Uncertain Principles

Radio DogPhysics: Northern Great Plains Edition

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:55:23 -0500

Just a reminder, I will be on KSOO radio Tuesday evening, 6:30 pm ET, if you'd like to hear about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog on the radio at the end of an extremely long day. If you're in broadcast range of Sioux Falls, SD, tune it in, or you can listen live via their web site.

I'll also be at Boskone this weekend, reading book-related stuff on Sunday morning. If you're in the Boston area, stop by. If you're not, well, there's still no way to experience a convention over the Internet. Sorry.

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Non-Dorky Poll: Time to Rise and Shine

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:41:38 -0500

No substantive blogging for you today, as my alarm clock decided not to go off, causing me to oversleep by the hour that I usually spend on bloggy things. So that you're not left without blog-related entertainment, though, here's an appropriate poll topic:

Of course, despite oversleeping by a full hour, I was still here twenty minutes before this morning's lab. And probably a good half-hour before the majority of my students. Their late arrival will do wonders for my mood.

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Links for 2010-02-09

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:49:49 -0500

BBC News - More cat owners 'have degrees' than dog-lovers

My favorite bit is the note that "Cat and dog numbers were last estimated in a scientific peer-reviewed journal in 1989," because, of course, peer review is critical to the process...

(tags: pets dog society education social-science)
Bright Idea: The First Lasers -- A history of discoveries leading to the 1960 invention.

An excellent step-by-step history of the development of the laser, including interviews with laser pioneers.

(tags: lasers science history physics optics atoms molecules)
The highs and lows of this year's Super Bowl ads | TV | Crosstalk | The A.V. Club

"I'm pretty sure that the general response to this year's Super Bowl commercials will be mild-to-strong disgust over how anti-woman so many of them were. I know it's the norm for ads during sporting events to play up how "man time" is sacred and "woman time" is lame, but I've rarely seen that theme take such a hostile turn."

(tags: gender television sports society culture avclub)
NASA Launches David Bowie Concept Mission | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

"According to NASA administrator Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden, Jr., the highly experimental glam space program--dubbed Project Starman--has been in development for exactly five years. Though engineers initially feared the mission might "blow our minds," the historic launch ultimately proceeded without incident. "Admittedly, this is a very bold and risky departure for the agency," said Bolden, later adding that Bowie's Ziggy Stardust period and other outer-space-related work has been a major influence on NASA's direction since the early 1970s. "Those familiar with NASA's previous, more conventional research and exploration sensibilities are going to be in for quite a shock. Many are likely to be confused and threatened by the boundary-pushing nature of the project.""

(tags: music space history silly culture onion)
ChatRoulette : The Frontal Cortex

"ChatRoulette is an online version of the friction that cities produce for free. It's like a subway ride on your computer, a chance to bump into strangers on the "street" without leaving your desk. Sure, there are lots of weirdos out there, and plenty of those strangers won't stare back. But every once in a while, a meaningful interaction might occur, as the social slot machine dispenses a few quarters. "

(tags: neuroscience blogs science society internet computing)

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Amazing Laser Application 1: Light Show!

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:49:32 -0500

What's the application? The use of lasers to provide an entertaining light show for humans, dogs, or cats.

What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "How will I entertain my dog or cat?"

2) "How can we distract people from the fact that Roger Daltrey has no voice left?"

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Laser Smackdown: The Finalists

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:25:02 -0500

A couple of weeks ago, I announced a contest to determine the Most Amazing Laser Application. After a follow-up post listing the likely candidates, we have a final list of candidate applications, an even dozen of them (after consolidating some related topics):

Cat toy/ dog toy/ laser light show
Laser cooling/ BEC
Laser ranging/position measurement
Optical tweezers
Optical storage media (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray)
LIGO
Telecommunications
Holography
Laser ignited fusion
Laser eye surgery
Laser frequency comb/ spectroscopy
Laser guide stars/ adaptive optics

Here's how this will work: over the next week or so, I will write up a series of blog posts explaining these applications, and the pros and cons of each. At the end of that time, I'll put up a poll, and we'll decide the winner based on that most scientific of methods: random people on the Internet clicking radio buttons.

Watch this space-- the first application post will appear this afternoon.

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My Boskone Schedule

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:56:20 -0500

The usual "This is the stuff that looks interesting to me" post, based on the preliminary online program. Subject to change if they move things around, or if I discover something I overlooked that sounds more interesting, or if I decide I'm hungry, and opt to blow off panels in favor of food.

This year's program is lighter on panels, but includes both a signing and a reading. Which will be a very different experience than years past...

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Way Cuter Than the Puppy Bowl

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:44:37 -0500

There was some discombobulation yesterday afternoon that kept me from posting these-- I had meant them to be a Super Bowl alternative for the non-football-inclined. They'll work just as well as a Monday brightener, though. So here's a clip of SteelyKid a couple of weeks ago, laughing at the "got your food wrapper" game:

And here's one of her talking on the phone with her grandmother:

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Links for 2010-02-08

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 07:26:12 -0500

More than 300 cases of mumps reported in Monsey, New Square | LoHud.com | The Journal News

"At least 60 percent of the people in Rockland who have gotten mumps during the current outbreak had not been fully immunized, Facelle said. Mumps were common before the vaccine became available. In 2008, there were only two reported cases in Rockland, according to the Department of Health's year-end communicable disease report."

(tags: medicine vaccine health-care stupid science news)
Temple Grandin | Other Shows | TV Club | TV | The A.V. Club

"Playing Grandin in the HBO biopic Temple Grandin, Claire Danes captures the brilliance of the woman: how she sees things that others don't, and makes connections others can't. Danes gets Grandin's braying monotone, stooped posture and default defensive stance to other people--and more importantly she conveys it all unselfconsciously, as Grandin would, with no awareness of how she must look to others. (That is, until they start laughing or whispering behind her back.) The performance is more than just a collection of skillfully strung together tics. Danes also captures Grandin's sense of humor and her perception of everyday life: how she finds things funny that aren't necessarily jokes, and how unexpected sounds, lights and motion can put her in a mild state of panic."

(tags: television movies review blogs avclub medicine neuroscience)
When did the (Scientific) Renaissance take place? « The Renaissance Mathematicus

"Periodisation in human history is an artifice. We the historians impose periods onto history in order to try to tame it and make it easier to handle and in doing so we run the very real risk of falsifying it. There are no sign posts rammed into the real roadmap of time saying you are now leaving the Early Middle Ages please conduct your self in future in a manner suitable for the High Middle Ages. In fact as the peasant farmer in Middle Europe turned over the page of his calendar from the 25th to the 26th of March in 1199 and thus entered the thirteenth century nothing changed in his life at all. Time is a constantly flowing river and change is incremental and on the ground mostly imperceptible as societies, cultures and ways of live evolve within the general flow. It is only with hindsight and selective interpretation of the facts that we can perceive the major changes that we then use to identify the periods that we stamp out of the riverbed."

(tags: history science humanities math blogs)
Arts: Photographer Loves Math, Graphs Her Images | Magazine

"Most of us can't tell our secant from our cotangent. But the forms are everywhere, and Nikki Graziano wants to help us see them. Graziano, a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology, overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos. "I wanted to create something that could communicate how awesome math is, to everyone," she says. Graziano doesn't go out looking for a specific function but lets one find her instead. Once she's got an image she likes, Graziano whips up the numbers and tweaks the function until the graph it describes aligns perfectly with the photograph."

(tags: art math science pictures culture)
Dear Jim: Congratulations! George. on Twitpic

Star Wars vs. Titanic.

(tags: pictures silly movies sf culture)
In Which The Players Are More Interesting Than The Commercials - Home - This Recording

"As the middle linebacker, [Jonathan] Vilma is the quarterback of the defense. Watch him, and not Peyton Manning, for at least one drive during the Super Bowl and check out what kinds of furiously intense and split-second head games the two men are playing with each other. Maybe it looks uncomplicated, but you'd rather take a staple gun to your chode than replace either of these men for one play. They say there's only 11 minutes of actual "game" during a football game, but they're wrong. This tete-a-tete between quarterback and middle linebacker is the equivalent of watching a player's eyes during a chess match, if the pieces tried to kill each other, and their actions resulted in wanton crying and unnecessary financial ruin for some of the spectators. Enjoy."

(tags: sports football television culture US)

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The Super Bowl Index of Economic and Cultural Indicators

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:57:59 -0500

It occurs to me that if you take the Super Bowl as a comment on the current state of the US of A-- which, you might as well, because it's as good as anything else-- we are totally screwed.

I mean, consider the fact that two-thirds of the ads were for Bud Light. OK, that may be a slight exaggeration, but I think every commercial break in the first half had at least one Bud Light ad in it. That basically tells you that the only company with the money to spend on Super Bowl advertising is one that makes its money from helping people drown their sorrows. That's an encouraging statement.

Worse yet, the general crop of ads continued the deplorable trend of glorifying idiots. This has been going on for years, but has really reached a peak lately with things like the Sonic ad campaign with two idiots in a car, those Coors Light commercials with the football coaches, and pretty much any commercial Taco Bell has made in the last, say, ten years. Maybe longer.

And worst of all, the Simpsons totally sold out. I mean, really, is nothing sacred?

What a bunch of crap. Space aliens looking at this year's sorry crop of ads would probably decide to save time and just nuke us from orbit. The orbit of Jupiter.

On the bright side, it was at least a decent game. Congratulations to the Saints, the feel-good story of the century so far.

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Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters, and How Weblogs Can Help

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:26:38 -0500

My talk at Maryland last Thursday went pretty well-- the impending Snowpocalypse kept the audience down, as people tried to fit in enough work to compensate for the Friday shutdown, but the people who were there seemed to like it, and asked good questions. If you weren't there, but want to know what I talked about, here are the slides on SlideShare:

Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters and How Weblogs Can Help

View more presentations from Chad Orzel.

This flattens out some of the more animation-dependent jokes, but gets you the basic idea. It is, of course, much more entertaining live, in case you're running an organization that might like a talk about this sort of thing...

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How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Update

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 11:18:36 -0500

Miscellaneous stories and links about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:

Kathy Ceceri, who wrote the story about the book that ran in the Times Union, has posted the full article on the Home Physics blog. The link to the paper itself may very well disappear behind a paywall, but this post should remain accessible.
There's an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that I can't read because I'm not a subscriber, and I don't remember the password needed to access it via the library subscription. If anybody has access and would like to tell me what it says, that would be cool. (UPDATE: I've got it now, thanks very much.)
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is used as an example in a German presentation about problem solving. Google translate is good enough to get the idea of the way it's being used, but is no help at all with the embedded presentation slide. I think it's a translation of part of the Introduction, but my German is nonexistent.

That's the best of this week's vanity searching. Again, I will be on KSOO radio Tuesday evening, 6:30 pm ET, if you'd like to hear what I sound like live. I'll also be at Boskone next weekend, reading book-related stuff on Sunday morning.

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Sports Science Poll: Super Bowl

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 09:30:17 -0500

We're mere hours away from the start of the Super Bowl, the biggest football game of the year. Obviously, the question of who will win has been the subject of much debate over the last couple of weeks on sports media and in offices around the country. What these discussions have lacked, though, is Science!!! (with any number of exclamation points).

So, let's employ science to determine the winner in advance, with a totally accurate Internet poll:

The game kicks off around 6:30pm ET, so make sure you vote before then, if you want your vote to have predictive power.

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Links for 2010-02-07

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 08:09:38 -0500

Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 6, 010101 (2010): Teaching and understanding of quantum interpretations in modern physics courses

"Just as expert physicists vary in their personal stances on interpretation in quantum mechanics, instructors vary on whether and how to teach interpretations of quantum phenomena in introductory modern physics courses. In this paper, we document variations in instructional approaches with respect to interpretation in two similar modern physics courses recently taught at the University of Colorado, and examine associated impacts on student perspectives regarding quantum physics. We find students are more likely to prefer realist interpretations of quantum-mechanical systems when instructors are less explicit in addressing student ontologies. We also observe contextual variations in student beliefs about quantum systems, indicating that instructors who choose to address questions of ontology in quantum mechanics should do so explicitly across a range of topics."

(tags: physics quantum education academia articles)
Journal of Unpublishable Mathematics

This ought to be supported by the Bertrand Russell Foundation, which funds all foundations that don't fund themselves (h/t Michael Nielsen).

(tags: math science silly journals)
[1001.5455] Starry Messages: Searching for Signatures of Interstellar Archaeology

"Searching for signatures of cosmic-scale archaeological artifacts such as Dyson spheres or Kardashev civilizations is an interesting alternative to conventional SETI. Uncovering such an artifact does not require the intentional transmission of a signal on the part of the original civilization. This type of search is called interstellar archaeology or sometimes cosmic archaeology. The detection of intelligence elsewhere in the Universe with interstellar archaeology or SETI would have broad implications for science. For example, the constraints of the anthropic principle would have to be loosened if a different type of intelligence was discovered elsewhere. A variety of interstellar archaeology signatures are discussed including non-natural planetary atmospheric constituents, stellar doping with isotopes of nuclear wastes, Dyson spheres, as well as signatures of stellar and galactic-scale engineering."

(tags: space astronomy science articles sf)
Cocktail Party Physics: my kind of town

"Eureka is an affectionate paean to the small town, with a twist: it's population is made up of brilliant scientists (and their families), all of whom work at a vast, sooper sekrit lab called Global Dynamics that gets a large part of its funding from the Department of Defense, yet is dedicated to curiosity-driven research -- at least in principle. The show is a dramedy that combines elements of Northern Exposure and The X-Files, according to Jaime -- and I'd throw in a dash of Scrubs and Gilmore Girls to boot. In fact, it reminds me a little of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel without the mystical trappings, both of which combined drama with humor and featured terrific characters and smart, sassy dialogue. (Needless to say, I'm a Eureka fan.) "It's small town trappings with endless possibility," he says, and admits the show's premise is at least partially inspired by places like Los Alamos, Berkeley Lab, Livermore, Bell Labs, even Area 51."

(tags: science television culture cocktail-party blogs)

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Inheritance

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:36:20 -0500

It's been brought to my attention that there hasn't been any cute-baby video posted here for a while, so let me rectify that with a couple of clips. First, SteelyKid discovers that it's kind of difficult to fill Daddy's shoes:

For both our sakes, I hope those never fit her.

A clear indication of inheritance at work is the way she talks with her hands, as seen in this second clip:

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Why Does E=mc2? by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:35:44 -0500

I want to like this book more than I do.

As a general matter, this is exactly the sort of science book we need more of. As you can probably guess from the title, Why Does E=mc²? sets out to explain Einstein's theory of relativity, and does an excellent job of it. It presents a clear and concise explanation of the theory for a non-scientific audience, using no math beyond the Pythagorean Theorem.

I picked this up partly as research of a sort-- if there is ever a How to Teach Physics to Your Dog 2: Canine Boogaloo, the most obvious topic for it would be relativity, which I mention a few times, but don't discuss in any detail. I was thinking about how that would work, and picked this up to see how they went about explaining things. I don't think I've encountered a better explanation of the physics, which they explain entirely with a geometric picture of spacetime, that makes a great deal more sense than most of the mathematical approaches I've encountered in my professional education.

And yet...

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