nanoscale views

This'll be my last talk description for a while, I promise. Colloquium today was Gerry Gabrielse , talking about their group's late...

Frank Wilczek gave his second talk at Rice, "The lightness of being", about the origins of mass and the "feebleness" of ...

Frank Wilczek is visiting Rice for two days this week, and is giving two talks. I was fortunate enough to have lunch with him. He's a...

I've posted about this topic before, but Gordon Watts' recent post on the subject of long-term research makes me want to throw this...

A few highlights from this week, though brief. I've actually been working on my book rather than writing as much. Coming soon: more a...

Last week at the APS, Lars Samuelson closed his nano-related talk with the following quote, reportedly from Albert Einstein: "Any inte...

Well, I'm back home from APS. I'll write a bit more about the science over the weekend, but for now, here are some last thoughts on...

More good physics at the APS meeting, though I'm rapidly approaching the point of mental exhaustion. There was an invited symposium on s...

I can already tell that I have one big thing in common with my thesis advisor besides our first name: I have a tough time saying 'no...

I would live-blog the APS meeting, except that the wireless connection at the Denver convention center is completely dysfunctional. I saw s...

This video that Kristen Kulinowski sent me is great. metadatta gets major street cred for figuring out which paper this refers to.

Alain Aspect gave the departmental colloquium today, and his talk was fantastic. He let the audience choose whether to hear about his more...

There's a great post on Cosmic Variance about the "cult of genius" in physics - the myth in our discipline that if you're...

One theory paper, and two experimental papers this time. cond-mat/0702446 - Poggio et al ., Feedback cooling of a cantilever's fundamen...

Several papers caught my eye this week; I'll be brief, particularly since I haven't had time to read them in detail. Now that our p...

(Updated and corrected) As others in the blogging world have pointed out, today is the big day for D-Wave , a privately held, VC-financed ...

I haven't written too much about my own research on this blog, mostly because I figure that people who really care about it can read my ...

See this comic ? See how, down at the bottom, it says "This comic courtesy of Jeff from Rice U."? That's my grad student, Je...

I can't resist posting a link to this article (NY Times, reg. req.), about two friends of mine from college. If you ever see a joke on...

Real life continues to limit my blogging time. I'll hopefully be posting more often again soon. In the mean time, here's a neat pa...