Chad Orzel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College in Schenectady, NY. He blogs about physics, life in academia, ephemeral pop culture, and anything else that catches his fancy.
My Giants fianlly got the chance to play a bad team today, and true to form almost honked a game to the Texans. They trailed in the fourth quarter, but rallied to win 17-14.
Their bad play was a combination of being generally banged up (the defense was without Osi Umenyiora, Brandon Short, Sam…
Over at Effect Measure, Revere (or one of the Reveres, anyway, I'm not certain if they're plural or not) has posted another broadside against PowerPoint, calling it "the scourge of modern lecturing." This is something of a sensitive point for me, as I use PowerPoint for my lectures in the…
For I'm not sure what reason, Scott Eric Kaufman is blogging a close reading of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn". I suspect this may be a new frontier in procrastination, but I'm not up on the latest developments in that field.
In the course of his reading, he helpfully updates one stanza into modern…
I'm in charge of the senior major seminar, in which we have the senior physics and astronomy majors meet once a week to talk about topics of interest to them. I've also been making them give short "progress reports" on their thesis research projects. Last week, one of my students was tapped for a…
In the previous installments, I talked about identical particles and symmetry, and what that means for fermions. Given that there's only one other type of particle in the world, that sort of means that I need to explain what symmetry means in the case of bosons.
When I explain this to the first-…
Via Inside Higher Ed's Quick Takes, some good news about the medical profession:
The proportion of medical residents who said they had worked more than 80 hours a week in the previous four weeks at any point during the 2005-6 academic year fell to 2.4 percent, spread among 18.7 percent of all…
This might not look it, but this is actually a happy dog picture. On windy days, she'll sit like this at the edge of the patio, just letting the wind blow interesting smells past her. You can't see it from a still photo, but she's constantly sniffing, and her ears are twitching, and she's…
The Onion AV Club has a review of the Aardman Animation CGI flick Flushed Away that contains a sentence starting with:
Once the film introduces a pack of French frog ninjas led by Jean Reno,...
Really, it doesn't much matter what comes after that. I don't really intend to see the movie, but it…
Like most pieces in McSweeney's, the lette denying Indiana Jones tenure goes on a bit too long, but it has its moments:
The lone student representative on the committee wished to convey that, besides being an exceptional instructor, a compassionate mentor, and an unparalleled gentleman, Dr. Jones…
November has been dubbed "National Novel Writing Month" or "NaNoWriMo" for those with too short an attention span to handle full words, in which people will commit to trying to write an entire novel in just thirty days. If you look around a bit, you'll see lots of blogs and LiveJournals tracking…
While I know that there's no great love for basketball in these parts, I can't let Jonah Lehrer's post on the "Hot Hand" go without comment. It's about a paper analyzing the statistics of jump shooting, which finds that contrary to popular belief among basketball players, they don't really get "hot…
This is a couple of days old, but I only got around to reading the story last night. The New York Times has an occasional sports magazine supplement, and this week, they published a nice article on Bill Parcells:
Bill Parcells is the only coach in N.F.L. history to take four different teams to the…
College basketball season is almost upon us (practices have started, but there won't be real games for another couple of weeks), which means that college basketball previews are thick on the ground. Over at the world-wde leader in sports marketing, they have a column about the Maryland guard…
NASA has scheduled a mission to service the Hubble. This should keep the space telescope flying and producing great science until 2013 or so.
Obviously, there are a lot of caveats in there-- the mission isn't scheduled until 2008, so the Hubble needs to last that long, and there can't be major…
I didn't take any pictures, but Monday night, I went to a Balinese gamelan concert on campus, put on by a group of twenty-odd students from a couple of Asian music classes, aided by some visiting musicians from Bali. There were also dance performances by three students, and one visiting Balinese…
Well, vote for a ScienceBlog, anyway. Shelley is a finalist for a student blogger scholarship.
Weirdly, the outcome appears to be determined by a popular vote, which seems like it's just asking for Internet Drama. But if you're interested in student blogging, go read the nominees, and vote for one.
So, in the previous post about symmetry and the difference between bosons and fermions, I threw in a bunch of teasing comments about how the requirement that quantum particles be indistinguishable has surprising and interesting consequences. Of course, I never quite explained what all that was…
A couple of weeks ago, when I bought the new Hold Steady album, I also picked up Sam's Town by the Killers. I bought it in spite of some pretty harsh reviews, but in the end, I think that The Onion's AV Club got it right:
The Killers have created a batch of easily digestible pop songs that would be…
The Times this morning has an article on the future of computer science:
Computer science is not only a comparatively young field, but also one that has had to prove it is really science. Skeptics in academia would often say that after Alan Turing described the concept of the "universal machine" in…
I've had a chance now to read through the new papers mentioned in the Wolfgang Ketterle post last week, and there's some interesting stuff there. The second item on the list from the AIP news article, "First observation of Mott insulator shells," is particularly interesting, as I did some early…
Because I'm a Bad Person, I no longer remember who pointed me to Halfway There's primer on polling, but it's really an excellent of the effects of sample size, and why it's legitimate to project results based on small numbers of interviews. Some important notes from the conclusion:
Second, even a…
Gina Kolata in the New York Times today reports on new attempts to blame obesity for the problems of the world:
Last week the list of ills attributable to obesity grew: fat people cause global warming.
This latest contribution to the obesity debate comes in an article by Sheldon H. Jacobson of the…
The Day the Earth Stood Still was on tv yesterday, and we watched most of it because it's a classic, and because the alternative was bad college football. Kate had never seen it before, and was surprised to find that it wasn't campy.
There is, however, one scene that has become unintentionally…
I got a comment to my recent "Classic Edition" post on peer review asking permission to translate the post into French, and put it on a French-language blog. Needless to say, I was kind of flattered that anybody would think it was worth that much work, so I agreed, and now it's appeared. Cool stuff…
Two nights before my college graduation, I was having a beer in one of the two bars in town, and one of the Deans was at the bar, holding forth. "Do you know," he said to me and a couple of other students, "there are five people in your class who aren't going to graduate because they don't have…
There's been a lot of discussion of single-sex education in blogdom recently, in the wake of new rules allowing more single-sex schools. Matt Yglesias offers links, and Kevin Drum expresses concern:
It turns out, though, that my real fear is just the opposite: what if we try it and Becks turns out…
I've had a tab open for a while containing an Inside Higher Ed article on a new approach to introducing science at Emory University:
David Lynn, who chairs the department of chemistry at Emory University, spoke about Emory's seminar program for entering freshmen. All Emory freshmen must take a…
