My Maryland Terrapins have been, shall we say, inconsistent this year, with back-to-back home losses to Ohio University (not Ohio State, Ohio U.) and American University. As a result, I didn’t have really high hopes headed into Saturday’s game at tope-ranked North Carolina. Much to my surprise, they played a really good game, and held… Continue reading Maryland beats North Carolina
Month: January 2008
links for 2008-01-20
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Faculty Exchanges: Notes Toward a Proposal The next great reality show: ProfSwap! Hey, if the writer’s strike keeps up… (tags: academia education experiment) Words Words Words — The Dream Cafe Weblog Steve Brust gets sick of LiveJournal, ans dtarts a group blog. (tags: blogs books SF) Fantastic Japanscapes :::… Continue reading links for 2008-01-20
Physics Contains Multitudes
It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with the Incoherent Ponderer, but he’s exactly right regarding Scientific American‘s “The Future of Physics” issue (via PhysMath Central): [T]his month’s issue of Scientific American has a special titled “The Future of Physics”. I was quickly disappointed when I realized that the article covers only “terascale” physics,… Continue reading Physics Contains Multitudes
links for 2008-01-19
The Quantum Pontiff : The Contextuality of Quantum Theory in Ten Minutes “Elves, Santa, boxes, and quantum measurements. That’s the Bell-Kochen-Specker theorem: quantum measurements are contextual.” (tags: physics quantum science computing) An Upsetting Outcome :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education “When the researchers crunched the data, though,… Continue reading links for 2008-01-19
Buy The Dragon Never Sleeps! Buy it Now!
Amazon conveniently informed me today of a very positive development in SF: Night Shade Books is republishing Glen Cook’s space opera novel The Dragon Never Sleeps, which I reviewed quite some time ago. I’ve re-read it since then, and if anything, my opinion of it improved. It’s “New Space Opera” written years before there was… Continue reading Buy The Dragon Never Sleeps! Buy it Now!
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard P. Feynman
Somehow or another, I have managed never to read Feynman’s famous book on Quantum Electro-Dynamics. It always seemed a little too much like work, but having found myself in the position of writing a pop-science book about quantum physics that includes a chapter on QED and Feynman diagrams, it seemed like it would probably be… Continue reading QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard P. Feynman
Dorky Poll: Physics or Stamp Collecting?
Ernest Rutherford once said In science, there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting. So, a really simple question: which do you prefer? Physics or stamp collecting? Leave your answer in the comments.
links for 2008-01-18
The Box Of Paperbacks Book Club: Smith Of Wootton Major & Farmer Giles Of Ham by J.R.R. Tolkien (1967, 1949) | The A.V. Club “A friend who’s much smarter than I once theorized that the process of growing up involves going either through a Tolkien phase or a Beat phase, but never both.” (tags: books… Continue reading links for 2008-01-18
Waiting for the Jack of Hearts
They’re renovating a lab down the hall from mine (this is what led to the power shutdown that temporarily disabled my wavemeter). Today’s agenda apparently involves a lot of drilling. Or, possibly, a bank robbery. Whatever’s going on, the intermittent violent shaking of the floor is not so conducive to research with laser diodes. When… Continue reading Waiting for the Jack of Hearts
True Lab Stories: Fire Safety
Typing up the demolition story reminded me of another before-my-time NIST story. Again, the statute of limitations has run, so it’s probably safe to tell this. As mentioned in the earlier post, it was very expensive to get the official facilities team at NIST to do construction work, so a lot of things used to… Continue reading True Lab Stories: Fire Safety