Archive for September, 2007
For homesick physicists
A nice paragraph from `A lab away from home,’ by Elizabeth Clements in Symmetry Magazine, Vol 4 Issue 6 (Aug 2007) : Living in a new place–be it a strange city or a different continent– takes you out of your element, away from the comforts of home. It can make you more vulnerable. Perhaps it is that […]
Filed under: Expatriate Life | Closed
SPIRES now supports RSS feeds
Today I just discovered that SPIRES (Durham mirror) supports RSS feeds. Fig 1. Now I’ll be the first to know when Einstein publishes a new paper. eprintweb.org already offers an arXiv feed, though I’ve found that it doesn’t always catch every new paper. What’s great about SPIRES is that the RSS feed the output of […]
Filed under: Science 2.0 | 6 Comments
Food standard…
There is an `experimentalist’ workshop going on this week and I’ve had the pleasure of having dinner with some of the postgraduate students. After hearing how everyone gets to go to CERN, however, I’ve experienced a new feeling: experimentalist-envy! I had a good laugh, however, during a discussion of the cost-of-living in CERN. One British […]
Filed under: Just for Fun | 1 Comment
Funding techie undergrads
It’s a bit old by blog standards, but there is a bit of news from last month that Montana senator Max Baucus is proposing free college tuition for students of mathematics and science (“techies” in the parlance of my undergraduate institution). The goal is to provide 25,000 (merit-based) university scholarships to math/science students who teach […]
Filed under: Opinion | 1 Comment
Yesterday I discovered a neat little website with some potential for science communication. ScribLink is a `virtual whiteboard.’ It combines a rudimentary drawing program with a chat room and some `Web-2.0′ features. Fig 1. Screen shot using ScribLink, featuring a graph in a previous post. Ok, so it’s a glorified MS-Paint. If you want you […]
Filed under: Science 2.0 | 3 Comments
A theoretical physics joke
I discovered a fun website that allows you to share a `virtual whiteboard’ with other users. I’ll talk about this in my next post. First, I wanted to share one of my favourite theoretical physics jokes. (No offense intended, string students!) I’ve been told that this joke was told to incoming gradaute students at UCSB. […]
Filed under: Just for Fun | 11 Comments
Tags: physics joke
Toll door
Unlike my adviser, who will come to the office early on Saturday mornings, I prefer to work in the evenings and occasionally return to the office after dinner. Either way, the building is closed to the public after hours and one needs to be affiliated with the department to enter. The IPPP has a very […]
Filed under: Just for Fun | 2 Comments
Check your units
A few weeks ago I was bugging my astro-buddy* to write a blog post about the funny-sounding units he uses, such as the jansky (watt per meter squared per hertz). Well, astro-bud, welcome to academia because you got scooped by Wired magazine. (*-Ok, so he’s not my `astro-buddy’ but rather my friend who is an […]
Filed under: Just for Fun | 3 Comments
g = \pi^2
Yesterday I stumbled upon a fantastic blog by Isabel, a fellow grad student blogger at God Place Dice. She has some very well thought-out and fascinating posts (certainly more so than my blog) and GPD has quickly become one of my favourite blogs. I wanted to share a particularly excellent post about why the gravitational […]
Filed under: Just for Fun | 7 Comments
The Philanthropic Principle
One of my childhood friends is now a blossoming opera singer at the Los Angeles Opera, It’s always a pleasure to catch up whenever we happen to be in the same part of the state/country/world, partially because our young professional careers actually have a lot more in common than one would expect. Both theoretical physics […]
Filed under: Opinion | Closed
An American Physics Student in England 