Science
drorzel | October 24, 2010Between my long-ago high-school French and Google Translate, I can tell that this is a good review of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. It does note, though, that reading the book requires knowledge of English to understand it, which is a problem. And, as far as I know, French translation rights haven't been sold yet... French publishers, je vous regarde.
In other foreign-edition news, we've sold German and Turkish rights, so there will be editions in those languages eventually. Emmy was very happy to hear that the book will be published in Turkey, though that was mostly a case of preposition…
drorzel | October 23, 2010Some time back, I took issue with an article about "masculine" and "feminine" approaches to science that struck me as a little off. The author of the original post, Alexandra Jellicoe, has a new post on the same topic that she pointed out in comments to my original post.
I have two major problems with this article. One of them is a problem I have with the whole genre (as it were), and I'll save that for another time, because it will be difficult to write. The bigger and more immediate problem that I have, though, is that I don't recognize Jellicoe's description of science. She writes:
The…
drorzel | October 22, 2010As promised, an answer to a question from a donor to this year's DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge. Sarah asks:
Chad, can I get a post about how you (or scientists in general) come up with ideas for experiments? You've covered some of the gory detail with the lab info posts, but I think it would be useful for your readers to see where the ideas come from.
The answer is obvious: Ideas come from Schenectady. Which, not coincidentally, is where I live...
More seriously, in my area of experimental physics, I think there are two main ways people come up with ideas for new experiments:…
bioephemera | October 21, 2010A couple of days ago, the New York Times reported on an undergraduate class at Harvard that teaches the science of cooking. It's called "Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science," and it's popular: if you're a Harvard undergrad, you have about a 43% chance of winning a seat at the lab bench (still, as one of the instructors points out, better odds than most people have of getting reservations at one of the participating guest chefs' exclusive restaurants).
The class also seems to be changing the way some students think about science:
For Mr. Jean-Baptiste, a junior…
drorzel | October 21, 2010Melissa at Confused at a Higher Level has a nice post on the tension between faculty research and teaching:
Malachowski writes, "We all know that working with undergraduates is time consuming and in some cases it slows down our research output, but work with undergraduates should be supported, celebrated, and compensated at a high level. For most of us, the process involved in research with students is as important as the product." If colleges adopt a narrow definition of scholarly productivity measured only by publications, they may unintentionally provide incentives for faculty not to…
oracknows | October 20, 2010I really have to give those guys at McGill University's Office for Science and Society credit. They're fast. In fact, they've already uploaded video for all the events at the Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium. Here's the main page with the videos (the 2010 Trottier Symposium occurred on October 17, 18, and 19), and here are the individual links:
2010 Lorne Trottier Roundtable (moderated by Dr. Joe Schwarcz)
2010 Lorne Trottier Public Syposium
Investigating Pseudoscientific & Paranormal Claims with James Randi
Enjoy!
My "friend" also reports that a great time was had by all and he…
oracknows | October 20, 2010Yesterday was a travel day, which means I was too exhausted to grind out a piece of peerless logorrheic prose full of Insolence, Respectful, not-so-Respectful, or both. Fortunately, readers sent me something rather amusing that is also timely given some of the conversations we had at the Lorne Trottier Symposium Monday and Tuesday, where questions about why various forms of woo are not accepted by mainstream medicine, chemistry, science, etc. One answer that came up is that, if these things worked, there'd be a lot of really interesting things to study, applications of these things to real…
bioephemera | October 20, 2010And now for a completely different type of glass art: this time from sculptor Luke Jerram. His deceptively beautiful glass malaria parasite (see video below) will be auctioned off to benefit Malaria No More.
Via Medical Museion. The "malaria parasite" is also known as Plasmodium falciparum. Read more about Jerram's sculpture here - no, I don't know when the auction will be, but I imagine he'll update his website with the news.
oracknows | October 19, 2010The Lorne Trottier Symposium is over, and it went quite well. Amazingly, even though I had to follow Michael Shermer's talk, people told me I didn't suck, which made me feel better. Oh, there was this issue of a guy who wanted to tout Royal Rife and his machine. He wouldn't have irritated me so much for doing that. What did irritate me was that he went on and on and on and wouldn't yield the microphone, to the point where I tried to interrupt him to ask him if he had a question and then ended up being perhaps too dismissive of his question. On the other hand, even Michael Shermer told him, "…
drorzel | October 19, 2010There have been a bunch of interesting things written about education recently that I've been too busy teaching to comment on. I was pulling them together this morning to do a sort of themed links dump, when the plot at the right, from Kevin Drum's post about school testing jumped out at me. This shows test scores for black students in various age groups over time, but more importantly, it demonstrates one of my pet peeves about Excel.
If you look at the horizontal axis of this plot, it shows regularly spaced intervals. If you actually read the labels, though, you'll see that they're anything…
drorzel | October 18, 2010As you may or may not be aware, we are once again in the middle of a DonorsChoose fundraiser to support public school students and teachers. The good news is, the Uncertain Principles entry for the 2010 Challenge is in second place among ScienceBlogs blogs with $373 in donations thus far; the bad news it that more than half of that money is from the initial contribution I made when I set the challenge up.
We've done much better than this in the past, but I realize these are tough economic times, and people may not have as much disposable cash to give to charity. I was thinking, though, about…
drorzel | October 15, 2010A big and important argument about religion and science has flared up again on Twittter. It occurs to me, though, that nobody has taken the obvious step of polling people about their actual beliefs, so let's see if we can't settle this question with (social) SCIENCE!:
I would prefer to be a member of:Market Research
What? It's not like this is any more pointless than the actual science-and-religion argument that's going on in blogdom.
drorzel | October 15, 2010Standing around in the cold for a few hours yesterday, then driving for almost five hours has given the cold SteelyKid had a week or so ago the opening it needed to infect me, so I'm all hoarse and achy this morning. Which means you get silly blogging, such as this poll inspired by some edits I had to make to this week's lab in the intro E&M class I'm teaching:
The code for those little colored bars on electrical resistors is:online survey
I know you'd like to be able to click more than one answer. Life's tough. Get a helmet.
pharyngula | October 14, 2010This is beautiful, I'd hang it on my wall. It's a genetic map of the first synthetic organism, and it and many others will be on display in the Serpentine Gallery in London this weekend.
And gosh, what do you know, I am going to be in London this weekend! I may have to sneak out of The Amazing Meeting a bit, which is going to be hard to do since it's so jam-packed with cool people and cool stuff, but some of them might want to join me in a little extracurricular travel as well.
drorzel | October 14, 2010Emmy and I are in Buffalo today, after a long drive last night, made longer by the NY Thruway authorities decidin to randomly sprinkle lane closures along the westbound portion of I-90. They also made the sadistic move of putting on the "tune to this radio station for information" flashers before the big back-up, and then playing only a recording saying that they were updating the messages on the information network. For at least an hour. Nice work, Thruway idiots. That was positively Pennsylvanian.
Anyway, we're here in scenic Buffalo, where it isn't snowing yet, so don't ask. Which means I…
drorzel | October 13, 2010Melissa at Confused at a Higher Level offers some thoughts on the relative status of experimental vs. theoretical science, spinning off a comprehensive discussion of the issues at Academic Jungle. I flagged this to comment on over the weekend, but then was too busy with SteelyKid and football to get to it. since I'm late to the party, I'll offer some slightly flippant arguments in favor of experiment or theory:
Argument 1: Experimentalists are better homeowners. At least in my world of low-energy experimental physics, many of the skills you are expected to have as an experimental physicist…
drorzel | October 12, 2010SteelyKid is a big fan of the classic children's book Goodnight Moon, which, if you haven't spent the last sixty-odd years in a cave, you probably know features a bunny saying goodnight to a variety of objects in a great, green room. The attentive toddler will find a lot to look at in the pictures-- there's a mouse in every one that SteelyKid delights in pointing out-- but an inquiring adult might well ask "Just how long does it take this bunny to say goodnight to all this stuff, anyway?"
Well, we can answer this question with SCIENCE! You see, there are six pictures in the book showing the…
oracknows | October 11, 2010
Well, this looks interesting. It's the 2010 Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium at McGill University in Montreal. This year, the theme is Confronting Pseudoscience: A Call to Action. A certain "friend of the blog" will be speaking with Ben Goldacre and Michael Shermer on Monday, October 18 from 5 to 7 PM on the Threat of Pseudoscience. He'll also be on Dr. Joe's radio show on CJAD 800. On Tuesday, October 19, the ever-amazing Randi will speak on investigating paranormal claims.
If you happen to be in the Montreal area or can get there on October 18 and/or 19, come on over to McGill. It…
drorzel | October 11, 2010Via Tom, a site giving problem-solving advice for physics. While the general advice is good, and the friendly, Don't-Panic tone is great, I do have a problem with one of their steps, Step 7: Consider Your Formulas:
Some professors will require that you memorize relevant formulas, while others will give you a "cheat sheet." Either way, you have what you need. Memorization might sound horrible, but most physics subjects don't have that many equations to memorize. I remember taking an advanced electromagnetism course where I had to memorize about 20 different formulas. At first it seemed…