For the (statistically speaking) fraction of a reader within commuting distance of Washington, DC. Tomorrow (Saturday) is the Naval Observatory Open House
Though it is raining today, the weather looks like it’s going to be great tomorrow. Which means that no meteorologists will need to be strangled.
Pick me! Pick me! Adopt-a-physicist is running again this spring. Registration/sign-up is open as of today, with the forums open April 13 – May 1.
Help high school students explore what it’s really like to be a physicist – consider participating in Adopt-a-Physicist! In this program, people with physics degrees (at any level) are “adopted” by high school classes interested in finding out about the careers, educational backgrounds, and lives of real physicists.
Advice on deciding on whether or not one should go to grad school. Striving to be realistic, without flavoring it too much in either direction.
[Y]ou should know the basic facts of grad school experience: most experiments do NOT produce useful results, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying. You are not guaranteed an academic job after your PhD – or any job in specific geographic area or any specific type of the job. You will be making minimum wage-like salaries for ~5-7 years, and even though postdocs get paid more, it is not much more. But for this time you will have the company of like-minded people who are extremely smart, you will learn a lot, and since you live only once, grad school will certainly provide a unique experience that will shape your outlook on life.
“You will make a lot of money” isn’t on the list of what happens afterward, either. (It certainly can happen, but it probably won’t). But what the PhD helps enable is the opportunity to work on interesting problems. So if the whole “hanging out with smart people” angle appeals to you, it’s certainly something to consider.
Lasers Provide Antimatter Bonanza
Hui Chen and Scott Wilks of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and their colleagues now report that they have generated copious amounts of positrons with intermediate energies–in the range of a million electron-volts. They fired picosecond pulses with intensities of around 1020 watts per square centimeter from the Titan laser at Livermore’s Jupiter laser facility onto millimeter-thick gold targets. Positrons were produced via the “Bethe-Heitler” process, in which part of each laser pulse creates a plasma on the surface of the target, and the remaining part of the pulse then blasts electrons from the plasma into the solid. Next, the electrons are slowed down by gold nuclei, an interaction that generates gamma-ray photons. The gamma rays then interact with more gold nuclei and transform into electron-positron pairs.
Have over 22,000 films. Will travel. For more than a decade, we’ve been rescuing old 16mm school films from dumpsters and obscurity and showing them to folks like you.
Among the must-see-tee-vee, er, film:
Alcohol Is Dynamite (1958)
Am I Trustworthy? (1950)
Destruction: Fun or Dumb? (ca. 1970s)
Duck and Cover (Archer, 1951)
Getting Along With Others (1965)
How Quiet Helps At School (1953)
Living with the Atom (1957)
More Dates For Kay (Coronet, 1952)
Respect for Property (1959)
So I Took It… (1975)
VD is for Everybody (1969)
Why Doesn’t Cathy Eat Breakfast? (1972)
Oh, gosh dangit. How to Play Dodgeball (Über-American Instructional films) isn’t there. Yet.
U.S. Naval Observatory IYA 2009 Open House
In celebration of the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of the telescope, the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO have declared 2009 to be the International Year of Astronomy (IYA 2009). As part of a world-wide celebration of this event, the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO) will be sponsoring a free-admission Open House on Saturday, 4 April, from 3:00 pm to 10:00 pm. During that time the Observatory’s telescopes will be open for inspection, scientists will explain the mission of USNO’s Master Clock, exhibits will display the Observatory’s history and present work, and local amateur astronomers will share views through their telescopes.
The event is planned regardless of weather, although predominantly cloudy conditions may limit observing activities. Additionally, heavy or persistent rain may result in cancellation. Be sure to watch the website for updates.
More details in the press release
I’ll be there, helping out, meetin’ and greetin’. I announced this on the local geocaching bulletin board, since USNO time supports GPS, so I hope to hang out with fellow geocachers for a while (there’s actually a geocache at the Observatory, which normally requires you to take the public tour), and then I’ll probably be helping out with the Time Service display. If you’re in the area, come on by. If you can’t make it, you can still commemorate your nonvisit with a Navel Observatory shirt
Can’t vouch for all the statistics, but if they’re accurate, they represent some things to consider. I like the point about how we’re preparing students today for jobs they will eventually get but that don’t yet exist. However, the point
The amount of technical information is doubling every two years …
For students starting a 4 year technical degree this means that … half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study
is wrong.
First of all, it makes the mistake of equating technical study with simply learning facts, and that’s not accurate. Second, it implies that new information makes old information obsolete. While that may be true in some cases — technology often makes old technology obsolete — it doesn’t really happen that way. Sometimes new information is really new information, i.e. something we didn’t know before, and not “just” a better way of doing something. Relativity, quantum mechanics — these represented completely new areas of physics, but did not make the kinematics equations of a macroscopic object obsolete. Science doesn’t really devour itself that way; more often it expands. Third, it implies that students learn cutting-edge material in their first year, and that just isn’t widely the case, if at all. You start with the basics, and that never becomes outdated unless it was wrong to begin with. The cutting-edge material is more likely learned in advanced study, and at the end.
h/t to the Mom
(The only pyramid that can possibly work is the Fonzi scheme, where you convince everyone to be cool.)
Academic Earth’s beta website
Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world class education.
Tips on lab write-ups at Uncertain Principles
Not only were you able to [verb] the [noun], you did [verb] the [noun]. Say that directly.
My nit: when I was TA-ing it was a battle to disabuse them of the notion that “experimental error” is “the difference between our answer and the one in the book”