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.
A quick reminder: How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog (cover in the left sidebar) will be released at the end of the month. If you'd like to win a signed copy early, though, you can enter our Photoshop contest. Just edit a picture of Emmy into another picture having something to do with physics.…
NPR hack apologizes for Wall Street « LBO News from Doug Henwood
For a while, I've been thinking about writing a piece on how NPR is more toxic than Fox News. Fox preaches to the choir. NPR, though, confuses and misinforms people who might otherwise know better. Its "liberal" reputation makes…
So, my Giants edged out Kate's Patriots again in the Chateau Steelypips Bowl, in a game that was certainly not without its drama. I'm not going to gloat about it, because a couple of different bounces here or there easily could've changed the outcome. Also, I didn't see the third quarter at all,…
Proving that you can find physics in everything, Sean Carroll points to a strange anomaly in the Super Bowl coin toss: the NFC has won 14 coin tosses in a row. The odds of this happening seem to be vanishingly small, making this a 3.8-sigma effect, almost enough to claim the detection of a new…
Like many Americans, I'm going to be hugely preoccupied today. Thus, a poll for your blog-like entertainment needs:
The Super Bowl is today. Who's going to win?
If you choose the last option, please arrange to have contacted me in the past to tell me who to have laid a significant bet on so I will…
Duke's Cameron Crazies Lose Their Enthusiasm - NYTimes.com
There is growing sentiment that Cameron has lost some of its craziness, and there is definitive evidence that it has lost some of its Crazies. About 1,200 seats are earmarked for Duke's undergraduates, but this season students have filled…
It's been a little while since I wrote up what I've been doing in my "Brief History of Timekeeping" class, because I was out of town, and then catching up from being out of town. Some of this material has already appeared here, though, so I can hopefully catch up a lot of stuff in one post.
The…
Whither The Occupation - Ta-Nehisi Coates - National - The Atlantic
"There's an argument that the process of federal legislation, at this point, is crippled by deep systemic problems. The filibuster is an obvious example. It's also worth pointing out that there is a space for activism beyond…
It's now officially February, and the release date for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is only a few weeks off-- the official release date is Feb. 28. Of course, I've got a copy already:
If you would like a copy of your very own, you can either wait until the release, or take part in this…
As I keep saying in various posts, I'm teaching a class on timekeeping this term, which has included discussion of really primitive timekeeping devices like sundials, as well as a discussion of the importance of timekeeping for navigation. To give students an idea of how this works, I arranged an…
It's apparently a good day for asking questions of the readership, so here's another one: as SteelyKid has gotten older and more active, she's become a real drain on productivity, especially at bedtime. Bedtime is now a process rather like a certain spoof book, extending well over an hour, and…
I'm using Dava Sobel's Longitude this week in my timekeeping class. The villain of the piece, as it were, is the Reverend Dr. Nevil Maskelyne, who promoted an astronomical method for finding longitude, and played a major role in delaying the payment to John Harrison for his marine chronometers. It'…
Quantum Diaries
Science is complex. There's no getting around that. But it's essential that everyone engage constructively with it. That's particularly true of the political and business leaders in Davos, whose decisions on science-based subjects can influence everything from the well being of our…
There's been a lot written recently about academic publishing, in the kerfuffle over the "Research Works Act"-- John's roundup should keep you in reading material for a good while. This has led some people to decide to boycott Elsevier, including Aram Harrow of the Quantum Vatican. I'm generally in…
BOOK REVIEW: How To Teach Relativity To Your Dog By Chad Orzel - Science News
It may sound like a strange setup, but the somewhat kooky concept works well for explaining a field of physics that can sound, well, kooky to the uninitiated. Emmy is the stand-in for the everyman (or everydog) who has…
I was going to write something about the politics of scientific publishing, but instead, I want to focus on what's really important in modern publishing:
That's right, I got a couple of early copies of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog in the mail this morning. It's a real book, with pages and…
slacktivist » Mark Driscoll, John Woolman, Zacchaeus and grace
That [Quaker abolitionist John] Woolman was so miraculously persuasive suggests to me that he likely wasn't as monomaniacally focused on a single subject as the old preacher in the story I shared in the previous post. And the more I…
The toy model of statistical entropy that I talked about the other day is the sort of thing that, were I a good computational physicist, I would've banged out very quickly. I'm not a good computational physicist, but by cargo-culting my way through some of the VPython examples, I managed to get…
So, back when How to Teach Physics to Your Dog was coming out, I did a few "dramatic readings" of bits of the book, such as this one on the Quantum Zeno Effect:
This was made with Windows Movie Maker, because it was free (came with the computer) and dead simple. However, Movie Maker on my new…
I'm fairly certain somebody has already done this, because it's such an obvious idea. It's a little beyond my cargo-cult VPython skills right at the moment, though (I can probably learn to do it, but not right now), and I none of the applets I Googled up seemed to be doing this, so I'm posting this…
I've been really bad about documenting The Pip's growth here. The annoying thing is, I've actually taken pictures of him over the last couple of weeks, but I've been too busy to edit and post them. If there's one thing transcontinental flights are good for, though, it's providing you with time to…
While clearing the cars of frost Thursday morning, I was reminded of a difference of opinion Kate and I have about the best approach to a cold car. I tend to start the car up, and immediately turn the defrost on full blast; she prefers to let the car warm up for a while first, because it just blows…
Ben Franklin's 200+ Synonyms for "Drunk" - Mental Floss
Today we're celebrating Ben Franklin's 306th birthday. If you're celebrating at home, perhaps one of these phrases from The Drinkers Dictionary will come in handy. The lengthy list of expressions meaning "inebriated" was first published by…
In the same basic vein as last week's How to Read a Scientific Paper, here's a kind of online draft of the class I'm going to give Friday on the appropriate ways to present scientific data. "Present" here meaning the more general "display in some form, be it a talk, a poster, a paper, or just a…
What I Wish Wikipedia and Others Were Saying About SOPA/PIPA
The blackout and other protests today are the result of a long, sustained, full-court press against legislation that's being pushed through despite widespread opposition. Yet, Lamar Smith and many other members of the U.S. House and…
The always interesting Timothy Burke has a post that's basically a long links dump pointing to two articles about the state of humanities in academia, which includes a sort of aside that is more interesting to me than either of the linked articles:
This leads me to the second piece I really liked…
1 job good, 2 jobs better? § Unqualified Offerings
Inspired by FSP's post on 2-body problems in hiring, i.e. situations where both members of a couple are seeking academic jobs, I'd like to pose some challenges to those of my readers with opinions on academic hiring. This topic is usually…
SteelyKid and I have developed a weekend routine: I make pancakes (with her help in mixing and occasionally measuring ingredients) on Saturday morning before we head out (usually to SoccerTots, but the last couple of weeks to birthday parties). On Sunday, we make French toast, before going to the…
Swans on Tea » The Scientists' Dilemma
I recently had an interesting discussion with someone who is interested in science, but without training or experience as a scientist. The question was, basically: Why don't we (scientists) all just lie to each other? i.e. what compels scientists to…
