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.
Today is the official beginning of the week of Just Science. The many blogs who signed up have pledged to post only about science for the week, and particularly not to post about "anti-science"-- no "religious people are stupid," no "alternative medicine is crap," no "global warming denialists are…
I'll put my prediction behind the cut, as since the Pats lost, Kate has been trying to pretend that football season is over, and I wouldn't want to upset her...
I don't really have a strong rooting interest in either team. I have some good friends who are Bears fans, but that could cut either way,…
I didn't actually plan for the site to go completely dark for the weekend, but Kate and I were off at a wedding for the weekend, and wound up not actually having regular Internet access, so I couldn't post any of the weekend things I didn't get around to scheduling before I left. I'm sure this…
Time spent locating the parts for the Compton Effect experiment: 15 minutes.
Time spent dragging lead bricks for radiation shielding into the lab: 10 minutes.
Time spent bulding little lead houses for the hot 137Cs source and Photo-Multiplier Tube (PMT): 15 minutes.
Time spent trying to find…
Late spring/ early summer is Conference Season in academic science, with lots of meetings scheduled during the academic break, so that everybody can attend without cutting into their teaching responsibilities (of course, our trimester calendar means we're still in session for most of these, but…
Eurekalert has a press release about new results involving "articifical atoms" at Yale. This is new work appearing in this week's Nature from the Schoelkopf lab.
The term "artificial atoms," while evocative, doesn't really mean what you might think (the name they give it on their own page is…
I'm really bad about remembering these things-- I ought to start putting them on my calendar-- but the physics blogging carnival Philosophia Naturalis is now up, collecting many excellent posts about physics. If you've been away from the computer for the last month, or would just like a quick recap…
Via Eurekalert a poll of American attitudes toward science confirms that people are a little confused about the whole science thing. I think the most concise desription of the problem is in the second sentence:
Most (87%) rate being a scientist as one of the most prestigious careers, yet 75% can't…
Over in LiveJournal land, I've been reading a bunch of posts about superhero stories, mostly in the form of forty-odd years of comic books on DVD (mentioned in locked posts on a pseudonymous LJ, so no link for you). I end up reading these posts with a sort of detached interst, because I don't…
In the comments to the post where I noted how many more people had least favorite textbooks than favorite ones, dr. dave writes:
Textbooks... particularly SCIENCE textbooks, are not really written to be ENJOYED by anyone. They tend to be purely utilitarian. Asking for someone's favorite textbook is…
Gordon Watts has deja vu:
[Leaving a colloquium], I got stopped by another member of our department, who is a good friend of particle physics, and she said basically the same thing: all particle physics talks look the same. Some of the comments: Two slides on the detector. Some pictures of quarks,…
There's been much less hoops-blogging than usual around here this year for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I'm busy with work, and more substantive blogging, so I don't have time to watch a lot of games. I'm also playing a fair amount of basketball these days, both pick-up games at lunch, and…
Mark Kleiman explains the problem of abortion in American politics (Bill Hicks: "Yeah, I'm gonna win you all back with this one") in two paragraphs of this post:
Jane Galt is right that the country would be better off if the abortion debate sparked less hatred on both sides. Moreover, she's right…
Discover magazine has announced a contest:
Your goal is to create a video that quickly and clearly explains perhaps the most baffling idea in the history of the world: string theory.
And the best part is that you have just two minutes.
You'll be happy to know that Peter Woit has already bowed out…
Various and sundry items that don't quite rate a post of their own.
I was astonished to learn on Pardon the Interruption that today is Gene Hackman's birthday. Not so much that it's his birthday, as that it's his 77th birthday. He doesn't seem like he should be that old.
Then again, he's looked…
Having talked about force and fields, it seems fairly natural to move on to talking about energy, next. Of course, it also would've made sense to talk about energy first, and then fields and forces. These are interlocking concepts.
A concise one-sentence definition of energy might go something like…
I meant to post a comment on the new SciFi Channel series of The Dresden Files yesterday, but really, it's hard to work up much enthusiasm. It's not that the show was bad-- if it was bad, I'd have no problem writing something saying that. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't all that good, either.
The…
Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings points out an honest-to-God terrorist conviction that didn't make a big splash in the news. Guess why:
GREENBELT, Maryland - Robert F. Weiler, Jr., age 25, of Forestville, Maryland pleaded guilty today to possessing a pipe bomb (an unregistered destructive device),…
Something my sister pointed out, based on driving from San Francisco to southern California, and subsequently confirmed by local observations (for example, in the parking lot on my way back from basketball today):
When you see magnetic ribbons attached to cars, they invariably have right-leaning…
Apparently, it's "economics of higher education" day here at Uncertain Principles. This time out, we have Steve Hsu on Larry Summers.
(Update: I should also link to this post by Brad DeLong discussing the same article, with good stuff in the comments. And while I'm bashing free-market advocates,…
Inside Higher Ed also features an opinion piece about Princteon's tuition freeze, following my alma mater's lead from 2000.
While Princeton is larger and may carry more punch in the world of higher education than Williams, I will be very surprised if this decision triggers an onslaught of emulation…
This is kind of sticking with the "Journal of Unsurprising Results" theme, but Inside Higher Ed today reports on a new study of student evaluations finding, well, more or less what you would expect:
One explanation could be that good students are earning good grades, and crediting their good…
Travis at Arcane Gazebo suggests a game: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
Go to Wikipedia.
Click the random article link in the sidebar.
Open a second random article in another tab.
Try to find a chain of links (as short as possible) starting from the first article that leads to the second.
Lacking…
Christopher Moore's Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story is probably my favorite of his books. It is a silly book, about the romance between Tommy Flood, a naive would-be writer from Nebraska, and Jody Stroud, a young woman in San Francisco who finds herself turned into a vampire. It's an extremely…
The dog is standing at the window, wagging her tail excitedly. I look outside, and the back yard is empty. "What are you looking at?" I ask.
"Bunnies made of cheese!," she says. I look again, and the yard is still empty.
"There are no bunnies out there," I say, "and there are certainly not any…
As noted a little while back, I recently bought Tom Waits's Orphans collection, which includes a number of covers that are given his "lounge singer from another planet" treatment. Most notable among these is probably "Sea of Love," which I first heard through the Robert Plant side project the…
Cosmic Variance finally got themselves an experimentalist, John Conway of CDF, and he hits the ground running with a nice post about the search for the Higgs boson:
I've been looking for the Higgs boson for almost 20 years.
So there I was, on a Saturday morning in December, at CERN as it so…
Matt Leifer doesn't blog all that often, but what he posts is very good. It tends to be extremely high-level stuff about foundational problems in quantum theory, mind, so it's not for the faint of heart, but if you get into that sort of thing, it's fascinating. Wednesday's post on dechoerence is no…
Via Eurekalert, a Florida State press release touting a paper in Science studying techniques used to teach reading. The conclusion won't surprise anyone who has worked in education:
The researchers found that "the efficacy of any particular instructional practice may depend on the skill level of…
I've been collecting a bunch of little news squibs from the IoP and the APS over the last week or so, and I keep saying that I'm going to do a nice long post explaining each of the experiments. And my actual job keeps eating my life, what with candidate interviews, committee meetings, class prep,…
