Conferences

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FemaleScienceProfessor discusses the pros and cons of talk vs. poster, confounded by the politics of being involved in the conference. Physics conferences in particular have a certain breakdown that’s mentioned over at Uncertain Principles, that being invited talks, contributed talks and posters. It was my impression that posters weren’t nearly as big a thing in the particle physics community vs the AMO community, during my postdoc at an accelerator lab some years back — I was gearing up for an atomic physics conference, to discuss the double-MOT system we had, and how we transferred the atoms, and the particle men acted like they weren’t familiar with the concept of a poster session.

One aspect of talk vs. poster is how important is it to be seen, as opposed to how important it is to get experimental details out (as much as you can do that in 10 minutes or so). In that case it was a description of an apparatus and not any real experimental results, so a poster made sense. When we had some experimental results, I gave a talk, and that gave the attendees a chance to see me and associate my face with that experiment — several or many dozen, as opposed to a smaller number that might have dropped by a poster. (Of course, a smaller number isn’t so bad when it includes a Nobel prize-winner or winner-to-be).

What I remember about that particular talk is that the program listed the talks as being 15 minutes long: 12 minutes of talking, with 3 more for questions. During the announcements preceding the plenary session, we were informed that that was a typo in the program, and the talks were actually just 12 minutes total: 10 for presentation and 2 for questions. The poor people giving talks that day had no chance to revise things and cut down their presentations, and everything ran late. I at least had that evening to make adjustments and drop a slide to bring my talk in in the allotted time.

What Everyone Should Know About Science

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The topic being adressed at Uncertain Principles, based on an idea from Michael Nielsen

1) Science is a Process, Not a Collection of Facts

2) Science is an essential human activity.

3) Anyone can do science.

infer some ellipses between those items; Chad goes into some detail about all of them.

Perhaps what science is not is important, too.

– Science doesn’t claim to have all the answers. Good thing, too, since we’d all be doing something else with our lives if everything had been answered.

– Science isn’t about faith (of the religious variety). Related to the above, but it’s important to know that science quantifies certainty and uncertainty. Having some uncertainty is not the same thing as having no certainty at all.

(what everyone should know about blogging: When in doubt, link to someone else)

Having Some Trouble

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FYI, I’m having a smidgen of trouble uploading some files to the server for the posts I’m working on. (which is why some posts accessed through RSS won’t show up — they were published and then unpublished as I tried something out that didn’t work)

I know most men wouldn’t admit to having trouble uploading their files, or would try and brag about how many Megabytes they were. But I swear this has only happened once or twice before. It’s not you … it must be the stress.

edit: my “little problem” seems to have been fixed. Though if I keep uploading for four continuous hours, I’m supposed to consult my netdoctor.

Leap Day

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Phil Plait runs down the numbers about leap days, and why the Gregorian calendar has them every 4 years but skip every 100, except when we unskip every 400.

And if you find that confusing, you’re still probably not as confused as we Swedes are. The old Julian calendar didn’t have the rules about skipping (or not) years divisible by 100 or 400, so that’s why it got off track and countries started changing to the Gregorian. And while most countries just bit the bullet and dropped the 10 or 11 days (depending on when the change was made), Sweden tried to think different … and screwed it up. Miserably.

To avoid the havoc of just obliterating the large chunk of days, the Swedes decided to do it this way: just say no to leap days for 40 years, and then their calendar would be in synch with the Gregorian calendar. The problem of not lining up with either calendar didn’t dissuade them from this plan. It started out well enough — they began this in 1700, which was a leap year for the Julian but not the Gregorian calendar, so there would have been no Feb 29 with either method of adoption. But something went terribly wrong: somebody (no doubt addled by overconsumption of herring) forgot the master plan, so 1704 and 1708 both had a leap days. Rather than just go ahead with the Gregorian adoption, it was decided to go back to the Julian calendar, but an extra day would be needed, since one had been dropped in 1700. Solution? A leap day! It was added in 1712, and since 1712 was already a leap year, that meant there was a Feb. 30.

The Swedes went ahead with the Gregorian calendar in 1753, adding in the 11 days all at once.

Turning Physics on its Ear

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So yesterday I linked to a couple of anti-relativity sites, and tearing down their arguments might be fun, as gg suggests in the comments. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg of people who have a beef with some part of physics. And the folks who think physics is in need of an overhaul aren’t limited to their own little websites, or posting to science forums. They write books, too. There’s a discussion about one such author over at Pharyngula (and the same topic popped up today on SFN) but it’s been dealt with pretty thoroughly over at the JREF forum. I haven’t read the book, so I’m not going to raise specific objections here.

But there’s an attitude that is presented, and echoed elsewhere, that the physics is wrong because it doesn’t explain things. And these people are hell-bent on explaining things. But they go about it in the wrong way — they seem to be mortally afraid of making a specific prediction. Of using math in a useful way.

A common refrain goes along the lines of X is not a mathematical model, and it does not, nor does it need to, reduce mathematically to the physics I’m attempting to supplant

And that’s the problem. It’s great that you can “explain” phenomenon A. But can you also “explain” phenomenon B, that doesn’t actually happen? If you can explain anything, then it’s not very useful. A useful explanation can’t be some vague handwave. The strength of the mathematical model is it allows one to actually calculate things. It’s not good enough to explain the bump on my graph. I want to know if the bump should be at 10 eV, because if your explanation puts it at 15 eV, then you’re wrong and need to go back and change something. Your work has to be able to be tested for being wrong in a verifiable way