Chad Orzel – Page 610 – Uncertain Principles Archive

If Solar Sails Work, THEN SO TOO WILL MY LIGHT CANNON

Quick! To Professor Science’s house! (I’d do that experiment for three lab coats, and I don’t even wear lab coats…)

New Blogs

I make a habit of checking my Technorati search results regularly, partly because I’m just vain enough to care that other people are linking to me (my rank is holding steady in the 8,000’s, but it hasn’t updated in a while), but mostly because it’s a good way to find new blogs, and there are… Continue reading New Blogs

Extraordinary Claims and Universality

“Thoreau,” guest-posting at Unqualified Offerings, has a nice post commenting on a Physics Today article about the use of language in science, by Helen Quinn. The article is pretty standard stuff for anyone following the “culture wars” debates here– use of the word “belief” to describe scientific conclusions causes confusion, and attempts to put science… Continue reading Extraordinary Claims and Universality

How the Other Half Researches

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean has an idea for an Undergraduate [Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology] Theory Insitute, a six-week summer course that would cover a bunch of the basic tools and techniques of the field, and prepare students to do theoretical research in those fields. The proposed syllabus: Special relativity, index notation, vectors, tensors. Lagrangian… Continue reading How the Other Half Researches

Motivation

Tobias Buckell is experimenting with a new concept to keep himself on pace as he writes his next novel. He’s publicly stated a goal of 6,000 words per week, and pledges to donate a nickel for every word he’s short of that, to a charity chosen by his readers (a different one each week). How’s… Continue reading Motivation

Cheerleading for Title IX

You might think that the most interesting thing in this morning’s New York Times was the photo essay about the Large Hadron Collider, but you’d be wrong. The most interesting article is this story about cheerleading. Why is that, you ask? Because it’s written about my home town: Thirty girls signed up for the cheerleading… Continue reading Cheerleading for Title IX

Conservatives on Campus

An article from the Chronicle of Higher Education has landed in my inbox, describing efforts to recruit students to conservative groups: Ryan J. Sorba stands before a table covered with mini-cupcakes and whoopie pies, calling out to students as they pass. A sign lists the prices: $6 for customers under 18; $3 for 19-year-olds; $1… Continue reading Conservatives on Campus

Kij Johnson, Fudoki [Library of Babel]

Kij Johnson’s The Fox Woman, the story of a fox in Heian-era Japan who becomes a woman for the sake of love, was a beautiful and moving book, so, of course, I bought her next book, Fudoki immediately. And then, it took me three years to get around to reading it… There’s no real good… Continue reading Kij Johnson, Fudoki [Library of Babel]

Extra Dimensions Get Smaller

One of my favorite experiments in physics has released a new set of results in Physical Review Letters, putting experimental limits on the size of any extra dimensions of the sort predicted by string theory: We conducted three torsion-balance experiments to test the gravitational inverse-square law at separations between 9.53 mm and 55 Âµm, probing… Continue reading Extra Dimensions Get Smaller

Too Much Tom Waits

I did an iTunes run recently, and picked up Tom Waits’s three-disc collection Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, along with a couple of other albums (TV On the Radio and the Decemberists among them). As is my usual practice, I put these records into the “Party Shuffle” on iTunes, so I get a chance to… Continue reading Too Much Tom Waits