Microsoft’s Office Labs has posted a tool for launching programs called SpeedLaunch. Now, there are a lot of launchers out there, as the creators of SpeedLaunch point out on their blog. What seems unique about theirs, they say, is the drag-n-drop functionality for creating shortcuts: you get a big ‘ole target in the corner of … [Read more…]
We’re used to computers zapping data back and forth with (mostly) perfect integrity. When you send a email, there’s no doubt that it will reach your intended recipient with all your crafty sentences completely intact. But!, even though your computers are good at transferring the information without loosing any, your recipient probably isn’t. Humans don’t … [Read more…]
Why won’t physicists leave these poor cats alone?! Is it dead? Alive? Both? As if the ideas about where quantum mechanics melds into classical physics weren’t already confusing enough, new experimental work seems to confirm the theory that the transition from multiple possibilities to a single observed outcome is far from instantaneous and is, in … [Read more…]
While Einstein is best remembered by the general public for his theory of relativity, this was largely complete by 1916. Quantum mechanics, by that time, was only just beginning to be developed into a full, general theory. Einstein made important contributions to quantum mechanics early on, in 1905 using the hypothesis that light is quantized … [Read more…]
On the first day of undergraduate physics at Olin College, Mark Somerville, my professor drew the following diagram on the board: In this course, he said, we’d be dealing with “big, slow stuff.” The dividing line between slow and fast is pretty well defined, with fast being any sizable fraction of the speed of light … [Read more…]
Microsoft and Apple seem to be willing to give implicit nods to one another’s products in their advertising. Apple’s MobileMe service, whose launch coincided with the iPhone 3G, billed itself on the Apple website as “Exchange for the rest of us,” referring to Microsoft’s Exchange Server. It seems to have recently cleansed its marketing copy … [Read more…]
My good friend and collaborator, Shawn Cornally, recently asked for my opinion on what language to use to teach programming. He teaches science & math at Solon High School in eastern Iowa. I’ll preface these comments by saying that choice of language is probably not as important as other things, like competence and enthusiasm of … [Read more…]
Uniform Resource Locators, commonly known as URLs are the address system for finding things on the internet. Unfortunately, they’re often not very humane. Can you imagine having to type this lovely example into your browser (much less trying to remember it!) http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PRLTAO000100000020200502000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes Yikes! (This, by the way, is the URL of our new physics paper) … [Read more…]
Having used the iPhone at the University of Oxford since November, my experience has been generally good, but there are a mishmash of departments, colleges, and the central university computing service (OUCS) to deal with. Now, with the iPhone 2.0 software update, I finally feel like I can take advantage of all the services that … [Read more…]
Just a quick post to share some excitement. After a bit of a struggle, I pulled down and installed the iPhone 2.0 software last night and added some apps. There are some good ones, which I’m sure you’ll hear described all over the intertoobs if you’re so inclined. My favorite so far is called Midomi. … [Read more…]