Every year around this time, references to that damn sunscreen speech pop up again, as people start thinking of graduations. It's in the air (Union's graduation is this Sunday, and I don't think I've ever been happier to see the end of an academic year).

And, of course, I have actually been asked to give a graduation speech. Which leads naturally to thinking about what one piece of advice I would give to a high school student who came up to me and said "I plan to study physics in college. What one thing should I study?"

(Hey, it could happen...)

My one-word piece of advice for students planning to study physics (or any other science, really, but mostly physics): Algebra.

• You’re Like School in the Summer… « The First Excited State "Summertime is a time to focus on your research, without the distractions of tests, homeworks, and (hopefully) teaching duties. But many grad students, at least in physics, take the summer as an opportunity to attend summer schools, which are short, intense sessions aimed at advanced grad students that are held at various institutions around the country and the world. " (tags: science academia physics education blogs)
• Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: The Dizzying Data Rate Conundrum Theorists are more likely than experimentalists to say that data preservation is "crucial," showing that experimentalists have a better idea of how much crap data there is in the world... (tags: science physics statistics)
• News: Tenure's Value ... to Society - Inside Higher Ed "While noting "countervailing public interests" in the case, the judge wrote that "the public interest is advanced more by tenure systems that favor academic freedom over tenure systems that favor flexibility in hiring or firing." The ruling added that "by its very nature, tenure promotes a system in which academic freedom is protected" and that "a tenure system that allows flexibility in firing is oxymoronic."" (tags: academia law politics society)
• News: More Rankings Rigging - Inside Higher Ed "How many members of the National Academy of Engineering are on the faculty at the University of Southern California? This might seem like a straightforward question, but it's anything but when you add in the politics of rankings. USC's Viterbi School of Engineering maintains a list of 34 faculty members it says are in the academy. And when reporting to U.S. News & World Report, which uses NAE members on the faculty as one criterion in its rankings of top engineering graduate schools (where USC landed at No. 7), Southern California claimed 30 members. But according to the National Academy of Engineering, USC has only 22 members on its faculty." (tags: academia education journalism inside-higher-ed stupid)
• Matthew Yglesias » Social Democrats Hammered in European Parliament Elections See if you can spot the problem with the graphics. (tags: world politics math yglesias)

Two things that are worth a plug beyond the Links Dump level:

1) Over at the Intersection, Sheril Kirshenbaum wants you to look at pictures of people kissing. This is for Science, so stop giggling, and tell her what you think of the pictures.

2) There's a new blog, Ecocomics, dedicated to exploring the burning questions of how the principles of economics play out in superhero comics. This is both more and less silly than that description makes it sound. If you'd like a participatory entry to parallel Sheril's kissing survey, they're asking readers who's the richest character in comics.

Somebody recently asked me whether I had figured out who Female Science Professor is. I truthfully replied that I haven't even tried.

That was the first thing that came to mind when some jerk from the National Review revealed the identity of "Publius", kicking off another round of discussion about the etiquette of revealing identities that bloggers have chosen to conceal. This one probably won't be any more revealing than the previous go-rounds.

It's worth a tiny bit of effort, though, to fight for correct language in this case. Lots of people, most of them right-wingers, will be referring to "Publius" as "anonymous," in an effort to tar him with the negative connotations of that word. "Publius" wasn't anonymous, though, any more than "Female Science Professor" is, or "Mark Twain" was. Those people are pseudonymous, and that's an important distinction.

Tom at Swans On Tea comments on an article about meetings:

The most common meeting in my experience is the status meeting, where everyone gets together and reports on what they've accomplished. If it's a small group, these are usually fine because you already have familiarity with the tasks. But when you get a large group together, which has diverse tasks and goals, there is impending disaster. Bad meetings I've attended often involve people discussing details that nobody else at the table understands or possibly cares about -- the sort of thing that should happen one-on-one or in a small group, as everyone else sits there, trying not to fall asleep.

The worst case I know of was a BEC project meeting attended by both theorists and experimentalists where a ludicrous amount of time was spent debating the relative merits of making coils out of tubing with a round cross section versus tubing with a square cross section. This led to the splitting of the BEC meetings into separate experimental and theoretical meetings, and became a buzzword with the theory crowd-- whenever an experimental discussion got too thick, they would ask "Does this involve round wire, or square wire?"

Because I have an exam at 8:30 this morning, let's throw this out for an audience participation thread:

What's the most absurdly detailed discussion you've ever been forced to sit through for no good reason?

The excess detail could be technical, bureaucratic, safety-related, or any other category of mind-numbing. All that matters is that it's something you had absolutely no reason to listen to, but you were forced to be at the meeting.

• Who Underestimates Their Systematic Uncertainties ? "It is a well-known fact that it is much easier to measure a physical quantity than to correctly assess the magnitude of the uncertainty on the measurement: the uncertainty is everything! " (tags: physics particles experiment statistics blogs dorigo science)
• Acephalous: Photo reference at the National Review "The logic—such that it is—of the National Review editorial board seems to be that since everyone knows Asians are better than Latinos, no one can call them racist if they compare Sotomayor to an Asian. That argument—such that it is—could’ve made more forcefully if they made it without validating the charge against them." (tags: race diversity politics blogs acephalous)
• The New York Times: We May Slide Into Irrelevancy But At Least We Update Daily « Whatever "Nothing wrong with this — writing on a regular basis is work, even when you’re ostensibly doing it for fun, and it shouldn’t be a surprise not a lot of people really want to work that hard. Also and perhaps more to the point, I suspect many people who start blogging realize fairly quickly that they either don’t like sharing all their thoughts to the world, or that their thoughts, while interesting to them, appear fairly banal once they’re typed out, and it’s better just not to post them for the sake of posting them. And there’s nothing wrong with this either, and indeed the blogger is to be congratulated of the bit of personal insight. Most blogs are abandoned because they should be." (tags: blogs internet journalism whatever)
• Calculated Risk: Unemployment Rate and Level of Education "Note that the unemployment rate has risen sharply for all categories in 2009. For "less than a high school diploma" the rate has increased from 9% in 2009 to almost 16% in May." (tags: education US economics politics class-war statistics)
• 7 Ridiculously Over-The-Top Modifications to Deadly Weapons | Cracked.com "The website for the TAC-15 offers no logical reason to put the crossbow on top of an assault rifle body, and the best we can come up with is if you also strap a laser or railgun underneath it you'll be set to do battle wherever your time machine lands you." (tags: silly gadgets technology)

Two annoying technology moments yesterday:

1) Kate and I got cell phones when we bought this house, and have been overpaying for them for quite some time. We rarely use them (partly because we get no signal inside the house), and have never come close to using our monthly allocation of minutes.

Verizon now offers pre-paid plans, which would save us a good deal of money that could then be spent on baby toys, so we went to the local Verizon store to switch over. And immediately got told that they couldn't guarantee that we could keep the same numbers. And then that it would take an hour or so to do the switch. Then that they needed my driver's license. Then that they needed to split the phone into two separate accounts, complicating the billing.

Of course, if we wanted to go with a more expensive plan, they could do everything immediately, with no hassle...

2) Our printer has been warning that the black cartridge was low for some time now, even though there has been no detectable decrease in print quality. Yesterday, when I tried to print something so I could review it for work, it decided that the black cartridge was done, and now refuses to print anything. I spent ten minutes trying to find a way to make it keep printing, with no luck, and along the way had to fend off about fifty dialogue boxes trying to get me to buy toner online.

Laser printers have gotten to be too goddamn smart. There's toner still in that cartridge, but since that's where they make their money these days, the printer is determined not to let me use it.

Verizon and Hewlett Packard: You're on notice.

SteelyKid attempts to show off her street cred:

Of course, her attempt at looking tough is kind of undermined by the Princess Tutu type duck on her hoodie...

That's ok, though, because it's all fun:

• Diary of a Trade Book (Newton and the Counterfeiter) 7.1: Rewards and Bribes « The Inverse Square Blog "[W]hen sheer love of words and sentences and ideas can’t carry you through, what can you fall back on? Bribery." (tags: writing books levenson)
• Matthew Yglesias » Book Launch 2.0 As someone who created a Facebook page for his dog as a way to promote a book project, I definitely appreciate this. (tags: internet books publishing marketing youtube video)
• Confessions of a Community College Dean: Assessing Professional Development "Since it's looking like we'll be short of funds for some time to come, I can foresee some pitched battles coming over what little professional development funding we haven't cut yet. And I can guess that those battles won't be terribly enlightening, because we haven't really figured out what makes some professional development activities better than others." (tags: academia economics blogs education dean-dad)
• Stealing Daylight : Starts With A Bang "Ever wonder how much daylight you can gain or lose just by getting in your car and driving either West or East? " (tags: science astronomy physics blogs starts-with-bang)
• Preoccupations - Meetings Are a Matter of Precious Time - NYTimes.com "Part of the problem at such meetings is that the leader has not set clear objectives or an agenda, and didn’t assign pre-meeting preparation tasks. Instead, the leader seems to hope that magic will occur, producing a serendipitous solution to some of the problems addressed. Of course, that doesn’t happen. As a general rule, meetings make individuals perform below their capacity and skill levels. This doesn’t mean we should always avoid face-to-face meetings — but it is certain that every organization has too many meetings, and far too many poorly designed ones. " (tags: meetings business education psychology culture academia stupid)

This may be too late in the day to generate much action, but I thought of it just a little while ago. Two questions:

1) If you were writing a letter of recommendation for a student, would you refer to them as "Firstname" or "Mr./Ms. Lastname"?

2) Does your answer depend on the level of the student? That is, would you refer to an undergraduate the same way as a graduate student?

I've seen both, and have a definite opinion on the subject, but I'm curious as to what people think.

Physics World posted a somewhat puzzling story a few days back, headlined Ultra cold atoms help share quantum information:

Scientists in the US have demonstrated a novel "light-switch" in an optical fibre that could become a new tool in the communications industry. The device created by Michal Bajcsy at Harvard University and colleagues could be developed to share both classical and quantum information.

Quantum information systems could bring a revolution to global data-sharing, by encrypting, processing, and transmitting information using the properties of quantum mechanics. However, as strings of "1s" and "0s" are represented by the quantum states of individual subatomic particles, such as the polarization of photons, they are very delicate and information can be easily lost. Prototype quantum devices have been developed but the move towards commercial applications requires more robust systems to compete with established "classical" technologies.

This is puzzling not because of the quantum stuff, but because it seems to have very little to do with the actual research being described, which was written up in Physics a few weeks ago (where, incidentally, you can get a free copy of the original paper). The work in question uses quantum mechanics, to be sure, but the business about quantum information isn't in the paper at all, and appears to be a garbled reference to something about three steps removed from what's actually being done.

The work described in the original paper is plenty cool. The paper comes from a collaboration between the research groups of Vladan Vuletic at MIT and Misha Lukin at Harvard, and it would be hard to find a more intimidatingly smart pair of PI's. They have worked out a way to trap a few thousand laser-cooled rubidium atoms inside a 3-cm piece of hollow-core optical fiber, which is impressive in its own right, but they then went on to use those cold atoms to demonstrate all-optical switching of the light passing through the fiber: they could determine whether a beam of light sent into the fiber was absorbed or transmitted by sending in a second beam of light, at a different frequency.

Physics World reports on the awarding of a major French prize in science:

A physicist has been awarded France's top science prize for his work on atomic physics and quantum optics. Serge Haroche -- one of the founding fathers of cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) -- was presented with this year's "gold medal" by the French national research council (CNRS) at a press conference in Paris yesterday. Haroche currently heads the electrodynamics and simple systems group at CNRS's Kastler Brossel Lab in Paris.

Previous physics recipients include the Nobel Prize winners Albert Fert and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, who was Haroche's PhD supervisor. "In these times of confusion and obscurity, Serge Haroche's clarity and lucidity are indeed very welcome," said CNRS president Catherine Bréchignac. The gold medal is awarded annually in recognition of a lifetime's academic achievement.

France has a surprisingly high concentration of really brilliant quantum optics types-- Cohen-Tannoudji, Dalibard, Aspect-- and Haroche is right there with the best of them. He's done a number of really cool experiments involving atoms in optical cavities, pairs of mirrors facing one another. These "cavity QED" experiments dramatically change the interaction between light and atoms by allowing a single photon in the cavity to interact with an atoms many times (speaking somewhat loosely). This makes it possible to look at quantum effects involving light and matter in great detail, and Haroche has been at the forefront of this work.

So, congratulations to Serge Haroche for a well-deserved honor.

• Swans on Tea » Going UP (Very Precisely) "Ignoring that we’re working in English units, which scientists don’t really do very much, the big thing that pops out to the budding, fully-bloomed, or dying scientist is the misuse of significant digits. Do we really believe the estimate of the house’s weight is exact? No, it’s probably good to 2 digits, at best — the house could easily weigh several thousand pounds more or less than the estimated value. So the answer is that it takes 1,500,000 cubic feet of Helium to fill the balloons. You can’t specify it any better than that. The same mistake propagates through the calculation of the number of balloons." (tags: movies science physics blogs swans-on-tea)
• Behind the Scenes: A New Angle on History - Lens Blog - NYTimes.com "Mr. Jones’ angle on the historic encounter is vastly different from four other versions shot that day, taken at eye level moments before the tanks stopped at the feet of the lone protester. Wildly chaotic, a man ducks in the foreground, reacting from gunfire coming from the tanks. Another flashes a near-smile. Another pedals his bike, seemingly passive as the tanks rumble towards confrontation. The photograph encourages the viewer to reevaluate the famous encounter. Unlike the other four versions, we are given a sense of what it was like on the ground as the tanks heaved forward, the man’s act of defiance escalated by the flight of others. " (tags: history journalism pictures world politics)
• slacktivist: 20 years ago "Some day -- maybe within the next 20 years, maybe longer, but some day for sure -- this picture will hang where pictures of Chairman Mao hang today. And some day, there will be a statue, life-size and bronze, on or near that very spot, and schoolchildren will line up to marvel at it and to hear again the story that they all already know by heart because the tanks didn't crush the story but rather, unwittingly as always, helped to write it." (tags: world politics history pictures)
• Sandwalk: Another Blogger Leaves the SEED Blogs (ScienceBlogs.con) Because everybody loves a train wreck on the Internet. (tags: blogs stupid internet)
• Powell's Books - PowellsBooks.BLOG - Is Science As Important As Football? "Teachers should be able to do this kind of science, and many would love to, but cannot because of the fear of what would happen if there were ever an accident. A student suffering even a relatively minor injury from a dangerous chemical would be front page news anywhere in the U.S., even if the same student spending a week in the hospital due to a sports injury would go completely unnoticed (unless perhaps he's the star quarterback). The science teacher would likely lose their job, while the coach would be offered condolences on the loss of their star player." (tags: science education sports society stupid physics chemistry academia)

My mom was in Saratoga Springs for a meeting, and stopped by tonight to make a guest appearance in this week's Baby Blogging. Here, SteelyKid shows off how she can haul herself into a standing position on the big tub of outgrown baby clothes sitting in the living room:

"How do we know she did that herself?" you ask, you skeptical baby-doubter, you. "Her grandmother is holding her up!" Well, this picture should remove any doubt:

Tom Levenson has another excellent piece in his series on the writing of his forthcoming book on Newton, this one on hitting a wall:

The one bit of history specific to the Newton and the Counterfeiter project came when I hit a wall. I had written about a quarter of the manuscript by the autumn of 2006 - I'd even submitted a chunk of it to the departmental committee pondering my tenure case, which is as those of you in the academy will know, something of a fraught moment.

But as I tried to make the turn out of what was in essence back-story, my account of Newton's life up to the point of his arrival at the Mint and the start of his confrontation with the counterfeiter of my title, William Chaloner, I found that I could not make any progress.

It's a familiar feeling to anybody who has written much of anything, from papers for college classes to blog posts to a book. The obvious question, though, is how does this happen when you've gone through the process of writing a proposal with a detailed outline and everything? Basically, because the map isn't the territory.

When this first came out, I didn't pick it up, despite a glowing recommendation from Jennifer Ouellette, because NASCAR is one of the few things on ESPN that interests me less than baseball. I didn't really think I'd be interested in reading a whole book on the subject.

I saw Jennifer and Diandra on Bloggingheads a little while back, and she made it sound pretty interesting. And then I saw that she was giving a public lecture at DAMOP, and figured it would be good for airplane reading on the way down and back.

The Preface gives a nice description of how she came to write the book:

• kitchen table math, the sequel: alternate universe "While visiting schools in a variety of districts, I began to notice something that puzzled me. Some of these schools, particularly those with large numbers of poor and minority children, are working against daunting — some would say unreasonable — expectations for improvement in test scores. In more affluent schools, those pressures are much less evident. Yet the kinds of instructional problems that surface in both types of schools are strikingly similar." (tags: education academia class-war society politics social-science)
• Infinite Summer "Four writers who have never before read Infinite Jest will do so for the duration of Infinite Summer. And each will be posting here weekly, not only to report on their thoughts and progress, but also to promote and facilitate discussion. " (tags: books literature blogs)
• The great Presidential book-reading race! « Skulls in the Stars "Let’s put aside the fact that maybe it isn’t a virtue for the “leader of the free world” to have lots of spare time to read two books a week, and also take Karl Rove at his word (ha ha) that Bush actually read that amount of books. Reading isn’t a horse race — it’s not just about how fast you read a book, it’s about how well you understand and retain the information you’ve read. " (tags: books politics US blogs education skulls-in-stars)
• Powells.com From the Author - John Crowley "How much did a condom cost in 1944? What did the package look like? Where could one be bought? Were there machines in the toilets (we called them toilets) of bars, as there were in the late 1950s? I was writing a novel about the U.S. home front in World War II (Four Freedoms, just out), and I needed to know. Why not just skip the detail, and say, "He bought a condom" or "He produced a condom"? Because the small details of common life give actuality, aliveness, and thickness to a historical story in the same way they do to a present-day story. The difference is you have to go find the details of the past; you can't just draw on experience. " (tags: writing books history internet)
• Abstruse Goose » Biologist Ex-particle physicists make the worst biologists. (tags: comics science physics biology silly abstruse-goose particles)
• News: 'Manipulating,' Er, Influencing 'U.S. News' - Inside Higher Ed "When President James F. Barker took over the South Carolina institution in 2001, he vowed in his initial interview to move Clemson into the top 20 (a distinction that many research universities covet, but few can achieve, given that most of those already in the top 20 aren't eager to relinquish their spots). Although many people on the campus were skeptical, Clemson has pursued the goal almost single-mindedly, seeking to "affect -- I'm hesitating to use the word 'manipulate,' " Watt said -- "every possible indicator to the greatest extent possible." She added: "It is the thing around which almost everything revolves for the president’s office."" (tags: education academia statistics stupid inside-higher-ed)

For reasons that don't really matter, I learned yesterday that there is a marathon in Antarctica:

On December 12th, 2009, the fifth Antarctic Ice Marathon will take place at 80 Degrees South, just a few hundred miles from the South Pole at the foot of the Ellsworth Mountains. This race presents a truly formidable and genuine Antarctic challenge with underfoot conditions comprising snow and ice throughout, an average windchill temperature of -20C, and the possibility of strong Katabatic winds to contend with. Furthermore, the event takes place at an altitude of 3,000 feet.

That's one of the great things about the Internet. It lets you instantly find all sorts of bizarre things you never knew existed. Things you never would've thought to ask about.

This seems like a good open thread sort of thing, so:

Leave a comment telling me something I don't know. It could be a statement of fact, or a link to a weird site, or a pointer to some unlikely field of scholarship. It could be about science, or art, or politics, or culture, but whatever you post should be something you're pretty sure I don't already know about.

I've been having trouble accessing Movable Type from work, so in the interests of avoiding the spam filters, please limit yourself to one link per comment. More than that may land your comment(s) in the moderation queue for however long it takes me to get in and clear it.

• Unscientific America: The Table of Contents | The Intersection | Discover Magazine 2009 promises to be a good year for science-y books by people with blogs. (tags: books science social-science society politics intersection culture)
• Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Is the right book winning the Hugo? "The problem we usually have with arguing about what won awards is that we’re too close to them, or else too far away. 1990 is long enough ago that we should have some perspective, and with these lists, we also have the perspective of the people who were there. Looking at the lists, I thought it was interesting what I did remember. Also, I have a control. Sasha, who was born in October 1990, is now eighteen. He reads SF." (tags: SF books literature history science tor)
• The Age of the Essay A long love letter to the sort of noodly conclusionless essay that I find infuriating. (tags: writing education literature history journalism culture)
• Confessions of a Non–Serial Killer - Michael O’Hare "The agent then explained that the mail was from an amateur sleuth in California named Gareth Penn, who had been trying for some time to interest the police in the idea that I was the Zodiac killer. Perhaps he was trying to alarm me into confessing or doing something incriminating. Who knows. Even today, I know little about the man, beyond the odd detail I’ve picked up here and there—like the fact that he is a librarian and surveyor by trade, that he has (or had) a wonderful Jesus beard, and that he is a member of Mensa. About the details of Penn’s theory, I know next to nothing (curious readers could find them in Penn’s two self-published books on the subject), except that it has made me the subject of a particularly bizarre and vacuous chapter in the annals of American criminal justice. " (tags: law weirdness stupid crime)

We no longer do what is possibly my favorite lab in the intro mechanics class. We've switched to the Matter and Interactions curriculum, and thus no longer spend a bunch of time on projectile motion, meaning there's no longer room for the "target shooting" lab.

It's called that because the culmination of the lab used to be firing small plastic balls across the room and predicting where they would land. In order to make the prediction, of course, you need to know the velocity of the balls leaving the launcher, and making that measurement was the real meat of the lab. The way I used to do it, it also included a nice introduction to error and uncertainty, particularly the difference between random and systematic errors.

I'm sorry to see this one go (I don't think there's any way short of a calendar change to fit it into the new curriculum), and I've toyed with the idea of trying to write it up for some pedagogical journal or another. I'm not sure that would be permissible, though, given the way the thing works.