July 22, 2014
In which our hangout turns nineteen; we may need to look into a special guest for the 20th, or something. Or maybe save guest stars for the one after that, when it can drink.
Anyway, Rhett and I chat about grading, lab reports, why Excel sucks, and an online experiment that we really ought to do…
July 19, 2014
Since lots of other people are posting their Worldcon progrm(me) schedules, I might as well share mine, too. Frankly, I find it a little baffling:
Kaffeeklatsch
Thursday 18:00 - 19:00, London Suite 5 (ExCeL)
Kay Kenyon, Chad Orzel
Banksian
Saturday 11:00 - 12:00, Capital Suite 9 (ExCeL)
'Banksian…
July 18, 2014
As noted last week, I went to SteelyKid's day camp on Tuesday to talk about being a college professor. This was a little awkward, because I was scheduled to talk to kids ranging from not-quite-three to six-and-a-bit, and really, what do they care about the daily routine of physics faculty?
So, I…
July 16, 2014
The surest sign that I've become a Real Author is that there are five months yet before Eureka comes out, and I'm already fretting about negative reviews. Negative reviews that haven't happened yet, but that I know will come, in a particular form.
The book, as you probably know from my prior…
July 14, 2014
We spent the weekend down in the Boston area, where Kate was doing stuff at Readercon and I was running the kids around the New England Aquarium and the Museum of Science (nominally in the company of a friend form college and his family, and some of Kate's cousins (respectively), but either…
July 11, 2014
We got an email from the people running SteelyKid's summer camp asking for volunteers to speak at a career day sort of event early next week. I said "Sure, I can do that, and talk about the glamorous life of a physics professor and book author." They said "Great, you'll be talking to several groups…
July 9, 2014
Text of the ad we're running for our searches this fall. This will go live on the usual sites at the start of August, but as a sort of experiment in the power of social media, I'm going to share it here first, and see what that gets us.
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We invite applications for two tenure-track Assistant…
July 8, 2014
In which our series of Google hangouts becomes old enough to vote and buy cigarettes-- but not drink!
Miscellaneous things mentioned in this:
-- My forthcoming book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I turned in the copyedits and figures a week or so ago, and cashed an advance check today, so it's…
July 7, 2014
Also coming to my attention during the weekend blog shutdown was this Princeton Alumni Weekly piece on the rhetoric of crisis in the humanities. Like several other authors before him, Gideon Rosen points out that there's little numerical evidence of a real "crisis," and that most of the cries of…
July 7, 2014
Right around the time I shut things down for the long holiday weekend, the Washington Post ran this Joel Achenbach piece on mistakes in science. Achenbach's article was prompted in part by the ongoing discussion of the significance (or lack thereof) of the BICEP2 results, which included probably…
July 3, 2014
I didn't plan to do a follow-up to yesterday's post about the optics of sending messages with lasers, but then I starting idly thinking about detection, prompted in part by a bunch of conversations with my summer students about single-photon detectors. which led to scribbling on the back of an…
July 2, 2014
In the comments to yesterday's grumpy post about the Fermi paradox, makeinu raises the idea that advanced aliens would be using more targeted communications than we do:
On the point about electromagnetic communications: even we are now using lasers to target communications with space, because it’s…
July 1, 2014
I've seen a bunch of people linking approvingly to this piece about the "Fermi paradox," (the question of why we haven't seen any evidence of other advanced civilizations) and I can't quite understand why. The author expends a good deal of snark taking astronomers and physicists to task for…
July 1, 2014
The physics vs. philosophy slow-motion blogfight continues, the latest major contribution being Sean Carroll's "Physicists Should Stop Saying silly Things About Philosophy. I've been mostly trying to stay out of this, but when I read through the comments at Sean's post to see if anybody offered any…
June 30, 2014
For some reason, the topic of really big rocks came up at dinner the other night, and SteelyKid declared that she wanted to find "A rock as big as the solar system." We pointed out that that was pretty much impossible, more or less by definition, rocks being sub-parts of the solar system.
"OK, how…
June 27, 2014
I'm not quite awake enough yet to deal with reviewing copyedits and reformatting figures for the book-in-process, so while I wait for the caffeine to kick in, let's talk something simple and cheerful: rural poverty. This week, Vox and the New York Times both touched on this, the former with a story…
June 26, 2014
After a bit of a hiatus because of scheduling issues, Rhett and I are back to talk about... stuff. Mostly summer classes, World Cup soccer, and Twitter. Also, how we've each gotten a blog comment from Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Miscellaneous links:
-- My long-ago book review and Rhett's more recent…
June 24, 2014
A few weeks back, a Union alumnus who works at Troy Prep contacted the college to arrange a visit for a bunch of second-graders, and asked if faculty would be willing to arrange talks and demos for the kids. I said something like "Sure, we could probably make liquid nitrogen ice cream for them,"…
June 23, 2014
As previously noted, I'm going to the Wordlcon in London this August, and as such will be voting on this year's Hugo Awards. The publishers provided a packet with at least bits of all the fiction nominees, so I've been reading through them at bedtime, and over the weekend finished all the regular…
June 19, 2014
As noted earlier, I was a guest on the Read Science! hangout on G+ earlier today. If you weren't able to watch it live, the video is available at that link, and I'll embed it here:
There were some feedback problems with the audio for a little while-- annoyingly, it only got bad once the hangout…
June 19, 2014
Rhett and I haven't done Uncertain Dots for a couple of weeks due to scheduling issues, but that doesn't mean I'm neglecting the multimedia side of things. In fact, I'll be doing a hangout today, as a guest on the Read Science! hangout hosted by Joanne Manaster and Jeff Shaumeyer. The event page is…
June 16, 2014
The latest in a long series of articles making me glad I don't work in psychology was this piece about replication in the Guardian. This spins off some harsh criticism of replication studies and a call for an official policy requiring consultation with the original authors of a study that you're…
June 15, 2014
Today is Father's Day in the US, so I got a bunch of little gifts from the kids. The Pip's was just a construction-paper card mostly made by his teachers, with a bit of scribble on it. SteelyKid's, though, included a fill-in-the-blank booklet that she wrote on and drew pictures to go with.
Some of…
June 12, 2014
A bunch of people were talking about this Nature Jobs article on the GRE this morning while I was proctoring the final for my intro E&M class, which provided a nice distraction. I posted a bunch of comments about it to Twitter, but as that's awfully ephemeral, I figured I might as well collect…
June 10, 2014
I had a couple of conversations at DAMOP last week about career issues, and I just want to note that I will never get used to the idea that I'm a respected elder anything, whose advice would be valued. I basically feel like I lucked into my whole career, so I hesitate to advise others as to what…
June 9, 2014
The Cosmos reboot season finale (or possibly series finale; not sure if they're trying for a second set of episodes) was last night, but I wasn't able to take part in the live-tweeting of it thanks to a super-restless Pip who didn't drop off until 9:30 EDT. I suppose I could've waited to start the…
June 8, 2014
Made it home Friday evening after another bout of airline nonsense-- they had replaced the plane for my flight into Albany with a smaller aircraft, so my email boarding pass assigned me to a nonexistent seat. Which had been corrected in their computer, but was never communicated to me, or to…
June 4, 2014
I'm working on some short pop-quantum explainers for reasons that I'll be a little cagey about. In casting around for a novel way to introduce Schrödinger's cat states, I hit on something that probably works, but illustrates the problems inherent in being both a professional physicist and a pop-…
June 2, 2014
I don't have anything all that new to say about last night's Cosmos reboot, and I'm leaving for scenic Madison, WI today to attend DAMOP, so I don't have a great deal of time. Kate did mention something over dinner last night, though, that's a good topic for a quick blog post.
Kate's a big listener…
May 28, 2014
For the sixteenth episode of Uncertain Dots, we decided to bring in some guests, Andy Rundquist and Kelly O'Shea for a conversation about standards-based grading. This came up because I'm playing around with this using the same tiered scheme I talked about back in January.
This was a fun…
