A reader emails to ask if I can make sense of this announcement from the European Space Agency: Scientists funded by the European Space Agency have measured the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field for the first time in a laboratory. Under certain special conditions the effect is much larger than expected from general relativity… Continue reading Gravitomagnetic Noise
Category: Science
Know Your Geeks
Alex Palazzo offers a taxonomy of biologists, and takes some heat in the comments for leaving people out or mischaracterizing subdisciplines. This reminded me that I did a similar post about physics quite some time ago– almost four years! That’s, like, a century in blog-time… I’ll reproduce the geek taxonomy after the cut, and clean… Continue reading Know Your Geeks
Good Experimentalists Never Grow Up
Janet Stemwedel over at Adventures in Science and Ethics has a new post on experiment vs. theory: Someone makes a comment about hot water making ice cubes faster than cold water. Someone else, familiar with thermodynamics, explains in detail why this cannot be the case. No actual ice cube trays risk harm, since none are… Continue reading Good Experimentalists Never Grow Up
Humanists Have All the Fun
I’ve seen the idea of an “Opposite Day” popping up lots of places in the political blogosphere (most recently from Big Media Matt and Will Wilkinson), and it sounds sort of cool. The idea is that you commit to writing blog posts on topics chosen by readers, taking the opposite position from what you would… Continue reading Humanists Have All the Fun
Rule 11: Don’t Be Peter Woit
Via BioCurious, the Public Library of Science offers an op-ed titled Ten Simple Rules for Getting Published. The advice is aimed at biologists, but it’s broadly applicable. I especially like: Rule 4: If you do not write well in the English language, take lessons early; it will be invaluable later. This is not just about… Continue reading Rule 11: Don’t Be Peter Woit
Better Jobs Than Science
Via Matt McIrvin (whose earlier entry on “Nerd Bravado” is also a must-read), the best explanation I’ve heard so far of the whole “Why are there so few women in scinece?” debate: they got better jobs: One of my students, we’ll call him Bill, in an introductory computer science class said that he wanted to… Continue reading Better Jobs Than Science
Top Eleven: We Have a Winner!
The votes are in, and have been carefully tabulated by our bleary-eyed accounting firm (that is, me– I would’ve posted last night, but I went to see Chuck D speak (because I’m down with the old-school rap), and he went on for more than two hours…) . What looked like a runaway victory for Michelson… Continue reading Top Eleven: We Have a Winner!
You Can’t Get There From Here
Buried beneath some unseemly but justified squee-ing, Scalzi links to an article about “counterfactal computation”, an experiment in which the group of Paul Kwiat group at Illinois managed to find the results of a quantum computation without running the computer at all. Really, there’s not much to say to that other than “Whoa.” The article… Continue reading You Can’t Get There From Here
Algebraic Intervention
I really don’t mean to turn the whole blog over to all algebra, all the time, but Richard Cohen’s idiocy has proved to be a good jumping-off point for a lot of interesting discussions (and a surprising number of comments, links, and TrackBacks…). The other ScienceBlogs comment on the whole thing that I’d like to… Continue reading Algebraic Intervention
Algebra and Storytelling
(It’s Presidents’ Day, so remember to vote!) Razib over at Gene Expression offers some thoughts on the algebra issue, in which he suggests some historical perspective: The ancient Greeks were not unintelligent, so the fact that many of us (rightly I believe) take symbolic algebra for granted as a necessary feature of our cognitive landscape… Continue reading Algebra and Storytelling