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.
Because it seems to be a good day for psoting about totally non-controversial political topics that I will undoubtedly not have time to follow up on, here's an article from Inside Higher Ed that takes a dim view of current arguments about Title IX:
Right now, the situation is getting us nowhere.…
Fred Clark at Slacktivist is the best writer in blogdom on issues of politics and religion in America, bar none. So when he takes up Amy Sullivan's Time article on the "God Gap", you know it will be worth a read.
He actually has two posts on the subject, the first making a good point about the…
Speaking of dubious and oft-cited "Laws", I've run into a number of citations of "Clarke's Laws" recently. Of course, these were apparently subliminal mentions, because I can't seem to locate any of them again, but it put the subject in my mind, which is partly why I was primed to be annoyed by the…
Despite efforts to avoid such foolishness, Kevin Beck inadvertently drew my attention to what people are calling "Blake's Law," which apparently briefly had its own Wikipedia page, but now appears to redirect to the Pharyngula page. Blogdom really needs a killfile.
Anyway, the Internet "Law" in…
Everybody is all abuzz about Harry Potter these days, what with the release of the final book coming this weekend. Scott McLemee takes up the really important question, though: what do professional academics think about everybody's favorite boy wizard?
In the years since the author introduced her…
I've never been a big fan of Michael Vick as a football player, and his indictment for running a dog-fighting business pretty much wipes out any chance he ever had of winning me over.
Steve Verdon notes that, if convicted, Vick could be fined up to $350,000 and face as much as six years in prison…
A comment I made at a meeting yesterday that I think is worth reproducing out of context:
A big part of making it from junior faculty to tenure is deciding which bits of unsolicited contradictory advice you're going to ignore.
Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study of Ph.D. completion rates by discipline. The original data are available as PowerPoint files that I haven't looked at, but IHE provides a summary in tabular form. Because everything looks more scientific as a graph, I cranked them into Excel and after the…
While on vacation in Michigan, I played a round of golf, which I do a few times a year. I shot reasonably well, when you consider that it was my first round of the year, and it was pouring rain. I even birdied one hole, by chipping in from about thirty feet off the green, so go, me.
The course we…
Having finished all of the fiction nominees, I'm now basically ready to submit my votes for the Hugos. Though it occurs to me that I've actually seen two of the five movies up for "Best Dramatic Presentation," so I might Netflix the others, and check off yet another category.
At any rate, I'm sure…
Rob Knop is leaving academia to design galaxies for Second Life (or some such).
On his way out, he's getting a lovely parting gift: a share of the Gruber Prize in Cosmology.
Stop by and offer congratulations, or condolences, or both, as you feel appropriate.
The Paper of Record today features an interview with Eric Mazur of Harvard, a physicist who is probably best known for his pedagogical work. He talks aabout how typical science teaching sucks, and why we need to change it:
From what I've seen, students in science classrooms throughout the country…
The Powers That Be at Seed were kind enough to send all the ScienceBlogs bloggers copies of the new book by Natalie Angier, The Canon, which is being pushed fairly hard by the publisher. I've been reading a lot more pop-science stuff recently, for self-interested reasons, and this was pretty…
Kate and I went out to Michigan this past weekend, to unwind a bit at the summer home of some friends from college. It was an Internet-less weekend for me-- there was Internet access at the house, but I fought through the incipient datastarve, and resisted the temptation to log in. (This means that…
This is the final Best Novel Hugo nominee of this year's field, and given James Nicoll's immortal description of Watts's writing ("When I feel my will to live getting too strong, I pick up a Peter Watts book" or words to that effect), I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about picking up Blindsight. I…
"Darkmatter," Andrew Bird
"21st Century (Digital Boy)," Bad Religion
"Some Fantastic," Barenaked Ladies
"Desolation Row," Bob Dylan
"Total Eclipse of the Heart," Bonnie Tyler
"Gravity Fails," the Bottle Rockets
"Protons, Neutrons, Electrons," The Cat Empire
"Alien," Chris Whitley
"Under the Milky…
Via Big Media Matt, a video that's too good not to share:
I have a lot more respect for Pat Leahy now. I wouldn't've been able to respond to that without a few F-bombs.
Inside Higher Ed today features an opinion piece by a lecturer about the excruciating awkwardness of job interviews:
[T]he banal yet innocuous questions faculty members do ask -- "Where was I from?" "How did I get interested in this topic?" -- become loaded with a significance out of proportion to…
Via Backreaction, I find that there's a paper on the Arxiv titled "Hollywood Blockbusters: Unlimited Fun but Limited Science Literacy," whose authors feel that the best way to counter bad pop-culture science is with equations:
(That's from a section discussing the bad physics in the ending of the…
There's a new paper in Nature announcing the detection of water vapor in the atmosphere of a "hot Jupiter" orbiting a distant star. There's also a story on Physics Web and a press release from the Spitzer Telescope group, if you'd like some stuff you can read without a subscription to Nature.
The…
Peter Steinberg is lecturing at a summer school in Florida, and has posted the slides for the three lectures he gave about recent work at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. The first lecture is linked from that post, and the other two are available (at the moment) from links on the…
The Weasel King posted a link to the classic Five Geek Social Fallacies essay, which you have no doubt already read. If you haven't, and you're reading blogs, you really should, because you're bound to recognize some of what it says.
Of course, that article dates from 2003, so it wouldn't be worth…
There's a new Zogby Poll on political bias in academia that should warm whatever it is that David Horowitz uses as a heart:
As legislation is introduced in more than a dozen states across the country to counter political pressure and proselytizing on students in college classrooms, a majority of…
A man in Oregon tied 105 helium balloons to a lawn chair, and flew into Idaho, 193 miles away. Do you believe that? A man tied 105 helium ballons to a lawn chair, and flew into Idaho! He flew 193 miles. In a lawn chair, with balloons tied to it.
He used 105 balloons. That's a lot. Can you count to…
You may or may not remember that we did a ScienceBlogs fundraiser last year for a group called "DonorsChoose" that provides small grants to teachers in poor school districts around the country. We'll probably do another in September this year (discussions are under way), but right now, they're…
From EurekAlert, we learn that corporate executives are a bunch of cheaters, when the incentives are right:
According to the authors, "Our results demonstrate two factors substantially increase the likelihood of financial misrepresentation: extremely low performance relative to average performance…
The Paper of Record, unafraid to tackle the really important questions, today addresses the perennial favorite: Is it dangerous to stand near a microwave oven?
You'll be happy to know that the answer is still "No." I would've preferred "No, you dolt," but you take what you can get:
Although…
Dave at the World's Fair is trying to start a "meme" based on a Science Creative Quarterly piece about physics envy among biologists and vice versa. He's asking other science bloggers whether there's another field that they wish they were working in.
While I have occasionally joked that if I had it…
I don't read the local paper regularly, so it took a LiveJournal post to alert me to this story from the Times Union:
The unannounced inspection by TSA officials took place early last week. [Albany International Airport's] security measures failed in five of seven tests, most of the problems…
So, you may or may not recall that last week, Matt Nisbet posted about a study purporting to show that religious people were more generous in their charitable giving than atheists. One of his commenters opted to go for the "sour grapes" response, claiming that religious charities were all stupid,…
