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.
Over the last few months, Kate and I have fallen into a Friday evening routine involving the watching of Japanese cartoons. We started out getting discs of Fullmetal Alchemist from Netflix, and then taping the later episodes off the Cartoon Network, and then Samurai Champloo from Netflix, and most…
Friday's a good day for lightweight blogging, so here's something fun, via Roberto Alamino: A big collection of physics flash animations from the University of Toronto. It includes everything from three-body graviational motion to the Stern-Gerlach experiment, to how to use an oscilloscope.
Our DSL…
One of the perks of this semi-pro blogging gig is that people have started sending me free copies of books about physics. I'm halfway through a new book on quantum mechanics at the moment, and a copy of Lee Smolin's forthcoming The Trouble With Physics is on its way.
If you can't wait to hear what…
The Dave Bacon post linked earlier today is actually the beginning of a plug for Doug Natelson's list of hot topics and controversies in condensed matter and nanoscale science.
As was suggested in a recent comment, now that a nonzero number of condensed matter and nano people are (apparently)…
We're still a month away from the start of classes at most schools, but over at Learning Curves, Becky Hirta has some advice for new students. Some of this is university-specific ("Dress in layers. The University Center is never above 70 degrees; the math building is never below 80 degrees."), and…
Quantum Pontiff Dave Bacon preaches the Word:
One thing that bugs the heck out of me, is when I hear particle physicists talk about their field as if it is all of physics. I have a great love of particle physics, so I'm not dissing the field at all, nor arguing that it isn't more fundamental, but…
This is a few days old, now, but Truth and Beauty Bombs has done something I would've thought impossible: They've suggested a way to make Garfield amusing. Who woulda thunk it?
It's not as deeply and gloriously wrong as yesterday's Medium Large, but it's weirdly compelling.
(Via a mailing list.)
Temperatures in Schenectady hit the mid-90's yesterday (do your own metric conversions), so I took the opportunity to do a little experimental thermodynamics: I played pick-up soccer after work with some of the students who are here for the summer. On the field-turf football field, which was a good…
Another email update from Senior Middle East Correspondant Paul Schemm, this time including some stuff that could be read as sort-of positive, if you're a fan of the American presence in Iraq:
The US soldiers obligingly stopped periodically during one patrol and
allowed me to clamber out and talk…
Continuing the recent "careers in science" theme, Inside Higher Ed has a story about what people with science degrees do with their lives, based on a new NSF report. From the Inside Higher Ed piece:
Many science and engineering degree recipients continue to get use from their undergraduate studies…
Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer Ouellette offers dating advice for the geek set. Mostly, this reminds me again how happy I am to be married, and not worrying about this stuff any more, but her advice seems reasonably sound, save for one point:
There's nothing sexier than a man who's…
The previous post reminded me of something I had marked as interesting: Technorati led me to ChemJerk, who pointed in turn to the Princton Review's list of Most Popular College Majors. In reverse order, with the top five below the fold, we have:
10) Political Science
9) Computer Science
8)…
There have been a number of responses to my Science Is Hard post over the last several days, and I've been trying to come up with something to say about them. This is the second of two posts responding to comments by some of my fellow ScienceBloggers.
Turning to Steinn's first post on the subject,…
Today is the 25th anniversary of the launch of MTV, back in 1981, with "Video Killed the Radio Star." Blogdom is, appropriately enough, full of people offering tributes and soliciting fond recollections of the days when they played music videos on MTV. See, for example, posts by Abel and Scalzi.…
There have been a number of responses to my Science Is Hard post over the last several days, and I've been trying to come up with something to say about them. In particular, Steinn points out that science is easier than digging ditches, while in comments, "revere" of Effect Measure says that…
Here's a link for Ed Brayton, who does a fair bit of poker blogging: via Dave Sez, Brian at MGOBlog is playing the the World Series of Poker, and blogging about it.
You may or may not regard the WSOP as the beginning of the end for ESPN, but the broadcasts are weirdly hypnotic. I've played just…
Via Victor Revelles (among other sources), news of a proposed experiment to follow up an earlier experiment that reportedpolarization shifts of photons in vacuum in a strong magnetic field. There's a similar news story about the new experiment.
The idea here is to try to nail down the cause of that…
There's a comment to the most recent Open Thread at Making Light asking why there isn't more handicapping of the Hugo Awards. The commenter, Kathryn from Sunnyvale, makes reference to a comment on John Scalzi's "Please Vote" thread, that suggested there was a clear favorite in the balloting:
There…
The academia and family life discussion continues on ScienceBlogs and elsewhere, and continues to be fascinating (at least if you're fascinated by this stuff...). The Female Science Professor has two more posts on the topic since I last linked her, one on awkward interview questions (though nothing…
The internal distribution of picture of the ScienceBlogs get-together in NYC (referred to here) prompted several calls for me to update my picture. I have, after all, lost rather a lot of weight since the picture in my profile was taken. Thus, I had Kate take a new picture of me post-weight-loss:…
One item I forgot to mention in the previous post: The Times Book Review section today features an article on backlist books and the so-called "Long Tail" exploited by on-line sales. It has some interesting stuff on the business of publishing and the sales of backlist books.
As with the medical…
Miscellaneous stories that caught my eye in today's New York Times:
First, on the science sdie of things, a long article about how people are living longer, not to mention bigger and healthier, than their ancestors. It compares medical records for Civil War veterans with people of similar age today…
The Department of Physics and Astronomy at Union College invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professor position starting in September 2007. The position is open with respect to research specialization and candidates with an active research program in any area of physics or astronomy…
The prolific Bora at A Blog Around the Clock is looking for the rock stars of science, as part of a long chain of people picking up this quote from Morgan Spurlock:
We've started to make science and empirical evidence not nearly as important as punditry--people wusing p.r.-speak to push a corporate…
For those following the discussion about having a career and a life, referenced in this post, there have been some interesting additions in recent days. Janet Stemwedel added a post clarifying some terms, and Rob Knop offers his own thoughts, and points out that academics aren't the only ones…
I've linked to Inside Higher Ed almost every day this week, so why stop now? Today's Views section features Terry Caesar being outraged over RateMyProfessors.com (which he refers to in BLOCK CAPS throughout). Among the many sins of the site, he includes this paragraph:
In fact, students at RATE don…
I don't usually post YouTube links and that sort of thing, because I figure everybody else in the world has watched them before I get there, but this clip of the Colbert Report is too good not to link. He gets right in the metaphorical face of a couple of morning shows that have done pieces about…
Via Dave Sez, Ed at the Sports Frog wants a divorce from ESPN:
I have carefully thought this through and I believe a divorce is our only resolution. I have been loyal and faithful to you and you have shit on me, cheated, lied, took 5 months to send me a check and you won't let me see some of my…
Jonah Lehrer at the Frontal Cortex asks an interesting question: Why is science so much work?
But I'm curious why science takes so long. I know this is an incredibly naive question, but why do post-docs have to work so hard? What is it about the scientific process that forces the average researcher…
Inside Higher Ed had a piece yesterday about leaks in the science pipeline-- that is, reasons why so few students end up majoring in science, math, or engineering these days. The hook for the article is some Congressional hearings on the subject, but the author lists some possible explanations…
