About fifteen minutes from now, my Giants will take the field against the Redskins. The Giants are coming off a bye week (in which they somehow managed to trail by 10 going into the fourth quarter), so the big story leading up to the game has to do with the always-volatile Jeremy Shockey, who popped… Continue reading Toward a Saner Sports Media Culture
Physics Contains Multitudes
I finished Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics last night, and will write up a full review in the next couple of days. On the whole, I thought it was a well-done book, and he makes some good points. It’s not without its problems, though, chief among them being the fact that the title is… Continue reading Physics Contains Multitudes
The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America
The new Hold Steady record, Boys and Girls in America was released on Tuesday, and I picked it up immediately at iTunes. I’ve listened to it straight through a bunch of times now, while doing onther things. So, how is it? The short answer is “Not as good as Separation Sunday.” At least, it doesn’t… Continue reading The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America
You Should See the Picture
While I’m being cranky about graphics in the mass media, a quick Bronx cheer for the New York Times and their Mars rover story this morning, which opens: NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover spent 22 months trekking almost six miles to a large scientifically promising crater. Like a tourist who asks a passer-by to take a… Continue reading You Should See the Picture
How to Lie With Test Scores
Sean Carroll comments on an item in the Atlantic Monthly on test scores compared across nations. There are two things that really bug me about this item, the most important of which is the deeply dishonest graphic the Atlantic did to illustrate the item. Here’s the honest version of the graph, redone using data from… Continue reading How to Lie With Test Scores
An Enthusiastic Amateur is Worse Than Any Pro
Kate points me to a real head-scratcher from Slate, about Harry Collins posing as a physicist. Collins is a sociologist who studies expertise, and also has a very strong interest in gravitational wave detection experiments. Collins and co-workers collected a bunch of qualitative questions about gravitational waves and detectors, and got an expert in the… Continue reading An Enthusiastic Amateur is Worse Than Any Pro
Classic Edition: The Transporters Aren’t Working. Again.
Third and final post in a series about “teleportation” from July 2002. This one is mostly dedicated to voicing the same complaints I have about the more recent stories that kicked this whole repost business off. The more things change, the more I keep repeating myself.
Classic Edition: Beam Me a Photon, Scotty
Part two of three of an explanation of “quantum teleportation” experiments, from July of 2002. This one goes through the basics how teleportation works. I might be able to do better now, having worked through it in more detail in order to teach about it in my Quantum Optics class, but it’s been a busy… Continue reading Classic Edition: Beam Me a Photon, Scotty
Classic Edition: Spooky Interaction at a Distance
As threatened in the previous post on new “quantum teleportation” results, here’s the first of three old articles on teleportation. This one discusses EPR states and “entanglement.” It’s somewhat linkrotted– in particular, the original news article is gone, but the explanation is still ok. This dates from July of 2002, which is like 1840 in… Continue reading Classic Edition: Spooky Interaction at a Distance
The Latest in Teleportation
The latest physics news is an experimental demonstration of “teleportation” involving both light and atoms, done at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and reported on by the Institutes of Physics and CNN, among others, and remarked on by Dave, among others. I wrote up some stuff about teleportation in the early days of this… Continue reading The Latest in Teleportation