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.
As part of the upcoming science blogging conference, Bora Zivkovic at A Blog Around the Clock has put together an anthology of the best science-related blog posts of last year. He's titled it The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006, and it's now available for purchase at Lulu,…
Inside Higher Ed had an article yesterday about a survey of student attitudes that they analyze in terms of gender differences, finding that women entering college are generally better prepared than their male counterparts, but men entering college are more confident in their abilities,…
I make a habit of checking my Technorati search results regularly, partly because I'm just vain enough to care that other people are linking to me (my rank is holding steady in the 8,000's, but it hasn't updated in a while), but mostly because it's a good way to find new blogs, and there are a few…
"Thoreau," guest-posting at Unqualified Offerings, has a nice post commenting on a Physics Today article about the use of language in science, by Helen Quinn. The article is pretty standard stuff for anyone following the "culture wars" debates here-- use of the word "belief" to describe scientific…
Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean has an idea for an Undergraduate [Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology] Theory Insitute, a six-week summer course that would cover a bunch of the basic tools and techniques of the field, and prepare students to do theoretical research in those fields. The proposed…
Tobias Buckell is experimenting with a new concept to keep himself on pace as he writes his next novel. He's publicly stated a goal of 6,000 words per week, and pledges to donate a nickel for every word he's short of that, to a charity chosen by his readers (a different one each week).
How's he…
You might think that the most interesting thing in this morning's New York Times was the photo essay about the Large Hadron Collider, but you'd be wrong. The most interesting article is this story about cheerleading.
Why is that, you ask? Because it's written about my home town:
Thirty girls…
An article from the Chronicle of Higher Education has landed in my inbox, describing efforts to recruit students to conservative groups:
Ryan J. Sorba stands before a table covered with mini-cupcakes and whoopie pies, calling out to students as they pass. A sign lists the prices: $6 for customers…
Kij Johnson's The Fox Woman, the story of a fox in Heian-era Japan who becomes a woman for the sake of love, was a beautiful and moving book, so, of course, I bought her next book, Fudoki immediately. And then, it took me three years to get around to reading it... There's no real good reason for…
One of my favorite experiments in physics has released a new set of results in Physical Review Letters, putting experimental limits on the size of any extra dimensions of the sort predicted by string theory:
We conducted three torsion-balance experiments to test the gravitational inverse-square law…
I did an iTunes run recently, and picked up Tom Waits's three-disc collection Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, and Bastards, along with a couple of other albums (TV On the Radio and the Decemberists among them). As is my usual practice, I put these records into the "Party Shuffle" on iTunes, so I get a…
In a back-channel discussion among ScienceBloggers, John Wilkins suggested that it might be interesting to do occasional posts on really basic concepts in our fields-- the sort of jargon terms that become so ingrained that we toss them around without realizing it, and end up confusing people. A lot…
For tedious reasons, I find myself faced with giving what will basically be a pure math lecture next Friday. I need to introduce a bunch of mathematical apparatus that we will need in the coming weeks, and I know that the Math department doesn't cover these topics in any of the classes that these…
I get a fair number of emails from people who have blogs or other web stuff that they would like to advertise. I do look at most of the links I get sent, but I end up posting very few of them. Not because I dislike what I see, but because I just don't have the time or energy to thoroughly research…
One year ago today, Uncertain Principles went live on ScienceBlogs. In honor of the anniversary, here's the first year at the new site, in one graph:
Well, ok, that's not that informative. In fact, for all you know, that could be an NMR trace from a chem experiment-- the little bump to the right…
There's been lots of news from the AAS meeting in Seattle this week, but the best from my perspective is that high school physics enrollments have neevr been higher:
Presenting new data that encourage this outlook, [Michael] Neuschatz [senior research associate at AIP's Statistical Research Center…
Janet reminds me that this has been declared National De-Lurking Week. If you're in the habit of reading this blog, but don't usually comment, here's a made-up holiday you can celebrate by leaving a comment here. You'll need to put in a name (it needn't be yours) and an email address (I promise it…
The last time I talked about our job search, I got a lot of comments of the form "Why does the process take so damn long?" As the first of our short list candidates shows up today for a campus visit/ interview, I thought I'd go through a sketch of what we do, and why it takes so long. I'm going to…
PhysicsWeb provides me with yet another blog post topic today, posting a lament about the death of letter writing, which makes life more difficult for historians:
Now that e-mail has replaced letter writing as the principal means of informal communication, one has to feel sorry for future science…
I am not a baseball fan-- I suck at the game, and it's boring as hell on tv-- but I can't help noticing occasional bits of baseball news. such as, for example, yesterday's announcement of the Hall of Fame voting, which prompts the post title. Eight writers did not vote for Cal Ripken to get into…
In the last week, The IoP's Physics Web has posted two news updates that fall into the category of "regrettable physics," here defined as "the sort of work that makes Daniel Davies say mean things about physicists." I'm talking here about the application of physics concepts to fields where they're…
Noted travel writer Bill Bryson has a real gift for making entertaining anecdotes out of basically nothing. His travel books are frequently hilarious, but if you think carefully about what actually happens in the books, there's very little there. His gift as a writer is to inflate mundane…
A lot of people have commented on this New York Times article on science budgets, mostly echoing the author's lament about the negative effects of operating at 2006 funding levels. I really don't have much to add to that, but it's worth reminding people where the blame for this belongs:
Last year…
Over at Page 3.14, Katherine highlights a Psychology Today article about the different approaches young men and women have to dating. It's more or less what you expect, but for one eye-popping sentence (emphasis added):
[New Mexico psychology professor Geoffrey] Miller believes boys actually…
Well, that's what I hear...
(It's been a couple of days since anyone said anything mean about him on ScienceBlogs. I wouldn't want him to think we don't care any more...)
Paul Davies's forthcoming book Cosmic Jackpot is subtitled "Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life," so you know that he's not going after small questions, here. The book is a lengthy and detailed discussion of what he terms the "Goldilocks Enigma," and what others refer to as "fine-tuning"--…
The American Astronomical Society is meeting in Seattle this week, which means a banner week for astronomy news: lots of press releases, and a bunch of live reports. If you're into space stuff, you should have plenty to read and talk about in the next few days.
Movable Type tells me that this is the 1,000th post to this blog since the move. This comes just short of the one-year anniversary of the move (the first posts are dated earlier, but the official launch was on January 11th, so that's when I'll do a full year-in-review.
For comparison, the total…
A busy sporting weekend for Chateau Steelypips:
First, there were two NFL wild card games on Saturday, as a sort of appetizer for the real action on Sunday. The Colts borrowed a defense from somewhere, and despite Peyton Manning deciding to play like his little brother for the first half or so,…
