relativity to Emmy, I got an email offering me a review copy of The Manga Guide to Relativity, part of a series of English translations of Japanese comic books explaining complicated concepts in a friendly way. That was clearly too good […]
Links for 2011-06-13
Maru the Cat does dimensional analysis : Built on Facts “Here is a picture of (I think) Maru the cat playing in a bag. He loves bags. Here is the same picture of Maru, at half the size: Now imagine that Maru is a physicist and the pictures are not pictures but instead windows into […]
Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief [Library of Babel]
I’ve heard a lot of buzz about The Quantum Thief— see, for example, this enthusiastic review from Gary K. Wolfe, so I was psyched when it finally became available in the US a little while back. Of course, the down side of this sort of buzz is that it’s almost impossible to live up to […]
Graduation 2011
It was the sort of mid-June morning that global warming deniers dream of: cold and threatening rain. the rain held off until all the speakers had spoken, all the graduates had done their walk across the stage, and all the degrees had been passed out. That’s as much as you can ask for, really. through […]
Links for 2011-06-11
The National Oral History – Grantland “The National Sports Daily, on the one hand, is a long-dead and short-lived newspaper that, for 18 months, between January of 1990 and June of 1991, attempted to cover sports in a way that no other American publication would, could, or had ever even imagined. On the other hand, […]
Science Poll: Get Real
If you look at the schedule of events for DAMOP next week, you will see that there is a movie showing scheduled for Tuesday night: Real Genius. This seems like an excellent excuse to run a poll: Real Genius is:survey software While the meeting will largely involve quantum mechanics, this is a purely classical poll, […]