Chad Orzel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College in Schenectady, NY. He blogs about physics, life in academia, ephemeral pop culture, and anything else that catches his fancy.
Crooked Timber » » Political science and economics
High-level discussion of the economics Nobel
(tags: Nobel economics politics academia)
Mixing Memory : Women in Math, Science, and Engineering: Is It About the Numbers (And Not the Ones You Might Think)?
Notes on the science of "social…
Via a mailing list, the Gingerbread Haka:
If you don't get the joke, there's a video of the original below the fold, with bonus shirtless ruggers:
There are dozens of other versions on YouTube, including one with French subtitles, if you really want to know what they're chanting. It's a pre-game…
Continuing the theme of highlighting the occasional particularly worthy proposal, have a look at "Better Viewing for Students", which pretty much encapsulates everything you need to know about the reasons for the fundraising drive. The proposal is asking for money to buy an overhead projector for…
OK, the monkey business may have been a little too abstract for a good audience participation entry. So let's fall back on a classic:
What science-related superpower would you most like to have?
Because this is a Dorky Poll, "science-related superpower" here means a supernatural ability that is…
ScienceBlogs has just redesigned the main site. Sort of. The change is subtle enough that you might not notice it-- the only real difference on the front page is that the "channel" list has been reorganized-- it's now slightly shorter, and some old channels have been combined into new ones.
There…
Edge-Serpentine Gallery: FORMULAE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
Equations as art objects (via Cosmic Variance)
(tags: science art blogs)
Marginal Revolution: Mechanism Design for Grandma
The Economics Nobel explained
(tags: economics Nobel news)
At the time of this writing (about 8:20 on Monday), my DonorsChoose challenge entry stands at $2,802, nearly double last year's take. That's outstanding, and I thank everyone who contributed.
Of course, I set a Challenge goal of $6,000, which means we're not quite halfway there. Which means I need…
This is the famous carving of the Three Wise Monkeys on the stable at the Nikko Tosho-gu:
Looking at that suggests a possible question for a non-dorky poll, analogous to the dork classic "what superpower would you want?":
If you could go through life either seeing no evil, hearing no evil, or…
In the spirit of the newly clarified regulations governing the Academic Competitiveness Grant and National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent (SMART) Grant Programs administered by the Department of Education, I am pleased to announce the Uncertain Principles Physics Scholarship…
The weekend interrupted the parade of Nobel prizes, setting apart The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2007, more commonly called the Nobel in Economics (even though it's a late addition). This goes to three guys in the US, including the obligatory Chicagoan:…
Friends, not policies, win elections - Physics World - physicsworld.com
I am shocked-- shocked!-- to learn that voters don't always elect the candidate woth the best policies.
(tags: politics physics stupid journals)
C. Sample Citation and Introduction to Citing Blogs
For those times when you…
So, we'd like to get a new refirgerator (our current refrigerator is pretty old and beat. When the compressor kicks on, the lights in the living room flicker, and the shelf on the inside of the door is broken, which greatly reduces the useful storage space.), and being good liberal types, we'd like…
I've been largely silent about the NFL for the past couple of weeks, mostly because I don't know what to make of anything that's happening. I only saw the first half of last week's Giants game, where it looked like they had reverted to their early-season form, but then they exploded in the second…
I'm cleaning out some old saved items from my RSS feeds, to prepare for some changes at ScienceBlogs, and one of the items I had marked but never done anything with was an announcement of the launch of Correlations, a group blog from Wired Science and PBS. It suffers a bit from the Wired aesthetic…
Overheard in New York | History Is an Unbroken Chain of Irony
(tags: silly)
YouTube - Cowboy Bebop AMV - Woolongs for Nothing
A classic Dire Straits video redone with Cowboy Bebop characters
(tags: anime music youtube silly)
Here's another installment in the payoff for Rajesh Vaidya's donation. This is one of a bunch of pictures Kate took of me and Emmy playing on the floor:
This sort of looks like it ought to be a scene from one of our physics conversations, so here's my lame attempt at a caption:
I'm sure somebody…
You may or may not have noticed the appearance of large banner ads promoting the ScienceBlogs DonorsChoose EccentricCapitalization Challenge. If you haven't, they go to this page explaining the challenge and offering valuable prizes. If you'd like to increase the range of swag you can obtain for…
It's Saturday, and it's Homecoming weekend at Union, so I'll be over on campus watching sporting events for a good chunk of the day. That means it's a perfect time to pay off another blog purchase, this one from Rajesh Vaidya who asked for LOLEmmys, at least five pictures worth.
There are two…
Nonlocal Quantum Effects with Bose-Einstein Condensates
New theoretical resutls having to do with measurements of particles in two independent condensates show some cool quantum effects
(tags: physics quantum science articles)
Finite-Temperature Collective Dynamics of a Fermi Gas in the BEC-BCS…
I promised a while back to write a post on a topic of your choosing, in exchange for a $30 donation to my DonorsChoose challenge. I've got a fair number of requests, and I should really start paying them off. The first one comes from Ewan McNay, who aks:
what quantum mechanics can tell us about the…
There's been a bunch of talk about the apparent European dominance in Nobel Prizes this year, and whether it means that American science is in decline, blah, blah, blah. I'm a little surprised at this-- nobody took last year's abundance of American laureates as a sign of the collapse of European…
(WASHINGTON, DC) On the heels of reports from Oslo that the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former US Vice President Al Gore, a White House spokesman issued a statement saying that "significant uncertainty" remained regarding the…
The Nobel Peace Prize was announced this morning, and will be split between an international panel and everybody's favorite PowerPoint presenter:
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on…
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2007 - Speed Read
The Nobel committee explains the Chemistry prize
(tags: chemistry Nobel science news)
PhysicsCentral: Nanobowl Video Contest: Win World's Smallest Trophy!
Make a YouTube video showing the physics of football, win a nanoscale trophy
(tags: youtube…
If you'd prefer a more positive approach to fundraising, here's another post to highlight a specific project, one of many that are asking for funding to meet depressingly basic needs. In this case, the proposal is titled "Weighing In", which is pretty accurate:
Our 7th & 8th graders from our…
At least, that's a conclusion a cynical person might be tempted to draw from the fact that the ScienceBlogs Leaderboard for the DonorsChoose challenge is dominated by us "Neville Chamberlain" types...
At present, the ScienceBlogs participating in the Challenge have raised more than $14,000 to help…
In the "Social Networks Brighten My Morning" file, I am inordinately amused to be getting status updates from a Nobel laureate on Facebook.
Speaking of Nobel laureates, the latest chunk of dynamite money was awarded this morning to novelist Doris Lessing:
"that epicist of the female experience, who…
By popular request, I'm moving the links below the fold. Click "Read on" to find a wealth of links to Nobel Prize information, colorful bunnies, and early basketball information.
You R Here: MTV News Live Music Coverage » Ticket Stubs: Bob Dylan, The Shins, Breaking Benjamin, Lifehouse
MTV News…
Attention-grabbing anecdote about science-related issue.
Short biographical sketch of quirky researcher working on scientific problem.
Short explanation of the scientific problem's history and significance.
Anecdote about quirky researcher's work on scientific problem.
Short explanation connecting…
I'm running short of Dorky Poll topics-- suggestions are welcome-- but it occurred to me that a meta-dorky-poll might be worth a shot. So:
There have been many Dorky Polls here over the last year or two. Which Dorky Poll question was the most dorktastic?
"Dorktastic" is in the eye of the beholder…
