Pop Culture
drorzel | May 20, 2014While solo-parenting Sunday night, I still managed to get free of The Pip just barely in time to catch the start of Cosmos. This was a strange episode in a couple of ways, chiefly having to do with the selection of topics.
For one thing, there's no small irony in the fact that following a couple of weeks in which host Neil deGrasse Tyson has been raked over metaphorical coals for dismissing philosophy as pointless because it doesn't lead to testable predictions, a big chunk of the episode was given over to wildly impractical speculations about panspermia and related topics. I realize it's…
drorzel | May 14, 2014One of the very best treatments of the scientific method in fiction that I've read-- I suspect it may be the best, but years on the Internet make me want to hedge everything-- is the Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein. The main character, Rowan, is a Steerswoman, a member of an order dedicated to collecting and sharing knowledge of the quasi-medieval world in which she lives, and over the course of four books she puzzles out some amazing things about the secret origins of her world and society. It's a joy to watch the scientific reasoning process Rowan follows, and the plots have plenty…
drorzel | May 12, 2014Last night's episode of the Cosmos reboot focused on one of the three physicists whose pictures Einstein kept in his office: Michael Faraday. I'm a big fan of Faraday, who famously started his career as a bookbinder's apprentice reading the books brought into the shop, and ended as one of the greatest experimental physicists of the 19th Century. Also, he had magnificent sideburns, as you can see in the picture. It's a great story-- I highly recommend his biography-- and pretty much the entire episode was devoted to Faraday, with only a surprisingly tenuous astronomy connection at the end,…
drorzel | May 11, 2014Over at Five Thirty Eight, Walt Hickey has a piece about cheerleading as a sport and injury rates, which is both a nice look at the way to use stats to measure the real danger level of an activity, and the sort of small details that can be teased out. The piece includes a table of injury rates for a wide variety of sports, seen above as the "featured image" and reproduced below. I don't really have anything much to say about cheerleading, but one thing did jump out at me from the table, leading to the question in the post title.
this table show concussion rates in competition and in practice…
drorzel | May 9, 2014Last weekend, the circus came to town, and Grandma and Grandpa came up to help us take the kids. We took SteelyKid a couple of years ago, and figured The Pip was old enough to go this time, too. Having bought tickets a couple of years ago, I got sent a pre-sale offer link, and followed that to get tickets in the front center section.
What I didn't realize was that these put us in the "Circus Celebrity" section-- when the show started, they came and gave us these ribbon things to wear, and a bit before the intermission some of the performers came over to our section, and led us out to the…
drorzel | May 8, 2014This coming fall term, I'll be teaching Astronomy 052, "Relativity, Black Holes, and Quasars," because the guy who has traditionally taught it (a radio astronomer who studies active galactic nuclei) has to do other courses instead. But I said "Well, hell, I've written a popular audience book explaining relativity. I can teach that." And since I get to make teaching assignments (the one and only positive feature of being department chair), well, I put myself down to teach it. Now, of course, I find myself thinking about ideas for that class, months in advance, when I ought to be working on…
drorzel | May 6, 2014Last week's talks were using sci-fi space travel as a hook to talk about relativity, and my original idea for the talk was to explain how faster-than-light travel ultimately ends up violating causality. Some observers will see effects happening before the events that cause them, and that's just weird. In How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, the illustration I use is a stationary dog watching a cat moving by at half the speed of light and a space alien zipping past at four times the speed of light. In that scenario, the dog can hand a water balloon to the passing alien to soak the cat, and…
drorzel | May 5, 2014I have a couple of things in the mental queue for this week, but I'm still playing catch-up from my trip to Texas, so instead you get a really quick comment on last night's Cosmos. This one was all about the history of the Earth-- continents moving, climate changing, mass extinctions-- stuff that I know in outline, but not detail. It was, by and large, far enough from my areas of expertise that I can't say much.
I did think that some parts of it were a little too pat, though. These fall into two categories: just-so stories, and things obvious in hindsight. The former includes the very…
drorzel | May 3, 2014Below you'll find the slides from my Physics Day presentations at Space Center Houston, embedded via SlideShare. I was doing the TED-style minimal text thing, so they're probably not all that comprehensible on their own.
The event was supposed to have a pop-culture connection, so I decided to use space travel and extrasolar planets as a hook for talking about relativity, thus all the movie images near the beginning. The original idea I had was to look at different fictional ways of evading the ban on faster-than-light travel, but they wanted something more in the half-hour range than the hour…
drorzel | May 2, 2014My Thursday presentation here in Houston went well, though it was a pretty small crowd. I'll be doing it again today before running to the airport to get home. I didn't really have an opportunity to do shameless self-promotion regarding the new book, but I did get a copy of the official cover for it, which you'll see above if you're looking at this on the blog, or below if you're reading via RSS.
I don't have a very detailed schedule for the rest of the process, but the target on-sale date is in early January 2015. Which probably dashes my dream of getting on the Colbert Report, but I'll…
drorzel | May 1, 2014One of the pop-physics books I've read recently was Amanda Gefter's much-discussed Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn. I was going to post a review of it back in March, but literally the day I was planning to write it, I got email from an editor at Physics Today asking if I had any books I'd like to review for them. So it ended up there instead of here:
Amanda Gefter’s Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn comes with a super-sized subtitle: “A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything.” It’s a mouthful, but also rather fitting for a book that manages to be many things…
drorzel | April 30, 2014I had hoped to have another post or two scheduled for the end of this week, but The Pip got some kind of stomach bug, and threw everything into disarray. And tonight, I'm flying to Houston to give a couple of talks as part of Physics Day at Space Center Houston. Life being what it is these days, I'm still fiddling with the talk, so I don't have time to get any more big blog posts done.
If you're in the Houston area and free in the middle of the day Thursday or Friday, come by the Space Center-- I'm talking at noon both days. If you're not in Houston, or not free at lunchtime, well, I'll…
drorzel | April 28, 2014Back when the first episode of the Cosmos reboot aired, somebody put together a composite of the cartoon people who flashed on screen, and we played a guessing game on Twitter. The image above is from a blog post by Meg at True Anomalies, and I think it was probably her, but the ephemeral nature of Twitter makes it annoying to track down the original discussion.
Anyway, we collectively got four of the five right: ibn al-Haytham in the upper left, Annie Jump Cannon in the middle top, Isaac Newton on the lower left, and William Herschel on the lower right. Well, five of six, if you include…
drorzel | April 24, 2014The finalists for the 2014 "Flame Challenge" have been selected, three written entries and three visual entries. None of these is my entry, alas, but it was worth a shot.
I watched the videos last night, and it was sort of interesting to compare what ended up working well with the test audience of 11-year-olds to the comments that I got. The main difference between what I did and what got picked wasn't so much in the use of unfamiliar words (the thing that generated comments on my post), but in the use of 11-year-old humor. (To be honest, I kind of hate one of them, because it overdoes the…
drorzel | April 22, 2014"DAAAAADDDDDYYYYY!!!!"
"What's the matter, honey?"
"I don't like being alone."
"Well, I'm sorry, honey, but I have work to do, and it's time for you to go to sleep."
"But when I'm alone I get scared."
"Well, I can put on some music if you like. You can listen to that, and it might give you something else to think about."
"Yeah, put the music on."
"I don't know if you've noticed, but when I sleep, I always put music on, because it helps me feel less lonely."
"The music helps, but I still worry about things. Like bad guys. And the evil snakes from Lego Ninjago. I worry that they might be around…
drorzel | April 18, 2014Astonishingly, in the last few weeks, I've actually found time to read some-- gasp-- novels. In particular, I finished two books that probably belong in the "Hard SF" genre: A Darkling Sea by James L. Cambias and Lockstep by Karl Schroeder. Both Jim and Karl are people I've met many times at cons; I've enjoyed a lot of books by Karl, but this is Jim's first published novel (I think).
I'm lumping these together both because it's rare for me to get time to read, let along booklog stuff, but also because there's a sense in which they're complementary books: Both offer thoroughly fascinating far-…
drorzel | April 15, 2014I'm not really a comic-book guy, but I've watched a bunch of comic-book movies recently. Kate was really fired up for the new Captain America movie, so I finally got around to watching the first one as background for that, then when I was sleep-deprived last week I watched the second Thor movie via on-demand cable, then Sunday evening Kate and I went to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier in the theater (her second time watching it-- she's really fired up).
Mostly, this has served to confirm that I'm not a comic-book guy. I'm just not invested enough in the idea of a movie about these…
drorzel | April 14, 2014
A diabolical psychologist brings a mathematician in for an experiment. The mathematician is seated in a chair on a track leading to a bed on which there is an extremely attractive person of the appropriate gender, completely naked. The psychologist explains "This person will do absolutely anything you want, subject to one condition: every five minutes, we will move your chair across one-half of the distance separating you."
The mathematician explodes in outrage. "What! It'll take an infinite time to get there. This is torture!" They storm out.
The next experimental subject is a physicist,…
drorzel | April 13, 2014One of the weird quirks of Union college, where I teach, is that the hockey teams compete in the NCAA's Division I, something that doesn't usually happen for a school with only 2200 students. That might seem like a ridiculously terrible idea, but last night, it worked surprisingly well: Union beat perennial hockey power Minnesota for the NCAA National Championship. It was an amazing game
I'm not going to pretend like I'm a huge fan-- Kate and I watched on tv, the only hockey I've watched all season-- and I'm certainly not going to use first-person pronouns to talk about it (I really hate that…
drorzel | April 12, 2014This was kind of a dispiriting week in a lot of ways, but as mentioned in yesterday's links dump, Kate and I had tickets for the Hold Steady in Albany last night. And since schools are closed next week, we packed SteelyKid and The Pip off to Grandma and Grandpa's, and went to a rock show.
If you're not familiar with the Hold Steady, you're obviously not following me on Twitter, because I've been obsessing about them for a while now-- since 2005 or so. They've been the world's greatest band for about a decade now, and their new record, Teeth Dreams is excellent.
I saw them back in 2009, and…