Science
drorzel | February 3, 2014It's taken me a disgracefully long time to finish the review copy of Lee Billings's Five Billion Years of Solitude I was sent back in the fall, mostly because I didn't read anything not immediately related to the book-in-progress for most of November and all of December. Which is to say, the long delay is not in any way a reflection of the quality of this book, which is excellent.
The title comes from the observation that the span from when life arose on Earth to the distant future when the expanding Sun will swallow the planet entirely is around five billion years. The span when the planet…
drorzel | February 2, 2014Unless you've been marooned on a desert island for the last couple of weeks-- or, you know, foreign-- you're probably at least dimly aware that the Super Bowl is this evening. This is the pinnacle of the football season, and also the cue for lots of people to take to social media proclaiming their contempt for the Super Bowl, NFL football, or just sports in general. This can occasionally be sort of amusing, as with Kyle Whelliston's "Last Man" game, but usually, it's just kind of tedious. The AV Club has pretty much the only necessary response, namely that Nobody Cares That You Don't Care…
drorzel | February 1, 2014Kameron Hurley did a blog post on what it took her to become a writer, which I ran across via Harry Connolly's follow-up. These are fairly long, but well worth reading for insight into what it means to be a writer-- and they're both very good at what they do. You should buy their books, right now.
As always, reading these made me feel really guilty. Maybe I ought to add "the writing life" articles to the list of topics I just don't read, with "Let's make fun of religious people!" and "The Higgs boson is the greatest thing since sliced bread!" Except unlike those two, which just irritate me,…
drorzel | January 31, 2014Topping the looooong list of things I would give a full ResearchBlogging write-up if I had time is this new paper on a ultra-cold atom realization of "Dirac Monopoles". This is really cool stuff, but there are a lot of intricacies that I don't fully understand, so writing it up isn't a simple matter.
The really short version, though, is that a team of AMO physicists have created particles that are analogous to magnetic monopoles-- that is, to a particle that was only a "north" or "south" pole of a magnet, not both together like a conventional bar magnet (leading to my favorite social-media…
drorzel | January 29, 2014Last week, a comment I made on Twitter about the annoyance of doing merit evaluation paperwork led to some back-and-forth with Rhett Allain and the National Society of Black Physicists Twitter account about whether blogs can or should count toward academic evaluation. This seemed like a good topic for another video hangout with me and Rhett, which we did yesterday. Unfortunately, there were some technical issues with the hangout, which delayed the start and didn't allow live Q&A, but we did get video:
(The camera appears to be on just me for most of this, so it's largely a hangout…
drorzel | January 28, 2014The Pip was sick this weekend, I had a deadline for a bunch of administrative crap that I pushed off back in December when I was rushing to finish the book, and I'm giving an exam on Thursday. So, I'm not doing lengthy blogging right now, but two quick notices:
1) A reminder (I think I posted this before) that the Union College Department of Physics and Astronomy is hiring a visitor, for up to three years (contingent on performance). If you're in the market for an academic job, albeit a temporary one, check out the ad. If you know anybody who might be interested, point it out to them.
2)…
drorzel | January 24, 2014The local sports-talk radio station is running a bunch of commercials from a tax prep service in which a loud announcer declares that "People who did their own taxes left one billion dollars on the table last year. That's billion with a 'b.'" and urges people to "Get your billion back!" by paying for their tax-return service. Which, you know, sounds like quite a bit.
Only, there are upwards of 300 million people in the US. So, a billion dollars is about $3 per person. So, it's maybe not as impressive as they want you to think.
Of course, a lot of those people are too young or too old to be…
pharyngula | January 23, 2014One of the advantages of working at a small university that puts a variety of disciplines cheek-by-jowel in a single building is that I get exposed to all sorts of different stuff. It sometimes has its downsides — I'm on an interdisciplinary search committee, so next week is consumed with seminars in statistics and computer science, all very mathy, that will sorely strain my brain — but I get to learn stuff all the time, which makes me happy.
So this semester I'm always trundling stuff up and down between the second and third floors for my genetics lab, and the third floor is where all the…
drorzel | January 23, 2014I realize people are getting sick of reading me talk about this charged-tape business, which has run to one, two, three, four posts at this point. Truth be told, I'm losing enthusiasm for it myself. So this will be the final post, at least for now...
As I mentioned on Twitter, as I type this stuff up for the blog, I've toyed with the idea of hanging onto it instead, and writing it up for The American Journal of Physics or The Physics Teacher, so I could get a little professional credit for it. There are two problems with that (other than that some stick-in-the-mud editor or reviewer might…
drorzel | January 23, 2014Ashutosh Jogalekar has a response to my post from yesterday complaining about his earlier post on whether multiverses represent a philosophical crisis for physics. I suspect we actually disagree less than that back-and-forth makes it seem-- he acknowledges my main point, which was that fundamental theoretical physics is a small subset of physics as a whole, and I don't disagree with his point that physics as a discipline has long been characterized by a reductionist sort of approach-- always trying to get to smaller numbers of fundamental principles.
Our real point of disagreement, I think,…
oracknows | January 22, 2014And now for something completely different.
There was a time when, as a blogger, I would have been instantly aware of an incident like the one I'm about to discuss, instantly aware of it and all over it within a day. That it's been a few days since this happened, and I remained blissfully unaware of it until yesterday tells me how much I've changed as a blogger since my early days. Sure, some things haven't changed much, as anyone who reads my first post cum manifesto can see if he goes back and reads it, such as the subject matter of this blog and my commitment to science and science-based…
drorzel | January 22, 2014The very last section of the book-in-progress (at least the draft that's with my editor right now...) is titled "Science Is Never Over," and talks about how there are a nearly infinite number of phenomena that you can investigate scientifically. The universe is a never-ending source of amazement and wonder, with surprisingly rich dynamics in the simplest of things. I mean, look at the thousands of words I've gotten out of talking about sticky tape...
This is why I sigh heavily whenever I see a title like Ashutosh Jogalekar's "Should Physicists Stop Looking for Fundamental Laws. This is, at…
drorzel | January 22, 2014In the previous post about simulating the attraction between sticky tapes using VPython, I ended with a teaser mentioning that there was a discrepancy between the simulation and the theoretical solution from directly solving the equations. The problem is kind of subtle, but clearly visible in this graph from that post:
Data for the toy model version of the system, showing the equilibrium position as a function of initial separation.
In this, we see the equilibrium position that the mass-on-a-spring settles into as a function of the initial separation between the charges in the toy model.…
drorzel | January 21, 2014What with the umpteen zillion articles declaring the Death of the Blog, I've been toying with the idea of doing something podcast-ish for a while. Rhett Allain from Dot Physics was game, too, and suggested using Google+ to do a video hangout, so here we are talking about our classes this term:
The video quality is kind of crap on my end, which is a recurring problem here when we Skype with the grandparents. I probably should've closed more programs and tabs, but I'm an idiot. Also, I fidget a lot. But this is meant to be fairly casual, and I really do talk with my hands like that.
Anyway,…
drorzel | January 21, 2014Having spent a lot of time solving equations related to sticky tape models, including trying to work solutions in my head while driving to Grandma and Grandpa's with the kids, and making some measurements of real tapes, there was only one thing left to do: try simulating this problem in VPython. Because I'm a physics nerd who knows just enough about programming to be dangerous...
Finding the full solution to the real sticky tape scenario is kind of a miserable process, because it involves a long continuous tape with charge all down its length, which is kind of complicated, and then there's a…
oracknows | January 19, 2014The flu season continues apace around my part of the country. I wrote about it about a week and a half ago, in particular how people don't get their flu shots because they don't think they need them, because they don't think the flu is a serious disease. Two more stories illustrate this disconnect. For instance, here's a story about three people in their 20s who died of the flu in Michigan. The key heart-wrenching passage is this:
Ashley McCormick was 23 years old when she died December 27.
"We were like, 'This is the flu. How can this happen? It's just the flu.' I mean, everybody gets the…
drorzel | January 17, 2014In addition to making a toy model to show the tipping-point behavior of charged pieces of sticky tape, I spent some time on Tuesday trying to do something quantitative with this. Of course, Tuesday is the one day of the week that I don't teach, and I didn't want to go to campus to do the experiment, so I put it together from the incredibly sophisticated materials I had available at home: Lego bricks and a tape measure belonging to SteelyKid and The Pip.
Having built this high-tech rig, I set up my new video camera on the tripod, and shot some videos of the key phenomena. First, there's the…
oracknows | January 17, 2014Everyone hates health insurance companies. At least, so it seems. Personally, I've had my issues with such companies myself, particularly when having to deal with them when they refuse to cover certain medical tests for my patients. Fortunately for me, surgical oncology is a specialty that doesn't have a lot of tests or treatments that are frequently not covered, particularly for breast cancer surgery, which means that I don't have to deal with insurance companies that much. It's a wonderful thing for a doctor.
Still, for all the complaining about insurance companies, if there's one good…
carlyo | January 16, 2014By Lisa Matthews
Bladensburg High School and the biomedical sciences program welcomed Dr. Margaret Hamburg, Commissioner of the FDA, on Wednesday January 15th as a Nifty Fifty Speaker, sponsored by InfoComm International. She was honored with a color guard, musical presentation and was presented by the Mayor of Bladensburg with a proclamation honoring her accomplishments. She reciprocated with a compelling and interesting discussion of her career path and opportunities with the FDA, and a message to the student of Bladensburg to continue on the path they have taken that focuses on math and…
oracknows | January 16, 2014Practitioners of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) have a love-hate relationship with randomized clinical trials (RCTs). Actually, it's mostly hate, but they do crave the validation that only randomized clinical trials can provide within the paradigm of evidence-based medicine (EBM). Yes, I intentionally said EBM, rather than science-based medicine (SBM), because, as I've described so many times before, the two are not the same thing. EBM fetishizes clinical trials, a fixation that I sometimes call "methodolatry," defined by a blog bud of mine from long ago as the "profane…