Blogs
drorzel | April 22, 2015It was nice and sunny this morning when I sat down at Starbucks to do some blogging, so I wrote a new Forbes post about the quantum physics that makes sunshine possible. This also brings in xkcd's take on the fundamental forces, and even a little bit of SteelyKid.
Sadly, it's now grey and dreary, but that's spring in New England for you. But if you'd like a small amount of quantum-mechanical sunshine, head on over to Forbes and check it out.
drorzel | April 17, 2015So, the mysterious strings of digits that I wrote about the other day seem to be part of a class assignment from the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Students are being asked to go read and comment on blogs, and the random digits are individual student identifiers.
This makes sense given the form and content of the other comments, and makes me sorry we live in a world where my first guess regarding this was that it was some sort of con. But, you know, I was led there by gigabytes of email from ersatz Nigerian widows.
I would, however, like to send one message to whoever it is at the…
drorzel | April 15, 2015One of the things I struggle with a bit when it comes to writing about cool modern physics is how much to play up the weirdness. On the one hand, people just can't get enough of "spooky action at a distance," but on the other hand, talking too much about that sort of thing makes quantum physics seem like a completely bizarre theory with no applications.
Which is unfortunate, because quantum physics is essential for all manner of everyday technology. For example, as I try to explain in a new post at Forbes, quantum physics is essential to the cheap alarm clock that wakes me up in the morning.…
drorzel | April 15, 2015So, I get a lot of comment spam here, probably a couple of orders of magnitude more than I get real comments (sigh). The vast majority of this gets blocked by built-in filters, so none of the stuff pitching medically implausible treatments for whatever makes it to a point where I have to see it. There's one new category of junk comment, though, that slips through the filters and requires human moderation (i.e., I have to approve or reject it), and I find this utterly baffling.
The comments are sorta-kinda relevant to the post that they're sent to, albeit with dubious English, and they don't…
drorzel | April 10, 2015We're into admitted student season, that muddy period when large numbers of anxious high-school seniors visit college campuses all over the nation, often with parents in tow, trying to decide where to spend the next four years. As a result, I'll be spending a good deal of time over the next few weeks talking to high-school students who are interested in physics, trying to convince them to come here.
So, since I'm putting time into that anyway, I typed out a version of the argument in favor of going to a small liberal arts college (Williams, or Union, or some lesser school) to major in science…
drorzel | April 6, 2015Last week, Steven Weinberg wrote a piece for the Guardian promoting his new book about the history of science (which seems sort of like an extended attempt to make Thony C. blow a gasket..). This included a list of recommended books for non-scientists which was, shall we say, a tiny bit problematic.
This is a topic on which I have Opinions, so I wrote a recommended reading list of my own over at Forbes. I'm more diplomatic about Weinberg than Phillip Ball was, but I have ego enough to say that I think my list is way better...
I won't pretend that it's a truly comprehensive list, though, so…
drorzel | March 30, 2015I hinted once or twice that I had news coming, and this is it: I've signed up to be a blog contributor at Forbes writing about, well, the sorts of things I usually write about. I'm pretty excited about the chance to connect with a new audience; the fact that they're paying me doesn't hurt, either...
The above link goes to my contributor page there, which will be your one-stop-shopping source for what I write at Forbes. There are two posts up this morning, a self-introduction, and an attempt to define physics and what makes it unique. The "Follow" button has an option for an RSS feed; this isn…
drorzel | March 27, 2015That's the title of the talk I gave yesterday at Vanderbilt, and here are the slides:
Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs: Social Media for Communicating Science from Chad Orzel
The central idea is the same as in past versions of the talk-- stealing Robert Krulwich's joke contrasting the publication styles of Newton and Galileo to argue that scientists spend too much time writing technical articles aimed at an audience of other experts, and need to do more "Galileian" publication aimed at a broad audience. And that social media technologies offer powerful tools that can enable those who are…
drorzel | March 25, 2015I mentioned last week that I'm giving a talk at Vanderbilt tomorrow, but as they went to the trouble of writing a press release, the least I can do is share it:
It’s clear that this year’s Forman lecturer at Vanderbilt University, Chad Orzel, will talk about physics to almost anyone.
After all, two of his popular science books are How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. Orzel, an associate professor of physics at Union College in New York and author of the ScienceBlog “Uncertain Principles,” is scheduled to speak on campus at 3 p.m. Thursday, March 26.
As…
drorzel | March 16, 2015One of the things I miss about not being able to follow college basketball these days is that I don't really know enough about the state of the game to understand Mark Titus's columns at Grantland. They're kind of sophomoric, but you know, a little of that is sometimes good, and I always enjoyed reading his stuff (I also enjoyed his book). But his columns are so heavily referential as to be basically incomprehensible unless you watch a lot of games.
I still follow him on Twitter, though, and was a little surprised when he tweeted out a link to a Reddit AMA where he talked about struggling…
drorzel | March 2, 2015While I'm running unrelated articles head-on into each other, two other things that caught my eye recently were Sabine Hossenfelder's thoughts on scientific celebrities (taking off from Lawrence Krauss's defense of same) and Megan Garber's piece on "attention policing", spinning off that silliness about a badly exposed photo of a dress that took the Internet by storm.
Like Sabine, I'm generally in favor of the idea of science celebrities, though as someone whose books are found on shelves between Lawrence Krauss's and Neil deGrasse Tyson's, there's no small amount of self-interest in that.…
drorzel | February 26, 2015Jon "Men Who Stare at Goats" Ronson has a new book coming out, and has been promoting it with excerpts in major newspapers, most notably the New York Times Magazine and the Guardian. In these, he tracks down people whose lives were wrecked by massive public shaming campaigns over idiotic things they wrote on social media, and talks to them about what happened, and what they've been doing since.
Ronson's whole career is built around profiling unusual and often unpleasant people in a way that is ultimately sympathetic without endorsing their problematic aspects-- it belatedly occurs to me that…
drorzel | February 25, 2015Paige Brown Jarreau, who blogs at From the Lab Bench is in the throes of writing her dissertation about science blogging, and plowing through a lot of interview data. She's sharing some of the process on the blog, and a lot more on Twitter, where it's prompted a good deal of discussion.
One of the big things she's brought up recently is the question of why scientists seem to blog about their own research only on rare occasions (Storify link). My own answer is in there somewhere: blogging about something you're actively working on doesn't feel like a departure from doing work. If you're going…
drorzel | February 20, 2015I didn't see this before yesterday's post about Twitter, but over at SciLogs, Kirk Englehardt gets evangelical, offering a very chipper list of "Ten Reasons for Academic Researchers to Use Social Media." I'll just put the item headers here, though each of these has a more complete description, with links to lots of other stuff:
10. You’re in the Driver’s Seat
9. It’s About the Network
8. It’s Newsy and Trendy
7. Promotion (may) = Citations and Downloads
6. Spreading Your Love of Science
5. Setting the Record Straight
4. Sharing Interesting Things
3. Enhancing Your Research
2. It’s Easy
1. It…
drorzel | February 15, 2015The final bit of meta-blogging I'll do this weekend is another look at what survives from past years. Unfortunately, when National Geographic took over, they broke our Google Analytics access, so I can't see blog stats from before mid-2012 any more. I do, however, have this old post listing the top posts of 2010, traffic-wise, which serves as a snapshot of what was popular at the time. It's interesting to see how this compares to the current list of top posts from 2010-- the approximate rank of 2010 posts based on traffic in 2014 is in parentheses:
A Lot of Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing (…
drorzel | February 15, 2015Continuing the weekend theme of meta-blogging, one of the questions I've occasionally wondered about in doing top-posts lists for a given year is the problem of a bias against recency-- that is, that posts put up toward the end of the year are inherently at a disadvantage because they've had less time to integrate up the slow trickle of traffic that every page on the Internet gets. Obviously, this isn't a question that can be answered by data from 2014, but I have access to traffic stats back to mid-2012, so I can look at data for 2013. So, these are the top posts I put up in 2013 in terms of…
drorzel | February 14, 2015As a follow-up to yesterday's post about what draws the most traffic here, I went through and pulled out the top 20 posts from the blog (by traffic) for the calendar year 2014 that were first published in 2014. Numbers after the links are the fraction of the total pageviews for the year that each of these drew, according to Google Analytics:
"Earthing" Is a Bunch of Crap 1.03%
Tennis Ball Plus Soccer Ball Equals Blown Minds 0.65%
Impossible Thruster Probably Impossible 0.55%
Quick Interstellar Thoughts 0.54%
What Is Color? 0.52%
The Physics of Crazy Sleds 0.45%
Method and Its Discontents 0.43…
drorzel | February 13, 2015When I was writing up the state of blogging post last weekend, I thought about pulling together a Top Ten Posts thing, but didn't have time. also, Google analytics moved a bunch of stuff since the last time I used it, so I had a hard time locating the right options. Having tracked it down, though, I give you the ten highest-traffic blog posts from 2014, with the year of posting in parentheses, and the fraction of the total pageviews for the year that the post racked up, according to Google Analytics:
How Do I Kill the Squirrels who Are Eating My Car? (2010) 15.2%
Why Does Excel Suck so Much…
drorzel | February 12, 2015Rhett Allain has a list of 5 Things Every Human Should Know About Light, to tie in with the International Year of Light, and it's a good list with lots of .gifs. Of course, there are some gaps, so let me offer some additional things that everyone ought to know about light:
-- Light Is a Particle
Rhett and I have a long-running argument about the use of photons in introductory physics; he's against them for reasons that make no sense to me. To my mind, it is unquestionably true that light has particle-like properties (and here's a follow-up with some math), and that's a thing that everybody…
drorzel | February 9, 2015I was going to let Andrew Sullivan's departure from blogging pass without comment-- I haven't been a regular reader of his stuff in around ten years, after all-- but a couple of mysterious guys in dark suits showed up at the house and pointed out that as someone who started blogging in 2002, I would face dire consequences if I didn't say anything at all. I offered to do two really short posts consisting of just links to Ezra Klein and Kevin Drum and the word "Indeed," but they weren't amused.
Truth be told, I do owe Sullivan a bit of a debt, and not just because he linked to me a few times…