Pop Culture
drorzel | December 4, 2016There 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 Craig Finn of the Hold Steady.
The origin of the picture, obviously, needs a little explaining. The current set of shows is a four-night stand (originally three, but they added one after the first three sold out) at the Brooklyn Bowl, reuniting with keyboardist Franz Nicolay for the 10th…
drorzel | November 22, 2016At 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 those specific people in that specific time, and nobody is all that excited to hear reworked Led Zep covers.
It's an interesting claim, but I don't really agree (influenced in part by the fact that I don't especially care for the examples he uses as "songs"). I had a hard time coming up with a…
drorzel | November 19, 2016People 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 actually arranged a babysitter for the night, and caught it in the theater.
It's a surprisingly credible effort at adapting a story I would've guessed was unfilmable. I wasn't as blown away as a lot of the folks in my social media feed, though. I think that's largely because I'm too familiar with the…
drorzel | July 20, 2016It'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 of a couple posts inspired by our trip to Rome, this one looking at the basic mechanics of the key structural element of Roman building, the arch.
-- What Ancient Roman Buildings Teach Us About Science And Engineering: Second post about Roman construction, in which looking into the question of how…
drorzel | June 29, 2016When 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 every significant ruin and striking exaggerated poses for each other to take photos of. I had to carefully frame a few of my own photos to avoid them, but I did also take a few that deliberately included their posing, because it was so amusingly over the top.
Tourists taking photos of each other in…
drorzel | June 17, 2016The 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 some kind of glitch, so instead we did it via Skype from my office on campus. (Where there was some sort of heavy equipment running outside my window before and after the interview, but miraculously, they took a coffee break for the crucial fifteen minutes of the actual call...)
You can listen to the…
drorzel | June 7, 2016The 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 Little Dude, so I'll reproduce it here.
LIGHTNING BOLT by [The Pip] Orzel
[Illustration: Lightning bolt's Mask]
Alternate Identity Len Boom
Occupation: Scientist
Speciality: Studying super powers. In his lab there's a computer that can communicate with Lightning Bolt.
Home Town: Lightning Bolt City…
drorzel | May 22, 2016I've had this piece by Rick Borchelt on "science literacy" and this one by Paige Brown Jarreau on "echo chambers" open in tabs for... months. I keep them around because I have thoughts on the general subject, but I keep not writing them up because I suspect that what I want to say won't be read much, and I find it frustrating to put a lot of work into a blog post only to be greeted by crickets chirping.
But, now I find myself in a position where I sort of need to have a more thought-out version of the general argument. So I'm going to do a kind of slapdash blog post working this out as I type…
drorzel | May 19, 2016Noted grouchy person John Horgan has found a new way to get people mad at him on the Internet, via a speech-turned-blog-post taking organized Skeptic groups to task for mostly going after "soft targets". This has generated lots of angry blog posts in response, and a far greater number of people sighing heavily and saying "There Horgan goes again..."
If you want to read only one counter to Horgan's piece to get caught up, you could do a lot worse than reading Daniel Loxton's calm and measured response. Loxton correctly notes that Horgan's comments are nothing especially unique, just a variant…
drorzel | May 17, 2016It's one of those days where none of the stuff I probably ought to be writing seems even slightly appealing, so instead I'm going to do something frivolous and morale-boosting, namely think out loud about an imaginary course. Despite being on sabbatical, I do still check my work email, and have caught the edges of a new round of arguments about whether we're providing enough "Gen Ed" science courses pitched at non-majors. The hardest part of this is always meeting the "science with lab" component, because those courses are pretty resource-instensive, and we have a limited set of them that we…
drorzel | May 8, 2016The week leading up to our cruise was crazy busy for me, with a bunch of travel for work. Which means you get a collection of cell-phone snapshots from that week, since I didn't bring the good camera with me on all those trips.
229/366: Man the Barricades
SteelyKid and the Pip behind a wall of sticks.
There are some paths running into the woods near the kids' day care, and the older kids decided to wall one of these off by wedging sticks between trees on either side. Because kids. It's an impressive bit of work, until somebody huffs and puffs and blows it all down.
230/366: Quad
The…
drorzel | March 2, 2016Sunday was a beautiful day in Niskayuna, so after going to campus to deal with some paperwork, I went off to a park to take some pictures. There's a town park down on River Road that sits on a high and scenic bluff above the Mohawk, so I figured I'd give that a look. And, indeed, the view of the river is pretty.
But there are also these:
Apparently, I live near the set of a cult British SF show.
That's a fat piece of PVC pipe, painted bright green, rising about 7-8' from the ground. And there are a couple dozen of these dotting the hillside in the park.
I don't really have a clue what…
drorzel | March 1, 2016As you probably already know, last year we ran a workshop at the Joint Quantum Institute for science-fiction writers who would like to learn more about quantum physics. The workshop was a lot of fun from the speaker/oragnizer side, and very well received by last year's writers, so we're doing it again:
The Schrödinger Sessions is a three-day workshop for science fiction writers offering a “crash course” in modern physics, to be held at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), one of the world’s leading research centers for the study of quantum mechanics. We will introduce participants to…
drorzel | February 25, 2016The tagline up at the top of this blog promises "Physics, Politics, and Pop Culture," but unless you count my own photos as pop art, I've been falling down on the last of those. This is largely because, despite being on sabbatical, I've been so busy running after the kids that I don't have much time for pop culture. And also because this is kind of a frustrating pop-culture moment, with a number of media currently dominated by works that just aren't my thing.
That's a critical bit of context for my reaction to a recent Salon interview with music critic Jim Fusilli, which sports the headline "…
drorzel | February 23, 2016I feel a little bad sometimes that I don't really give the Pip his due on the blog. Back when SteelyKid was a toddler and pre-schooler, I had a lot more free time in which to transcribe the various conversations I had with her into super-cute blog posts. The Pip is in the same sort of stage now, and tells some amazing stories, but I have much less time, and by the time I do get free to get to the computer, I usually forget about it.
However, while cleaning up and photographing the Giant Shelf of Kid Art, I ran across a book that he made with... One of his preschool teachers, I guess, because…
drorzel | February 9, 2016As I go through my daily routine, I find myself sort of out of phase with a lot of the Internet. My peak online hours are from about six to ten in the morning, Eastern US time. That's when I get up, have breakfast, and then go to Starbucks to write for a few hours.
This means that most of the other people awake and active on my social media feeds are in Europe or Australia. And my standard writing time ends right around the time things start to heat up in the US. I do continue to have access to the Internet through the afternoon, of course, but unless I have a deadline coming up, I'm often…
drorzel | February 8, 2016I've been remiss in my self-promotional duties, but I'm giving a public lecture tomorrow night in Newport News, VA, as part of the Jefferson Lab Science Series. This will be my traditional "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk, with the sad addition of a slide honoring the late, great Queen of Niskayuna (visible as the "featured image" with this post). This isn't the first dog-physics talk I've given since her death in December, but the previous one was the relativity talk, which has less Emmy-specific content. This one includes one of the video clips I made around a dog…
sa smith | February 6, 2016Listen, nobody thinks the guy who 'cured Charlie Sheen of HIV' cured Charlie Sheen of HIV.
Even Charlie Sheen.
Dr Sam
I was with u in
Mexico for
1 day.
It's illegal for u
to practice in
U.S.A. where u
treated me for 2 months
© https://t.co/lKv6YPYdhm
— Charlie Sheen (@charliesheen) February 1, 2016
... But what if he could, tho?
What would this super awesome therapy THE MAN doesnt want you to know about look like? How would it work?
That would be a fun and educational game to play!
Okay, to play this game you first have to understand what 'CAEV' is. Caprine arthritis-encephalitis virus is a…
drorzel | February 5, 2016A long-ish stretch of time, but I was basically offline for a bunch of that because I needed to finish a chapter I was asked to contribute to an academic book. So there are only four physics posts from Forbes to promote this time:
-- 'The Expanse' Is A Rare Sci-Fi Show That Gets Simulated Gravity Right: Another post on the SyFy adaptation of "James S. A. Corey"'s books, talking about a nifty bit of visual effects that nods at the Coriolis force you'd see on a rotating space station.
-- What Is The Quantum Pigeonhole Principle And Why Is It Weird?: A paper published in the Proceedings of the…
drorzel | January 22, 2016The Center for Quantum Technologies is running a "Quantum Shorts" contest, where they solicited short stories exploring some aspect of quantum physics. They cut their large number of applicants down to two short-lists of ten, one for the "Open" category, and one for the "Youth" category. They'll be giving out a "People's Choice Award" based on Internet voting, so you can go over there and vote for your favorite.
There are also judged prizes, and I'm serving as a judge for the "Youth" category (and already sent in my rankings), so it would be inappropriate for me to plug any particular stories…