Over in Scientopia, Janet notes an interesting mis-statement from NPR, where Dina Temple-Raston said of the now-dead terrorist: [O]ne intelligence officials told us that nothing with an electron actually passed close to him, which in a way is one of the ways they actually caught him. As Janet notes, this would be quite a feat,… Continue reading The Physics of Finding Osama bin Laden (As Mis-Reported on NPR)
Author: Chad Orzel
Proving Einstein Wrong…ish: Measurement of the Instantaneous Velocity of a Brownian Particle
Last summer, there was a fair bit of hype about a paper from Mark Raizen’s group at Texas which was mostly reported with an “Einstein proven wrong” slant, probably due to this press release. While it is technically true that they measured something Einstein said would be impossible to measure, that framing is a little… Continue reading Proving Einstein Wrong…ish: Measurement of the Instantaneous Velocity of a Brownian Particle
Big Brother Is Evaluating Your Teaching
The New York Times ran a couple of op-eds on Sunday about education policy. One, by Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari is familair stuff to anyone who’s heard me talk about the subject before: teachers in the US are, on the whole, given fewer resources than they need to succeed, paid less well than… Continue reading Big Brother Is Evaluating Your Teaching
Links for 2011-05-02
The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries – NYTimes.com “WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the… Continue reading Links for 2011-05-02
Links for 2011-05-01
Acculturating students to science § Unqualified Offerings “A student with a very enthusiastic yet serious demeanor, and very responsible habits, recently asked if he could work in my research group. He has few relevant skills at this point, and my crew is pretty full, but I want to help him, so we’re applying for some… Continue reading Links for 2011-05-01
Toddler On Wheels
SteelyKid and Kate are down in Boston this weekend, which has given me time to get some work done around the house, and go to some restaurants that they don’t like. It’s left me a little deprived of cute, though. So, as a counter to that, some cute video of SteelyKid riding her “motorcycle” (her… Continue reading Toddler On Wheels
What a Drag It Is Getting Old
Today’s blog silence was the result of travel down to and back from New Haven, where I gave a talk at Southern Connecticut State University. Weirdly, this was also a day full of reminders of my own advancing age: — After the talk, I wandered around New Haven a bit, visiting places I used to… Continue reading What a Drag It Is Getting Old
Links for 2011-04-29
Photonist » Blog Archive » Antihydrogen trapped for 1000 seconds “A new experiment from the ALPHA collaboration, based at CERN, has created and trapped antihydrogen atoms for 1000 seconds, 6000 times longer than their previous attempts which trapped antihydrogen for 172 ms. Having antihydrogen trapped for this period allows the possibility of studying fundamental properties… Continue reading Links for 2011-04-29
Thursday Techno-Toddler Blogging 042811
Kate and I have spent a lot of this week being thwarted by technology in one way or another, so SteelyKid decided to set us straight about how things work. First, she demonstrated how to work the tv: Then she showed us how to take pictures on her phone (because, of course, all phones take… Continue reading Thursday Techno-Toddler Blogging 042811
Laptop Recommendations
As previously noted, the Lenovo ThinkPad X61 tablet that I use for my lectures is limping badly these days (it blue-screened this morning, whee). The options for a direct replacement are pretty limited, but in thinking about it a bit, I realized that I hardly use the tablet functions other than to annotate slides during… Continue reading Laptop Recommendations