Blogs
drorzel | January 29, 2014Last week, a comment I made on Twitter about the annoyance of doing merit evaluation paperwork led to some back-and-forth with Rhett Allain and the National Society of Black Physicists Twitter account about whether blogs can or should count toward academic evaluation. This seemed like a good topic for another video hangout with me and Rhett, which we did yesterday. Unfortunately, there were some technical issues with the hangout, which delayed the start and didn't allow live Q&A, but we did get video:
(The camera appears to be on just me for most of this, so it's largely a hangout…
drorzel | January 28, 2014The Pip was sick this weekend, I had a deadline for a bunch of administrative crap that I pushed off back in December when I was rushing to finish the book, and I'm giving an exam on Thursday. So, I'm not doing lengthy blogging right now, but two quick notices:
1) A reminder (I think I posted this before) that the Union College Department of Physics and Astronomy is hiring a visitor, for up to three years (contingent on performance). If you're in the market for an academic job, albeit a temporary one, check out the ad. If you know anybody who might be interested, point it out to them.
2)…
drorzel | January 23, 2014Ashutosh Jogalekar has a response to my post from yesterday complaining about his earlier post on whether multiverses represent a philosophical crisis for physics. I suspect we actually disagree less than that back-and-forth makes it seem-- he acknowledges my main point, which was that fundamental theoretical physics is a small subset of physics as a whole, and I don't disagree with his point that physics as a discipline has long been characterized by a reductionist sort of approach-- always trying to get to smaller numbers of fundamental principles.
Our real point of disagreement, I think,…
drorzel | January 21, 2014What with the umpteen zillion articles declaring the Death of the Blog, I've been toying with the idea of doing something podcast-ish for a while. Rhett Allain from Dot Physics was game, too, and suggested using Google+ to do a video hangout, so here we are talking about our classes this term:
The video quality is kind of crap on my end, which is a recurring problem here when we Skype with the grandparents. I probably should've closed more programs and tabs, but I'm an idiot. Also, I fidget a lot. But this is meant to be fairly casual, and I really do talk with my hands like that.
Anyway,…
drorzel | December 2, 2013I got some feedback from my editor about draft chapters of the book-in-progress a while ago, and while it was generally pretty positive, there's a lot of work to be done. Shortly after that, I realized there was a big and awkward gap in the material I had, which involved a lot of frantic research and (re)writing to fix, so I'm not as far along in the revising as I'd like to be. And since I'd like to make the original end-of-the-year deadline for completing the manuscript, for a variety of reasons, that means some intense work in the next few weeks. Which, in turn, means a significant…
drorzel | October 21, 2013I was pleasantly surprised at how well the What does Science Online Want to Be? post was received-- I kind of expected that to cause more anger than it did. It did prompt a lot of discussion, most of it during the dinner hour in Chateau Steelypips, so it was really hard for me to keep up. Given the volume of stuff and my inability to respond promptly, I thought I'd try to round up a few things here:
1) Kelly Hills's post on cons vs. conferences is very good. This is something I said myself after Science Online this past year-- it felt very much like a SF convention. In ways both good and bad…
drorzel | October 20, 2013The ongoing mess over Bora Zivkovic's harassment of women writers in connection with his editorial role at Scientific American and Science Online has moved into the "What is to be done now?" phase. The most prominent and linkable of these are from Maryn McKenna and Kelly Hills, though I've also seen the edges of more ephemeral discussions on Twitter. Much of this has focused on formal organizational changes, stripping Bora of power and titles and banning him from the conference. These are entirely appropriate, though partly moot given that he's resigned from both Scientific American and…
drorzel | October 18, 2013There's a sense in which the saddest true statement I've read about the unpleasant events of the past week is this: Blog editor at Scientific American is a position of great power, with the ability to make or break careers.
I'm not disputing the truth of this. It's absolutely true that the position has enormous influence, and it's why Bora's actions were wrong. That is not in question. But it's sad because it's an indicator of where we've ended up, and not in a good way.
I mean, there's a limited sense, if you're a glass-half-full sort of person, in which this could be seen as a good thing.…
drorzel | October 17, 2013Let me say these things, because they are important. Bora was wrong. Scientific American was wrong. Ofek was wrong, Wrong, WRONG.
If you follow science blogs beyond this one, you have no doubt run across the gigantic debacle that erupted this past weekend; if not the first few paragraphs of this Slate piece give a reasonably compact summary. The shorter short form is: an editor at a blog network called Danielle Lee a whore (which was wrong), she wrote a blog post about it (emphatically not wrong), and the responses to that splattered a gigantic festering mess of Wrong all over everything.
So…
drorzel | October 15, 2013Over the weekend, before the whole Scientific America debacle blew up, Ben Lillie tweeted:
Looking for science news pegs that aren't "a paper was published." Good examples? #ScioOcean #scionew
— Ben Lillie (@BenLillie) October 12, 2013
This is, of course, a familiar problem to a lot of people who care about the public dissemination of science. The need for a good "hook" is a constant issue, because without one, you can't get anyone to pick up a story. And you can't let one get past, either, leading to a frantic scramble whenever anything happens that has the slightest connection to science…
drorzel | October 14, 2013It was looking like we were going to slip through the entire Nobel season without a winner in the Uncertain Principles Betting Pool, but at the eleventh hour, we got one: DougT correctly predicted that the 2013 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel would be shared by Eugene Fama (remember, the requirement to name all the laureates for a particular prize applied only to votes for a Higgs boson prize in physics).
So, congratulations to Doug! Email me to claim your valuable prize.
drorzel | September 21, 2013It's gradually becoming clear to me that this blogging thing is old hat. It's a Web 4.0 world now, and we're all just Tmblng through it. So, I need to get with modernity, and start posting the listicles that are the bread and butter of the new social media order. Thus, I give you a web-friendly list of The 15 Most Interesting Force-Carrying Bosons.
The 15 Most Interesting Force-Carrying Bosons
1) The Photon
CGI photon from Physics World (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/aug/10/photon-shape-could… )
(Image source: This Physics World article)
The photon is the carrier of the…
drorzel | August 30, 2013It's been a banner week for blogging advice, between John Scalzi's thoughts on comments and Bee's advice on whether to write a science blog. Both of them are worth a read, and I don't have a great deal to add, but writing the stuff I'm supposed to be writing this morning is like pulling my own teeth, so throwing in a couple of brief remarks is much more enjoyable.
First, Bee's introduction raises an important issue:
I used to think there should really be more scientists blogging. That’s because for me science journalism not so much a source of information but a source of news. It tells me…
drorzel | July 2, 2013Having said that I want to focus more on positive stuff, and talking up cool things in science, I'm going to make an effort to do more write-ups of research papers. I've got a few ideas along those lines, and of course I get regular emails from journals and press offices bringing other papers to my attention. But I don't want to neglect my audience, here...
So, I'll throw this open as a place to request discussions of particular topics or papers. If there's some topic in physics that you'd like me to write up an explanation of, or a paper or preprint that you'd like me to do the detailed Q…
drorzel | May 31, 2013I mentioned on Twitter that I was thinking of proposing a Science Online program item about the professionalization of blogging, throwing in a link to post from a couple months ago. That included a link to this SlideShare:
Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters and How Social Media Can Help from Chad Orzel
And that was re-tweeted by Chris Chabris, kicking off a gigantic conversation about the whole idea of scientists communicating directly with the public (most of which took place after I went to bed last night, so I only saw it in my Twitter…
drorzel | May 28, 2013Last week's post about communications between scientists and journalists sparked a bit of discussion, and prompted the folks at the IoP's Physics Focus blog to ask me for a guest post advising journalists on how to talk to scientists. The post is now live, with the self-explanatory headline How Journalists Can Help the Scientists They Interview:
The temptation for each party in this situation is to try to push as much of the work to the other as possible, and that’s where most advice from journalists to scientists (or vice versa) fails. Each side treats the conventions of their particular…
drorzel | May 22, 2013Over at National Geographic's other blog network, Ed Yong offers a guide for scientists talking to journalists. Like everything Ed writes about scientists and journalists, this was immediately re-tweeted by 5000 people calling it a must-read. Also like nearly everything Ed writes about scientists and journalists, some of it kind of rubbed me the wrong way.
Given our respective areas of interest, there's approximately zero chance that Ed will ever contact me to ask my opinion of a paper, but I want to push back on a few of these, anyway. Because, in the end, scientists aren't responding in…
drorzel | May 21, 2013At Scientific American's blog network, Ashutosh Jogalekar muses about the "greatest American physicist", eventually voting for Josiah Willard Gibbs, one of the pioneers of statistical mechanics. As both times I took StatMech (as an undergrad and in grad school), it was at 8:30 in the morning, I retain almost no memory of the subject, and will bow to greater experience in assessing Gibbs's importance.
I do, however, want to take issue with one thing in the post. When assessing the historical place of American physics, he writes:
Here’s my personal list for the title of greatest American…
drorzel | April 4, 2013Last week, I gave my evangelical talk about science blogging to the Physics department at Wright State, and also a lot of education students who came to the talk (which made a nice change in the sort of questions I got). It's basically this talk that I gave at Cornell a couple of years ago, with a few updates to the slides that don't require a new upload to SlideShare:
Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters and How Social Media Can Help from Chad Orzel
The pitch that I make, if you don't want to flip through the slides, is that communicating to a…
drorzel | March 25, 2013Kind of short notice, but if you're in the appropriate bits of Ohio, you might be interested to know that I'm giving two talks at Wright State this Thursday. At 11am, I'm doing the Physics Department Colloquium in 202 Oelman Hall, "Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters, and How Social Media Can Help":
Budget cuts and funding instability are a constant source of anxiety for professional scientists, and public uncertainty about science threatens to derail critical policy actions in areas like climate change and public health. I will argue that these…