May 28, 2014
A little while back, I was put in touch with a Wall Street Journal writer who was looking into a new-ish health fad called "earthing," which involves people sleeping on special grounded mats and that sort of thing. The basis of this particular bit of quackery is the notion that spending time…
May 24, 2014
I've had a lot of weird things happen in the time I've been teaching, but the above image is my new favorite message from a student. We gave an exam Thursday night, so a couple of my colleagues canceled class on Friday, but I'm going to be at DAMOP the last week of class, so I want to get a little…
May 23, 2014
Here's some stuff I've had open in Chrome for a while, and want to close before we go out of town for the weekend:
-- Statistics on the professionalization of science blogging, a topic I have banged on about in the past. Nothing really new, but nice to have it somewhat quantified.
-- Speaking of…
May 22, 2014
That recent study on active learning continues to generate some press, including a new interview with Carl Wieman about why traditional lectures are problematic. Wieman is pretty blunt about his opinions on the subject, which will come as no surprise to people in the AMO physics community...
Anyway…
May 21, 2014
Rhett and I did the 15th episode of our Uncertain Dots hangout yesterday, commenting on a discussion started by Casey Rutherford about what we would like students coming into college physics to know. We had a slight difference of opinion about physics content, but agreed about the importance of…
May 20, 2014
While solo-parenting Sunday night, I still managed to get free of The Pip just barely in time to catch the start of Cosmos. This was a strange episode in a couple of ways, chiefly having to do with the selection of topics.
For one thing, there's no small irony in the fact that following a couple of…
May 19, 2014
Every now and then, I run across a question in class that I genuinely don't know how to answer. If I'm lucky, this happens when I'm prepping a class, rather than when a student asks it live. Like today, when I noticed the above discussion question in my slides (reproduced at the bottom as well for…
May 19, 2014
Kate's arguing a case in Connecticut today, so I was solo-parenting last night and this morning. which means that while I did manage to watch Cosmos last night, and have some thoughts about it, I don't have the time or energy to write them up this morning. As explanation, I offer this video from…
May 15, 2014
A couple of weeks ago, io9 ran a piece about the old accusations that Robert Millikan manipulated his data for the electron charge with the headlineDid a Case of Scientific Misconduct Win the Nobel Prize for Physics? that got a lot of attention. I wasn't as impressed with this as a lot of other…
May 14, 2014
Over at Xykademiqz, a couple of weeks ago, there was a very nice post about the struggle to get students to write. "Very nice" here means that it's a good description of the problem, not that I'm glad anybody else has to deal with this.
I don't face quite the same thing-- my students generally…
May 14, 2014
One of the very best treatments of the scientific method in fiction that I've read-- I suspect it may be the best, but years on the Internet make me want to hedge everything-- is the Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein. The main character, Rowan, is a Steerswoman, a member of an order dedicated…
May 13, 2014
Another week, another hangout with Rhett. In which we actually fielded a couple of questions from readers on Twitter, about the reason for inertia and a kind of meta-question. More audience questions would, of course, be welcome.
A couple of links to things that came up:
Mach's Principle, a past…
May 13, 2014
I've been setting up schedules with my summer research students lately, and the main constraint we're facing with that is that I'm going to spend most of August in Europe. Part of this is pure vacation-- Kate and I are going to the UK for a couple of weeks. Part of it is the World Science Fiction…
May 12, 2014
Last night's episode of the Cosmos reboot focused on one of the three physicists whose pictures Einstein kept in his office: Michael Faraday. I'm a big fan of Faraday, who famously started his career as a bookbinder's apprentice reading the books brought into the shop, and ended as one of the…
May 11, 2014
Over at Five Thirty Eight, Walt Hickey has a piece about cheerleading as a sport and injury rates, which is both a nice look at the way to use stats to measure the real danger level of an activity, and the sort of small details that can be teased out. The piece includes a table of injury rates for…
May 9, 2014
Last weekend, the circus came to town, and Grandma and Grandpa came up to help us take the kids. We took SteelyKid a couple of years ago, and figured The Pip was old enough to go this time, too. Having bought tickets a couple of years ago, I got sent a pre-sale offer link, and followed that to get…
May 8, 2014
This coming fall term, I'll be teaching Astronomy 052, "Relativity, Black Holes, and Quasars," because the guy who has traditionally taught it (a radio astronomer who studies active galactic nuclei) has to do other courses instead. But I said "Well, hell, I've written a popular audience book…
May 7, 2014
I've seen a few links passed around to this Tom Siegfried post about science literacy, which is mostly a familiar story about how polls show most Americans giving incorrect answers to science questions. The sort of stuff you find in the NSF's Science and Engineering Indicators report. What's…
May 6, 2014
We had a couple of weeks of unplanned hiatus due to sick kids and day care closures, so the superstitious among you might've thought we would never get to the 13th episode of Encertain Dots. Rhett and I are scientists, though, so we powered through:
Given the time of year, this is mostly about end…
May 6, 2014
Last week's talks were using sci-fi space travel as a hook to talk about relativity, and my original idea for the talk was to explain how faster-than-light travel ultimately ends up violating causality. Some observers will see effects happening before the events that cause them, and that's just…
May 5, 2014
I have a couple of things in the mental queue for this week, but I'm still playing catch-up from my trip to Texas, so instead you get a really quick comment on last night's Cosmos. This one was all about the history of the Earth-- continents moving, climate changing, mass extinctions-- stuff that I…
May 3, 2014
Below you'll find the slides from my Physics Day presentations at Space Center Houston, embedded via SlideShare. I was doing the TED-style minimal text thing, so they're probably not all that comprehensible on their own.
The event was supposed to have a pop-culture connection, so I decided to use…
May 2, 2014
My Thursday presentation here in Houston went well, though it was a pretty small crowd. I'll be doing it again today before running to the airport to get home. I didn't really have an opportunity to do shameless self-promotion regarding the new book, but I did get a copy of the official cover for…
May 1, 2014
One of the pop-physics books I've read recently was Amanda Gefter's much-discussed Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn. I was going to post a review of it back in March, but literally the day I was planning to write it, I got email from an editor at Physics Today asking if I had any books I'd like to…
April 30, 2014
I had hoped to have another post or two scheduled for the end of this week, but The Pip got some kind of stomach bug, and threw everything into disarray. And tonight, I'm flying to Houston to give a couple of talks as part of Physics Day at Space Center Houston. Life being what it is these days, I'…
April 29, 2014
Before going to the playground Saturday to investigate non-intertial frames, SteelyKid and I went over to campus to do some experiments in relativity. Galileian relativity, that is:
What you see here is SteelyKid sitting on a rolling lab cart with a camera bolted to it. She throws a ball up in the…
April 28, 2014
The Schenectady JCC, where SteelyKid and The Pip go to day care, has a playground with a merry-go-round on it. How this hasn't been sued out of existence, I have no idea, but it's a great boon to a physics professor. I've used it before to talk about angular momentum, but this weekend I enlisted…
April 28, 2014
Back when the first episode of the Cosmos reboot aired, somebody put together a composite of the cartoon people who flashed on screen, and we played a guessing game on Twitter. The image above is from a blog post by Meg at True Anomalies, and I think it was probably her, but the ephemeral nature of…
April 26, 2014
While I'm complaining about statisticulation in social media, I was puzzled by the graph in Kevin Drum's recent post about college wage gaps, which is reproduced as the "featured image" above, and also copied below for those reading via RSS. I don't dispute the general phenomenon this is describing…
April 25, 2014
Via a mailing list, probably via this Tyler Cowen post, an awful statistic about adjunct faculty:
35 years ago there were 44% more tenured faculty than adjuncts. Today there are 76% more adjuncts than tenured faculty, via @chronicle
— Ángel Cabrera (@CabreraAngel) April 25, 2014
This is awful in…
