Mad Scientist Laugh Sold Separately
Science and the Single Sports Metaphor
Call it fate, call it luck, Karma, whatever. I was thinking about the topic of the effort needed to do science, and then see that Doug Natelson has a post up on the subject (Battle hymn of the Tiger Professor), and Chad has already responded to it (Physics Takes Practice). Which just leaves me with the tired sports metaphor. In light of the recent Packers victory in the Super Bowl, perhaps it’s fitting to use a quote from Vince Lombardi:
Most people have the will to win, few have the will to prepare to win.
So it is with science, or any profession. It’s not enough to want to be good at something if you aren’t willing to do the work needed to perform at a high level. Is anyone really surprised to find out how much time professional athletes spend training? Or that the physically gifted ones who don’t have a good work ethic tend to fall short when they reach the professional level? Anyone who has played sports has probably had the realization that regardless of their initial skill level, getting better required doing drills and more drills, and mastering the basics was required before moving on — you can’t dribble a basketball between your legs if you can’t dribble at all. The approach to learning physics really isn’t any different.
The Vacuum is an Interesting Place
Vacuum has friction from an effect similar to the casimir effect
The phenomenon of vacuum friction for spinning objects is somewhat different than for the static parallel plates: the accelerating charges in a spinning conductive object interact with the vacuum fluctuations and can emit photons.
A quick scan of the paper (pdf) indicates that the thermally radiated photons have a different net angular momentum than the ones absorbed from the reservoir, i.e. the effect is that the emitted light has a net polarization which carries off the angular momentum as the particle slows down.
My Body is an Industrial Palace
Dr. Fritz Kahn’s illustration of the body as a machine: Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace)
ORLY, O'Reilly?
The Bill O’Reilly “God of the gaps” incredul-o-fest video spawned a number meme-o-grams, some of which I have seen on reddit. Now I see links to collections of them over at Bad Astronomy.
The comments in the BA post are interesting, too, especially the ones with the “why are you picking on him” flavor. It’s because he’s embracing willful ignorance and encouraging people to run away from critical thought. It was bad enough that he had repeated the “you can’t explain tides” canard until it blew up. But the kicker is defending his “facts don’t matter” attitude with his fallacy-laden argument. With that he’s inviting scorn and ridicule. It would be rude not to accept.
The Piece of Paper that Fooled Hitler
The piece of paper that fooled Hitler
The deception of the Normandy invasion. Like other spy games, it was helped along by some bias. If you tell the other side what the think is true or what they want to believe, they are more likely to accept it as genuine intelligence.
You Can't Do That!
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
Citizen activist grates on state over traffic signals
Cox has not been accused of claiming that he is an engineer. But Lacy says he filed the complaint because the report “appears to be engineering-level work” by someone who is not licensed as a professional engineer.
This seems rather silly, and I suspect it’s just payback. I can tell you when some piece of work is done by a professional engineer: it has a stamp on the document, and it’s signed. I am at a loss as to why it would take “three or four months” to figure this out. Because if simply using engineering equations is illegal without professional certification (as if you need an engineering safety course to handle them correctly), then anyone training to be a professional engineer is breaking the law.
The Physicists' History of the Earth
The birth of the moon is explained. (Apparently, Bill O’Reilly was wrong about that. Somebody did know!)