Blogs
drorzel | December 16, 2014The hot topic of the day is, of course, the big shake-up at Scientific American's blog network. The official statement is, of course, very carefully worded, but the end result is that they're shedding a bunch of blogs and instituting a standard set of guidelines for those that remain. A more detailed breakdown of who's staying and going, with some interesting commentary, was posted by Paige Brown Jarreau earlier this morning; additional comments from the network editor are in this post by Matt Shipman, and there's some additional commentary from the media watchdogs at the Knight Science…
drorzel | December 4, 2014After a loooong hiatus due to incompatible work schedules, Rhett and I are back with our intermittent hangout series. We talk about space programs, the engineering mindset, and cool stuff you can do with liquid nitrogen.
Amazingly, we didn't actually talk about our current (well, recently-completed, in my case) classes. That might be a first for Uncertain Dots...
drorzel | November 20, 2014That's "Science Online" as in the conference that folded, not "science, online" as in the practice of trying to understand the universe from in front of a networked computer. Specifically, I'm posting about David Zaslavsky's call for help in putting together a replacement meeting. There was a lot of talk about this right when Science Online went under, but that's pretty much died down, at least in public. David's trying to get something more active going.
This is, of course, a massive undertaking, and something fraught with peril. And it's not like I have any free time to make really…
drorzel | October 25, 2014I got the time for the regular hangout wrong, and then we had some weird computer difficulties, so we only had ten minutes for Uncertain Dots this week. Which was enough time for me to say disparaging things about comic book movies, so, you know, if that interests you...
Here's the making of Interstellar story about Kip Thorne.
Here's the Avengers 2 trailer.
Also, a program note: I will be at MASS MoCA tonight talking about Particle Fever, if you'd like to hear me talk about real physics on film, or just take issue with my slagging off comic-book movies in person...
drorzel | October 23, 2014Over at Backreaction, Bee has a nice piece on our current age of virality. Toward the end, she discusses some of the ways this applies to science, specifically a quote from this Nature article about collaborative efforts to measure "big G", and a story about a Chinese initiative to encourage collaboration. She writes of the latter, "Essentially, it seems, they’re giving out salary increases for scientists to think the same as their colleagues."
And I agree that this can be a problem-- there's a famous paper I can never find looking at the evolution of the accepted value of some physical…
drorzel | October 10, 2014If you like arbitrary numerical signifiers, this is the point where we can start to talk about plural dozens of Uncertain Dots hangouts. As usual, Rhett and I chat about a wide range of stuff, including the way we always say we're going to recruit a guest to join us, and then forget to do anything about that.
The video:
Other topics include how it's important to rip up your class notes every so often, the pros and cons of lab handouts/ lab manuals, and of course this week's Nobel Prize in Physics for blue LED's (shameless self-linkage).
I'm crushingly busy right now, largely because I had no…
drorzel | October 3, 2014Our semi-regular video hangout returns. In this episode, I'm wearing a tie, because I gave the department colloquium this week, and for psychological reasons I always dress up a bit to give talks. This was recorded under an hour after my talk, which probably explains why I'm a little more punchy than usual... I'm not sure what Rhett's excuse is.
Topics include a bunch of failed attempts to walk back an early cheap shot at computer scientists, where Rhett and I rank in terms of Google searches for our first names-- I have to go six pages deep to find myself (I'm on the first page of "Orzel"…
drorzel | September 30, 2014Two language-related items crossed in the Information Supercollider today: the first was Tom's commentary on an opinion piece by Robert Crease and Alfred Goldhaber, the second Steven Pinker on the badness of academic writing.
All of them are worth reading, and I only have small dissents to offer here. One is that, unlike Tom and Crease and Goldhaber, I'm actually just fine with the popular usage of "quantum leap" for a particularly dramatic change. Yes, I realize that the canonical "quantum jump" is the smallest possible change, but I think that's putting too much emphasis on only one aspect…
drorzel | September 19, 2014After a long absence due to travel (some of which is discussed), Uncertain dots returns!
Rhett and I talk about recent travels, how people going into internet-based physics outreach these days would probably do better to make videos than blog, physics in science fiction, celestial navigation, and as always, our current courses.
Some links:
-- Our Eratosthenes measurement from 2012.
-- Divided by Infinity, the best Many-Worlds story ever.
-- Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" isn't legitimately available online, but there's a spoilery Wikipedia page about it.
-- An old post where I talk about…
drorzel | July 30, 2014In which Rhett and I talk about awful academic computing systems, Worldcon, our Wikipedia pages, and AAPT meeting envy.
Some links:
-- Rhett's Wikipedia entry
-- My Wikipedia entry
-- The 2014 AAPT Summer Meeting
-- LonCon 3, this year's Worldcon
-- My puzzling Worldcon schedule
We have some ideas for what to do next time, when our little hangout is old enough to drink, but you need to watch all the way to the end to hear those.
drorzel | July 28, 2014Given the recent Feynman explosion (timeline of events), some people may be casting about looking for an alternative source of colorful-character anecdotes in physics. Fortunately, the search doesn't need to go all that far-- if you flip back a couple of pages in the imaginary alphabetical listing of physicists, you'll find a guy who fits the bill very well: Enrico Fermi.
Fermi's contributions to physics are arguably as significant as Feynman's. He was the first to work out the statistical mechanics of particles obeying the Pauli exclusion principle, now called "fermions" in his honor (Paul…
drorzel | July 24, 2014This Alberto Cairo piece on "data journalism" has been kicking around for a while, and it's taken me a while to pin down what bugs me about it. I think my problem with it ultimately has to do with the first two section headers in which he identifies problems with FiveThirtyEight and Vox:
1. Data and explanatory journalism cannot be done on the cheap.
2. Data and explanatory journalism cannot be produced in a rush.
The implication here is that "data and explanatory journalism" is necessarily a weighty and complicated thing, something extremely Serious to be approached only with great care.…
drorzel | July 22, 2014In which our hangout turns nineteen; we may need to look into a special guest for the 20th, or something. Or maybe save guest stars for the one after that, when it can drink.
Anyway, Rhett and I chat about grading, lab reports, why Excel sucks, and an online experiment that we really ought to do if we only had the time.
Some links:
-- Why Does Excel Suck So Much?, and "Line Plot" is Never the Right Choice. Perennial favorites on the blog.
-- How Do I Kill the Squirrels Who Are Eating My Car?, another constant source of a small amount of traffic.
-- Rhett's elevator video post.
-- My soccer…
drorzel | July 8, 2014In which our series of Google hangouts becomes old enough to vote and buy cigarettes-- but not drink!
Miscellaneous things mentioned in this:
-- My forthcoming book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I turned in the copyedits and figures a week or so ago, and cashed an advance check today, so it's definitely going to happen. Pre-order now, because Hachette bought my publisher, so you don't know how long those buttons will be there.
-- My appearance on the Read Science! hangout.
-- A commentary piece I did for Physics World on the OPERA neutrino story. I wasn't paid for this. (You probably need…
drorzel | July 7, 2014Right around the time I shut things down for the long holiday weekend, the Washington Post ran this Joel Achenbach piece on mistakes in science. Achenbach's article was prompted in part by the ongoing discussion of the significance (or lack thereof) of the BICEP2 results, which included probably the most re-shared pieces of last week in the physics blogosphere, a pair of interviews with a BICEP2 researcher and a prominent skeptic. This, in turn, led to a lot of very predictable criticism of the BICEP2 team for over-hyping their results, and a bunch of social-media handwringing about how the…
drorzel | July 1, 2014I've seen a bunch of people linking approvingly to this piece about the "Fermi paradox," (the question of why we haven't seen any evidence of other advanced civilizations) and I can't quite understand why. The author expends a good deal of snark taking astronomers and physicists to task for constructing elaborate solutions to Fermi paradox on the basis of shoddy and unjustified assumptions. And then proceeds to offer a different solution for the Fermi paradox based on shoddy and unjustified assumptions. Whee!
I mean, there is an element of this that's useful, namely the reminder that "We…
drorzel | June 26, 2014After a bit of a hiatus because of scheduling issues, Rhett and I are back to talk about... stuff. Mostly summer classes, World Cup soccer, and Twitter. Also, how we've each gotten a blog comment from Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Miscellaneous links:
-- My long-ago book review and Rhett's more recent complaint about Cosmos, where we each had a brush with scientific celebrity.
-- My silly cat tweet that's generated a huge amount of traffic:
Busy day at Schroedinger Industries... RT @EmrgencyKittens: How to organize your cats. pic.twitter.com/z3QS0fnSdL
— Chad Orzel (@orzelc) June 24, 2014
-- Rhett's…
drorzel | May 28, 2014For the sixteenth episode of Uncertain Dots, we decided to bring in some guests, Andy Rundquist and Kelly O'Shea for a conversation about standards-based grading. This came up because I'm playing around with this using the same tiered scheme I talked about back in January.
This was a fun conversation, and some interesting ideas came up. I remain kind of boggled by the amount of oral exam time Andy puts in, and I find the notion of goal-less problems intriguing, but I'm not sure I could implement it here.
Some links:
Kelly on goal-less problems
Direct Measurement Video
So, anyway, that was…
drorzel | May 21, 2014Rhett 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 algebra (which is like sunscreen).
I had meant to post this last night, but SteelyKid has made friends with the kids at one of the houses behind ours, so I spent a good chunk of the evening making sure she didn't climb over the fence into their yard. So, instead, you get to wake up with our physics…
drorzel | May 13, 2014Another 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 attempt to explain the origin of inertia.
Newton's famous refusal to explain gravity, "Hypotheses non fingo." Sir Isaac was second to none in his mastery of snotty condescension.
Veritasium's buoyancy quiz.
Aatish Bhatia's post about a new meta-analysis of "active learning" studies showing that…