Two Cultures
Category archives for Two Cultures
How the Other Half Grades
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 7, 2006 My Quantum Optics class this term is a junior/ senior level elective, one of a set of four or five such classes that we rotate through, offering one or two a year. We require physics majors to take one of these classes in order to graduate, and encourage grad-school-bound students to take as many as…
Two Cultures in Meetings
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 10, 2006 Prompted in part by Rob Knop’s post on meeting with humanists, an observation about the nature of academia attributed to our late Dean of the Faculty, a former Classics professor: The key difference between disciplines in terms of administrative business on campus is that scientists tend to do their research work (experiments, calculations, simulations) in…
Step One: Change Disciplines
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 4, 2006 Dr. What Now? has a nice and timely post about helping students prepare for oral presentations, something I’ll be doing myself this morning, in preparation for the annual undergraduate research symposium on campus Friday. Of course, being a humanist, what she means by oral presentation is a completely different thing than the PowerPoint slide shows…
Poetry About Physicists
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 18, 2006 Reading this article reminds me that I forgot to talk about the poetry reading from a few weeks ago. In lieu of a regular colloquium talk one week this term, we co-hosted a poetry reading by George Drew, a local poet with a book of physics-themed poems. There are some sample poems on that site,…
Algebra and Storytelling
Posted by Chad Orzel on February 20, 2006 (It’s Presidents’ Day, so remember to vote!) Razib over at Gene Expression offers some thoughts on the algebra issue, in which he suggests some historical perspective: The ancient Greeks were not unintelligent, so the fact that many of us (rightly I believe) take symbolic algebra for granted as a necessary feature of our cognitive landscape…
Pith-Helmeted Anthropological Reporting
Posted by Chad Orzel on December 30, 2005 Scott Eric Kaufman of Acephalous is blogging the MLA. (I’m sure he’s not the only one, he’s just the only one I’m reading…) As I understand it, the Modern Language Association meeting is pretty much the be-all end-all of humanities meetings. It’s sort of fascinating to read about, coming off as sort of a cross…
