January 15, 2014
One of the labs we do in the introductory E&M class I'm teaching this term involves investigating charged particles with sticky tape. If you haven't seen it before, "invisible" tape picks up an electric charge when it's peeled off a surface quickly, and with a little care, you can create both…
January 14, 2014
The other morning, I was lying in bed and for some reason, found myself wondering what the population of Niskayuna is. While this is easily Google-able, as I said, I was in bed, and didn't want to get up to get a device with Internet connectivity. So I tried to Fermi-problem my way to an answer…
January 13, 2014
When I wrote about Benjamin Bratton's anti-TED rant I only talked about the comment about the low success rate of TED suggestions. That was, admittedly, a small piece of his article, but the rest of it was so ludicrously overheated that I couldn't really take it seriously. It continues to get…
January 11, 2014
Friday night was a home game for Union's basketball teams, so I picked SteelyKid and the Pip up a little earlier than usual, and took them to the women's game (which starts right around the time day care ends and ends right around their usual bedtime). You might wonder what it's like taking the…
January 10, 2014
The posts on box-checking and liberal arts teaching generated a fair number of comments that I haven't really had time to address individually, across a few different social media platforms. So I'm going to collect some of the more important stuff here, in one catch-up post.
--A few people, mostly…
January 9, 2014
As a follow-up to yesterday's post about liberal education and the failure modes thereof, I thought I should try to do something constructive and make suggestions regarding how you might go about a "poetry for physicists" kind of thing. After all, one of the things I find intensely frustrating…
January 8, 2014
One of the many ancillary tasks associated with my job that I wish I was better at is the advising of students. More specifically, the advising of students who aren't like I was at that age.
What I mean by that is that when I was a student, I didn't need to be convinced of the utility of liberal…
January 8, 2014
A couple of weeks ago, I got a cool picture of snow hanging off SteelyKid's playset, and posted a call for people to suggest physics-y ideas about that. I only got one response, probably because nobody really read the Internet over the holidays.
Anyway, the next time I'm likely to have the free…
January 7, 2014
I'm teaching introductory E&M this term, so it's kind of fun to play around with silly applications of Coulomb's Law. For example, let's imagine that gravity suddenly switched off, but we wanted to keep the Earth in its orbit. How much charge would we need to move from the Earth to the Sun for…
January 6, 2014
Classes for the Winter term start today, and I'm totally prepared for this. Yep. Uh-huh. Losing a bunch of prep time to snow and ice last week hasn't thrown anything into disarray.
Anyway, for a variety of reasons, I've ended up departing from my plan to not do any new preps while I'm stuck being…
January 5, 2014
Kate and I will be going to the Worldcon in London this August. This will be my first trip to the UK for anything other than changing planes, so we're going to take a few days on either end to do touristy stuff. The pre-con plan is to stay based in London, maybe taking a day trip or two from there…
January 3, 2014
I got a new camera for Christmas, not because there's anything wrong with my DSLR, but because I wanted something that could do high-speed video. So I now have a Casio point-and-shoot camera that will record up to 1000 frames per second, woo-hoo!
To break it in, I got the kids to help out by re-…
January 2, 2014
This past Monday, a lot of people in my social media feeds were passing around this Benjamin Bratton piece about the problems with TED, blasting the whole phenomenon as "placebo technoradicalism." The whole thing, he claims, is shallow pseudo-inspirational bullshit that makes people feel nice, but…
January 1, 2014
I sent off the complete draft of the book-in-progress yesterday, somewhere between 12 and 36 hours ahead of my contractual deadline. Which I suppose makes it a book-in-process now, maybe. That process may still include re-writes, though, so my work probably isn't done yet.
The final draft,…
December 25, 2013
Merry Christmas if you celebrate it, happy Wednesday if you don't. That's about all there is to say, isn't it?
Warm holiday wishes from Chateau Steelypips.
December 22, 2013
I've seen a bunch of links to this interview with Peter Aldhous, mostly focusing on this quote:
I think for most science journalists, their model of journalism is explanatory. It’s taking the arcane world of the high priests and priestesses of science and translating what they do into language the…
December 20, 2013
While we were in Florida last weekend, we got a bunch of snow at home, so we came home to the proverbial winter wonderland. It's warmed up quite a bit since, though, and stuff is now melting. When I got home this morning after doing a bunch of revisions to the book-in-progress, I looked out the…
December 17, 2013
We spent this past weekend in Florida, visiting Kate's mom and her husband, who moved down there in October. This was a huge hit with the kids, who were very excited to fly on an airplane (four of them, actually, as we changed planes in Baltimore both ways). They also got a big kick out of driving…
December 6, 2013
I'm giving my talk about blogs as a tool for science outreach again on Monday, and need an updated version of the cute-kid picture screenshot I use in that. So here's a composite of the two kid pictures I posted a week or two ago, because it should all fit on screen, even on my laptop.
I probably…
December 4, 2013
I know I said there weren't going to be physics posts for a while, but yesterday our Communications office passed along a media request about this paper on feedback cooling of BEC, from some sort of communications-person mailing list. I'd seen it talked up elsewhere-- here, for example, so I banged…
December 2, 2013
I got some feedback from my editor about draft chapters of the book-in-progress a while ago, and while it was generally pretty positive, there's a lot of work to be done. Shortly after that, I realized there was a big and awkward gap in the material I had, which involved a lot of frantic research…
November 30, 2013
"Daddy, I wanna play with the robot dog!"
"It's not a dog, honey, it's an Imperial walker. An AT-AT. A fearsome armored assault transport used to overwhelm the Rebel defenses in the battle of Hoth."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"OK, fine, you can play with the robot dog."
We came down to my parents' for…
November 27, 2013
Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev hit on the idea of the Periodic Table as an organizing theme for a textbook he began writing in 1868. He did some work on refining the idea, and in 1870 presented a paper on it to a meeting of the Russian Chemical Society.
Well, actually, that's not quite true--…
November 26, 2013
We had a very late colloquium talk on Monday-- on the next-to-last day of our fall term exam period, so student turnout was a little disappointing-- by the science historian Dieter Hoffmann from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, who was in town visiting a colleague in our history…
November 24, 2013
Since SteelyKid got her own cute-photo post last night, it's only fair to give equal time to The Pip. This morning, for reasons that passeth adult understanding, the kids decided to balance teddy bears on their heads, SteelyKid using Bertha the Big Bear (who is just a little smaller than The Pip),…
November 23, 2013
One of SteelyKid's classmates came over for a couple hours today. After a bit, they got into the Magic School Bus science kit she got for her birthday, and decided to invent "new kinds of water." The "featured image" above shows her reinventing stock images... And doing a better job of it than this…
November 22, 2013
From The Fly in the Cathedral, Brian Cathcart's history of the experiments that led up to the splitting of lithium nuclei by accelerated protons in the Cavendish Laboratory in 1932. One of the incidents along the way was the discovery of the neutron by James Chadwick, also in 1932. In describing…
November 21, 2013
I'm not talking about the tv show Eureka here, which was mostly silly fluff but not especially problematic. I'm talking about the famous anecdote about Archimedes of Syracuse, who supposedly realized the principle that bears his name when slipping into a bath, distracted by a problem he had been…
November 20, 2013
A couple of Mondays ago, I was at work and got the dreaded phone call from day care. "[The Pip]'s got conjunctivitis again. It's really bad, and he needs to go home right away."
Admittedly, this isn't the very worst phone call a parent could receive, but it's very much Not Good. Conjunctivitis…
November 19, 2013
My trip into the office today was for the express purpose of posting this job ad:
We invite applications for Visiting Assistant Professor starting in September 2014. This position is available for up to three years, contingent on satisfactory performance. Applicants should have some teaching…
