Many apologies for posting this week’s cute toddler picture twelve hours late, but we had a little bit of a meltdown last night, thwarting my plans to get a cute picture after SteelyKid had her bath. She’s cutting some new molars (I swear, she’s part shark, with all the teeth she’s getting), and it’s hard… Continue reading Belated Toddler Blogging 082710
Author: Chad Orzel
Links for 2010-08-27
6 Baffling Flaws in Famous Sci-Fi Technology | Cracked.com “For instance, when the main reactor fails in Star Trek they call it a “warp core breech” and it happens so often there’s an entire page listing times it has happened on the Star Trek wiki. Seriously, it was like every third episode. Their only safety… Continue reading Links for 2010-08-27
Measuring Gravity: Ain’t Nothin’ but a G Thing
There’s a minor scandal in fundamental physics that doesn’t get talked about much, and it has to do with the very first fundamental force discovered, gravity. The scandal is the value of Newton’s gravitational constant G, which is the least well known of the fundamental constants, with a value of 6.674 28(67) x 10-11 m3… Continue reading Measuring Gravity: Ain’t Nothin’ but a G Thing
Guess-the-Lyrics: Unusual Rhymes II
Same deal as the last game: Each of the following pairs of words is taken from a pop song, where they are set up to rhyme (many of the phrases don’t really rhyme, but they’re treated as if they do). Your job is to guess the song based on the rhyming pair.
Links for 2010-08-26
“Mumble mumble shoulder something”: R.E.M., Guided By Voices, Ghostface, and the pleasures of lyrical ambiguity | Music | The A.V. Club Blog | The A.V. Club “The Stipe of R.E.M.’s early recordings uses words to create abstract compositions. It’s not the only way to approach lyric-writing in rock music, or even the best way. Some… Continue reading Links for 2010-08-26
The Cromartie Conundrum, the Foreman Solution, and the Chamberlain Estimate
New York Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie is getting mocked for a clip where he takes some time to name all his children (the clip isn’t as bad as the description makes it sound– he’s slow, but he doesn’t struggle all that badly). Cromartie claims that HBO manipulated the footage to make him look bad. Of… Continue reading The Cromartie Conundrum, the Foreman Solution, and the Chamberlain Estimate
Academic Poll: That Time of Year
This one’s pretty self-explanatory: Classes for the new academic year start a week from Monday.survey software You only get to pick one because that’s the way it is. If you need me, I’ll be over here scrambling frantically.
Melting Simulated Insulators
The Joerg Heber post that provided one of the two papers for yesterday’s Hanbury Brown Twiss-travaganza also included a write-up of a new paper in Nature on Mott insulators, which was also written up in Physics World. Most of the experimental details are quite similar to a paper by Markus Greiner’s group I wrote up… Continue reading Melting Simulated Insulators
Links for 2010-08-25
Streets of the optical scientists! | Skulls in the Stars “[While a post-doc in Amsterdam] I would take the bus to the rink from my apartment, and every day would travel down Maxwellstraat and past Lorentzlaan, but it didn’t occur to me until near the end of my time in The Netherlands that these streets… Continue reading Links for 2010-08-25
Tell Me Something I Don’t Know
I’m unaccountably sleepy today, and I have work to do, which is keeping me from deep, insightful blogging. So I’m going to punt, and throw this open to you all: Leave me a comment telling me something I don’t already know. Well, OK, since I can’t reasonably expect you to be mind-readers, that should be… Continue reading Tell Me Something I Don’t Know