For technical reasons, it turns out that alkali metal atoms are particularly good candidates for laser cooling. Rubidium is probably the most favorable of all of them– some atomic physicists jokingly refer to it as “God’s atom”– but all of the alkalis, even Francium, have been cooled and trapped. Of course, alkali metal elements are […]
Month: March 2006
Let the Games Begin
Classes start today for our Spring trimester, which is both the home stretch, and one of the most brutal academic death marches in the business– we wind up running into June every year (last day of finals is June 7), well after most colleges are out of session. By the end of the term, the […]
All Scientists Left Behind
Orac beats me to commenting on today’s depressing New York Times story about NCLB. It seems that, faced with strict “No Child Left Behind” requirements in reading and math, some schools are shifting things around so that their low-performing students take only reading and math: Rubén Jimenez, a seventh grader whose father is a construction […]
21.9 +/- 3.1%
Since you asked. Uncertainty is due to the answer to #7.
Pay No Attention to the Game Behind the Curtain
Just a quick note: When I talked earlier about the aesthetic superiority of college basketball, I wasn’t thinking of last night’s Memphis-UCLA game. Ye gods, what an ugly display. That set basketball back so far they should’ve replaced the rims with peach baskets at halftime. I think Memphis coach/ huckster John Calipari said it best: […]
Commiseration or Schadenfreude?
In the New York Times newsfeed this morning, we have: First Rocket Is Lost by Space Company A private venture hailed as the beginning of a new age of cheap and reliable access to space suffered a setback yesterday when its first rocket was lost over the Pacific Ocean about a minute after liftoff. The […]
Notes Toward a User’s Guide to Synthetic Chemistry Talks
Reading Dylan Stiles’s blog yesterday reminded me of a post I wrote last summer about how to approach student talks about synthetic chemistry. Since evil spammers have forced us to turn off comments to the old site, I’ll reproduce the original below the fold:
Gravitomagnetic Noise
A reader emails to ask if I can make sense of this announcement from the European Space Agency: Scientists funded by the European Space Agency have measured the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field for the first time in a laboratory. Under certain special conditions the effect is much larger than expected from general relativity […]
Random Ten
My iPod apparently decided that I needed some slightly trippy stuff to go with the Flexeril and Darvocet I’ve been taking for my shoulder: “Fight Test,” the Flaming Lips “Late in the Evening,” Paul Simon “Just Like Honey,” the Jesus & Mary Chain “Sunshine/ Nowhere to Run,” Ride “See a Little Light,” Bob Mould “Whole […]
I’m a Basketball Fan, That’s Why I Don’t Like the NBA
Matt Yglesias has a fairly silly article denouncing the NCAA as a “celebration of mediocrity.” Jason Zengerle takes issue with this, and provides a nice explanation of why college basketball is superior to the NBA on emotional grounds (and let me just note how happy I am to see our leading political magazines writing about […]