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Physics, Politics, Pop Culture
"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.
You've read the blog, now try the book: How to Teach Physics to Your Dog will be published December 22nd by Scribner.
"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.
Category: Education
Via somebody on Twitter, Copyblogger has a post titled "7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School," which is, as you might guess, dedicated to provocatively contrarian advice about how to write, boldly challenging the received wisdom of English faculty:...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:41 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
FriendFeed and Twitter are a terrific source of articles about how New Media technologies are Changing Everything. The latest example is Sebastian Paquet's The Fate of the Incompetent Teacher in the YouTube Era, in which he declares that the recorded...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:08 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
My panel on "Communicating Science in the 21st Century" was last night at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute. I haven't watched the video yet-- Canadian telecommunications technology hates me, and I'm lucky to get a wireless...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:49 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: DonorsChoose Fundraiser
If the Uncertain Principles cut of Hewlett-Packard's donation exceeds $2,000, I will recreate the Bohr-Einstein debates, with puppets.
Posted by Chad Orzel at 12:21 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
I've been buried in lab grading for a lot of this week, but I'm finally down to the last few stragglers. The experience has me thinking a bit about what we're doing here, and talking to people in other departments,...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:13 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
As mentioned on Twitter, I spent much of yesterday reading and rating a huge number of grant proposals. As such, I've looked at a lot of CV's and resumes, and the contrast is striking. People who work in industry tend...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 8:19 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
Via Michael Nielsen on Twitter, a Wired article and a research group website for the Stanford Study of Writing. As the Wired piece reports, the group has done a large study of student writing, and finds that modern college students...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 11:36 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Physics
I gave a guest lecture this morning in a colleague's sophomore seminar class about time. She's having them look at time from a variety of perspectives, and they just finished reading Longitude, so she asked me to talk about the...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 11:35 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Course Reports
The abbreviation here has a double meaning-- both "Open Access" and "Operator Algebra." In my Quantum Optics class yesterday, I was talking about how to describe "coherent states" in the photon number state formalism. Coherent states are the best quantum...
Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:57 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
Somebody should look to see if there's a correlation between the weather on the days of campus visits and the number of prospective students who apply/ enroll at a given school....
Posted by Chad Orzel at 4:16 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
