October 31, 2017
ScienceBlogs is coming to an end. I don't know that there was ever a really official announcement of this, but the bloggers got email a while back letting us know that the site will be closing down. I've been absolutely getting crushed between work and the book-in-progress and getting Charlie the…
October 30, 2017
It's been a couple of years since we lost the Queen of Niskayuna, and we've held off getting a dog until now because we were planning a big home renovation-- adding on to the mud room, creating a new bedroom on the second floor, and gutting and replacing the kitchen. This was quite the undertaking…
September 1, 2017
Another month, another set of blog posts. This one includes the highest traffic I think I've ever seen for a post, including the one that started me on the path to a book deal:
-- The ALPHA Experiment Records Another First In Measuring Antihydrogen: The good folks trapping antimatter at CERN have…
August 22, 2017
I keep falling down on my duty to provide cute-kid content, here; I also keep forgetting to post something about a nerdy bit of our morning routine. So, let's maximize the bird-to-stone ratio, and do them at the same time.
The Pip can be a Morning Dude at times, but SteelyKid is never very happy to…
August 13, 2017
Our big home renovation has added a level of chaos to everything that's gotten in the way of my doing more regular cute-kid updates. And even more routine tasks, like photographing the giant pile of kid art that we had to move out of the dining room. Clearing stuff up for the next big stage of the…
August 8, 2017
Another month, another collection of blog posts for Forbes:
-- The Physics Of Century-Old Mirror Selfies: Back in the early 1900's there was a brief vogue for trick pictures showing the same person from five different angles; this post explains how to do that with mirrors.
-- Why Research By…
July 8, 2017
So, when last I posted an update on kid stuff, we were about to embark for a week in Mexico with family. As you would expect, I have a huge pile of pictures from this, but most of the cute-kid shots feature the kids with their cousins from Illinois, and I try to avoid posting photos of other people…
July 2, 2017
To make up for last month's long delay in posting, I'll knock out this month's recap of Forbes blog posts really quickly. Also, I still have Vacation Brain, so writing anything really new isn't in the cards...
-- What Should Non-Scientists Learn From Physics?: You probably won't be surprised to…
June 20, 2017
Much delayed, but this works out well because it'll give you something to read while we're away in Mexico on a family vacation. Here's what I wrote for Forbes in the merry month of May:
-- In Science, Probability Is More Certain Than You Think: Some thoughts on the common mistake people make in…
June 19, 2017
I've skipped a few weeks of cute-kid updates, largely because I was at DAMOP for a week, and then catching on stuff I missed while I was at DAMOP for a week. The principal activity during this stretch has been SteelyKid's softball, with a mad flurry of games at the end of the season to make up for…
June 1, 2017
We took a rare long weekend to go to a family party for Memorial Day at my parents' (Kate and the kids always get the day off, but I usually have to teach; this year, I'm doing a team-taught class, and the other person was willing to cover my Monday spot), thus the lack of a weekly update post. The…
May 25, 2017
During my sabbatical last year, I decided to try to do a photo-a-day project, taking and sharing at least one good picture a day of something or another. The strict photo-a-day format fell victim to my general busy-ness and disorganization, but I did eventually complete the whole thing. In the…
May 21, 2017
The big development of this week is that construction started on the Great Chateau Steelypips Renovation of 2017. We're extending one part of the back of the house about ten feet to gain a bedroom on the second floor, and gut-renovating the kitchen, dining room, and mud room. This is a massive…
May 13, 2017
At SteelyKid's softball game today, the Pip provided an ideal cute-kid photo to use as a springboard to some SCIENCE! Or at least, a graph... Anyway, here's the Little Dude showing off how tall he's gotten:
The Pip under Kate's coat.
OK, really he's hiding under Kate's raincoat (after two…
May 7, 2017
For a long time now, I've had a Sunday routine with the kids, where we go to the Schenectady Greenmarket and then to the Open Door (which is right next to the outdoor market, and a couple blocks from the indoor location), then to lunch at Panera, and usually grocery shopping. We have a standing…
May 4, 2017
Inside Higher Ed ran a piece yesterday from a Ph.D. student pleading for more useful data about job searching:
What we need are professional studies, not just anecdotal advice columns, about how hiring committees separate the frogs from the tadpoles. What was the average publication count of tenure…
May 2, 2017
It's the first week of May, which means we're due to see flowers watered by all this damn rain soon, and also a recap of the various posts I wrote for Forbes during April:
-- Why Are There Too Many Papers In Theoretical Physics?: A look at the origins of "ambulance chasing" in high-energy theory,…
April 30, 2017
One of the things parents of multiple kids often talk about is how they don't end up doing the same things with second children that they did with their first. For example, I carried the weekly Appa-for-scale photos on with SteelyKid for a couple of years, but didn't last anywhere near that long…
April 3, 2017
Another month, another batch of blog posts at Forbes:
-- In Physics, Infinity Is Easy But Ten Is Hard: Some thoughts on the odd fact that powerful math tricks make it easy to deal uncountably many interacting particles, while a smaller number would be a Really Hard Problem.
-- New Experiment…
March 30, 2017
There was a kerfuffle in academic social media a bit earlier this week, kicked off by an anonymous Twitter feed dedicated to complaints about students (which I won't link to, as it's one of those stunt feeds that's mostly an exercise in maximizing clicks by maximizing dickishness). This triggered a…
March 24, 2017
I mentioned in passing in the Forbes post about science funding that I'm thoroughly sick of hearing about how the World Wide Web was invented at CERN. I got into an argument about this a while back on Twitter, too, but had to go do something else and couldn't go into much detail. It's probably…
March 24, 2017
A bunch of people in my social-media feeds are sharing this post by Alana Cattapan titled Time-sucking academic job applications don't know enormity of what they ask. It describes an ad asking for two sample course syllabi "not merely syllabi for courses previously taught -- but rather syllabi for…
March 6, 2017
Another month, another collection of physics posts from Forbes:
-- Quantum Loopholes And The Problem Of Free Will: In one of those odd bits of synchronicity, a previous post about whether dark matter and energy might affect atoms in a way that allowed for "free will" was followed shortly by a news…
February 2, 2017
It's a new month now, so it's time to share links to what I wrote for Forbes last month:
-- Small College Astronomers Predict Big Stellar Explosion: I mostly leave astronomy stories to others, but I heard about this from a friend at Calvin College, and it's a story that hits a lot of my pet issues…
February 1, 2017
So, I tweeted about this yesterday, but I also spent the entire day feeling achy and feverish, so didn't have brains or time for a blog post with more details. I'm feeling healthier this morning, though time is still short, so I'll give a quick summary of the details:
-- As you can see in the photo…
January 13, 2017
This one's late because I acquired a second class for the Winter term on very short notice. I was scheduled to teach our sophomore-level "Modern Physics" class, plus the lab, but a colleague who was scheduled to teach relativity for non-majors had a medical issue, and I'm the only other one on…
December 4, 2016
There are only a couple of bands I'd drive a significant distance to see live, and now I've made the trip to NYC to see two of them. I went to see the Afghan Whigs in 2014, and this past Friday, I drove to Brooklyn for a Hold Steady show. And this time, I have a cool picture as a bonus...
Me with…
December 1, 2016
I'm not posting as much as I did last year, when I was on sabbatical (gasp, shock, surprise), so making Forbes-blog links dump posts a monthly thing is probably just about sustainable.
-- What Math Do You Need For Physics? It Depends: Some thoughts about, well, the math you need to learn to be a…
December 1, 2016
This is going to be a bit of a rant, because there's a recurring theme in my recent social media that's really bugging me, and I need to vent. I'm going to do it as a blog post rather than an early-morning tweetstorm, because tweets are more likely to be pulled out of context, and then I'm going to…
November 22, 2016
At dinner the other night, Kate mentioned this podcast, which excerpts a bit of a Jon Brion interview from 2006 where he makes a distinction between "songs" and "performance pieces." As an example of the latter, he uses Led Zeppelin, saying that their recordings, as great as they are, are about…
