November 19, 2016
People have been raving about the new movie Arrival, which is an adaptation of Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," which I did a guest lecture on for a colleague's class on science fiction some year ago. It's unusual enough to see a science fiction movie hailed for being smart that Kate and I…
November 12, 2016
I'm teaching introductory mechanics for the umpteenth time, using the Matter and Interactions curriculum, as we have for a while. This is going to be my last time teaching out of M&I, though, because last year the department decided to switch to a different book. Starting this winter term, we'…
November 12, 2016
Here's a thought that occurred to me during one of this week's sleepless nights: Donald Trump is Marion Barry for rural white people.
That's probably too cryptic for a lot of people, since I'm now an old man who yells at clouds, but what I'm referring to is Barry's second election as mayor of DC,…
November 3, 2016
As the post title says, it's been a whole two months since the last time I did a round-up of my physics blog posts for Forbes. That's less content than you might think, though, because with the new academic term starting and some deadlines I had for other stuff, I posted basically nothing for most…
October 20, 2016
As I've mentioned several times, I just finished a two-month sentence on a grand jury in Schenectady County (well, technically, I have to go back for one more day, because they didn't finish everything). I'm not allowed to talk about the details of the cases we heard, but I have some general…
September 25, 2016
Back before The Pip was born, our previous departmental administrative assistant used to bug me-- in a friendly way-- about how Kate and I ought to have another kid. (She had two kids of her own, about two years apart in age.) "When are you guys going to have another baby?" she would ask, and I…
September 21, 2016
There's a piece in Inside Higher Ed today on yet another study showing that student course evaluations don't correlate with student learning. For a lot of academics, the basic reaction to this is summed up in the Chuck Pearson tweet that sent me to the story: "Haven't we settled this already?"
The…
September 18, 2016
A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to speak on a panel about teaching during Union's new-faculty orientation. We had one person from each of the academic divisions (arts and literature, social science, natural science, and engineering), and there was a ton of overlap in the things we said, but here…
September 12, 2016
And now, the photo-a-day project straggles in to the finish line, with a final five photos dominated by the kids:
362/366: Kid Art I
A set of figures drawn by The Pip at day care over the summer.
363/366: Kid Art II
Awesome owl drawing by SteelyKid.
One of the official end of summer…
September 11, 2016
Another day, another batch of photos from August.
353/366: Trail Blaze
One lost sock next to the hiking path in the Reist bird sanctuary.
This is actually a slight reversal of chronology, as the hike through Vischer's Ferry was the day after I went for a hike in the H. G. Reist Wildlife…
September 10, 2016
Another in the sadly delayed wrapping-up of my photo-a-day project. These are all pictures from a hike in the Vischer Ferry Nature Preserve over in Clifton Park. We took the kids over there one time, but a thunderstorm started coming in before we got very far. While the kids were at my parents', I…
September 8, 2016
I've got a big backlog of photo-a-day pictures, but finding time to edit and post them is a major challenge. I've got nearly all the editing done, now, so I'll start putting blocks of stuff up when I have time (generally very early in the morning, as I'm awake before everyone else in Chateau…
August 31, 2016
It's been a while since the last Forbes links dump, but since it's the last day of the month, I figure I might as well sum up a bit. Only two posts, but they have a connection that I'll expound on a bit to make up for the lack of material...
-- Can A Tesla Model S Really Accelerate Faster Than…
August 21, 2016
It's been over a month since I did a photo-a-day post, largely because I haven't been taking many pictures for a variety of reasons. I do still mean to get a year's worth of good photos done, but the "daily" part has completely disintegrated at this point.
As a way of getting somewhat back on…
August 12, 2016
Several weeks of silence here, for a bunch of reasons that mostly boil down to "being crazy busy." I've got a bunch of physics posts over at Forbes during that interval, though:
-- The Camera Trick That Justifies The Giant Death Star: I busted out camera lenses and the kids' toys to show how you…
July 20, 2016
It's been a month since the last links dump of posts from Forbes, though, really, I took a couple of weeks off there, so it's been less than that in terms of active blogging time. But I've put up a bunch of stuff in July, so here are some links:
-- The Physics Of Ancient Roman Architecture: First…
July 15, 2016
A delayed photo dump this week, because I was solo-parenting last week while Kate was traveling for work, and then I took the sillyheads down to Long Island to visit my grandmother while Kate was at Readercon. Recovering from all that took a lot of time, plus there was a bunch of computer wrangling…
July 14, 2016
A question for the more politically plugged-in folks out there: If I want to donate money this election cycle, who should I be looking at giving it to?
OK, that probably needs some unpacking, but given Internet attention spans, I wanted to get the basic question right up front before a passing…
July 5, 2016
Periodically, some scientific celebrity from the physical sciences-- Neil deGrasse Tyson or Stephen Hawking, say-- will say something dismissive about philosophy, and kick off a big rush of articles about how dumb their remarks are, how important philosophy is, and so on. Given that this happens on…
July 3, 2016
A while back, I went down to Vroman's Nose in Middleburgh to go for a hike, and found a sign saying that peregrine falcons are known to nest on the cliffs. Since the peregrine falcon is SteelyKid's absolute favorite bird, and the subject of her school research project, this seemed like a good…
June 29, 2016
When I was going through the huge collection of photos I have from the Forum in Rome, I kept running across pictures containing two young Asian women (neither of them Kate). This isn't because I was stalking them, but because they were everywhere, stopping for long periods in front of virtually…
June 27, 2016
Kate and I spent last week in Rome, to attend the wedding of a friend of mine from college, who was marrying an Italian woman. I've always wanted to see Rome, so this was a great excuse, and of course I took a lot of pictures-- over 1,600 all told.
This happens in part because when I'm visiting a…
June 18, 2016
As of today, I can officially no longer claim to be in my "early 40's," so here's a great song with a thematically appropriate title:
(The lyrical content has no particular relevance to my life, I hasten to add...)
I'm taking a bit of a social-media hiatus at the moment, but it is very nice to see…
June 17, 2016
The NPR program Here and Now has been running segments this week on Science in America, and one of these from yesterday featured me talking about science literacy. We had some technical difficulties getting this recorded-- it was supposed to happen at a local radio studio last week, but they had…
June 17, 2016
Another week, another batch of photos. This is coming on Friday rather than the weekend because I'm going to be incommunicado for most of the next week, and have some free time now.
284/366: LIGO, Eat Your Heart Out
Gravity wave clouds above our house.
Sure, LIGO detected gravitational waves…
June 12, 2016
Shortened "week" this week, because I did the last photo dump on Tuesday. 80% of these are also from a single day, this Friday, when I decided to call a Mental Health Day and get away from stuff that was annoying me by driving down to Scoharie County to hike up Vroman's Nose.
279/366: Road
Rt. 30…
June 9, 2016
Another few weeks of physics blogging at Forbes, collected here for your convenience.
-- Commercialization Of Space: Three Cheers For The Mundane: Some belated but brief comments on the SpaceApps conference I went to down in NYC.
-- How Studying Atoms On Earth Helps Us Learn About Other Planets: As…
June 7, 2016
The Pip is nuts about superheroes, so when he and his speech teacher made a book, naturally, it introduced a new super hero: Lightning Bolt. It's only a couple of sheets of paper folded in half and stapled, and the text and illustrations were done by his teacher, but the contents are 100% our…
June 6, 2016
Last in a series of themed collections of pictures. These ones are showcasing my rudimentary GIMP skills, pasting together multiple pictures into composites.
276/366: Sky-Bison for Scale
One of the earliest happenings in the three-week period I'm dumping photos from was SteelyKid getting strep…
June 6, 2016
This one, we'll do sorta-kinda chronologically:
268/366: Niska-Parade
Why is it always bagpipes?
One of the big temporal landmarks of the recent stretch without photo-blogging posts was "Niska-Day," the annual community festival here. This kicks off with a parade, the route for which comes right…
