Julianne gets an invitation

Marilee Thomas of Beaver City, Nebraska. And a tornado. [source] Mid-Americans ... Minnesotans, Texans, Nebraskans and denizens of Arkansas, and everyone in between, understand tornadoes, but to varying degrees. There are differences by region in how we deal with them. In Arkansas, I've seen foolish bravado. The tornado shelter there is known as the "fraidy hole" and having one or not in your back yard may be linked to one's sense of machismo. People from Missouri that I have known have a deep respect for tornadoes. An example: A few years back there was a talk being given at The U when the tornado sirens went off. Looking out the windows all we could see was black punctuated by white dots (the hail hitting the window). That was not good at 3:00 in the afternoon. As the group sat there wondering what to do, my student, Lynne, stood up and said "I'm from Missouri. I'm going to the basement. You'all can stay here if you like."

Kate and I made a run to Babies "R" Us today, and looked at a bunch more baby stuff. We got a little punchy after a while, so it was perhaps not surprising that I was tremendously amused by the idea of Penguin Bowling.

On further reflection, though, it's really only natural. After all, the toy is really nothing more than a child's introduction to the study of physics. It's really an educational tool that captures the very essence of physics: we learn about the world we live in by throwing things at other things, and seeing what happens when they collide. Sometimes we throw photons at atoms, or protons at anti-protons, and sometimes we throw rattly plush bowling balls at crinkly stuffed penguins (or farm animals or fuzzy monsters).

Whatever the target, and whatever the projectile, it's all good physics.

Following up on the last post, here's George Johnson with Stephen Colbert. Where else on TV could someone recreate one of Faraday's experiments? The new Mr. Wizard?

Via Swans On Tea, I see that Comedy Central has put up the video of George Johnson's appearance on the Colbert Report. Or, I should say, they claim to have put it up-- their video player didn't work worth a damn on my computer.

I saw this on the day-late rerun, and it was hilarious. Not because Johnson is at all witty or amusing-- he's not. But toward the end it turns into an xkcd comic, and achieves a sort of accidental brilliance.

Check it out, if you can get it to play.

My kid's spacy English writing assignment makes me so proud! He's nine, he's only been once for a few days to an Anglophone country, and we rarely speak English at home. Yet he seems to have picked the language up from on-line gaming, and he's long been able to read e.g. the Harry Potter books in English. With his permission, here are his ideas about space colonies.I think that in the future those who want to will be able to move onto another planet, or into a space station. People will breathe using space suits, and at home they will have air inside their houses. They will get food by either importing it from Earth or sending up a space plantation near the planet (or space station) that people live on/in. Another solution for breathing is to place a big glass cupola - I've heard that some researchers have found a way to make glass very strong - over the part of the planet where people live, and put air and plants (because they can produce oxygen) in there so people can breathe anyway. You could maybe find a way to make the cupola keep what's inside temperate.

To make it cheaper to live in space you will have to be a vegetarian, because it will be very expensive to import food from Earth. If you're a vegetarian you can eat food from the space plantations, which will cost as much as the food does here. When you buy food from a space plantation they come with the food to the supermarket. Imported foods will cost more than the food that comes from the space plantations. You have to import animals like birds, insects and other animals that help the environment. Before you can live in space you will have to find a (cheap) solution to how to get water. Maybe you can find a planet with drinkable water on it.

There are still some problems to solve, and that is why you can't live in space today. I would like to live in space, maybe not for my whole life, but for a couple of years.

As promised last Friday, today we report the results of our investigation of the solubility properties of an avocado. To get the disappointment out of the way up front, we will not be reporting K_s.p. values.

Since we had some around, we decided to use conical tubes to hold the avocado pieces and the experimental solvents. I didn't want to mark the tubes with Sharpies (because we'll probably re-use them) and we don't have the cool colored tape you find in biochemistry labs, so we used a system of plastic cups to keep clear on which tube held which solvent. (The cups also served as our test-tube rack.)

Timothy Burke has some interesting thoughts about the College of the Atlantic, which represents a real effort to build interdisciplinarity on an institutional level. "Interdisciplinary" is the buzzword of the moment in large swathes of academia, and the College of the Atlantic, which doesn't have departments and works very hard to make connections between disciplines, is sort of the apotheosis of the interdisciplinary movement.

Toward the end of his post, Burke relates a story from earlier in his career:

When I was briefly at Emory at the start of my career, I was in a workshop on interdisciplinarity. After many of the junior people there duly celebrated interdisciplinary study, a very wise, interesting senior professor, a classicist, stirred himself. "You guys," he said, "don't have a beef with disciplines. You have a beef with departments. Everybody's interdisciplinary in some respect in their scholarship. It's departments that cause the problem by raising the barriers to interaction and discussion".

To some degree, I agree with this-- a lot of the problem with interdisciplinary work has to do with the structure of academia, not the content of the disciplines. But we shouldn't overlook the fact that there are very real differences in the ways that scholars in different disciplines go about their business. The most extreme example, and the one that causes the most angst when discussing merit evaluations, has to do with book publishing-- scholars in the humanities and social sciences are expected to produce scholarly monographs, but that's almost unheard of in the natural sciences and engineering. This makes it very difficult to construct a system that appropriately rewards both humanists and scientists for their scholarly production.

But there are significant differences even within the sciences:

Nima Arkani-Hamed front pages cnn.com

Spot (and explain, if you can) the differences.

It's not much of a hint to say that the last one is quite difficult - but the last one is quite difficult.

There's a news piece in Physics World this week titled "Atom laser makes its first measurement" and you might think this would be right up my alley. Mostly, though, it serves to remind me that the term "atom laser" has always kind of pissed me off.

This is somewhat ironic, as it's a beautiful piece of "framing," the sort of thing I've spoken in favor of numerous times here. I have a principled technical objection to the term, though, in that I think the analogy it draws is deliberately misleading.

I should stress that there's really nothing wrong with the analogy on the face of it. The basic idea is that there is a parallel to be drawn between a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) and a laser-- a BEC is a macroscopic number of atoms occupying a single quantum state (at least, that's the high school physics explanation), while a laser can be thought of as a macroscopic number of photons occupying a single quantum state (in this case, a single mode of the electromagnetic field, with a particular frequency, direction, and polarization). The process by which atoms in a vapor form a BEC is directly analogous to the stimulated emission process by which the photons end up in a single laser mode, and you can draw valid analogies between various laser components and the elements of a BEC experiment (with the important caveat that all "atom lasers" to date have been Q-switched lasers).

The problem has to do with the way this analogy is deployed, and the meaning of the word "macroscopic."

The mothership, aka Seed magazine, has a crib sheet for quantum computing. Its not half bad, considering how bad things like this can go. And of course this is probably due in part to the fact that they list the Optimizer as a consultant. But the real question is whether that little shade of black outside of NP is an illustrators trick or the result of a complexity theorist being the person they asked to vet the cheat sheet?

Now we know why Ron Weasley didn't like Astronomy

Two fans in Dodger stadium caught back to back fouls during a Mets game (and, almost as importantly, the Dodgers lost, woohoo!)

When discussing ways that quantum computing may fail, a common idea is that it may turn out that the linearity of quantum theory fails. Since no one has seen any evidence of nonlinearity in quantum theory, and it is hard to hide this nonlinearity at small scales, it is usually reasoned that these nonlinearities would arise for large quantum systems. Which got me thinking about how to well we know that quantum theory is linear, which in turn got me thinking about something totally wacko.

I've been grading lab reports in two different classes, and I've been struck once again by the way that students attach mystical properties to anything with a digital readout. The uncertainty used in calculations is invariably put down as half of whatever the least significant digit displayed was, even in cases where the readout visibly fluctuated during the measurement.

Even better, any experiment involving length measurements will inevitably produce lab reports suggesting that the uncertainty could've been improved if they had had a caliper with a digital readout, rather than a vernier caliper.

I think that the next time I do my usual introduction to uncertainty analysis, I'm going to borrow the digital-readout caliper from the shop, and have everybody in the class measure the length of some rough block of metal. Maybe seeing the variation in the results will drive home that digital metering only creates the illusion of absolute precision...

The video that accompanies this PopSci.com article is pretty impressive. A bunch of college kids show off their ability to hit trick shots with ping-pong balls, bouncing them off walls, doors, floors, moving skateboards, people, and items of furniture and into beer cups. As the PopSci piece notes, there's a good deal of physics in this-- if every student put half as much effort into learning the material as these guys put into practicing trick shots, the world would be a better place.

The title of the piece, however, is "The Physics of Beer Pong," which brings us to today's non-dorky poll question:

Beer Pong: Paddles or no?

This is a critically important doctrinal dispute, so leave your answer in the comments.

Triacetin is the glycerol triester of acetic acid:

MSNBC's Alan Boyle, author of Cosmic Log, just interviewed me about the ever worsening Nargis catastrophe. You can hear the audio here, and excerpts here. An excerpt:

Mooney: I'd be careful about saying that. There's good evidence that global warming should affect tropical cyclones ... in some way and probably make them stronger on average. But when you get a catastrophe like this, global warming isn't the direct cause, and it really doesn't explain why there's been so much suffering.

You really have to look at other factors in order to figure out why a storm can hit the United States and only a couple die, and a storm can hit Myanmar and tens of thousands of people die. That has much more to do with socioeconomic conditions, forecasting systems, lack of evacuation, lack of communication to the populace, and all these other things.

Q: Is this another case of a perfect storm, where, as in Katrina, it happened to hit just wrong and was something that played on all the vulnerabilities that that area faced?

A: It's certainly looking like that. You had something with Nargis that you didn't have with Katrina. Katrina, we saw it coming days in advance. We saw a Category 5, and we were just sitting there waiting. Well, Nargis rapidly intensified at the last minute. It had been a fairly weak storm, and then it just started exploding even as it headed toward the coastline. So people didn't even know there was a bad storm coming until maybe just 24 or 48 hours out. And it kept getting worse and worse and worse, and then it hit a vulnerable place.

Q: But you had written about Nargis, gosh, more than a week in advance and indicated that this would be a pretty bad storm.

A: Yeah, I blogged about it. I wrote about it over at the Daily Green. I track cyclones, so whenever I see something developing in the Bay of Bengal, and I see the ocean temperatures are really warm ... you just know that it can't be good. I didn't know how strong the storm was going to get, but I knew that the ocean temperatures were warm and I knew that it was already completely formed - and it had this ocean ready to pounce and ready to draw energy from. If you look at the Bay of Bengal, it sucked a couple of degrees Celsius out of the ocean and flung that at the coastline.

Again, links here and here.

As seen in a recent links dump, gg at Skulls in the Stars posted a fun challenge for science bloggers:

My "challenge", for those sciencebloggers who choose to accept it, is this: read and research an old, classic scientific paper and write a blog post about it. I recommend choosing something pre- World War II, as that was the era of hand-crafted, "in your basement"-style science. There's a lot to learn not only about the ingenuity of researchers in an era when materials were not readily available, but also about the problems and concerns of scientists of that era, often things we take for granted now!

This does sound like a neat idea, as the level of ingenuity required to carry out some of the classic experiments of physics is really impressive. I've been toying with taking up the challeneg, but there's one question remaining, which I'll throw open to the audience:

What pre-WWII paper should I read for the Skulls in the Stars challenge?

My inclination would be to go with the Michelson-Morley experiment, conveniently available through the AIP's collection of classic papers by American physicists, as it was voted the greatest experiment ever a couple of years ago. I'm open to other suggestions, though, provided that they're in English and available online somewhere (anything in the Physical Review is fine, for example).

So, if you have a suggestion, leave it in the comments.