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.
con_or_bust: Con or Bust NOW taking requests for July-September cons!
"Con or Bust is pleased to announce that as of this very moment, and through May 31, fans of color/non-white fans may request assistance to attend SFF cons in July, August, and September 2011.
Because there was no advance…
As mentioned a little while ago, Locus is running a Short Story Club to discuss the award-nominated stories that are available online. First up is Aliette de Bodard's "The Jaguar House, in Shadow". Like her novels and other notable short fiction, this has a Central American theme, though it's…
SLR Camera Simulator | Simulates a digital SLR camera
"Practice using an SLR camera...
Experiment with the lighting, ISO, aperture, shutter, and distance settings while observing the readings in the camera viewfinder
Click the "Snap photo!" button
Review your photo!"
(tags: technology pictures…
This was a hellishly busy week, and today was especially bad. I barely had time to read non-work-related email, let alone write anything for the blog. And now that I have time, I'm too fried to write anything.
So here's a bonus cute-toddler photo, with an ego-blogging element:
That's SteelyKid…
A career as editor « the Node
"In 1993-4, I went on the job market, looking at standard faculty positions. I received some offers, including one from Vanderbilt University, where I am now. But I was resisting accepting a position, and some friends - who were also on the job market at the time -…
Earlier tonight, I was sitting at my computer, and SteelyKid came running over. "Let's go to Israel. Pretend Israel." she said in a conspiratorial whisper.
"Why are you whispering?" I asked. "Do we have to whisper in pretend Israel?"
"Yes," she replied immediately. "Because there are bears."
The…
In keeping with this week's unofficial theme of wibbling about academia, there's an article at The Nation about the evils of graduate school that's prompted some discussion. Sean says more or less what I would, though maybe a little more nicely than I would.
I wouldn't bother to comment further,…
Via Twitter, Daniel Lemire has a mini-manifesto advocating "social media" alternatives for academic publishing, citing "disastrous consequences" of the "filter-then-publish" model in use by traditional journals. The problem is, as with most such things, I'm not convinced that social media style…
News: What They Are Really Typing - Inside Higher Ed
"The authors of two recent studies of laptops and classroom learning decided that relying on student and professor testimony would not do. They decided instead to spy on students.
In one study, a St. John's University law professor hired…
Today's lecture topic was position-space and momentum-space representations of state vectors in quantum mechanics, which once again brought up one of the eternal questions in physics:
Why do we use the symbol p to represent momentum?
I did Google this, but none of the answers looked all that…
Book View Cafe - Exordium 01, by Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge
"Smith and Trowbridge describe the flavor of their five-book space opera Exordium as a cross between Star Wars and Dangerous Liaisons with a touch of the Three Stooges. With its fast-moving blend of humor and horror, of high-tech…
Well, on video over the web, anyway... If you look at the Featured Videos on the National Geographic Channel web page, or, hopefully, in the embedded video below:
You'll see a short video clip of a program about quantum physics, that includes me and Emmy among the experts on camera. I'm pretty…
As I noted the other day, we're entering graduation season, one of the two month-long periods (the other being "back to school" time in August/September) when everybody pretends to care deeply about education. Accordingly, the people at the Pew Research Center have released a new report on the…
For both of the readers who enjoyed last fall's Short Story Club, there's another round starting up soon, this time run by Locus, featuring award-nominated works. I'm busier now than I was in the fall, so I'm not sure I'll be able to participate in all of these, but then, I've already read two of…
Generalist's Work, Day 5 « Easily Distracted
"In humanistic writing, I'm struck by the sometimes uncomfortable mixing of a romanticist vision of authorship with the value of scholarship as a collaborative, collective and accumulative enterprise. In peer review, tenure review, grant applications…
Several years ago, now, a group at Penn State announced a weird finding in helium at extremely low temperatures and high pressures (which is what you need to make helium solidify): when they made a pendulum out of a cylindrical container with a thin shell of solid He toward the outside edge,…
Physics is a notoriously difficult and unpopular subject, which is probably why there is a large and active Physics Education Research community within physics departments in the US. This normally generates a lot of material in the Physical Review Special Topics journal, but last week, a PER paper…
Beta Readers: Best Practices » Inkpunks
"The author-beta relationship is a strange one. The author exposes a vulnerable, still-in-the-works thing to the beta, a fleshy little newborn fiction coated in soft bits. The author is pleased. The author thinks this is an Excellent Thing which they are…
College graduation season is upon us, at least for institutions running on a semester calendar (sadly, Union's trimester system means we have another month to go). This means the start of the annual surge of Very Serious op-eds about what education means, giving advice to graduates, etc. The New…
SteelyKid is, as I have noted previously, half Korean, a quarter Polish, and an eighth each Irish and German. Her parents are irreligious, the extended family is Catholic (more so on my side than Kate's), and she goes to day care at the Jewish Community Center. In other words, a thoroughly American…
Against Craft « Booklife
""Craft" today is not a counter to the Romantic vision of an artistic elite chosen by the Divine, it is a quasi-proletarian flinch often designed to protect one's work from being compared to art, thus protecting it (and one's ego) from its near-inevitable failure to…
Back when I was an undergrad, we did a lab in the junior-level quantum class that involved making a dye laser. We had a small pulsed nitrogen laser in the lab, and were given a glass cell of dye and some optics and asked to make it lase in the visible range of the spectrum.
My partner and I worked…
Writing About Science, and Liking It. In the Pipeline:
"I remember William Rusher, who used to publish National Review, writing about how he had to tell a colleague that "there is no concept so simple that I can fail to understand it when presented as a graph". That made me feel the two cultures…
Tonight's Toddler Blogging features SteelyKid taking a picture of me taking a picture of her, while Appa does the forced perspective thing again:
The "camera" in this case is the salt shaker that came with her kitchen playset. Which is a versatile object, serving also as a drinking cup:
The…
The title is a .signature line that somebody-- Emmet O'Brien, I think, but I'm not sure-- used to use on Usenet, back in the mid-to-late 90's, when some people referred to the Internet as the "Information Superhighway." I've always thought it was pretty apt, especially as I've moved into blogdom,…
Atomic clock is smallest on the market - physicsworld.com
"Researchers in the US have developed the world's smallest commercial atomic clock. Known as the SA.45s Chip Size Atomic Clock (CSAC), it could be yours for just $1500. The clock, initially developed for military use, is about the size of…
While Kenneth Ford's 101 Quantum Questions was generally good, there was one really regrettable bit, in Question 23: What is a "state of motion?" When giving examples of states, Ford defines the ground state as the lowest-energy state of a nucleus, then notes that its energy is not zero. He then…
Scientific Study Links Flammable Drinking Water to Fracking - ProPublica
"The group tested 68 drinking water wells in the Marcellus and Utica shale drilling areas in northeastern Pennsylvania and southern New York State. Sixty of those wells were tested for dissolved gas. While most of the wells…
If I get a review copy of a book that sounded interesting from a publicist, but it turns out I kind of hate the book, am I still obliged to read it and write it up for the blog? I'm not talking about the totally unsolicited review copies that turn up unannounced in my mail-- I feel no obligation to…
When I was looking over the Great Discoveries series titles for writing yesterday's Quantum Man review, I was struck again by how the Rutherford biography by Richard Reeves is an oddity. Not only is Rutherford a relatively happy fellow-- the book is really lacking in the salacious gossip that is…
