July 23, 2011
Quantum Diaries
At the moment anyone who has even a passing interest in particle physics is thinking about the results being presented that European Physical Society High Energy Physics 2011 conference (referred to as simply "EPS".) It is at EPS that we hear news about the search the Higgs boson…
July 22, 2011
The final Space Shuttle landed the other day, leading to much lamentation over the end of the program, all over the Internet. It was absolutely choking my Twitter feeds for a while, which is mostly what I was thinking about when I re-tweeted this snide comment from Robert Lamb (though, to be fair,…
July 22, 2011
If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault - Anil Dash
"As it turns out, we have a way to prevent gangs of humans from acting like savage packs of animals. In fact, we've developed entire disciplines based around this goal over thousands of years. We just ignore most of the lessons that…
July 21, 2011
SteelyKid's "no pictures" phase continues, meaning that I have to do things like snapping low-light pictures of her after she falls asleep:
I used a really wide aperture lens for this-- waking her up with the flash would be the end of the world-- and had to process the hell out of it to get the…
July 21, 2011
It's really frickin' hot in much of the US. Fortunately, we have central air at home, A/C in the car, and convenient local businesses with air conditioning and free wi-fi. The inadequate HVAC systems in the Science and Engineering building on campus aren't anywhere near being able to cope with this…
July 21, 2011
A lot of pixels have been spilled lamenting the death of Borders books, a rather large fraction of them being used to say stupid things. Particularly in the "they killed off independent bookstores so good riddance to them" vein-- it's great that you lived in a place that had good indie bookstores…
July 21, 2011
Towards an Opt-Out Button in Left-Liberal Debates | Easily Distracted
"Here's what I want and I think maybe a lot of people, both Americans and otherwise, want. I want what my colleagues Barry Schwartz and Ken Sharpe call "good enough". I don't want to grab for the brass ring, be the alpha male,…
July 20, 2011
Keeping the week's unofficial education theme, Kevin Drum posts about the latest "kids these days" study, namely the just-released NAEP Geography results. Kevin makes a decent point about the 12th grade questions being fairly sophisticated, but includes one comment that struck me as off base:
I…
July 20, 2011
One of the standard education reform proposals that gets suggested every time somebody brings up the condition of American public education is that teachers should be offered some form of performance incentive, whether in the form of "merit pay" programs on a continuing basis, or bonuses for…
July 20, 2011
The Strategic Plan: Neither Strategy Nor Plan, but a Waste of Time - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education
"This interchangeability of visions for the future underscores the fact that the precise content of most colleges' strategic plans is pretty much irrelevant. Plans are usually…
July 19, 2011
I've been going through the manuscript for the book making up a list of glossary words (a frighteningly long list), and also noting miscellaneous pop-cultural references-- quotes, direct mentions, paraphrases, etc. I'm sure I've missed a few-- many of them occur in section titles, which my eyes…
July 19, 2011
A lot of pixels have been spent discussing this study of grade inflation, brought to most people's attention via this New York Times blog. The key graph is this one, showing the fraction of grades given in each letter category over the last fifty years:
Lots of effort is being put into trying to…
July 19, 2011
Views: Perspective in Math and Art - Inside Higher Ed
"As a mathematician, I expect that people at parties will tell me that they're no good at math. I'm used to my fellow professors confessing their ignorance of my subject. I understand that many of my students think math is hard and scary. That…
July 18, 2011
(A white house, Niskayuna, NY) Negotiations stalled for the 125th consecutive minute, dashing early hopes that a compromise might be reached in the tense talks that have gripped this otherwise quiet suburban neighborhood.
As the crisis enters its third hour, both sides reiterated their long-…
July 18, 2011
This past weekend, Kate and I were at Readercon, a SF convention outside Boston. This particular con is, as the name suggests, very literary in nature, and features a lot of panels of a more academic inclination. Unfortunately, my feelings about the humanities side of academia are in the "Oh,…
July 17, 2011
As many a thoughtless person has observed when learning what I do for a living, physics is really hard. But you may have wondered just how much harder is physics than other subjects? Well, now, we have a quantitative answer:
This is a shelf of books at the Burlington, MA Barnes and Noble, clearly…
July 15, 2011
Prompted by this and this, among other things, one of the critical questions of the modern age:
Harry Potter is a:
Magic is a classical phenomenon, no matter what you may have heard, so you can choose one and only one option.
July 15, 2011
Yesterday's foray into procrastination by mathematical modeling forced me to shift some actual work into the evening hours, which meant that I completely forgot about Toddler Blogging. Which is fine, because lately SteelyKid has been reacting to cameras in approximately the same way as the…
July 15, 2011
Guest Blog: Why Is Quantum Gravity So Hard? And Why Did Stalin Execute the Man Who Pioneered the Subject?
In fact, the field of quantum gravity was born in 1916, even before physicists had properly explained the other fundamental forces, electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. Twenty years later…
July 14, 2011
I really ought to be doing other things, but this roller slide business kept nagging at me, and I eventually realized I could mock up a crude simulation of the results. This led to the production of this graph:
This looks pretty similar to the Tracker Video data from the previous post, which I'll…
July 14, 2011
On Monday, I posted a short video and asked about the underlying physics. Here's the clip again, showing SteelyKid and then me going down a slide made up of a whole bunch of rollers at a local playground:
The notable thing about this is that SteelyKid takes a much, much longer time to get down the…
July 14, 2011
Via Jessa Crispin on Twitter, there's a really excellent article in the Paris Review about Harvard and Class:
When I applied, I thought it would be great because I would get to meet lots of smart people. Those were the kinds of people I liked to be friends with, and I thought there would be more of…
July 14, 2011
Jamie Leigh Jones verdict: Jury trials aren't always satisfying, but they're better than angry mobs. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine
As Alan Dershowitz explained last week: "A criminal trial is never about seeking justice for the victim. If it were, there could be only one verdict: guilty.…
July 13, 2011
Last week Doug Natelson noted a drop-off in active physics blogs. This had not gone unnoticed hereabouts, though I couldn't immediately think of what to say about that. Yesterday, though, former ScienceBlogs wrangler Christopher Mims provided a possible answer: Google+ has destroyed blogging…
July 13, 2011
Like a lot of people in SF/ Fantasy circles, I stayed up late reading last night. Unlike most of those people, though, what I was reading was not A Dance with Dragons from George R. R. Martin, but Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson, the sequel to Spin and Axis, concluding a series that he said in 2007…
July 13, 2011
Counting Crows' Recovering The Satellites | Music | We're No. 1 | The A.V. Club
"Recovering The Satellites is easily my favorite Counting Crows album, precisely because it's the record where Duritz went from wanting to be a big star (or so he sang in "Mr. Jones") to equating his celebrity with…
July 12, 2011
Among the articles highlighted in this week's Physics is one about a new test of QED through a measurement of the g-factor of the electron in silicon ions. This comes on the heels of a measurement of proton spin flips (this includes a free PDF) a couple of weeks ago, and those, in turn, build on…
July 12, 2011
A month and a half ago, I reported on a simple experiment to measure the performance of a timer from the teaching labs. I started the timer running at a particualr time, and over the next couple of weeks checked in regularly with the Official US Time display at the NIST website, recording the delay…
July 12, 2011
RESEARCH | MATTHEW B. THOMPSON
Like many interesting scientific discoveries, this one was an accident. Sean Murphy, an undergraduate student, was working alone in the lab on a set of faces for one of his experiments. He aligned a set of faces at the eyes and started to skim through them. After a…
July 11, 2011
(Note: This was not prompted by any particular comment. Just a slow accumulation of stuff, that turned into a blog post on this morning's dog walk.)
It's been a couple of years now that I've been working on writing and promoting How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, so I've had a lot of conversations…
