Monthly Archives: January 2011

Overheard at Lunch of the Day

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We said farewell to a colleague earlier this week, a physicist who has decided to go to grad school. His boss was sorry to see him go, and not just because filling out the paperwork to hire someone new is a pain.

Anyway, the two physics PhD’s in attendance gave him some grad school advice: even if you desire to do experiments, don’t stop studying theory.

It’s common to divide physicists into two groups: theorists and experimentalists. But that’s not really true. The reality of physics research is that there are physicists who do theory, and physicists who do experiment and theory. Learning theory is unavoidable if you want to do experiments, because you have to understand what the experiment means and evaluate the data in terms of some model. I think the physicists who do experiments declare themselves as experimentalists because that’s what distinguishes them form someone who works solely on theory (and, to be fair, theory work by the theorists can go into more far depth with really hairy math and get just plain weird, as long as they don’t have to worry about how to come up with a test for it). The misconception the new student might have, that if s/he’s going to work in a lab then theory can be ignored, is a setup for difficulties down the road.

New! Diffraction-Free!

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New material blocks light from exhibiting diffraction

In the new material that the researchers made, there is no mechanism by which the diffraction is compensated. Instead, the material simply doesn’t allow diffraction to occur—we will get to how this occurs later—meaning that the light field can’t expand or contract. Indeed, what you put in is exactly what you get out, independent of the light intensity, making this very different from a normal soliton.

Tweedle Beetle Battle

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Last week Rhett introduced me to Hex Bugs, and I had to go out and buy a starter kit. Rhett’s thing is taking video and doing physics analysis. Mine is slow-motion:

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The bugs vibrate, as you might be able to tell, and the angled legs give them a forward motion bias from the shaking. They even go up an incline of ten or 20 degrees. I tested three bugs in the hallway, where they were free to roam; one had a tracking bias clockwise, another anti-clockwise, and the third ran pretty straight. The legs appear to be silicone, so it’s not easy to change how they are bent (elastic deformation) to see if you can change that.

There are other form factors as well. More on that as my wallet is drained.

Scientific Method Acting

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The Best Debugging Story I’ve Ever Heard

The Expert got a chair and a cup of coffee and sat in the computer room – these were the days when they had rooms specifically dedicated to computers, after all – and watched it as the attendants queued up a large print job. He waited until it crashed – which it did. Everybody looked to The Expert – and he didn’t have a clue what was causing it. So he ordered that the job be queued up again, and all the attendants and technicians went back to work.

The Expert sat down in his chair again, waiting for it to crash. It took something like six hours of waiting, but it crashed again. He still had no idea what was causing it, other than the fact that it happened when the room was crowded. He ordered that the job be restarted, and he sat down again and waited.

By the third crash, he had noticed something.

Anthony Michael Hall Effect, 2010

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The weirdest of 2010’s Weird Science

First you fight, then you protest, and then you just stop going: This story gets extra Weird Science credit for the Orwellian-sounding journal name: The Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions. The topic is quite good too: a large study of precisely why kids get sent to the principal’s office, enabled by the fact that over 1,500 schools used an electronic system to track this stuff. The data reveals a clear trend: in the early years of school, kids mostly get sent for fighting with each other. By middle school, they’re getting sent in for (verbally) fighting with their teachers. And, by the time they hit high school, apathy has set in, and most of the incidents are because they’re late for or skipping class.

Making It Sound Worse Than it Really Is

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Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf post small December sales

This was the year General Motors Co. and Nissan made good on their promise to bring mass-produced electric cars to the market. But don’t count on seeing one in traffic soon. Sales so far have been microscopic and they’re likely to stay that way for some time because of limited supplies.

GM sold between 250 and 350 Chevy Volts this month and Nissan’s sales totaled less than 10 Leaf sedans in the past two weeks. Production for both is slowly ramping up.

It will be well into 2012 before both the Volt and Leaf are available nationwide. And if you’re interested in buying one, you’ll need to get behind the 50,000 people already on waiting lists.

One might argue that extremely limited availability doesn’t count as “bring(ing) mass-produced electric cars to the market.” It’s bringing a small amount of cars to market. The headline makes it seem like there isn’t much demand, rather than the companies selling every electric car they’ve made.

It's Not All Glamour

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Grad School Cost of Living

[S]top trying to make a bong out of a damn Pert Plus bottle and pay attention you undergrad noobs, I’m about to drop some grad school economics on you.

Alternate version, via an MIT professor: Girlfriend, car, hobby. Pick one.

I bit the bullet and shared a house with two other grad students for four of the six years I was in school. Rode my bike or walked to school on weekdays when parking permits were required. Tutored for beer money.

via @JenLucPiquant

Death to Contract Goblins

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Funny story about contract goblins, the denizens of the land of the wireless, who are not human, have no souls and bind you to contracts.

The store a few blocks away, which I walked to in the kind of weather that warps reality, couldn’t help me either. See, I purchased my phone from an at&t licensed store, not a core store. At this point, I had been trying to get this iPhone for just over three hours, and my anger was such that I could almost move objects with my mind. I returned to the kind, helpful sales rep at my local store and told him I’d be willing to swallow the price tag of an iPhone. He said he was out of stock.

I don’t have the desire to spend upwards of $1k a year on phone service; I have a brick of a phone and buy minutes so that I can use it the three times a year it’s helpful to me. Otherwise my phone is turned off. My own peeve is with the phone and cable companies who send out massive amounts of paper spam mail, with the offers to bundle your services. They put helpful phrases on the envelope, such as “Important account information inside!” to get you to open it, but of course the “important” thing is getting you to add more services to your account, which is more importance to them than to me. The trouble with this is that it gets you desensitized to the mail, and when the bill shows up, mysteriously not announcing that there is truly important information in it — your frakking bill — you might just ignore it. Which I just realized I did, again, while paying another bill online. Oh, Joy, here comes a late fee, which I have no doubt is by design, and helps pay for all that spam. Positive return on investment.

Dirty buncha angel rapers.