Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
I can’t think of any technical task that I mastered in my first 3 hours of exposure.  Despite that, we (like many physics departments) give the students a different experiment every week, and at the end of 3 hours there’s nothing left to do but write a report on whatever they managed to salvage [...]

By Thoreau
Much like Austin Powers’ father, there are only two things I hate:  People who discriminate on the basis of age, and the Baby Boomers.  Those hypocrites smoked anything they could touch a match to in 1968, and less than 2 decades later they were supporting “Just say no!”  Other than 46 chromosomes, 9 months [...]

By Thoreau
Though I have expressed sympathy for OWS, I am uncomfortable when people compare OWS to Tahrir Square.  Overall, things aren’t as bad as that in the US…yet.  However, if the folks in Tahrir Square wish to show solidarity with victims of police brutality, more power to them.
OTOH, while I am uncomfortable with pushing these [...]

By Thoreau
According to The Onion, this broken, crumbling civilization is finally willing to get the hell out of my way and let us Evil Fiziks Types have our way.  About freaking time.  We are the 1% when it comes to IQ.

By Thoreau
Physical Review Letters already has an article arguing that faster-than-light neutrinos are ruled out by other observations.  I’m not qualified to comment on it, but I’m surprised that it got through peer review so quickly.  Here is a summary.
I will say this, though:  Relativity actually does have equations that describe faster-than-light particles.  These equations [...]

By Thoreau
Chad Orzel has perhaps the greatest ever Occupy letter.

“I work around the clock– 1043 Planck times per second– providing the gravitational attraction to hold this galaxy cluster together. And some baryonic cosmologist wants to explain me away as a modification of Newtonian gravity?  I have been silent for 13.7 billion years, [...]

By Thoreau
Right after making the post below, I got an email whose title begins “STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL”.  I can’t say anything more than that, because the contents really are strictly confidential, but when I first saw the message pop up I thought for sure it was either spam or a friend having fun after reading my [...]

BY SPECIAL GUEST BLOGGER LIBYAN SCIENCE MINISTER
DEAR DR. THOREAU,
I TRUST THAT THIS FINDS YOU WELL.  AS YOU KNOW, THE DISCOVERY OF GHADAFFI’S EMBEZZELED $200 BILLION PRESENTS OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE NEW LIBYAN MINISTRY OF SCIENCE.  BASED ON THE VERY USEFUL RESEARCH RESULTS THAT YOU ARE PUBLISHING, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND REVIEWER #2 HAS SUGGESTED THAT YOU ARE [...]

By Thoreau
I send my students to an undergraduate research conference most falls, as a warm-up to the grown-up conferences in winter and spring.  The reviewers for the undergraduate conferences take themselves way too seriously, so every year we have to revise an abstract over some ridiculous point.  Grown-up conferences, OTOH, generally take any abstract that [...]

By Thoreau
As I sit here waiting for the last reviewer to submit his review so the editor can make a decision (the online manuscript submission system lets me see how many reviewers have finished their work, but does not let me see their recommendations until after the editor weighs in), I note that one of [...]