February 10, 2015
I've done yet another piece for The Conversation, this one expanding on something I've been saying in interviews promoting Eureka: that knowing the process of science can help people sort good science from bad. In this particular case, I take the somewhat #slatepitch-y angle that the recent high-…
February 9, 2015
I was going to let Andrew Sullivan's departure from blogging pass without comment-- I haven't been a regular reader of his stuff in around ten years, after all-- but a couple of mysterious guys in dark suits showed up at the house and pointed out that as someone who started blogging in 2002, I…
February 8, 2015
This was a good week for "Chad bristles at side issues of massively reshared stories," with the Vox and gender bias stories, and also this PBS piece urging parents to tell their kids science stories. That probably seems surprising, given what I do around here, but while I fully endorse the end of…
February 7, 2015
I've seen a lot of reshares of this report about the long-term effect of gender bias in elementary math, which comes from an NBER working paper about a study of Israeli schools. The usual presentation highlights one specific result, namely that on a math test graded by teachers who knew the names…
February 6, 2015
I've seen a bunch of re-shares of this Vox profile of a "Men's Rights Activist" on various social media channels, with reactions varying from "This is fascinating" to "Boooo-ring." I thought it was sort of interesting, but not really in the way it was intended to be. The thing I found most striking…
February 5, 2015
(When I launched the Advent Calendar of Science Stories series back in December, I had a few things in mind, but wasn’t sure I’d get through 24 days. In the end, I had more than enough material, and in fact didn’t end up using a few of my original ideas. So I’ll do a few additional posts, on an…
February 4, 2015
Probably the dumbest person I've ever met in my life was a housemate in grad school. I didn't do my lab work on campus, so I wasn't living in a neighborhood where cheap housing was rented to students, but in a place where folks were either genuinely poor, or in the market for very temporary…
February 3, 2015
It didn't make the news, because skittish media types are mostly based in New York City and thus don't care about anything north of Westchester County, but we had a big snow storm yesterday. It started snowing Sunday night, though, and kept up through pretty much dinnertime Monday. Both the local…
February 3, 2015
Over at Scientific American's Frontiers for Young Minds blog, they have a great post on what happens when you ask scientists to explain key elements of a different research field. It's pretty funny, and rings very true, as SteelyKid asks me tons of science questions, very few of which have anything…
February 2, 2015
(When I launched the Advent Calendar of Science Stories series back in December, I had a few things in mind, but wasn't sure I'd get through 24 days. In the end, I had more than enough material, and in fact didn't end up using a few of my original ideas. So I'll do a few additional posts, on an…
February 2, 2015
The ending of last night's Super Bowl couldn't've been more perfect as a demonstration of the point I was making about scientific thinking in football (and, you know, in that book I keep flogging...). First, on the positive side, you have New England's Malcolm Butler making the key play:
"I knew…
January 30, 2015
I wrote up another piece about football for the Conversation, this time drawing on material from Eureka, explaining how great football players are using scientific thinking:
Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman gets called a lot of things. He calls himself the greatest cornerback in the NFL…
January 29, 2015
Math with Bad Drawings has a post about "word problems" that will sound very familiar to anyone who's taught introductory physics. As he notes, the problem with "word problems" for math-phobic students is that it requires translating words into symbols, and then using the symbols to select a…
January 28, 2015
Over at Curious Wavefunction, Ashutosh Jogalekar offers a list of great surprising results in physics. This is fairly comprehensive, but leaves out one of my favorites, which is the discovery of the muon. Muons are particles like electrons, but a couple hundred times heavier. When they were first…
January 27, 2015
I know I said I was done with this story, but this was actually recorded last week: The Daily Planet show on Discovery Channel in Canada contacted me last week when all this deflated-football silliness was exploding, and got a cameraman to come over and record me talking about it. The episode aired…
January 26, 2015
Tonight's bedtime stories included two books involving flying characters: Foo, the Flying Frog of Washtub Pond (in which the title character gets blown into the sky by a gust of wind), and The Magic Brush. The latter is a dead-grandparent book, but ends with a cheerful picture of the kids reunited…
January 26, 2015
While I've managed to generate a lot of blog traffic talking about football, I sort of suck at turning that into book sales. Sigh. I am, however, continuing to do interviews in support of Eureka: discovering Your Inner Scientist, the most recent of which is this one with WICN's Inquiry, hosted by…
January 25, 2015
I've mentioned in a few places that SteelyKid frequently comes home from school/ camp/ day care singing garbled versions of current pop hits. So for the first time since about 1990, I added a Top 40 station to my car radio presets, so I would know what she was actually trying to sing. This leads to…
January 25, 2015
The low-level cold I've been nursing for a month now finally exploded into the full unpleasantness of my usual winter illness Saturday, or else I would've been more active following up on my Deflategate article and my ideal gas law post. As it was, for most of the day, I could barely keep on top of…
January 23, 2015
So, as mentioned yesterday, I got an email asking me about the weird scandal involving the Patriots and underinflated footballs, so I wrote a piece for the Conversation on the subject. since a few people had beaten me to citations of the Ideal Gas Law, though, I decided to bring my own particular…
January 22, 2015
One of the cool things about working at Union is that the Communications office gets media requests looking for people to comment on current events, which sometimes get forwarded to me. Yesterday was one of those days, with a request for a scientist to comment on the bizarre sports scandal…
January 22, 2015
One of my favorite Christmas presents this year was a Seek Thermal camera to use with my Android phone. This allows for a lot of idle physics-y fun, taking pictures of things in thermal mode.
One idea I had was to do a sort of follow-up to the test of my insulated mug that I did a couple of years…
January 21, 2015
Having made several mentions here of the two tenure-track faculty positions we were trying to fill, I feel like I ought to at least note the completion of the search. As of last Friday, all the papers have been signed with properly dotted i's and crossed t's, and we have two new tenure-track…
January 20, 2015
(When I launched the Advent Calendar of Science Stories series back in December, I had a few things in mind, but wasn't sure I'd get through 24 days. In the end, I had more than enough material, and in fact didn't end up using a few of my original ideas. So I'll do a few additional posts, on an…
January 20, 2015
(That title doesn't quite scan as is, but if you stick an "a" in there, you can sing it to the tune of a song from "Fiddler on the Roof"... You're welcome.)
The last time I taught my "Brief History of Timekeeping" seminar was in 2012, so I spent a bunch of time on the Mayan calendar. This time…
January 16, 2015
I'm teaching my "Brief History of Timekeeping" class again this term, and as always, I'm tweaking things a bit. This is one of our "Sophomore Research Seminar" courses, intended to introduce students to academic research, so it's not specifically a physics class, but I'm choosing to take the…
January 15, 2015
SteelyKid missed the bus this morning-- she was dressed and ready, but I was talking to Kate, and if there isn't a person at the end of the driveway when the bus comes around the corner, they won't stop. So I drove her over to school myself (which is faster, anyway). The GE research lab complex is…
January 15, 2015
"Daddy, ask me a math problem."
"OK. What's 18 plus 6?"
"Ummm... 24."
"Correct."
"See, I just keep the 18 and then add 2 from the 6 to get 20. That leaves 4 from the six, and 20 plus 4 is 24."
"Right. Good work."
------
"Hey, SteelyKid. What's 120 plus 180?"
"Ummm... 300."
"Very good!"
"I just…
January 13, 2015
Yesterday's Open Letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson struck a chord with a lot of people, and has spread a good distance on social media, which is gratifying. Given the delocalized nature of modern social media, though, it means I'm having essentially the same argument in five different places via…
January 13, 2015
(When I launched the Advent Calendar of Science Stories series back in December, I had a few things in mind, but wasn't sure I'd get through 24 days. In the end, I had more than enough material, and in fact didn't end up using a few of my original ideas. So I'll do a few additional posts, on an…
