I’m back! After lots of work improving the theme and the implementation of my website, I’m getting back to regular blogging!

Most of the site looks pretty similar to how it did before, but there are some significant changes under the hood.

• I’ve converted almost the entire site from my homebrew content management system (Modulo) to the static site generator Pelican, omitting only a few pages that that mostly involve dynamic content. I’ll keep the old site active until I get everything converted. This will make it a lot easier for me to write blog posts.
• I switched web servers from CherryPy, which is designed for dynamic sites implemented in Python, to Caddy, which is designed for mostly-static sites. Caddy also provides an easy way to enable HTTPS, which is long overdue for my site.
• I’ve converted the math in blog posts to use MathJax, which looks way cleaner than the LaTeX-generated images I used to have.
• I have a new icon, a simple design with three circles that fits right in with the site’s theme.
• The design is now responsive and adapts to mobile browsers better. This still needs some work but at …

Greetings, readers!

I’ve been absent from the blog for a while for a few different reasons — between some issues to deal with in my personal life and a bunch of projects for work, I haven’t been able to focus on a blog post for about six months. But I thought that streak has gone on long enough. Here’s a quick status update:

• My group has put out a paper, which was just accepted for publication into Physical Review D! This paper is a generalization of the same calculation I did for my PhD thesis, which I’m 2/3 of the way into a series of posts explaining. The third post is coming at some point, I promise.

• I’ll be traveling to two conferences to talk about this paper. First, the Rencontres du Vietnam workshop on heavy ion physics, held at the brand new International Center for Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering (PDF), which is taking place next week. This is the first time I’ve been invited to present at a real conference! The venue also looks amazing.

  (image from the Rencontres 2014 website, all rights reserved)

  When the official schedule includes time for “Beach and …

Well, it’s that time of year again. The end, that is. That is the time of year that it is.

Everyone else is doing top 10 lists to reflect on their output this year, but I’m not convinced there’s anything so special about the number 10. Why stop there? With that in mind, here are all my favorite posts from the past year, representing a broad spectrum of topics: particle physics, thermodynamics, optics, fluid dynamics, rocket science, percolation theory, statistics, technology, law, and a few things just for fun.

• The coolest thing since absolute zero
• Could you light the Superdome with cell phones?
• An April Fool’s Planck, for science
• Positrons in space!! and EXTRA EXTRA (positrons)! Read all about it!
• A close look at the new CISPA
• Putting the JATO rocket car to rest
• Riding on water
• Have we really found a tetraquark?
• B meson decay confirmed!
• Interpreting Fourier transforms
• Do Teslas really catch on fire less than gas cars? and No, really. Teslas are safe
• Science comics
• Why vaccines are important
• More Higgs updates from Moriond and Higgs updates from Moriond and The Higgs boson, fermions, and you

Here’s hoping for more of the …

I’m aware that my last post was all about how I was going to return to blogging… and yeah, that never happened. It turns out that about ten days is not enough to catch up on research, file ten more postdoc applications, and deal with about 40 intro E&M students panicking over their upcoming final exam. Oh, and SLEEP. (And not become a hermit. Sometimes time spent with friends is important too.)

At this point I have 35 postdoc applications filed. To put it another way: I’ve applied to almost every job opening in the world in my field of research with a deadline since late November. It really makes the point that this particular corner of particle physics is a niche subject. Anyway, my understanding is that each position receives roughly about 200 applications, on average. If I have 35 chances to succeed at something with a probability 0.005 (that’s 1 in 200)… well, perhaps you know where this is going:

Yep, that means I have an a priori 84% chance of not getting any offer at all. For the record, when you realize you’ve applied for all the jobs and it’s …

If you’ve been watching my blog, you’ve noticed that my posting frequency has dropped off tremendously in the past week. That’s mostly because I’ve been scrambling to finish a presentation on my research. It’s now over, so in theory I have more time to make blog posts, but still I think it’s past time to call National Blog Writing Month officially over.

Let’s look back over the past 5 weeks and see how it went. Not counting this one, I managed to get in 25 blog posts, most of which were decidedly nontrivial. For fun, I decided to estimate a word count for each of these posts — now, I can’t get an exact count easily because of the formatting, including math and especially pictures, but I can just run p.text_src.split() and it spits out some rough numbers. I want to get a sense of how this compares to the task of actually writing a 50000 word novel:

• Nov 1: “National” Blog Writing Month: Take 2, 104 words
• Nov 3: Local measurements: the Rosslyn escalator, 351 words
• Nov 4: Not really a simple regularization analogy, 391 words
• Nov 6: On the …