You've read the blog, now try the book: How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner, and available wherever books are sold.
"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.
Just a reminder, I will be on KSOO radio Tuesday evening, 6:30 pm ET, if you'd like to hear about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog on the radio at the end of an extremely long day. If you're in broadcast range of Sioux Falls, SD, tune it in, or you can listen live via their web site.
I'll also be at Boskone this weekend, reading book-related stuff on Sunday morning. If you're in the Boston area, stop by. If you're not, well, there's still no way to experience a convention over the Internet. Sorry.
No substantive blogging for you today, as my alarm clock decided not to go off, causing me to oversleep by the hour that I usually spend on bloggy things. So that you're not left without blog-related entertainment, though, here's an appropriate poll topic:
Of course, despite oversleeping by a full hour, I was still here twenty minutes before this morning's lab. And probably a good half-hour before the majority of my students. Their late arrival will do wonders for my mood.
My favorite bit is the note that "Cat and dog numbers were last estimated in a scientific peer-reviewed journal in 1989," because, of course, peer review is critical to the process...
"I'm pretty sure that the general response to this year's Super Bowl commercials will be mild-to-strong disgust over how anti-woman so many of them were. I know it's the norm for ads during sporting events to play up how "man time" is sacred and "woman time" is lame, but I've rarely seen that theme take such a hostile turn."
"According to NASA administrator Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden, Jr., the highly experimental glam space program--dubbed Project Starman--has been in development for exactly five years. Though engineers initially feared the mission might "blow our minds," the historic launch ultimately proceeded without incident.
"Admittedly, this is a very bold and risky departure for the agency," said Bolden, later adding that Bowie's Ziggy Stardust period and other outer-space-related work has been a major influence on NASA's direction since the early 1970s. "Those familiar with NASA's previous, more conventional research and exploration sensibilities are going to be in for quite a shock. Many are likely to be confused and threatened by the boundary-pushing nature of the project.""
"ChatRoulette is an online version of the friction that cities produce for free. It's like a subway ride on your computer, a chance to bump into strangers on the "street" without leaving your desk. Sure, there are lots of weirdos out there, and plenty of those strangers won't stare back. But every once in a while, a meaningful interaction might occur, as the social slot machine dispenses a few quarters. "
A couple of weeks ago, I announced a contest to determine the Most Amazing Laser Application. After a follow-up post listing the likely candidates, we have a final list of candidate applications, an even dozen of them (after consolidating some related topics):
Cat toy/ dog toy/ laser light show
Laser cooling/ BEC
Laser ranging/position measurement
Optical tweezers
Optical storage media (CD/DVD/Blu-Ray)
LIGO
Telecommunications
Holography
Laser ignited fusion
Laser eye surgery
Laser frequency comb/ spectroscopy
Laser guide stars/ adaptive optics
Here's how this will work: over the next week or so, I will write up a series of blog posts explaining these applications, and the pros and cons of each. At the end of that time, I'll put up a poll, and we'll decide the winner based on that most scientific of methods: random people on the Internet clicking radio buttons.
Watch this space-- the first application post will appear this afternoon.
The usual "This is the stuff that looks interesting to me" post, based on the preliminary online program. Subject to change if they move things around, or if I discover something I overlooked that sounds more interesting, or if I decide I'm hungry, and opt to blow off panels in favor of food.
This year's program is lighter on panels, but includes both a signing and a reading. Which will be a very different experience than years past...
There was some discombobulation yesterday afternoon that kept me from posting these-- I had meant them to be a Super Bowl alternative for the non-football-inclined. They'll work just as well as a Monday brightener, though. So here's a clip of SteelyKid a couple of weeks ago, laughing at the "got your food wrapper" game:
And here's one of her talking on the phone with her grandmother:
"At least 60 percent of the people in Rockland who have gotten mumps during the current outbreak had not been fully immunized, Facelle said.
Mumps were common before the vaccine became available. In 2008, there were only two reported cases in Rockland, according to the Department of Health's year-end communicable disease report."
"Playing Grandin in the HBO biopic Temple Grandin, Claire Danes captures the brilliance of the woman: how she sees things that others don't, and makes connections others can't. Danes gets Grandin's braying monotone, stooped posture and default defensive stance to other people--and more importantly she conveys it all unselfconsciously, as Grandin would, with no awareness of how she must look to others. (That is, until they start laughing or whispering behind her back.) The performance is more than just a collection of skillfully strung together tics. Danes also captures Grandin's sense of humor and her perception of everyday life: how she finds things funny that aren't necessarily jokes, and how unexpected sounds, lights and motion can put her in a mild state of panic."
"Periodisation in human history is an artifice. We the historians impose periods onto history in order to try to tame it and make it easier to handle and in doing so we run the very real risk of falsifying it. There are no sign posts rammed into the real roadmap of time saying you are now leaving the Early Middle Ages please conduct your self in future in a manner suitable for the High Middle Ages. In fact as the peasant farmer in Middle Europe turned over the page of his calendar from the 25th to the 26th of March in 1199 and thus entered the thirteenth century nothing changed in his life at all. Time is a constantly flowing river and change is incremental and on the ground mostly imperceptible as societies, cultures and ways of live evolve within the general flow. It is only with hindsight and selective interpretation of the facts that we can perceive the major changes that we then use to identify the periods that we stamp out of the riverbed."
"Most of us can't tell our secant from our cotangent. But the forms are everywhere, and Nikki Graziano wants to help us see them. Graziano, a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology, overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos. "I wanted to create something that could communicate how awesome math is, to everyone," she says. Graziano doesn't go out looking for a specific function but lets one find her instead. Once she's got an image she likes, Graziano whips up the numbers and tweaks the function until the graph it describes aligns perfectly with the photograph."
"As the middle linebacker, [Jonathan] Vilma is the quarterback of the defense. Watch him, and not Peyton Manning, for at least one drive during the Super Bowl and check out what kinds of furiously intense and split-second head games the two men are playing with each other. Maybe it looks uncomplicated, but you'd rather take a staple gun to your chode than replace either of these men for one play.
They say there's only 11 minutes of actual "game" during a football game, but they're wrong. This tete-a-tete between quarterback and middle linebacker is the equivalent of watching a player's eyes during a chess match, if the pieces tried to kill each other, and their actions resulted in wanton crying and unnecessary financial ruin for some of the spectators. Enjoy."
It occurs to me that if you take the Super Bowl as a comment on the current state of the US of A-- which, you might as well, because it's as good as anything else-- we are totally screwed.
I mean, consider the fact that two-thirds of the ads were for Bud Light. OK, that may be a slight exaggeration, but I think every commercial break in the first half had at least one Bud Light ad in it. That basically tells you that the only company with the money to spend on Super Bowl advertising is one that makes its money from helping people drown their sorrows. That's an encouraging statement.
Worse yet, the general crop of ads continued the deplorable trend of glorifying idiots. This has been going on for years, but has really reached a peak lately with things like the Sonic ad campaign with two idiots in a car, those Coors Light commercials with the football coaches, and pretty much any commercial Taco Bell has made in the last, say, ten years. Maybe longer.
And worst of all, the Simpsons totally sold out. I mean, really, is nothing sacred?
What a bunch of crap. Space aliens looking at this year's sorry crop of ads would probably decide to save time and just nuke us from orbit. The orbit of Jupiter.
On the bright side, it was at least a decent game. Congratulations to the Saints, the feel-good story of the century so far.
Just a reminder, I will be on KSOO radio Tuesday evening, 6:30 pm ET, if you'd like to hear about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog on the radio at the end of an extremely long day. If you're in broadcast range of Sioux Falls, SD, tune it in, or you can listen live via their web site.
