July 18, 2013
One of the chapters of the book-in-progress, as mentioned previously, takes the widespread use of statistics in sports as a starting point, noting that a lot of the techniques stat geeks use in sports are similar to those scientists use to share and evaluate data. The claim is that anyone who can…
July 17, 2013
It's been a really long time since I've done a Dorky Poll here, but I'm pretty fried at the moment, so here's a kind of mathematical personality test: two numbers that do not uniquely define a sequence, but suggest some possibilities that reveal your innate character type and/or appropriate career…
July 16, 2013
I forget who pointed me to the Tenure She Wrote piece on mentoring, but it's something I've been turning over for a couple of weeks now. Probably because I became aware of it right around the time my two summer students started work last week. It keeps colliding with other conversations as well,…
July 15, 2013
One thing I left out of the making-of story about the squeezed state BEC paper last week happened a while after publication-- a few months to a year later. I don't quite recall when it was-- I vaguely think I was still at Yale, but I could be misremembering. It's kind of amusing, in an exceedingly…
July 12, 2013
I spend a lot of time promoting Rhett Allain's Dot Physics blog, enough that some people probably wonder if I get a cut of his royalties (I don't). I'm going to take issue with his latest, though, because he's decided to revive his quixotic campaign against photons, or at least teaching about…
July 11, 2013
Yesterday's write-up of my Science paper ended with a vague promise to deal some inside information about the experiment. So, here are some anecdotes that you would need to have been at Yale in 1999-2000 to pick up. We'll stick with the Q&A format for this, because why not?
Why don't we start…
July 10, 2013
In Monday's post on squeezed states, I mentioned that I really liked the question because I had done work on the subject. This is, in fact, my claim to scientific fame (well, before the talking-to-the-dog thing, anyway)-- I'm the first author on a Science paper with more than 500 citations having…
July 9, 2013
There was a flurry of discussion recently on campus about "critical thinking," and how we sell that idea to prospective and current students. This was prompted by a recent report arguing for the importance of the humanities and social sciences (which I found really frustrating in ways that are…
July 8, 2013
In the Physics Blogging Request Thread the other day, I got a comment so good I could've planted it myself, from Rachel who asks:
It’s a term I see used a lot but don’t really know what it means – what is a “squeezed state”? What does “squeezing” mean? (in a QM context of course…)
I love this,…
July 7, 2013
There was another round of the "who counts as a scientist?" debate recently, on Twitter and then on the Physics Focus blog. In between those, probably coincidentally (he doesn't mention anything prompting it), Sean Carroll offered a three-step definition of science:
Think of every possible way the…
July 5, 2013
The picture above shows the new sign on SteelyKid's door. She had to ask us how to spell the words-- she's not five for another month, yet-- but she is now the proud owner of a hand-lettered "DO NOT ENTER" sign for her bedroom. About half a dozen years earlier than I was hoping for...
I made good…
July 4, 2013
It's Independence Day here in the US, so here are some patriotic kid photos for you.
"Wait a minute," you say, "That featured image doesn't have any flags or fireworks or gilled meat products! How is that patriotic?"
"Ah," I reply,"It was taken at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC last…
July 3, 2013
There was a brief flurry of discussion yesterday kicked off by Matt Yglesias posting People Don't Major in Science—Because It's Hard, which more or less says what the title would lead you to believe (either title, since he's blogging for Slate where they like to give pages titles that don't match…
July 2, 2013
Having said that I want to focus more on positive stuff, and talking up cool things in science, I'm going to make an effort to do more write-ups of research papers. I've got a few ideas along those lines, and of course I get regular emails from journals and press offices bringing other papers to my…
July 2, 2013
In my darker moods, I sometimes suspect that all academics, regardless of their specialty, are engaged in the same pursuit: searching out and exposing the systematic oppression of... whatever department or program the faculty member speaking at the moment happens to belong to. No matter what field…
July 1, 2013
One of the great frustrations of my intellectual life, such as it is, is the problem of the disappearing quote. This is a function of having acquired a broad liberal education (in the sense of "liberal arts college" not the sense of "person to the left of Rush Limbaugh") in a somewhat haphazard…
June 27, 2013
The day I bought my iPad, as I was taking it out of the box, SteelyKid (then 3) came bopping into my office, spotted it, and declared "I want to play Angry Birds!" It's a remarkable demonstration of the genius of their product: not only have they created a game that a three-year-old can play, they'…
June 26, 2013
I'm always a little ambivalent about writing up papers that have also been written up in Physics: on the one hand, they make a free PDF of the paper available, which allows me to reproduce figures from the paper in my post, since I'm not breaking a paywall to do it. Which makes it much more…
June 25, 2013
Kate had to leave at 7am this morning to go to a "retreat" for her office, so I took the kids to Dunkin' Donuts for breakfast. That got us all out the door at the same time, avoiding the freakout from The Pip if he saw Mommy leave without him. Kate will be late getting home tonight, as well, so I'…
June 22, 2013
One of the great things about "Fermi Problems" is that there are multiple ways of attacking them. So, for example, when considering the death ray plot yesterday, I used medical devices as an example system to assess the plausibility of the plot, while Physics Buzz talked total energy. But those…
June 21, 2013
One bad thing about SteelyKid's preschool graduation yesterday was that it drained my phone battery, causing me to miss an interview request from a local TV station looking for somebody to talk about a a couple of local guys arrested for a plot to build a "death ray" from X-ray components. This is…
June 20, 2013
SteelyKid's preschool "graduation" was today, and in addition to a certificate with her name on it, she got a CD of her class's favorite songs and a composite picture of her class. I'd include an image, but it wouldn't reproduce well, and anyway, I try not to post pictures of other people's kids.…
June 20, 2013
One of the oddities of writing the book-in-progress is that it involves a lot more history-of-science than I'm used to. which means I'm doing things like checking out 800-page scientific biographies from the college library so I can use them to inform 500 word sections of 4000 word chapters. One of…
June 18, 2013
I've got a ton of stuff that needs to get done this week, but I don't want the blog to be completely devoid of new content, so here's a quasi-poll question for my wise and worldly readers:
What scientist is most in need of a good popular biography?
By "popular biography," I mean things like Norton…
June 17, 2013
The other big event of the weekend was Commencement at Union. I didn't make it in time for the academic procession and all that, but I did hear John Lewis's speech, which was great. More importantly, though, I was there to see our students graduate, and congratulate them in person.
As I told my…
June 17, 2013
This past weekend was more complicated than it might've been. On Friday night, we drove to Whitney Point to my parents' house, then on Sunday morning very early we drove back to Niskayuna so I could make it to Union's graduation on Sunday (I arrived just in time to hear Civil Rights icon John Lewis…
June 13, 2013
A few months back, I got a call from a writer at a physics magazine, asking for comments on a controversy within AMO physics. I read a bunch of papers, and really didn't quite understand the problem; not so much the issue at stake, but why it was so heated. When I spoke to the writer (I'm going to…
June 12, 2013
Hey, dude? Yeah, what's up?
I'm not normally the one who initiates this, but I was wondering: When you were at DAMOP last week, did you see any really neat physics? Oh, sure, tons of stuff. It was a little thinner than some past meetings-- a lot of the Usual Suspects didn't make the trip-- but…
June 11, 2013
I saw a bunch of people yesterday tweeting approval of John Hawks's complaint about academic timidity when it comes to blogging:
The bottom line is: People need to decide if they want to be heard, or if they want to be validated. I have long been an associate editor at PLoS ONE, and once I edited…
June 11, 2013
As previously noted, I spent most of last week at the 2013 DAMOP meeting, where I listened to a whole bunch of talks. At some point, I was listening to a talk, and said "I bet this guy hasn't given a lot of these before." What was the give-away? The fact that he almost never said "Um."
To the…
