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.
Mightygodking.com » Post Topic » What if Bertie Wooster, rather than being a mere layabout, was also Batman?
""Good morning, sir. I have prepared a breakfast of scrambled egg, kippers and bacon, as per your request."
"Fantastic, Jeeves! I tell you truly, I've worked up a massive appetite and…
Via Crooked Timber, there's a silly web site that lets you put in a chunk of text, and does some sort of statistical analysis of it to determine what famous writer's prose it most closely resembles. It turns out, I'm kind of hard to categorize.
For instance, when I'm writing about Holy Grails, I…
With the rumors of a Higgs Boson detected at Fermilab now getting the sort of official denial that in politics would mean the rumors were about to be confirmed in spectacular fashion, it's looking like we'll have to wait a little while longer before the next "Holy Grail" of physics gets discovered…
I'm not much of a baseball fan, but as a New York resident and Williams alumn, it seems I'm contractually obligated to say something about the death of Yankee owner George Steinbrenner. He was a fixture in New York sports for as long as I've been aware of them, and his impact on baseball and sports…
Can I build an ansible to communicate across the cosmos?
"In this week's Ask a Physicist, we answer a question that's on everyone's mind: Can we use quantum entanglement to make a mockery of the speed of light, and create intergalactic communications devices like Le Guin's "ansible"?"
(tags:…
we have a summer student seminar series, in which students who are doing summer research give 15-minute talks about their research. These are generally pretty good-- our students are, by and large, very good public speakers.
One thing that I always find interesting about this is how many of the…
Yesterday's poll about "outreach" activities drew 117 responses by this morning. Since PollDaddy stupidly calculates percentages for ticky-box polls based on the number of total selections, not the number of people who vote, the graph you get when you view the results is kind of useless. A better…
It looks like I may well be getting together with some friends from college in Alabama on the first weekend in October, to go to a college football game. The logistics of getting to Tuscaloosa make this seem like an awfully long weekend, but I would feel guilty taking two days off just for football…
Scientists vs. Engineers - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences
"In the past, I have heard there was conflict between the "two cultures" of science and the humanities. I don't see a lot of evidence for that type of conflict today, mostly because my scientific friends all are big fans of…
Rumors that the Tevatron at Fermilab may have discovered the Higgs boson have escaped blogdom to the mainstream media. This originates in a blog post by Tommaso Dorigo, which I can't read because it doesn't display properly in Firefox, but I'm sure is very interesting.
Anyway, this is a good excuse…
I spent this weekend in Baltimore for the summer meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public, held at the Maryland Science Center, which is a really nice science museum. This has left me feeling jet-lagged, a neat trick when I never left the Eastern time zone, but perhaps Saturday's visit to…
I missed the first 15 minutes of yesterday's World Cup final because it was inordinately difficult to find a tv showing the game at BWI airport. There are tvs all over the place, but they're all locked into playing a pre-recorded loop of CNN programs, without even a news ticker that could give…
LaserFest | Videos of Lasers in Art & Entertainment
A collection of videos showing the use of lasers in art, movies, and television.
(tags: lasers science physics video television movies outreach art)
Home - emergentuniverse.org
A small but well-designed site dedicated to giving the public…
Energy Secy advances nano science in spare time - San Jose Mercury News
"This is Chu's second such meaty scientific paper in recent months, both published in the journal Nature.
The first, published in February, was following Albert Einstein's general relativity theory and better measuring how…
The big physics story at the moment is probably the new measurement of the size of the proton, which is reported in this Nature paper (which does not seem to be on the arxiv, alas). This is kind of a hybrid of nuclear and atomic physics, as it's a spectroscopic measurement of a quasi-atom involving…
Thoreau offers without qualification some complaints about a paper in a glamour journal, ending with:
All of this might have been excusable if the big flashy Glamour Journal paper had been followed up with more detailed papers in other places (a common practice in some fields). However, when I…
Using the General Social Survey | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine
Notes on how you, too, can be a social scientist. Or at least noodle around with statistics.
(tags: social-science blogs statistics surveys)
Science in the Open » Blog Archive » It's not information overload, nor is it…
I got sufficiently engrossed in writing a ResearchBlogging post for tomorrow that I almost forgot today's Toddler Blogging. To make up for it, though, today's post is using those three-dimensional effects that are all the rage these days:
Look out! There's a ball coming right at you!
What's that?…
Kevin Drum has done a couple of education-related posts recently, first noting a story claiming that college kids study less than they used to, and following that up with an anecdotal report on kids these days, from an email correspondent who teaches physics. Kevin's emailer writes of his recent…
I suppose I have to say something about the Great Pepsi Blog Controversy, because it's sucking all the oxygen out of science blogging right now. I'll try to keep this short and self-contained.
At this time, I have no intention of leaving ScienceBlogs over the paid PepsiCo blog. I'm very sorry to…
slacktivist: The Indignant Household Budget
"[T]he pitiable thing is that here in reality -- as opposed to the smug fantasy world of this stock speech -- overtime and second jobs are exactly what many of those poor cheering fools in the audience are actually doing to try to make ends meet. The…
Over in yesterday's communications skills post commenter Paul raises a question about priorities:
I wonder to what extent good writers, public speakers and communicators are being promoted in science in place of good thinkers - people who can challenge prevailing dogma, invent promising novel…
Physics - Keeping atoms synchronized for better timekeeping
"Atomic clocks often have a limited coherence time due to the interactions between the constituent atoms. While it is usually very easy to use fewer atoms to reduce the interactions, this leads to lower signal-to-noise and less precise…
I was under the impression that the World Cup semifinals didn't start until tomorrow, but I was wrong about that. So here's a hastily-posted Open Thread for discussion of the games. Will Uruguay manage to carry the honor of South America into the final game? Or is South America doomed to be the Big…
As I am still getting lengthy comments at the Chris Mooney post accusing me of making unreasonable demands on scientists, I thought I should spell out as explicitly as possible what skills I think scientists ought to have. This probably won't solve the problem, but it'll give me something to point…
YouTube - Look Around You - Maths (With download)
"I happened upon this inspired bit of British comedy after watching Goodness Gracious Me (hit and miss). I was curious why there would be a ten minute show on TV. At first, I actually thought it was a children's instructional science program.…
SteelyKid has some molars coming in, which led to some intermittent generalized fussiness this weekend. When she gets that way, she can sometimes be calmed down using videos on the computer, such as the "Wheels on the Buss" DVD my mom has. In order to spare the sanity of the adults in her life,…
It's Independence Day here in the US, where we spend the day playing with fire (grilling during the day, fireworks at night) to express our gratitude for not needing to give a damn about the British royal family. Or something like that.
Since I'm going to do my patriotic playing-with-fire duty (…
Summer is here, which means vacations for lots of people, which means "beach reading"-- trying to read a book or two while kicking back somewhere. The ideal beach read is something that isn't so heavy as to bring you down or demand too much attention, but is also serious enough that it's not…
Bill Simmons: World Cup's 20 questions - ESPN
"Question No. 9: But you'd still love the NBA to incorporate the yellow/red card system for flagrant fouls and technical fouls, correct?
Sure. Much better than an official leaning over a scorer's table and telling them what the technical or flagrant…
