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Nitpicker's Paradiso: We Don't Need no Stinking Scientists and Engineers Edition

Researchers Dispute Notion That America Lacks Scientists and Engineers in the Chronicle of Higher Education is a fine example of how thinking that scientific or engineering degree’s are like technical training degrees will lead you to say all sorts of funny things. Yep, it’s another edition of Nitpicker’s Paradiso.
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Teaching Happiness…

…is finding a homework stuck to my door, with duck tape, along with the note “Gone to Mt. Baker” (Mt. Baker is a local ski area.) Actually this reminds me of a policy I’ve always wanted to try: require every student to NOT attend class at least a few times a term. The idea being that it is actually beneficial to at least try to teach yourself the material without guidance from the teacher. Many students probably can learn on their own, but never try, because they equate doing well with attendance. Nudging these students towards that realization, I think, might actually be a good thing.

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God Is a Weak Coin Flipper

One of the funniest abstracts to a paper on the arxiv in many moons appeared yesterday, authored by Carlos Mochon:

arXiv:0711.4114
Title: Quantum weak coin flipping with arbitrarily small bias
Authors: Carlos Mochon
“God does not play dice. He flips coins instead.” And though for some reason He has denied us quantum bit commitment. And though for some reason he has even denied us strong coin flipping. He has, in His infinite mercy, granted us quantum weak coin flipping so that we too may flip coins. Instructions for the flipping of coins are contained herein. But be warned! Only those who have mastered Kitaev’s formalism relating coin flipping and operator monotone functions may succeed. For those foolhardy enough to even try, a complete tutorial is included.

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Physics in the New York Times?

One good reason to subscribe to the New York Times is that they have what I consider far above average science reporting for a newspaper. Their Tuesday Science Times section is a must read for me pretty much every week. Over the last three weeks I’ve been keeping track of the stories that were run in Tuesday’s science section. By my count, three weeks ago there were two stories which might be considered as articles about physics, one of which the categorization is a stretch (swarm models have been studied by physicists, but I doubt many physicists would consider this physics), and since two weeks ago, not a single article on physics has appeared. So the question is whether the reason for this is (1) not much is happening in physics that is newsworthy, (2) physics is, after many years of being hailed as achieving great public relations, losing its public relations touch, (3) biology and medicine are much more important, interesting, and newsworthy, (4) the New York Times hates physics, physicists, and even physicist’s children, or (5) none of the above?
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