Category: Science

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

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

Bunches and Antibunches of Atoms: Hanbury Brown and Twiss Effects in Ultracold Atoms

Two papers in one post this time out. One of these was brought to my attention by Joerg Heber, the other I was reminded of when checking some information for last week’s mathematical post on photons. They fit extremely well together though, and both relate to the photon correlation stuff I was talking about last… Continue reading Bunches and Antibunches of Atoms: Hanbury Brown and Twiss Effects in Ultracold Atoms

Credibility Is Easy to Lose: Paleo-Chemical Edition

I was channel-surfing the other night, and stumbled across a History Channel program on paleoanthropology, talking about new-ish theories of how humans first populated the Americas. Coming off my recent read of 1491, this seemed like a good way to pass a little time. After a little bit, it started to talk about some guy’s… Continue reading Credibility Is Easy to Lose: Paleo-Chemical Edition

The Science Mindset List

It’s nearly time for classes to resume, which means it’s time for a zillion stories about Beloit College’s annual Kids These Days List, listing off a bunch of things that this year’s entering college class, who were mostly born in 1992, have always taken for granted. A sample: 1. Few in the class know how… Continue reading The Science Mindset List

Media Skills for Scientists

Everybody’s favorite science-and-politics blogger has posted a video clip showing part of what’s wrong in science communication. It’s a clip from the BBC from last December, featuring one of those head-to-head quasi-debates about “Climategate” between Prof. Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia and political consultant Marc Morano, who has made himself a nice… Continue reading Media Skills for Scientists

Waves: Moving Without Going Anywhere

At the tail end of Tuesday’s post about wind and temperature, I asked a “vaguely related fun bonus question:” If the air molecules that surround us are moving at 500 m/s anyway, why isn’t the speed of sound more like 500 m/s than 300 m/s? This is another one that people are sometimes surprised by.… Continue reading Waves: Moving Without Going Anywhere

1491 by Charles C. Mann

We picked up a used copy of Charles Mann’s pop-archeology book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus a while back. I didn’t read it at the time, because I was a little afraid that it would be rather polemical in what I think of as the Neil Young mode– wildly overstating the awesomeness… Continue reading 1491 by Charles C. Mann

Quantum Optics from the Opposite Direction: QED Limits on Laser Intensities

Most of the time, when we talk about seeing quantum effects from light, we talk about extremely weak beams– looking at intensities where one photon more or less represents a significant change in the intensity of the light. Last week, though, Physics Buzz wrote up a paper that goes in the other direction: they suggest… Continue reading Quantum Optics from the Opposite Direction: QED Limits on Laser Intensities