In this post we present an update to our earlier measurement of the Baby Feeding Correlation Function: The figure above shows a histogram of the interval between feedings for SteelyKid in the 14 weeks since birth. Error bars represent 1-σ statistical uncertainties. As you can see, we have added a great deal of data since… Continue reading Baby Quantization Update
Author: Chad Orzel
Athletes Aren’t Different
It’s a great time of year if you’re a sports fan. The NFL is in full swing, and college football is coming to the inconclusive end of its season (save for the weird six-weeks-later coda of the bowl games). The NBA and NHL are just starting up, and most importantly, college basketball season has just… Continue reading Athletes Aren’t Different
Einstein and Millikan
In the previous post, I promised to say something more about Einstein and the photoelectric effect. It turns out that I already wrote about this, back in 2005. That post is the end of a long chain of links about the history of photons. This is a good thing, because it frees me from having… Continue reading Einstein and Millikan
Einstein on TV
The History Channel ran a two-hour program on Einstein last night. I had meant to plug this in advance, but got distracted by the Screamy Baby Fun-Time Hour yesterday, and didn’t have time to post. The show restricted itself more or less to the period from 1900, just before his “miracle year” in 1905, to… Continue reading Einstein on TV
links for 2008-11-18
Kevin Drum – Mother Jones Blog: Conservatives and Unions "Overturning Roe is certainly a conservative priority, but it’s only been on the list for about 30 years. Fighting unions has been on the list for more like 130 years. If it’s not central to the conservative identity in America, I don’t know what is." (tags:… Continue reading links for 2008-11-18
Nobody Cares About Superconductivity
Nobody reading blogs, anyway. Doug Natelson asked for comments on a recent workshop on iron arsenide superconductors yesterday, and the count of comments still stands at zero. The under-representation of condensed matter physicists among bloggers and blog readers, relative to their abundance in the general population, really is amazing.
Academic Stimulus Package
Regarding the current financial crisis, a consensus has developed that the government needs to do something, and do something dramatic. The argument is, basically, that the normal sources of cash flow that might stimulate the economy out of recession have dried up, either through idiotic investments, or out of fear caused by all the idiotic… Continue reading Academic Stimulus Package
Think Before You Plot
There’s a link in today’s links dump to a post from Pictures of Numbers, a rarely-updated blog on the visual presentation of data (via Swans On Tea, I think). There’s some really good stuff there about how to make graphs that are easy to read and interpret. I would like to dissent mildly from one… Continue reading Think Before You Plot
links for 2008-11-17
Information Processing: Central limit theorem and securitization: how to build a CDO "[T]he mathematical concepts related to the current financial crisis leave over 95 percent of our population completely baffled. If your Ivy League education didn’t prepare you to understand the following, please ask for your money back." (tags: economics math statistics blogs) Pictures of… Continue reading links for 2008-11-17
Strain to SEE
When I’m in the right mood, I’m a sucker for really awful sci-fi movies. For example, Saturday night I stayed up far too late to watch the end of the tv-movie version of The Andromeda Strain, based on the book by the prolific and recently deceased Luddite Fiction writer Michael Crichton. It’s been twenty-plus years… Continue reading Strain to SEE