I’m giving an exam this morning, and there’s yet another job talk at lunch, followed by an afternoon of trying to finish all the stuff that’s been pushed aside by candidate talks and interviews, so I’m a little too busy for detailed blogging. Sounds like time for a couple of audience participation entries… I’m running… Continue reading Dorky Poll: Favorite Elision
Why Does iTunes Suck So Much?
Well, ok, it doesn’t generally suck, but it’s absolutely horrible at ripping CD’s. I haven’t done much of this lately, but in doing some other stuff, I recently discovered that I never ripped the Death cab for Cutie album Transatlanticism into my collection. So I popped it into the CD drive, and happily added all… Continue reading Why Does iTunes Suck So Much?
Cosmetics in the Lab
I spent the better part of an hour putting nail polish on mirror mounts yesterday. No, this isn’t a tragic misinterpretation of my students’ advice to “wear more pink.” It’s because the optical table looks like this:
Physics News of the Day
A couple of quick stories off Physics Web: First, they have a short article about a record-breaking cat state. This is a state in which a group of researchers have maneged to “entangle” six photons so that they are either all polarized vertically, or all polarized horizontally. This breaks the previous record of five entangled… Continue reading Physics News of the Day
For Some Value of “Experiment”
I’m running about a day behind on my Inside Higher Ed commentary because the ongoing search has made this a Week From Hell, but there was an interesting news item yesterday about an economic study suggesting that health care subsidies would improve education more than tuition credits: The study’s bottom line finding, in the authors’… Continue reading For Some Value of “Experiment”
The G-Word
Scott Aaronson talks sense about religion, in response to an emailer who stopped reading his quantum computing lectures because he made references to “God”: What I’m trying to say, Bill, is this: you can go ahead and indulge yourself. If some of the most brilliant unbelievers in history — Einstein, Erdös, Twain — could refer… Continue reading The G-Word
How to Lie With Statistics
Over at Good Math, Bad Math, Mark offers two entries for the Basic Concepts series: Mean, Median, and Mode Normal Distributions Between those two, he tells you almost everything you need to know to lie with statistics. Or how to spot when somebody else is trying to lie to you with statistics, which is probably… Continue reading How to Lie With Statistics
Basic Concepts: Force
This is the first post I’m doing for the “Basic Concepts” series. When I asked for suggestions, I got a good long list of stuff, and it’s hard to know quite where to start. I’m going to start with “Force,” because physics as we know it more or less started with Isaac Newton, and Newton… Continue reading Basic Concepts: Force
Windows 386 Is on the Attack
Via a mailing list, I got sent this link to a really mind-boggling Microsoft marketing video from the 80’s. It really defies description, but the original poster made a good attempt: Microsoft sent this tape to retailers to explain the benefits of Windows 386. Boring until the 7 minute mark when the production is taken… Continue reading Windows 386 Is on the Attack
The Open Laboratory
As part of the upcoming science blogging conference, Bora Zivkovic at A Blog Around the Clock has put together an anthology of the best science-related blog posts of last year. He’s titled it The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006, and it’s now available for purchase at Lulu, should you be interested… Continue reading The Open Laboratory