Today I met up with Aakash in NYC to hang out, since he’s starting his lawyerin’ internship tomorrow. I learned a few interesting things today: Read more »

Posted: May 27th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Not-work-safe discussion and pictures, after the bump…

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Posted: May 23rd, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Bryce DeWitt was a theorist that developed an early form of quantum gravity in an effort to bypass the infinite number of counterterms it seems to require, and, with John Wheeler, wrote down what amounts to the wave function of the universe. That said, a talk he gave entitled “Quantum Gravity, Yesterday and Today”, has appeared on arXiv:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0805.2935v1

I think my favorite part of this article isn’t his remarkable role in the history of the development of a very difficult field, but rather his anecdote about Wolfgang Pauli:

I was hoping to spend some time as a postdoc at the ETH, so Pauli asked me what I was working on. I said I was trying to quantize the gravitational field. For many seconds he sat silent, alternately shaking and nodding his head (a nervous habit he had, affectionately known as die Paulibewegung). He finally said “That is a very important problem - but it will take someone really smart!”

That’s classic Pauli for you.

Posted: May 21st, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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http://gizmodo.com/392091/silicon-valley-nerds-plan-sea+based-utopian-country-to-call-their-own

I mean, seriously

Posted: May 21st, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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My friend Shae linked me to this article at Inside Higher Ed about a professor, Steven D. Aird, who was fired for failing too many students. At first glance, that looks about reasonable. A Professor failing 90% of his students might be a little harsh. But read on — you find a duplicitous administration that ignores the results of its own policies, and a professor who wants to hold his students to *gasp* standards. Thank God for professors like Dr. Aird, who are willing to do what is necessary and proper to insure that a college degree still means something. As for me, if I see a diploma from Norfolk State University come across my desk for a job or summer internship, I think I might just have to keep sliding it along…

Posted: May 14th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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I thought I’d share something the professor I’m teaching for shared with the class. His basic comment was that the writing of the class was full of flowery prose, but very few substantive statements; something I’d noticed all semester in their lab reports. To illustrate his point, he linked them to a George Orwell essay and I thought it would be worth sharing with others. It goes along with my wish that I could demand that all of my students read Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style before writing their lab reports, but unfortunately I couldn’t.

Posted: May 14th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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My friend and fellow Tech alumnus Will Welch, who has at this point in his life spent six years in college obtaining two degrees, and has contemplated a Congressional run against House Village Idiot Lynn Westmoreland (seen here unable to count of the Ten Commandments after claiming that he cannot think of a better place for them than in a courthouse), recently linked me to a new website, brijit, which is a compilation of hundred word synopses of the news, as provided by such luminous sources as The Economist (my preferred news source), Nature, and ESPN The Magazine. They don’t pay me to write about this, so clearly I’m doing it because I think it’s a good idea. It’s hard to keep up with everything everywhere, so compiling everything into a short snippet can at least keep you reasonably well informed, and the fact that they have opted out of the wiki format means that what cyberhaxXx1991 thinks about the Obama campaign will be kept out, which is never a bad thing.

Posted: May 11th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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This fit should be a very, very tight linear fit. It is not a tight linear fit.  

Posted: May 8th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Time to give people updates. As of Monday I’ll be having a badge that says I have limitless access to Brookhaven National Laboratory, where I plan to do my Ph.D work in the Collider Accelerator Physics division. You can find the website here. Thus far, I’ve been shown around by Dr. Vladimir Litvinenko, who runs the show and might be one of the coolest professors I’ve ever met.

This move means that my love of quantum field theory will become peripheral at best, and the energy scale will increase by about nine orders of magnitude. It also means that the number of accelerator physics grad students graduating with me in the entire country can be counted on two hands.  This means the odds of my getting an academic job after I graduate goes through the roof. Which is good. Because I’m too stupid to succeed otherwise.

Anybody who wants to visit me and check out some damn cool physics, just let me know and I can use my mad connections to show off. Most importantly, I’ll be eventually Dr. Webb again, and I’m much happier for it.

Posted: May 5th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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