September 3, 2015
Last weekend, while the kids were at my parents', Kate and I decided to go over to Williamstown and look at some art. We originally intended to go to the Clark Art Institute, but it was mobbed, so we drove on to MassMoCA instead.
I told several different people about that, all of whom said "Oh, did…
September 2, 2015
I spent a while this morning typing on my laptop on the deck, and brought the new camera out with me for occasional procrastination. The shady spot at that hour has a nice view of the bird feeder, and I snapped a few shots of these guys feeding (using a telephoto lens):
Two birds on our backyard…
September 2, 2015
Slate's been doing a series about college classes everyone should take, and one of the most heavily promoted of these has been a piece by Dan Check urging students to take something they're terrible at. This is built around an amusing anecdote about an acting class he took back in the day, but as…
September 1, 2015
Today, I officially stopped being department chair, and started my sabbatical leave. I also acquired a new toy:
My new camera, taken with the old camera.
My old DSLR camera, a Canon Rebel XSi that I got mumble years ago, has been very good for over 20,000 pictures, but a few things about it were…
August 30, 2015
So, the Hugo awards were handed out a little while ago, with half of the prose fiction categories going to "No Award" and the other half to works I voted below "No Award." Whee. I'm not really interested in rehashing the controversy, though I will note that Abigail Nussbaum's take is probably the…
August 28, 2015
SteelyKid starts second grade next week, and her summer project was to read Julius, the Baby of the World and make a poster with baby pictures of herself. This, of course, led to looking at a lot of old photos of SteelyKid, including many of the Baby Blogging shots I took back in the day with Appa…
August 28, 2015
I seem to be settling into a groove of doing about two posts a week at Forbes, which isn't quite enough to justify a weekly wrap-up, but works well bi-weekly. (I'm pretty sure that's the one that means "every two weeks" not "twice a week," but I always struggle with that one...) Over the last…
August 25, 2015
A couple of articles came across my feeds in the last day or two that highlight the truly important cultural divide in academia. Not the gap between sciences and "humanities," but the much greater divide between faculty and administration. This morning, we have an Inside Higher Ed essay from Kellie…
August 14, 2015
I forgot to do this last week, because I was busy preparing for SteelyPalooza on Saturday, but here are links to my recent physics posts over at Forbes:
-- What 'Ant-Man' Gets Wrong About The Real Quantum Realm: On the way home from the Schrödinger Sessions, I had some time to kill so I stopped to…
August 12, 2015
Over in Tumblr-land, Ben Lillie has an interesting post on all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes of a science talk. It's an intimidatingly long list of stuff, in quite a range of different areas. But this is a solved problem in other performance fields:
And that raises and interesting…
August 10, 2015
I was staring out the diner window, watching it rain, when Jimmy the werewolf slid into the booth behind me. “We got trouble, boss,” he said, and I spilled coffee over the back of my hand.
“Asshole,” I said, not turning around. “How about a little warning next time?”
“Don’t want to let on I know…
August 7, 2015
Today is SteelyKid's seventh birthday, which she's been counting down to for a good while. It's a little hard to believe it's seven years since she was substantially smaller than her stuffed Appa toy.
She's become quite a handful in that time, with boundless energy apparently derived from…
August 7, 2015
There's a new Science Express paper on interfering clocks today, which is written up in Physics World, with comments from yours truly. The quote is from a much longer message I sent-- with no expectation that it would end up as anything other than a pull quote, I might add, but I thought the…
August 6, 2015
Last weekend was our APS-funded outreach workshop The Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction, held at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland. The workshop offered a three-day "crash course" on quantum physics to 17 science fiction writers from a variety of media-- we…
July 22, 2015
Having mentioned in yesterday's post that I'll be on sabbatical for the next academic year, this would probably be a good time to point out that this means I'm somewhat more flexible than usual in terms of going places and giving talks. And I enjoy going places and giving talks. About lots of…
July 21, 2015
This past academic year was my 14th as a professor at Union, and my last as department chair. I'm on sabbatical for the 2015-16 academic year, doing my very best to avoid setting foot in an academic building, so it will be September 2016 before I'm teaching a class again. This seems like a good…
July 17, 2015
Another week, another set of posts at Forbes to link here:
-- Why Do Solids Have Energy Bands? A conceptual explanation of why putting together lots of atoms with electrons in well-defined energy levels leads to a solid with electrons filling broad energy bands.
-- This Is The Key Distinction…
July 10, 2015
The big development of the week is that I bought a new car, as seen in the featured image. This ate up most of Tuesday, but I still got some quality physics blogging in over at Forbes:
-- The Basic Science Behind Creating Colors: A look at two quantum-mechanical phenomena and one quirk of biology…
July 4, 2015
Seveneves is the latest from Neal Stephenson, and true to form is a whopping huge book-- 700-something "pages" in electronic form-- and contains yet another bid for "best first paragraph ever":
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full.…
July 3, 2015
Another busy week of physics-y blogging over at Forbes. I'm pretty bad about remembering to post pointers to individual posts here, but I can probably just about manage to do a weekly links dump of what I've been posting.
-- What's The Point Of Science Without "Eureka!" Moments? Picking up on a…
June 29, 2015
I've been doing a bunch of conferencing recently, what with DAMOP a few weeks ago and then Convergence last week. This prompted me to write up a couple of posts about conference-related things, which I posted over at Forbes. These were apparently a pretty bad fit for the folks reading over there,…
June 28, 2015
This went around a different corner of my social-media universe while I was off in Waterloo, away from my iTunes. I was curious about it, though, so looked at the contents of the "25 Most Played" playlist, and having done that, I might as well post them here (the number in parentheses is the number…
June 27, 2015
I've been pretty quiet about educational matters of late, for the simple reason that I was too busy teaching to say much. The dust having settled a bit, though, I thought I would put some notes here about what I did this past term, and what worked.
I had two sections of the introductory Newtonian…
June 25, 2015
I spent the last few days in Ontario, attending the Convergence meeting at the Perimeter Institute. This brought a bunch of Perimeter alumni and other big names together for a series of talks and discussions about the current state and future course of physics.
My role at this was basically to…
June 21, 2015
Act I:
STEELYKID and THE PIP: Happy Father's Day, Daddy!
DADDY: Aww, that's sweet. So, what are you going to make me for breakfast?
STEELYKID and THE PIP: What?
DADDY: It's father's day, right? So you guys should be cooking breakfast for me.
STEELYKID and THE PIP: No!!!!
THE PIP: We can't cook…
June 19, 2015
I've been really busy with year-end wrap-up stuff, but have also posted a bunch of stuff at Forbes. which I've fallen down on my obligation to promote here... So, somewhat belatedly, here's a collection of physics-y stuff that I've written recently:
-- Using Atoms To Measure Tiny Forces: A post…
June 16, 2015
Matt "Dean Dad" Reed is moving to New Jersey, and confronting one of the great dilemmas of parenting (also at Inside Higher Ed): what school district to live in. This is a big problem for lots of academics of a liberal sort of persuasion:
From a pure parental perspective, the argument for getting…
June 14, 2015
Commencement was today, the 14th of those that I've been to as a faculty member. As usual, the procession was led in and out by the Schenectady Pipe Band; I realized that after many years of this, I'm coming to associate "Scotland the Brave" with graduation...
This was a really unpleasant year for…
June 9, 2015
I'm at DAMOP this week, though it took longer to get here than it should've-- severe storms yesterday canceled the flight I was supposed to take from Baltimore to Columbus, so I had to rebook to the 6am departure this morning, whee. I think this is the first time I've ever had a flight canceled…
June 7, 2015
Engaging in a bit of tab clearance before I head off to DAMOP tomorrow afternoon, I noticed that I still had How to Teach an Ancient Rape Joke open. This is because while I found it kind of fascinating, it's not all that directly relevant to what I do, and I didn't have anything all that concrete…
