Rain and sleepiness

It is cold and rainy today. And yes, I'm sleepy. Mostly from sitting in a warm room right after lunch listening to a boring statistics lecture. Very difficult to stay awake.

Friday's are Physics Colloquium days! I love to attend physics colloquia, and I have since I was an undergrad. I am a geologist, but I have always found physics colloquia to be more exciting and interesting than your average geology or earth science colloquium. Why? I'm not entirely sure. Geologists and earth scientists tend to have good ways of explaining topics to a wide audience, and make their topics interesting. But I find I'm usually way more excited by the physics topics. If I go to the earth science colloquium I'm usually bored.

An example of a super interesting colloquium - when I was an undergrad a physicist gave a talk about the atmospheres of brown dwarf stars. It was so interesting to me because he was talking about models for the condensation of these atmospheres, and these models were very similar to models that igneous petrologists use to simulate crystallization in a magma chamber. I was enthralled and sitting forward in my seat for the entire hour. It was so exciting. (The funny thing about that colloquium was that I was probably the only one awake. All the physicists there were bored out of their minds).

Now, today's physics colloquium is:

Thallium atoms, diode lasers, and 'table-top' tests of fundamental symmetries.
By: Protik K. Majumder Department Chair and Associate Professor of Physics Williams College

I'm not sure if this one will be super interesting. But here is the one I missed (sob!) last week:

Did a Gamma-Ray Burst Initiate the Late Ordovician Extinction?
By: Adrian L. Melott, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Kansas

Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions known in the Universe. A GRB within our galaxy could have catastrophic consequences for the Earth. Extrapolations from the global rate suggest an average interval of a few hundred million years for events in which the Earth is irradiated from an event on our side of the Galaxy. The atmosphere would become heavily ionized, resulting in major destruction of the ozone layer, darkened skies and nitric acid rain.
Both the prompt UV and the solar UV resulting from long-term loss of the ozone layer are destructive to living organisms. The attenuation length of UV in water is tens of meters. There is a strong candidate for a GRB based mass extinction in the late Ordovician, 440 My ago. Planktonic organisms and those animals living in shallow water seem to have been particularly hard hit during this mass extinction.
(www.physics.montana.edu/news/seminars/Semfcollomain.htm)

When I found out I missed that one, I was quite upset. Cool topic! I love learning about things other than my specific field, which is probably why I love physics colloquia so much.