Like everybody else, I’m horrified by the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech. It’s the sort of nightmare situation you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. Of course, the bodies aren’t even cold yet, and already the blogosphere is a-flutter with people touting this as proof that the US needs to change its gun laws in… Continue reading A Vain Plea for Decorum
Month: April 2007
The Unsinkable Standard Model
The big physics news of the week last week came while I was in transit on Wednesday: The MiniBooNE (the odd capitalization is because it’s sort of an acronym) neutrino experiment released their first results on the neutrino oscillation studies they’ve been doing, and found, well, nothing new. In contrast to a previous experiment that… Continue reading The Unsinkable Standard Model
Global Climate Phase Shift
After three glorious sixty-degree days in California, we returned to Schenectady just in time for a major winter storm. In mid-April. There’s an inch or two of icy slush all over everything, and it’s still raining. Whee! It occurs to me again that what we’re seeing locally from climate change feels more like a climate… Continue reading Global Climate Phase Shift
Basic Concepts: Ohm’s Law
Scott Aaronson is explaining “Physics for Doofuses,” and has started with electricity. He’s got a nice breakdown of the basic quantities that you need to keep track of to understand electricity, leading up to Ohm’s Law. He asks for a little help on this point, though: Well, as it turns out, the identities don’t always… Continue reading Basic Concepts: Ohm’s Law
Newton: Still Right
Physical Review Letters this week features a paper on a topic that might not seem to be in dispute: Newton’s Second Law of Motion: We have tested the proportionality of force and acceleration in Newton’s second law, F=ma, in the limit of small forces and accelerations. Our tests reach well below the acceleration scales relevant… Continue reading Newton: Still Right
Conference Report
The NCUR meeting and associated activities (including a minor little adventure into San Francisco) have kept me really busy over the last few days. We’re headed out early this afternoon, which means that we finally have a morning without any obligations. And, of course, there’s a cold, steady rain falling after two days of spectacularly… Continue reading Conference Report
Air Travel Blues
Greetings from pitch-dark Northern California, where I’m just ecstatically happy to be awake at 5am. Jet lag sucks. Other things that suck? Weather delays. We were supposed to arrive at about 1:00 yesterday afternoon, but snow in Chicago screwed that up completely. We spent a good hour and a half sitting on the plane at… Continue reading Air Travel Blues
Pining for Sleds: Forbidden
I’m headed out to the West Coast at an ungodly hour tomorrow morning, as one of the faculty accompanying the students who are presenting at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research. I’m looking forward to the trip, other than the bit where I have to get up at 4am to go to the airport. Prior… Continue reading Pining for Sleds: Forbidden
Timing Is Everything
Let me be the millionth person to link to the Washington Post article about the busking virtuoso. Let me also agree with Kevin Drum about the reasons nobody listened: Plus, of course, IT WAS A METRO STATION. People needed to get to work on time so their bosses wouldn’t yell at them. Weingarten mentions this,… Continue reading Timing Is Everything
Shtetl of the Times
I forgot to link to Sunday’s New York Times article about D-Wave and their controversial claim to have made a working quantum computer, which prominently features quotes from the world’s second funniest physics blogger: Scott Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist at the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Canada, fired the… Continue reading Shtetl of the Times