Pop Culture
drorzel | September 19, 2014After a long absence due to travel (some of which is discussed), Uncertain dots returns!
Rhett and I talk about recent travels, how people going into internet-based physics outreach these days would probably do better to make videos than blog, physics in science fiction, celestial navigation, and as always, our current courses.
Some links:
-- Our Eratosthenes measurement from 2012.
-- Divided by Infinity, the best Many-Worlds story ever.
-- Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" isn't legitimately available online, but there's a spoilery Wikipedia page about it.
-- An old post where I talk about…
drorzel | September 16, 2014The second one of the TED-Ed lessons I wrote about quantum physics has now been published: What Is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This is, again, very similar to stuff I've written before, specifically this old blog post and the relevant chapter of How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to Your Dog.
As usual, I tried but probably failed to do justice to other interpretations in the "Dig Deeper" references I sent; outraged Bohmians should feel free to comment either here or there with better explanations.
Again, it's really fun to see the images the animators found to put to my words. I love…
drorzel | September 15, 2014My TED@NYC adventure last fall didn't turn into an invite to the big TED meeting, but it did lead to a cool opportunity that is another of the very cool developments I've been teasing for a while now: I've written some scripts for lessons to be posted with TED-Ed. The first of these, on particle-wave duality just went live today.
The content here is very similar to my talk last fall, which is, in turn, very similar to Chapter 8 of Eureka: a historical survey of the development of quantum physics. I did the script for this, which was then turned over to professional animators, who did a great…
drorzel | September 12, 2014I got a royalty statement yesterday for How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to Your Dog (it continues to sell steadily, which is very gratifying), which includes a breakdown of the sales in terms of different formats. That reminded me of a particular annoying quirk of many recent discussions of the state of modern publishing, which is the often unsupported assertion that everything is ebooks these days, and paper books (and book stores) are just a small residual element that publishers and authors cling to out of historical affection.
Since I happen to have my royalty statements in front of me,…
drorzel | September 4, 2014Three weeks in Europe means a lot of time on planes and trains, so I actually got to read some fiction for a change. I'm stuck in a meeting all day today, and need a morale boost on the way in, so I'll go back to my book-blogging roots and type up the books that I read:
-- Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land. Conclusion of the trilogy begun with The Magicians back in the day, and while it's a better book than the first one, if you didn't like the first book, you probably won't like this. Mostly because of the characters, who are very much a like-them-or-hate-them crew.
Personally, I think it's…
drorzel | September 2, 2014If you're making your weekly check of the ebook editions (Kindle, Nook) of my quantum book (I'm not the only one who regularly looks at these, right?), you may have noticed a change: they're no longer sporting the original black cover you'll see in the right sidebar, but a new cover based on the smash hit UK edition. This isn't a database glitch, but a new release, with a new cover and adding the word "Quantum" to the title.
I've made allusions on Twitter a few times to having exciting news I wasn't ready to share-- this is one of those things. The original edition sold reasonably well and…
drorzel | September 1, 2014I'm up way too early with jet lag, looking over Twitter, and ran into Nick Falkner's report on the TED panel I moderated at Worldcon, which reminded me that I never did write anything about the con. Late is probably still better than never, so here are some quick long-after-the-fact comments about my program items:
-- Only one person showed up for my Kaffeeklatsch, probably because it was at dinnertime on the first day of the con, and also the Kaffeeklatsch rooms were in a place that didn't look like somewhere you were allowed to go. My one guest was a guy I've exchanged emails with for many…
drorzel | August 13, 2014Kate and I had a very nice time doing touristy things in Bath yesterday during the day-- old church, very old hot spring, Georgian architecture-- then went on to Bristol where I gave a talk on the forthcoming book, as you can see in the picture above. I would ordinarily include a SlideShare link to the slides I used for the talk, but the talk is so image-heavy and the hotel wi-fi so grindingly slow that I'm not even going to attempt uploading it.
The first bit, as you might guess from the photo above, was basically the same as my TED@NYC talk last fall, making an analogy between the…
drorzel | August 7, 2014Our little hangout thing is now old enough to drink, in episode-years anyway, and to celebrate, we finally figured out how to get live audience feedback during the hangout. Which takes the first couple of minutes of the video, because we're highly trained professional scientists.
Once we got that sorted, we talked about a bunch of stuff, including but not limited to crazy space drives, the history of major concepts in physics, space probes and asteroids, and "native advertising" and how it relates to blog history. Some links:
-- My post on the impossible space drive, which has links to…
drorzel | July 25, 2014I should really know better than to click any tweeted link with a huff.to shortened URL, but for some reason, I actually followed one to an article with the limited-reach clickbait title Curious About Quantum Physics? Read These 10 Articles!. Which is only part one, because Huffington Post, so it's actually five articles.
Three of the five articles are Einstein papers from 1905, which is sort of the equivalent of making a Ten Essential Rock Albums list that includes Revolver, Abbey Road, and the White Album. One of the goals of a well-done list of "essential" whatever is to give a sense of…
drorzel | July 24, 2014This Alberto Cairo piece on "data journalism" has been kicking around for a while, and it's taken me a while to pin down what bugs me about it. I think my problem with it ultimately has to do with the first two section headers in which he identifies problems with FiveThirtyEight and Vox:
1. Data and explanatory journalism cannot be done on the cheap.
2. Data and explanatory journalism cannot be produced in a rush.
The implication here is that "data and explanatory journalism" is necessarily a weighty and complicated thing, something extremely Serious to be approached only with great care.…
drorzel | July 19, 2014Since lots of other people are posting their Worldcon progrm(me) schedules, I might as well share mine, too. Frankly, I find it a little baffling:
Kaffeeklatsch
Thursday 18:00 - 19:00, London Suite 5 (ExCeL)
Kay Kenyon, Chad Orzel
Banksian
Saturday 11:00 - 12:00, Capital Suite 9 (ExCeL)
'Banksian' has become a commonplace descriptor in SF reviews, but what do we mean by it? What are the characteristics we associate with Iain M Banks' work? How far has his influence travelled? Who is writing Banksian SF today?
Chad Orzel (M), Michael Cobley, Jaine Fenn, Paul Kincaid, Ruth O'Reilly
We need to…
drorzel | July 7, 2014Also coming to my attention during the weekend blog shutdown was this Princeton Alumni Weekly piece on the rhetoric of crisis in the humanities. Like several other authors before him, Gideon Rosen points out that there's little numerical evidence of a real "crisis," and that most of the cries of alarm you hear from academics these days have near-perfect matches in prior generations. The humanities have always been in crisis.
This wouldn't be worth mentioning, but Rosen goes on to offer an attempt at an explanation of why the sense of crisis is so palpable within the humanities, an explanation…
drorzel | July 1, 2014I've seen a bunch of people linking approvingly to this piece about the "Fermi paradox," (the question of why we haven't seen any evidence of other advanced civilizations) and I can't quite understand why. The author expends a good deal of snark taking astronomers and physicists to task for constructing elaborate solutions to Fermi paradox on the basis of shoddy and unjustified assumptions. And then proceeds to offer a different solution for the Fermi paradox based on shoddy and unjustified assumptions. Whee!
I mean, there is an element of this that's useful, namely the reminder that "We…
drorzel | June 26, 2014After a bit of a hiatus because of scheduling issues, Rhett and I are back to talk about... stuff. Mostly summer classes, World Cup soccer, and Twitter. Also, how we've each gotten a blog comment from Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Miscellaneous links:
-- My long-ago book review and Rhett's more recent complaint about Cosmos, where we each had a brush with scientific celebrity.
-- My silly cat tweet that's generated a huge amount of traffic:
Busy day at Schroedinger Industries... RT @EmrgencyKittens: How to organize your cats. pic.twitter.com/z3QS0fnSdL
— Chad Orzel (@orzelc) June 24, 2014
-- Rhett's…
drorzel | June 24, 2014A few weeks back, a Union alumnus who works at Troy Prep contacted the college to arrange a visit for a bunch of second-graders, and asked if faculty would be willing to arrange talks and demos for the kids. I said something like "Sure, we could probably make liquid nitrogen ice cream for them," and then basically forgot about it until last week, when I said "Oh, crap, I have to make liquid nitrogen ice cream for 60 seven-year-olds on Monday!"
Fortunately, our students in the Department of Physics and Astronomy are awesome, and I was able to round up a handful of helpers from the summer…
drorzel | June 23, 2014As previously noted, I'm going to the Wordlcon in London this August, and as such will be voting on this year's Hugo Awards. The publishers provided a packet with at least bits of all the fiction nominees, so I've been reading through them at bedtime, and over the weekend finished all the regular nominees-- I still have stuff that I may or may not read for the Campbell-that-is-not-a-Hugo-but-is-handed-out-at-the-same-time. I wouldn't really bother to say anything about them beyond the couple of comments I've already dropped on Twitter, but Kate quoted me in her recap of the Short Story…
drorzel | June 19, 2014As noted earlier, I was a guest on the Read Science! hangout on G+ earlier today. If you weren't able to watch it live, the video is available at that link, and I'll embed it here:
There were some feedback problems with the audio for a little while-- annoyingly, it only got bad once the hangout went live-- there was a tiny echo when we were talking about logistics beforehand, but not enough to justify screwing around with earbuds. then when we started the actual event, it suddenly got completely awful for a while. It does get better, though-- I have no idea why, but later on, the echo is…
drorzel | June 19, 2014Rhett and I haven't done Uncertain Dots for a couple of weeks due to scheduling issues, but that doesn't mean I'm neglecting the multimedia side of things. In fact, I'll be doing a hangout today, as a guest on the Read Science! hangout hosted by Joanne Manaster and Jeff Shaumeyer. The event page is here.
I've also got four summer research students to supervise this year, who quite reasonably expect a fair bit of my time (thus the blog silence this week), and thus I'll be doing this from my office on campus, which means Emmy isn't going to be joining in. Alas. Odds are good that I'll have to…
drorzel | June 9, 2014The Cosmos reboot season finale (or possibly series finale; not sure if they're trying for a second set of episodes) was last night, but I wasn't able to take part in the live-tweeting of it thanks to a super-restless Pip who didn't drop off until 9:30 EDT. I suppose I could've waited to start the DVR until I would synch up with the West Coast showing, but then, I also need sleep. and I greatly enjoyed being able to fast-forward through the innumerable commercials.
And, really, if you want the story of the Cosmos reboot in a nutshell, there's no better capsule summary than the treatment of…