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.
Just a quick note that everybody's favorite physics-oriented blog carnival is now up: Philosophia Naturalis #8.
Once again, I forgot to submit anything, but Sujit was kind enough to include one of the things I wrote anyway. There's a lot of good stuff there, so go check it out.
It's Friday, and the new academic term starts on Monday (I'll be teaching at 8am-- shoot me now), so it seems like a good time to try to forget about our troubles with pop music:
The Onion's AV Club has a list of great story songs, topped by "A Boy Named Sue." I was amazed to discover a year or…
The Dean Dad takes up a critical and shamefully neglected question about the academy:
Which superhero would make the best dean at a community college and why?
It's not really my genre, but there are some good suggestions, including Batman ("His whimsical dilettante cover would make him non-…
Weird ideas never die, they just go underground, and return with new names. "Cold Fusion" is now "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions," and was the subject of a day-long symposium at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society.
It's not clear how much credence to give this. It can't be entirely…
The Hugo Award Nominees for 2007 have been officially announced. The one award I usually watch closely is Best Novel, and this year's nominees are:
Eifelheim, Michael Flynn (Tor)
His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik (Del Rey)
Glasshouse, Charles Stross (Ace)
Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge (Tor)…
It's hard to be the Queen. This is actually from Tuesday night, and shows Queen Emmy the Mopey pining away for Kate, who was in Rochester for a trial. I meant to post it then, but I started to feel kind of light-headed not long after taking this, and opted to go to bed instead...
One final Steve Gimbel note. Toward the end of his anti-lab post, he writes:
If you want to see a science professor get angry, just tell them that they teach all those labs to get out of teaching real courses. You'll see faces get flush, veins pop out of heads and necks, and receive a high decibel…
In addition to the argument that labs are pedagogically bad, which I don't buy, Steve Gimbel offers some more reasons to get rid of lab classes on sort of procedural grounds. There are a bunch of interrealted things here, but the argument boils down to two main points:
Labs are very time-consuming…
Steve Gimbel at Philosopher's Playground is calling for the abolition of lab classes:p>
As an undergrad I majored in both philosophy and physics and I have a confession my former physics profs will surely not like -- everything I know about physics, I learned from my theory classes. You see,…
Yes, the unofficial Admissions Policy Month continues here at Uncertain Principles. The problem really is that it's Admissions Season in academia, so all the navel-gazing academic journals are loaded with articles about it, which means that having wandered into talking about it, I can't get out…
Via Dave Sez, a good Washington Post article about the post-Maryland career of Byron Mouton:
Five years have passed since Mouton helped Maryland win the national title the last time it was held in Atlanta, but the significance of that weekend still casts a shadow over his daily life in the American…
I can stop blogging about college admisions any time I want. Really.
In one of the previous posts, commenter AO noted a New York Review of Books article on class issues in college admissions. here's the article in question, a review of several recent books about how the current college admissions…
A little while after dinner last night, I started to feel achy and chilled and kind of light-headed, so I retired to bed. Where I had really spectacular fever dreams about... blogging. Somehow, I had come up with the greatest blog post in human history, or some such. I can't recall what it was, but…
Here's a project from a couple of weeks ago, that I forgot to post:
"Big deal," you say, "It's an ugly box."
Ah, but what's under the box?
This is the exhaust fan in our kitchen, which goes directly out through the back wall of the house. There's a little pull chain that turns the fan on and off…
This will probably cause some eye-rolling on the part of my local readers, but there's an interesting article in Inside Higher Ed on the real effect of merit scholarships, which is the term of art for "money given to students for reasons other than financial need." This is a hot topic, as the…
There's a meeting now underway in London on Outstanding Questions for the Standard Cosmological Model, which is the term for the current Big Bang/ Inflation/ Dark Matter/ Dark Energy/ Accelerating Universe view of the history of the universe. Tommaso Dorigo is attending, and reports on the talks on…
It's weird how I get into ruts here. I'm not usually obsessed with the subject of college admissions, but it came up recently, and now there's just one article after another about it (because, of course, it's college admissions season). I'm getting a little tired of it, but not so tired that I want…
There's a story in the New York Times today about a new movie on the infamous Iowa grad school shootings:
On Nov. 1, 1991, outraged that his doctoral thesis had been passed over for an academic prize, a young physicist at the University of Iowa named Gang Lu opened fire at a physics department…
I was pretty beat after returning from Boston yesterday, so I ended up watching bits and pieces of the much-ballyhooed Planet Earth tv show on the Discovery Channel. I can't really assess it in detail, as I was flipping back and forth to the Dresden Files, but they certainly had some impressive…
Inside Higher Ed provides another example of an essay receiving a perfect score on the SAT writing test:
In the 1930's, American businesses were locked in a fierce economic competition with Russian merchants for fear that their communist philosophies would dominate American markets. As a result,…
Hoops commentary has fallen off dramatically lately, but it's not because my teams are out of the tournament. Or, rather, it's not just because my teams are out of the tournament. Mostly, it's because Kate and I were out of town for the weekend, on vacation in Boston, and I barely saw any of the…
"Richard Stark," is, of course, the name that Donald E. Westlake uses when he wants to write books tat aren't funny. Ask the Parrot is the umpteenth Parker novel, picking up mere minutes after the previous volume, Nobody Runs Forever.
In that volume, Parker and a crew of other guys robbed a bank in…
I stopped by the library the other day, just to see if they had anything new, and I happened across the graphic novel section, which actually had a fairly decent selection of collected comics. As I've said before, I balk at paying $20 for soemthing that will take me an hour to read, particularly if…
Via Bookslut, there's an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about whether reading is really important:
Is it always a good thing to read an entire book? When I was a graduate student, it dawned on me that I often had the most intelligent things to say about books I'd only half- or quarter…
The case of Purdue's Rusi Taleyarkhan, cleared by the university of charges of misconduct in a murky process, has taken another turn. Congress is getting involved, with the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee requesting more details from the…
One of the unfortunate elements about the NCAA basketball tournament is that in addition to some great basketball, it brings around a few reminders of what an unpleasant organization the NCAA can be:
During the first round of the N.C.A.A. tournament last weekend, John Goodman -- a freshman who…
There are two Presidential election campaigns underway at the moment. Both feature establishment / incumbent parties that are pretty much in disarrary, wracked by missteps and accusations of corruption. They're opposed by candidates who are somewhat unexpected.
One of these campaigns is…
I'm going to be away from the computer for much of the weekend (I may schedule some posts, so the site doesn't go completely dark, depending on how much time I have this morning), so I'm not able to do a really thorough discussion of this. And, honestly, I'm kind of getting sick of the subject.
But…
There's an article in Inside Higher Ed today on the problem of college readiness:
We must come together in postsecondary education on many of these points if we are to prepare far greater numbers of students for college. ACT Inc. estimates that 60 percent to 70 percent of its test takers are not…
