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.
Have you ever wondered about the accuracy of the descriptions in chemical manuals of what different compounds smell like? "Sure," you say, "the book says that this smells like cheese, but does that really help me in my daily life?"
Well, worry no more. Dylan Stiles does the experiment so you don't…
Imagine that you are doing a physics lab to measure the velocity of a small projectile. After making a bunch of measurements to four significant figures, and doing a bunch of arithmetic, you get a value of 4.371928645 m/s. After yet more gruelling math, you find the uncertainty associated with this…
Bora/ coturnix over at Science and Politics has generated a lot of conversation via his taxonomy of science blog posts, mostly relating to the call for people to start publishing data and hypotheses on blogs. Much of the discussion that I've seen centers on the question of "scooping" (see, for…
I'd just like to note that I'm inordinately amused to find a blog called Mormon Philosophy and Theology linking me. I also seem to have picked up a sidebar link at Cocktail Party Physics, which reminds me that I really need to update the blogroll...
These minor revelations brought to you by ego-…
The people (well, person) who brought you the physics blog aggregator Mixed States have now rolled out a new biology-themed blog aggregator: Recombinants.
At the moment, it only has about six feeds going into it, and the content is about 70% PZ Myers, so head over there and suggest some biology…
Teresa Nielsen Hayden, writing about the phenomenon of fan fiction:
Personally, I'm convinced that the legends of the Holy Grail are fanfic about the Eucharist.
One of the most peevesome things about the hectic period I'm in at my day job is that I no longer have time to follow Making Light…
Via BioCurious, a list of science questions every high school graduate should be able to answer:
What percentage of the earth is covered by water?
What sorts of signals does the brain use to communicate sensations, thoughts and actions?
Did dinosaurs and humans ever exist at the same time?
What…
Monday is the decision deadline for accepted students to decide whether they're coming here next year, and we've had a slow parade of people getting tours of the department and suchlike over the last few weeks. We've also had a couple "Open House" events, where accepted students and their families…
The NFL Draft is this weekend, and ESPN is entering their 57th day of intense, round-the-clock coverage of the draft. I have one simple thing to say to them: Stop. You're hurting America.
This isn't even a real sports story-- this is a fantasy sports story. This is like college basketball…
I've found myself in the weird position of giving career advice twice in the last week and a half. Once was to a former student, which I sort of understand, while the second time was a grad student in my former research group, who I've never met. I still don't really feel qualified to offer useful…
In a previous post, I dissed the NBA as being a haven for ugly pseudo-basketball. It does serve a purpose, though, as a sort of methadone program to ease the way down from the hoops-jukie high of March to the Great Sports Desert between the end of the NBA and the start of the NFL.
As I was feeling…
Why is this dog sulking, you ask?
(Answer below the fold)
Because this:
and this:
show what the back yard looks like right now.
We've needed rain for the last couple of weeks, and as you can tell, this has been good for the lawn. Those parts of it that are still above water, that is...
Kate and I went to see Thank You for Smoking yesterday (Short review: About as good an adaptation of the original book as you could hope for, and much more my thing than Kate's). The set of trailers we got was generally excruciating-- lots of film-festival material about quirky families being awful…
As someone who reads a lot, I have a certain amount of interest in the way publishing works. It's sort of fascinating to get to hear about the day to day operations, and how a manuscript becomes a book.
In that vein, alg on LiveJournal (I'm hazy about whose names are public and whose aren't, so I'…
Over at the Seed editors blog, Maggie Wittlin asks who's the most overlooked scientist:
Which scientist (in your field or beyond) has been most seriously shafted? This could be taken two ways:
Who deserves to be more recognized, revered and renowned today than he or she is?
Who got passed over,…
I'm still feeling pretty lethargic, but I hope that will improve when I get to lecture about the EPR paradox in Quantum Optics today (it's going to be kind of a short lecture, unless I can ad-lib an introduction to Bell's Theorem at the end of the class, but then I've been holding them late for…
When I teach introductory classes, I use a somewhat more complicated homework policy than most of my colleagues. As a result, my syllabus tends to run longer than theirs, by at least a page or two. I sometimes worry that this is excessive, but happily, Inside Higher Ed is here to prove me wrong:
By…
The official letter from the department requesting the formation of an ad hoc committee for my tenure review was sent in yesterday. This is the official start of the process-- I'm still a little fuzzy on the timeline from here out, but by September, I'll have to provide the committee with a huge…
I'm not feeling especially inspired, blog-wise, this morning, and I've got another couple of busy days on tap, so you get the fall-back post of the uninspired blogger: Ten random tracks from my iTunes library (the four-and-five-star playlist), with commentary. I'm tempted to just steal Kate's…
I retain just enough of my childhood fascination with dinosaurs to be interested in a headline like "A Meat Eater Bigger Than T. Rex Is Unearthed". Of course, most of the information you would really want is right there in the headline: New dinosaur species, really big, carnivorous, next story…
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,…
I just got a link-pimping piece of spam that suggests they're improving the targeting algorithm for Subject: lines:
Subject: hep-th index update
(For those not in the know, hep-th is the High Energy Physics- Theoretical category on the porn server.)
It's still a "close, but not quite," as I read…
Two items from the sports pages this morning:
1) Not really a sports story, but I saw it first on ESPN: two Duke lacrosse players have been indicted. It really doesn't deserve a whole "CSI: Durham" post, because it's a sealed indictment, so there's basically no real information. But if you're…
For those following along with my Quantum Optics class, here's a bunch of lectures about photons:
Lecture 7: Commutators, simple harmonic oscillators, creation and annihilation operators, photons.
Lecture 8: Coherent states of the electromagnetic field.
Lecture 9: Number-phase uncertainty,…
Are you unhappy with the way you look? Feel like you're carrying around some large extra dimensions? Want to compactify your manifold before the summer conference season gets here?
If you answered "Yes!" to any of those questions, then you're ready for the String Theory Diet!
Each rich, satisfying…
That's what yesterday was, at least. It was a gorgeous spring day here, which we spent mostly outside, first doing some errand-running, and then some lounging in the sun reading and napping. I didn't even try to keep track of what was posted on other blogs, and I didn't miss it all that much-- it…
RPM is dropping his Double Entendre Fridays, which threatens to cut off the world supply of really dorky sex jokes. But never fear, I'm here to pick it up with a physics version!
Back when I was a lowly undergrad, I was the TA for an optics lab section, and was helping some students to adjust a…
The usual suspects are all upset about John Barrow's crack about Richard Dawkins:
When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer's Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, "…
I know the cookie bug is still afflicting some commenters-- the folks who make Movable Type are aware of the bug, and it will be fixed with the next release, whenever that is. You can get around the bug by either deleting cookies from scienceblogs.com, or by logging out from TypeKey, if you have a…
