I guess it’s a dog-day. No, not dogs as projectiles — what a horrible thought. (I used cats in my physics examples when I was teaching. Or smurfs, if I had blue chalk)
And a wiener dog, no less. Very Gary Larson.
Notice how the dog takes off as soon as the launcher draws back, making a distinctive sound. Pavlovian ballistics.
I’m no good at taking tests and the post “understanding” referenced within, over at the Blog of Doom.
I may not be able to see into their minds, but the problem I see is this: rather than learning the concepts and forming a mental model of how something works, students are learning (and are being taught) how to do certain problems. If a problem is outside the scope of what they’ve been taught, it’s considered impossible — even when it actually could be solved with their current knowledge. When a teacher tries to make students think outside the box, she’s accused of testing students on “stuff she never taught us.”
The flashback is to excuses I used to hear, of which “I’m no good at test-taking” was a favorite. We interviewed all students who failed exams, so there was a fair amount of opportunity to hear it.
Sunday’s Speed Bump cartoon.
The caption is (concerning an alien “dog”) “She’s 3 … or 22 trillion in light-years.”
Light-year, as we all know, is a distance. (As is “parsec.” I’m looking at you, Han Solo!)
Over at Skulls in the Stars
Direct measurements from Aristotle to Galileo to Roemer to Fizeau (and Tinkers to Evers to Chance), and then the work of Michelson and Morely
OK, already, I’ll become the millionth blogger to note the delicious irony of PZ Myers being, well, expelled from a screening of the upcoming movie, “EXPELLED!” Ironic not only because of being expelled, but also because, if those that are advancing evolutionary science and tearing down creationism/ID are beetles (as something with which a student of Darwin might identify), they chose the lesser of two weevils — Richard Dawkins was allowed in.
You can’t make this shit up.
Writing about the politics and antiscience of creation—evolution is easy points. There are things going on all the time, and the cdesign proponentsists are just so intellectually and morally bankrupt that fodder for blogging is plentiful, and there really isn’t a shortage of smart people to shoot down all the crap that gets written. (Not that the ID folks have a monopoly on such behavior — it pains me when a science advocate makes arguments in the same vein, when there is such a wealth of evidence to present — but lies, whether repeated knowingly or parroted blindly, are just so widespread in the creationism/ID movement)
The thing is, the arguments are by and large the same as they have been for a long time. Way back in the USENET days, I was active on the talk.origins newsgroup (active enough that I was nicknamed “Chris” and hold a faculty position at the University of Ediacara) and I see things bandied around today in discussions, and it’s the same crap. The same hollow, fallacious arguments, the same lies that keep propagating despite having been debunked long ago. It just makes me tired all over. Facts don’t matter and won’t sway someone not interested in science.
But, if you’re interested, there is a large collection of links about the story.
A visible freaking gamma ray burst? How cool is that?
Pi of the sky recorded it, and has a short loop of the images recorded.
ZapperZ discusses Public Impatience With Science, or the importance of doing basic research now so that people can do applied research later and bring new and useful technology to market in the future.
This ties in what I was talking about in my last entry, (and earlier than that) because while there are the funding organizations and agencies out there trying to drive applied research who also fund some basic research, it is usually in a narrow scope. Funding, overall, needs to expand in breadth and depth. What needs to be remembered is that advances and discoveries have a way of expanding and being adopted by other researchers, even crossing the traditional lines between disciplines, but it takes time to diffuse.
Even within the sciences themselves, many forget that some of the advancement in biochemistry, for example, were brought about because of something that was developed in physics years before. Synchrotron light sources came out of research in high energy physics, and it took many decades before the field of biochemistry, medicine, and pharmacy realized that such facilities can be valuable to their work.
And what is originally a heroic effort to observe some result will eventually become a standard lab practice or tool (BEC being a good example), allowing more advanced inquiry, but again, it takes time for this to happen.
AMO Physics meet chips.
I recently had the pleasure of attending a small workshop on the topic of doing atomic physics on chip-scale apparatus. The presentations and discussions were very interesting, but unfortunately do not lend themselves to a blog report for a couple of reasons. This kind of get-together discusses ongoing projects, some or all of which are not-ready-for-primetime, i.e. things haven’t been written up and published, so I wouldn’t be at liberty to discuss details, and a lot of the really cool stuff was shown in the pictures, some of which also haven’t been published. So while I can’t go into certain details, I can give an overview, and provide some links to representative work that has been published or is otherwise available to the public.
There’s quite a bit of physics that is described as being “tabletop” physics — in part to distinguish it from the physics that requires large collaborations and trips to an accelerator lab, or access to a big telescope or a satellite, etc. However, “tabletop” in atomic physics usually refers to an optical table, which can be a behemoth — an 8′ x 4′ table can weigh 1000 lbs or more. Add to that the requisite optics, optomechanics, vacuum systems and the support electronics, and you still have quite a lot of equipment, and it’s not going to be very portable.
As I had mentioned before, research layouts tend to be bigger than they strictly need to be, in order to provide some flexibility, and you can transition to more compact layouts if you have just one application in mind. If you take the concept a little further, and start thinking of the possibility that you might want an AMO experiment (e.g. a MOT or BEC, or trapped ions) to be applied to some specific problem, and require portability, you have to shrink not only the laser system, but the trap, and everything mentioned above — the vacuum pumps, power supplies and control electronics. Fortunately, a lot of this is coupled: if the trapping volume is decreased you don’t need as much pumping capacity or laser power, so your power demand is also smaller. If you can survive the decrease in signal, you can still go pretty good measurements, though new challenges tend to crop up working close to surfaces rather than far away. Instead of using general-purpose power supplies and electronics, you use devices specifically built for the application. You mount components together, rather than spaced apart, and use fibers rather than mirrors to transport light.
A sarcastic comment used when someone does something stupid is, “Way to go, Einstein!”
What did people say prior to 1905?