A scientific conference like DAMOP almost always includes a conference banquet (to which people may or may not bring dates), usually the last night of the meeting, where everybody gets together to eat massive quantities of catered food and drink massive amounts of wine supplied by the conference. The quality of these ranges from your… Continue reading Loose Lips Sink Research Grants
Category: Science
Unfinished Business
The problem with scheduling something like last week’s Ask a ScienceBlogger for a time when I’m out of town is that any interesting discussions that turn up in comments are sort of artificially shortened because I can’t hold up my end of the conversation from a remote site. I do want to respond (below the… Continue reading Unfinished Business
Credo
A very nice post from Rob Knop, exploring the the role of faith in science: You may then ask, am I not then taking many of the results of science as faith, since I didn’t check all of the experimental results and subsequent analysis myself? Answer: yes and no. It is a lowercase-f “faith”, in… Continue reading Credo
A Day in the Life
Woke up, got out of bed Ran a comb across my head…
100 Science Words
One of the perks of my job is that sometimes people send me books for free. Granted, these are mostly introductory physics textbooks, which tend not to be page-turners, but I’m a big fan of books, and I’m a big fan of free stuff, so free books are great. Thus, when I was contacted by… Continue reading 100 Science Words
Lead the World
Derek Lowe offers another Law of the Lab, and it’s a good one: Today’s law is: You are in real trouble if someone knows more about your project than you do. That’s a realization that hits people at some point in their graduate school career – preferably not much past the midpoint. It marks the… Continue reading Lead the World
Mount Noun-More
Since people have asked about the outcome of the Mike and Mike “Mount Sportsmore” thing that kicked off yesterday’s post about iconic scientists, I made it a point to catch their final list today: Muhammed Ali Babe Ruth Michael Jordan Wayne Gretzky They specifically put Jackie Robinson off in a special category of his own… Continue reading Mount Noun-More
Einstein, Darwin, Newton, and…?
On the way in to work, I was listening to ESPN radio’s Mike & Mike show, and they were discussing “Mount Sportsmore,” that is, the Mount Rushmore of sports. They had two of the four spots filled with Babe Ruth and Muhammed Ali, and were debating baseball players for the other two (which is stupid–… Continue reading Einstein, Darwin, Newton, and…?
Science of the Times
A couple of good science stories in today’s New York Times: First, an article on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The current news hook, weirdly, appears to be a recent calculation of the expected magnitude of the signal resulting from the collision and merger of two black holes. Why this merits a long article,… Continue reading Science of the Times
Uncertain Pop Quiz Results
We had 45 responses to yesterday’s poll/quiz question— thank you to all who participated. The breakdown of answers was, by a quick count: How do you report your answer in a lab report? 0 votes A) 4.371928645 +/- 0.0316479825 m/s 3 votes B) 4.372 +/- 0.03165 m/s 18 votes C) 4.372 +/- 0.032 m/s 21… Continue reading Uncertain Pop Quiz Results