Promoting science is about free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient – especially when it’s inconvenient.
The Illusion of Love
Insignificant Next to the Power of the Pants
Top 278 Star Wars Lines Improved By Replacing A Word With “Pants”
I find your lack of pants disturbing.
Chewie and me got into a lot of pants more heavily guarded than this.
You came in those pants? You’re braver than I thought.
Governer Tarkin. I should have expected to find you holding Vader’s pants.
Tell that to Jabba. If you’re lucky he might only take your pants.
Monotasking
Hot wings carryout from the cafeteria. It is not advisable to eat and use the keyboard in a parallel fashion.
That is all.
Follow the Bouncing Atom
Bouncing atoms take a measure of gravity
Pretty cool. The experiment uses a technique used in interferometry, where a laser standing wave induces an absorption-emission cycle of an atom, so it receives a momentum “kick” of twice the photon momentum (one kick for absorption, and once for emission), effectively making a diffraction grating out of light if they were moving through the standing wave, and uses this to bounce the falling atoms.
If the colour of the laser light and the frequency of pulses are set correctly, the atoms will be set bouncing and the acceleration due to gravity can be deduced from the experimental parameters and Planck’s constant. The team managed to sustain this bouncing for about 100 cycles, which they say is the equivalent of dropping the atoms about 2 cm in a standard experiment.
Come in Here, Dear Boy, Have a Cigar
By the way, which one’s Pink?
The Factual One ponders The physics of… Pink Floyd?
What’s more interesting is the fact that the refractive index is generally not a constant. Within the same material it can be different for different wavelengths. Usually – but not quite always – higher frequency light experiences a higher refractive index. It gets bent harder. It’s not obvious at the level of classes I teach why this should be so. Since the details aren’t really the key issue, the main thing to remember whether it’s high frequency or high wavelength that gets bent most strongly. It can be difficult to remember, until I remind the class about this:
[cue Dark Side of the Moon album cover]
More discussion at The Quantum Pontiff
Countdown to Geekgasm
Self-Propelled Catapult
Meet the iFling
Nothing Fair About It
A number of articles about a new bill bent on destroying public access to government-funded research
The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act is a lot of things, but fair ain’t one of them
Allan Adler, VP of the Association of American Publishers, issued a statement in which he had the gall to say that “Government does not fund peer-reviewed journal articles—publishers do.”
That’s just not true. The NIH spends over $28 billion in taxpayer money annually to fund research. Researchers write articles about their findings, and their peers review those articles, without compensation from publishers. Without the research, there would be nothing to publish. Largely due to historical accident, publishers manage the peer review process, helping journal editors to badger referees into reviewing articles, generally for no pay. The value of the scientific expertise that goes into refereeing dwarfs that of the office expenses incurred by publishers in managing the process. The referees’ salaries are paid by universities and research institutes, not by publishers. Basically, we have a system in which the public pays for the research, the universities pay for the refereeing, the publishers pay for office work to coordinate the refereeing, and also for some useful editing. Then the publishers turn around and sell the results back to the universities and to the public who bore almost all of the costs in the first place.
Congress Hears Debate Over Bill That Would Forbid NIH-like Public Access
Open Access: The Time to Act is Now
Please contact your Representative no later than February 28, 2009 to express your support for public access to taxpayer-funded research and ask that he or she oppose H.R.801. Contact your Representative directly using the contact information and draft letter below, or via the ALA legislative action center [link forthcoming 2/11]. As always, kindly let us know what action you’re able to take, via email to stacie [at] arl [dot] org.
Click the link for more.
H/t to D H.
A Little Morality Play
Imagine you are a teacher, giving tests over the course of several years. Even though you mention other behavior that is forbidden, for a long time you never tell your students that copying from a crib sheet, or another student, is wrong. It’s never listed as being against the rules. You leave the room when giving an exam, and you grade on a curve. What do you suppose will happen? If a C student does better, and in doing so starts outperforming others, forcing their grades down, will all of them chose integrity over better grades? Of course not.
You ask the students if they cheated. What answer will you get?
Phelps gets suspended, A-Rod gets … nothing
Yeah, Michael Phelps got suspended. Why? Because if he smoked pot, he broke the rules. Baseball, on the other hand, had no punishment for steroid use for the time in question. Steroids, specifically, were not “banned” until 2002, and that’s not even right, because there was no punishment for their use until 2004. So yeah, A-Rod did something commonly accepted as cheating in almost every sport, but up until baseball tested for them and had punishment, there was nothing to distinguish steroid use from vitamin supplements and eating your spinach (other than steroids needing a prescription, but that doesn’t seem to be the objection) except public perception, and public perception doesn’t sign the paycheck. So A-Rod will get some well-deserved derision and maybe lose some sponsorship money, too, but the organization that is Major League Baseball shouldn’t get free pass here, and nor should the players’ union — they resisted the implementation of these rules. Anyone discussing this? I don’t know — I’ve tried to avoid these stories. Too many sanctimonious sports pundits abound. (Personally, I think all modern electronic devices are performance-enhancing, so they’re all hypocrites if they use a word processor or cellphone to get their job done)
(Oh, and one could substitute law enforcement people not giving other law enforcement people e.g. parking tickets as another example of this, to name another example completely at random. Do they start parking illegally? You betcha.)