nanoscale views

As mentioned previously , the news story about NSF upper level staff surfing for porn while on the job is back .  This would be funny if it ...

One of the hot topics at the workshop I attended was the proper role of "first principles" calculations in trying to understand el...

I've received three pieces of fundraising advertising from AAAS in the last two days via US Mail.  This makes me wonder about a few thin...

Very often in experimental physics, we're interested in comparing some data to a physical model that may involve a number of unknown par...

Stuck in Schipol, forced to fly back to Houston via BRE-AMS-DET-IAH, since mechanical difficulties cancelled my early BRE-AMS flight (thus c...

The ISP ( netopsie ) for my hotel here in Bremen, Germany has apparently decided to block access to all "blogspot.com" domains.  I...

Three quick blurbs from the arxiv this week.  I'm going to a workshop in Germany next week and have a bunch to do in the meantime, so b...

Perhaps this feature has always been available, but I just noticed the other night that Google Analytics can tell me stats about what kind ...

Since nearly everyone else in the science blogging world has touched on this (see here , here , here , here , and here , to name a few), I m...

I've felt for a long time that the current business climate, which punishes rather than rewards long-term research investments by compan...

As new grad students flood onto campuses across the US, I just got around to reading this piece in Science from a few of weeks ago about Ro...

Sorry for the delay in posts. The beginning of the new academic year is a hectic time . This paper is a very exciting new result. Unfortu...

Where did summer go? Several interesting things on the arxiv recently. Here are two from this past week that caught my eye. arxiv:0806.354...

This article in the NY Times about the LHC's current problems was interesting. To be fair, the LHC is an incredibly complex undertakin...

Interesting. The pseudonymous Kyle Finchsigmate at The Chem Blog just gave some stats about his blogging. He gets something like 6000 uni...

Everyone has seen phase transitions - water freezing and water boiling, for example. These are both examples of "first-order" phas...

Hat tip to Arjendu for pointing this out. The Anacapa Society is a national society that promotes and encourages research in computationa...

This youtube video is something that I'll have to remember for a future demo. It shows that cellophane tape makes (1-side) frosted gla...

One truly remarkable feature of statistical physics (and condensed matter physics in particular) is the emergence of phase transitions. Whe...

I had a conversation today that made me think about the following. These days we're told countless times that it's essential for a ...