"Uncertain Principles" features the miscellaneous ramblings of a physicist at a small liberal arts college. Physics, politics, pop culture, and occasional conversations with his dog.
"Prof. Orzel gives the impression of an everyday guy who just happens to have a vast but hidden knowledge of physics." (anonymous student evaluation comment)
Emmy is a German Shepherd mix, and the Queen of Niskayuna. She likes treats, walks, chasing bunnies, and quantum physics.
I have a new appreciation for Cathy and Amanda and the rest of the infant room staff at the day care center, after two days of chasing a fully recovered SteelyKid around the house because she still had a couple of coxsackie virus blisters on her hands. They're earning the money we're paying them.
She's back in day care today, but my brains have turned to cheese, so here's a lyrics-guessing game. Same drill as before: each of these two-word phrases identifies a song; if you know it and want to guess, leave your guess in the comments, and include a two-word phrase from a different song for other people to guess.
This should be a little easier than usual, as today's songs have a seasonally appropriate theme:
After a long baby-induced delay, we are finally ready to announce the winners of the How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Caption Contest and Poetry Contest. I've obtained a few more copies of the bound galleys from the publisher, so we'll be giving two awards in each contest
category: one for each photo, one for Cuttlefish poetry, and one for non-Cuttlefish poetry.
"Overall, I like administering the list because I can virtually guarantee that any time I want to play, there will be others to play with. I also like the fact that I have some control over who gets on the list, and more importantly, who is excluded from it. Now don't get me wrong—this isn't some velvet rope thing, and it certainly isn't as exclusive as this basketball list. I invited almost all the regular players at the gym. However, I was also able to subtly exclude a few bad apples by intentionally failing to mention the list when they were around."
"The Fourth of July is this Saturday, and I can't resist trying to inject a little physics fun into the holiday celebration. My apologies to those of you who just wanted to sit in your backyard, eat a burger, and enjoy some fireworks without mentally calculating the trajectory of your bottle rocket or trying to guess at the chemical composition of your Roman candle."
""Time, I think, is a little bit like love. It's accessible to all of us; it is intuitively experienced by all of us in the same way; yet it retains its mystery at whatever level you weigh in on it. It is a mysterious force that we all can experience and share." That's how journalist and session moderator John Hockenberry opened "Time Since Einstein," at the World Science Festival in New York a few weeks back."
"The study, which surveyed four psychology classes at North Hennepin Community College in Minnesota, concluded that the clothing instructors wear has little effect on how students perceive them over longer periods of time. "
SteelyKid has recovered her usual energy level, as you can tell by the giant debris field she's created in the living room:
Looking at her there, among the scattered toys with Appa, you might be saying "Boy, what a great big baby she is!" It's all a matter of perspective, though:
SteelyKid's nearly over her coxsackie virus, but has just enough spots left that we can't take her to day care. Which means another day of baby wrangling, and another poll question chosen by the dog:
Emmy is convinced that we're insufficiently serious about home defense.
There is a fairly prominent strain of SF fandom which vehemently rejects all but the most superficial forms of literary analysis. This mostly seems to be due to bad experiences with English Lit classes in high school and/or college, at least based on the long rants they used to uncork on Usenet, back in the day.
I suspect that it is this element of fandom that is responsible for godawful dreck like Mike Resnick's stories making it onto the Hugo Award ballot. Their rejection of the very idea of thinking about what's going on beneath the surface level of a story has left them incapable of spotting the point in any story with actual literary virtues. Instead, they end up favoring stories with trite and horribly obvious Morals, whose messages are pounded home with the force of a meteorite strike.
It's only a theory, of course, but it does seem to explain most of the data plural anecdotes.
Just a reminder, if you're someone who's eligible to vote for this year's Hugo Awards, the deadline to do so is tomorrow. Of course, you probably already know that-- they sent out reminder emails last night. They want me to vote so badly, in fact, that I got four reminder emails last night, two with my own member number and voting PIN, and two with somebody else's...
I sent my vote in this morning. Once again, this was a year in which there was a huge gap between the category winners and the next-best nominees. It was awkwardly large, in fact-- not quite big enough to put "No Award" second, but big enough that I wanted some way to indicate that. I wonder how they would handle a ballot with no second-place vote, that went directly from "1" to "3"?
"Happily, Tom Levenson (of The Inverse Square, and one of our honored guest bloggers) has provided us with a fascinating peek into a telling episode in Newton’s later life — his career as a criminal investigator. Not really “P.I.”, as Newton was acting in his capacity as a government official, the Warden of the Mint. The story is closer to something from Law and Order or CSI — remarkably close, in fact. "
"As a hiring manager, I literally don't know what to do with [the Ricci decision]. I'm compelled by law to ferret out disparate impact, but forbidden by law from doing anything about it. Pre-emptive compliance with disparate impact will fail to meet the "strong basis" standard, since I can't prove I'd lose a lawsuit until I actually lost it. (As Kennedy put it, "[f]ear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer's reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions." (p.33) I can't just be afraid of losing; I have to actually lose.) "
"[L]egal experts note that one category of case the justices tend to take is a dispute in which the federal appeals courts are coming up with different approaches to the same issue. And for that reason, many advocates for Christian students and advocates for gay students had expected that the Supreme Court this week would agree to resolve a legal dispute involving the anti-bias policies of many public colleges and Christian student groups that want the right to ignore parts of those policies"
"First, the starting point of the whole article is unwarranted. Where is the evidence that something is wrong with modern science? How do you know that we have too few "revolutionary" scientists and too many "normal" scientists? This lacking basis, incidentally, is the same problem I have with Lee Smolin's call for more "risky" research. While I am sympathetic to the argument and personally tend to agree, it's not a scientific statement and anecdotes can't replace data. How do we know it's worse today than yesterday? Who determines whether we need more "revolutionary scientists?" Will somebody calculate a percentage? Who? Based on what? And wouldn't one expect that to depend on the field of research? And on the status of that field?"
