Television
drorzel | April 14, 2014
A diabolical psychologist brings a mathematician in for an experiment. The mathematician is seated in a chair on a track leading to a bed on which there is an extremely attractive person of the appropriate gender, completely naked. The psychologist explains "This person will do absolutely anything you want, subject to one condition: every five minutes, we will move your chair across one-half of the distance separating you."
The mathematician explodes in outrage. "What! It'll take an infinite time to get there. This is torture!" They storm out.
The next experimental subject is a physicist,…
drorzel | April 7, 2014Another Monday, another recap of a new episode of the Cosmos reboot. This one was all about optics, and much of it was excellent. This was in part due to the fact that its first couple of historical segments focused on non-Western figures, and I don't know as much about their background to be able to nitpick. First up was Mozi, a Chinese philosopher from circa 400BCE, who may have been the first to demonstrate the camera obscura technique of projecting images from a pinhole in the wall of a dark room. He was followed by ibn al-Haytham, circa 1000CE, who did the first fairly complete analysis…
drorzel | March 31, 2014The fourth episode of the Cosmos reboot aired last night, and as I said on Twitter it was a beautiful demonstration of why I'm finding this show intensely frustrating. There were flashes of brilliance, but also quite a few bits that left me shaking my head. Thus fitting the pattern of the previous episodes-- I didn't comment on last week's, because I was taking a break, but it had the same sorts of issues, too-- so I guess that's just what this show is.
Again, there was some very good stuff-- the opening framing device with William Herschel talking about ghosts was great, and Tyson's tour…
drorzel | March 17, 2014This week's Cosmos was all about the evolution of life, and was viewed by millions of people outside of Oklahoma, where they presumably got an hour-long local news promo, or analysis of the Oklahoma State's chances in the NCAA Tournament. As such, it was a bit outside my area of expertise, but that never stopped a blogger before...
There were a couple of things about this that I thought were great, and two things that bothered me. The episode opened with a very nice discussion of the history of dogs and humans, demonstrating how dramatically untold generations of human selection have modified…
drorzel | March 13, 2014"So, that's the science show with space pictures. What did you think of it, honey?"
"Science. Space pictures. Awesome!"
Our umpteenth winter storm of the season delayed school two hours this morning, which is kind of the worst of all possible worlds from a parenting perspective-- when the schools are closed, there's (usually) a snow-day day-care program, but they don't take kids during a mere delay. On the bright side, though, it gave me a chance to show SteelyKid the Cosmos reboot from Sunday night. Her capsule review is at the top.
In a little more detail:
-- I asked her if she wanted to…
drorzel | March 13, 2014So, last week I idly wondered about the canonical falling-bomb whistle. The was originally intended to be a very short post just asking the question, but I got caught up in thinking about it, and it ended up being more substantial. And leaving room for further investigation in the form of, you guessed it, VPython simulations.
This one isn't terribly visual, so you don't get screen shots, just a link to the code at Gist. It's a simulation of a falling bomb, with air resistance, tracking the velocity as a function of time. Then it calculates a "Doppler shift" using the velocity as a fraction of…
drorzel | March 12, 2014I alluded to this on Twitter, and meant to leave that be, but the other thing I was going to blog today didn't come together, and I probably shouldn't leave a cryptic tweet as my only comment. So...
One of the links getting passed around a lot in my social-media circles is this Tumblr post from Ben Lillie on The Humanities of Science Communication, which argues that discussions of the science of communication often seem to ignore the expertise of people who communicate for a living-- playwrights, actors, journalists, etc. This is a good point, but the post as a whole bugged me a bit, because…
drorzel | March 11, 2014In which Rhett and I talk about Cosmos. What, you thought there would be another topic? We have contractual obligations, you know...
Okay, there were some other topics like Battlestar Galactica (both versions), why so much of what's on Discovery Channel and TLC sucks these days, the flawed astrophysics of Firefly, speculation about how those little infrared thermometers work, and why some kinds of labs are hard.
And Cosmos again. Because, really, how could we not?
drorzel | March 10, 2014It says here in the fine print that my blogging license could be revoked if I fail to offer a public opinion on the Cosmos reboot, which premiered last night. I missed the first couple of minutes-- I had The Pip for bedtime, and he didn't start snoring until 8:58-- but saw most of it in real time. I posted a bit of commentary on Twitter, but will offer something marginally less ephemeral here.
The show opened and closed with tributes to Carl Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson standing on the same cliff where Sagan opened the original series back in 1980. That was good and fitting, and Tyson's…
drorzel | October 15, 2013I'm doing a bit of work on an idea for physics outreach, which would involve tying a discussion of modern physics to science fiction stories. I have Opinions about this sort of thing, of course, but I also have readers who might think of things I don't. So, let me throw this out to you all:
What is your favorite example of a science fiction story (here meaning print, movie, or television) making use of ideas from quantum physics? What's your least favorite?
My favorite stories invoking QM ideas are probably Robert Charles Wilson's brilliant "Divided by Infinity" (which I will draw heavily on…
drorzel | October 1, 2013Last week, before we headed out for the weekend, I had a brief exchange with Ben Lillie on Twitter, prompted by the following set of tweets:
OK, here's a thing. I'll often hear people complain that Hollywood gets science wrong because there's *1* scientist who does everything 1/3
— Ben Lillie (@BenLillie) September 27, 2013
But in reality, science is massively collaborative. So why can't storytellers get that right? 2/3
— Ben Lillie (@BenLillie) September 27, 2013
*BUT* at the same time we have, and wildly celebrate, the Nobel, which embodies exactly that myth. 3/3
— Ben Lillie (@BenLillie…
drorzel | July 29, 2013Over at Galileo's Pendulum, Matthew Francis expresses an opinion that's sure to get him in trouble with the Inquisition and placed under house arrest: Carl Sagan's Cosmos isn't all that:
However, even taking into account the differences in TV between 1980 and 2013, the show is very slow-paced at times. I’m not talking about the mellow oh-so-1970s Vangelis score, or Sagan’s measured style of speech: I mean the obvious stretching of material to make hour-long episodes. I have a long attention span, so I’m not saying Cosmos should be like the frenetic Star Trek reboot; I’m just saying that a…
drorzel | March 14, 2013In the twelve years I've been at Union, there are only two times I've tried to go to an evening speaker and been turned away. Once was 4-5 years ago, when Maya Angelou spoke on campus, the second time was last night, when Bill Nye the Science Guy spoke. I managed to make it to the foot of the steps of Memorial Chapel before they hit the fire code (939, I think they said the number was) and turned everybody away. There were probably 20-30 students behind me in the line, so even if I had made it all the way to the front, I might've stepped aside and let one of them in instead.
It's worth…
drorzel | February 12, 2013I found myself writing about the social skills of scientists today for the book-in-progress (something I've done here before), and how they're portrayed in the media, so of course I had to drop in a reference to "The Big Bang Theory." Jim Parsons's portrayal of Sheldon Cooper pretty much nails down one of the extremes of the "socially inept scientist" axis, the borderline autistic genius who can't comprehend normal social interactions, but still won't shut up. The other extreme, of course, is occupied by Paul Dirac, who famously almost never spoke.
"The Big Bang Theory" is an endless source…
drorzel | April 9, 2012SteelyKid has recently become obsessed with the Disney Junior show Jake and the Never Land Pirates, demanding to watch it all the time. Thanks to her two recent bouts with this year's stomach bug, I've had to watch, or at least listen to her watching in the next room, every episode that Time Warner offers on demand. Being a scientist, and thus inclined to over-analyze things, this has, of course, raised some questions:
-- The show focuses on the title character, Jake, and his friends Cubby and Izzy, who live on Pirate Island off the coast of Never Land, and spend their time thwarting the…
drorzel | March 30, 2012One of the slighter slight flaws in my character is an unaccountable fondness for bad Americanized Chinese food. When I go to Starbucks to write, I walk right past a Chinese buffet restaurant, and it's a real effort not to run in and overdo it.
I occasionally try to cook stuff in this general category at home, with fairly mixed results. One thing that I've often tried to do at home is fried rice, with fairly mixed results, mostly because I don't generally have the right kind of rice on had (we mostly use medium grain rice from the "Hispanic" section of the supermarket, for no really well…
drorzel | February 5, 2012Like many Americans, I'm going to be hugely preoccupied today. Thus, a poll for your blog-like entertainment needs:
The Super Bowl is today. Who's going to win?
If you choose the last option, please arrange to have contacted me in the past to tell me who to have laid a significant bet on so I will have won a large sum of money.
drorzel | December 13, 2011And what happened then?
Well, in Who-ville they say
That the Grinch's small heart
Grew three sizes that day.
And then the true meaning
Of Christmas came through
And the Grinch found the strength
Of ten Grinches, plus two
-- Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas
It's nearly Christmas, so SteelyKid keeps demanding to watch the two classic Christmas specials we have recorded, Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Watching these over and over again, my thoughts naturally turn to physics, and what sort of physics you could do with these shows.
The…
drorzel | August 30, 2011I get a lot of publicist-generated email these days, asking me to promote something or another on the blog. Most of these I ignore-- far too many of them are for right-wing political candidates-- but I got one a little while back promoting a program airing tonight, called Project Shiphunt, which included a link to watch a preview of the show. And since I needed stuff to watch on my laptop while SteelyKid falls asleep, I checked it out, and it's pretty good.
As the title suggests, it's a show about finding a sunken ship. Specifically, finding a sunken ship in Lake Huron, that went down a…
drorzel | August 29, 2011My father's a huge fan of the Weather Channel, something I've never really gotten into. I did watch a bunch of its hurricane coverage on Sunday, though, trying to figure out how my travel was going to be affected. Thus, I got to see a really fabulous exchange as the studio anchor tossed to a field reporter on a boardwalk in New York City after learning that the storm had been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm. Paraphrasing from memory:
ANCHOR: [Reporter], we've just learned that Irene has been downgraded to a tropical storm. Has that changed anything where you are?
REPORTER: […