Confrontation with my grand dad-The difficult task of proving the earth is round! « lazychemist To have grown up with an idea that earth is not flat, it never occurred to me that I will ever need to prove that to anyone, at least not to someone in my own family. But given that my […]
Month: May 2012
Entangled In the Past: “Experimental delayed-choice entanglement swapping”
Enough slagging of beloved popularizers– how about some hard-core physics. The second of three extremely cool papers published last week is this Nature Physics paper from the Zeilinger group in Vienna, producers of many awesome papers about quantum mechanics. Ordinarily, this would be a hard paper to write up, becase Nature Physics are utter bastards, […]
Links for 2012-05-04
Amazon.com: The Best Science Writing Online 2012 (9780374533342): Jennifer Ouellette, Bora Zivkovic: Books Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way we think about science– from fluids to fungi, poisons to pirates. Featuring noted authors and journalists as […]
Space Chronicles by Neil deGrasse Tyson
I was tremendously disappointed and frustrated by this book. This is largely my own fault, because I went into it expecting it to be something it’s not. Had I read the description more carefully, I might not have had such a strong negative reaction (which was exacerbated by some outside stress when I first started […]
Dog Physics: Obsessive Update
A few more links that have turned up of people talking about either How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog: Andrew Johnston has a review of the UK edition, praising it because “it’s bang up to date, and goes beyond the basic quantum concepts into more complex […]
Links for 2012-05-03
Is Cosmology in Shambles? « Galileo’s Pendulum I’ll fill in more about each of these studies shortly, but note in both cases, the authors make very strong statements about the very existence of dark matter, including the quotations that begin this post. In fact, the National Geographic coverage of the second article states things even […]
Official Portrait Blogging 050212
I’ve gotten really bad about posting pictures of the kids, but we got the official school picture proofs today, featuring a smiling SteelyKid and an insouciant Pip: Both pictures pretty accurately reflect them at this stage, which is kind of nice. SteelyKid’s kind of camera-averse at the moment, and it apparently took some doing to […]
Trickle Down Science
A week or so ago, lots of people were linking to this New York Review of Books article by Steven Weinberg on “The Crisis of Big Science,” looking back over the last few decades of, well, big science. It’s somewhat dejected survey of whopping huge experiments, and the increasing difficulty of getting them funded, including […]
Clock Synchronization Done Right: “A 920-Kilometer Optical Fiber Link for Frequency Metrology at the 19th Decimal Place”
I’ve been busily working on something new, but I’m beginning to think I’ve been letting the perfect be the enemy of the good-enough-for-this-stage, so I’m setting it aside for a bit, and trying to get caught up with some of the huge number of things that have been slipping. Which includes getting the oil changed […]
Links for 2012-05-02
Self-enhancement and imposter syndrome: neither is good for your teaching | Science Edventures McCrickerd points out it is only through dissatisfaction that we change our behavior. An instructor with an overly-enhanced self sees no reason to change when something bad happens in class. “Not my fault they didn’t learn…” And who else does a lot […]