Mysteries of the Simulated Pendulum
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 23, 2013 
Last week, I spent a bunch of time using VPython to simulate a simple pendulum, which was a fun way to fritter away several hours (yes, I’m a great big nerd), and led to some fun physics. I had a little more time to kill, so I did one of the things I mentioned as…
Journosplaining 101
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 22, 2013 Over at National Geographic’s other blog network, Ed Yong offers a guide for scientists talking to journalists. Like everything Ed writes about scientists and journalists, this was immediately re-tweeted by 5000 people calling it a must-read. Also like nearly everything Ed writes about scientists and journalists, some of it kind of rubbed me the wrong…
American Physicists and the Under-rating of Experiments
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 21, 2013 At Scientific American’s blog network, Ashutosh Jogalekar muses about the “greatest American physicist”, eventually voting for Josiah Willard Gibbs, one of the pioneers of statistical mechanics. As both times I took StatMech (as an undergrad and in grad school), it was at 8:30 in the morning, I retain almost no memory of the subject, and…
Nature or Nurture?
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 19, 2013 
During our weekly trip to the Schenectady Greenmarket, we took refuge from the rain in the Open door bookstore, where a short while later I saw the following scenes at opposite ends of the kids-book aisle (also the “Featured Image” for this post, but I’ll reproduce it to save the RSS folks from having to…
Simulating a Pendulum
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 16, 2013 
There’s a famous story about Richard Feynman at Cornell suffering from the science equivalent of writer’s block, after WWII. He was depressed and feeling like everything he did was pointless, until one day he spotted a student throwing a plate up in the air in the cafeteria. As the plate spun, it wobbled, and the…
Homework Is Evil?: “The benefits of completing homework for students with different aptitudes in an introductory physics course”
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 14, 2013 
One of the perennial problems of teaching intro physics is getting students to do their homework, so I was very interested to see Andy Rundquist on Twitter post a link to a paper on the arxiv titled “How different incentives affect homework completion in introductory physics courses.” When I shared this with the rest of…
Mobility on 2+2 Wheels
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 12, 2013 SteelyKid has a new prize possession: a training-wheel bike! You can’t quite hear what she says at the end of this, when she stops the bike, but it’s “That should be a full video!” She knows her fan base. On the way back, she wiped out (the first bad crash on the new bike) and…
Wolfgang Pauli, Father of the arXiv
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 10, 2013 The book-in-progress (which is coming along, albeit slowly, thanks for asking) is built around making analogies between scientific discoveries and ordinary activities. This necessarily means telling a lot of historical stories, which is both good and bad. The bad part is that actual history is way messier than the streamlined version you get to use…
Best. Arbitrary Four-Year Window. EVER!
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 8, 2013 
My 20-year college reunion is coming up at the start of next month (at the end of the week of DAMOP in Quebec– I’m going to be completely wiped out…), so I’ve been thinking a bit about nostalgia. A little while back, the subject of reunions came up on an email list, and somebody trotted…
Rocketships Don’t Have Hands
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 8, 2013 An astute observation from SteelyKid, as part of her jumping game: With bonus photobombing by The Pip toward the end.
