April 9, 2013
Back in January, thinking about science topics to add to the book-in-progress, it occurred to me that I would really be letting down SteelyKid (and pre-schoolers everywhere) if I didn't take the opportunity to include something about dinosaurs. The problem with that, of course, is that I know next…
April 6, 2013
I saw Maria Konnikova's Mastermind on the book lottery stacks at Science Online, and the subtitle "How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes" practically screamed "This is relevant to your interests!" Not only am I writing a book about how to think like a scientist, one of the chapters I have in mind uses…
April 4, 2013
Last week, I gave my evangelical talk about science blogging to the Physics department at Wright State, and also a lot of education students who came to the talk (which made a nice change in the sort of questions I got). It's basically this talk that I gave at Cornell a couple of years ago, with a…
April 3, 2013
The last week or so of silence on the blog has been due to my trip to Ohio (which was very enjoyable), and a lack of child care for the early part of this week. A day and a half home with both kids was just exhausting, but the trip was useful in that it provided me time to read Gravity's Engines by…
March 26, 2013
The Pip is getting really into books these days, and SteelyKid has been into them for a good while now (she's four-and-a-half, after all...). At some point last week, she asked about my writing, so I got down a copy of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog and showed her her name in the dedication,…
March 26, 2013
It's been a while since I've done a post over-analyzing some everyday situation, because I've been too busy to do any silly experiments. We're on break this week, though, so I took a little time Monday to bring excessive technology to bear on the critically important scientific question: how good…
March 25, 2013
Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau has a bit of a rant about what students perceive as grading on a "curve":
Moreover, many students have only the foggiest idea of what a curve is. Many (though probably not all) of their high schools had fixed grading scales with fixed percentages for each…
March 25, 2013
Kind of short notice, but if you're in the appropriate bits of Ohio, you might be interested to know that I'm giving two talks at Wright State this Thursday. At 11am, I'm doing the Physics Department Colloquium in 202 Oelman Hall, "Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of…
March 22, 2013
OK, here's my idea: We put a leash on Emmy and we put her up on top of this rock that's on top of all these other rocks. Then she jumps down into these petals. so she'll be safe. And you pull on the leash so she jumps down a little faster.
I'm down here on the bottom. This is my arm, holding this…
March 21, 2013
Yesterday's big post on why I think people should embrace scientific thinking in a more conscious way than they do already (because my claim is that most people already use scientific thinking, they're just not aware that they're doing it) is clearly a kind of explanation of the reason behind my…
March 20, 2013
As you may or may not know, I'm currently at work on a book called How to Think Like a Scientist. This raises the fairly obvious question in the post title, namely, why should people think like scientists? What's the point?
In a sense, this is (as Ethan Zuckerman pointed out at lunch the other day…
March 19, 2013
OK, Daddy, guess what? Here's my idea. We get a stick of wood and we put a timer on it, then we get a big rock and put it on the end. We have to put feet on the big rock, so it can stand on the stick.
Then when the rain comes down, down, down, we push really hard on the stick. We have to do a…
March 19, 2013
I had lunch with Ethan Zuckerman yesterday, and we were talking about technology and communicating science to a mass audience, and Michio Kaku came up. Specifically, the fact that he's prone to saying stuff that's just flat wrong, if not batshit crazy-- see this angry post from 2010 for an example…
March 18, 2013
We're entering the heart of College Admissions Season-- the offers are out, and students are doing the high-stress decision thing-- which means it's time for the New York Times to begin their annual series of faintly awful reports on the state of academia. And right on cue, there's this weekend's…
March 15, 2013
On Twitter and blogs, we're having another round of complaints about sensationalism and hype in science stories-- Matthew Francis and Gabrielle Rabinowitz are the latest to cross my social media feeds. I've also seen some stories recently (that I'm too lazy to dig up) complaining about the latest…
March 15, 2013
The kids are off at Grandma and Grandpa's, so Kate and I went out for a nice dinner Thursday night, and I found myself with a bit of time to blog... but no particular substantive ideas. The whole "publishers behaving badly" theme of last week seems to have run its course, between Random House re-…
March 14, 2013
What with all the angst lately over the impending death of Google Reader, I finally got over my inertia and am testing out the WordPress auto-tweet feature, because that's apparently how the kids get their blog feeds these days. I sort of hate Twitter feeds that are nothing but blog post links,…
March 14, 2013
In the twelve years I've been at Union, there are only two times I've tried to go to an evening speaker and been turned away. Once was 4-5 years ago, when Maya Angelou spoke on campus, the second time was last night, when Bill Nye the Science Guy spoke. I managed to make it to the foot of the steps…
March 12, 2013
SteelyKid has started to demand Sid the Science Kid videos, which of course we are implacably opposed to around here. One of the recent episodes available online was "Slide to the Side," talking about friction. While this partakes a bit of the Feynman "Energy makes it go" problem, it was generally…
March 8, 2013
WordPress's upload is broken, so here's a link to the photo: SteelyKid and The Pip.
February was... not a good month, in a lot of ways. Let's leave it at that. One of the unfortunate consequences of this was that I went just about the entire month without even taking any pictures of the kids, let…
March 6, 2013
There was a lot of re-sharing yesterday of an article about the "Finkbeiner Test" to be applied to profiles of women scientists. This is analogous to the "Bechdel Test" in pop culture, which asks "Do two women talk to each other about something other than a man?", only because we're scientists, it'…
March 5, 2013
One of the things that's been rattling around in my head since ScienceOnline back in January is the need for a greater diversity of voices in science communication generally. I don't mean diversity in the sense of racial and gender make-up of the people doing the communication, though that would be…
March 4, 2013
In rapid succession yesterday, Twitter threw me two how-to-behave-online links that kind of rubbed me the wrong way. The first was a widely re-shared essay titled You Are Boring:
You listen to the same five podcasts and read the same seven blogs as all your pals. You stay up late on Twitter making…
March 1, 2013
This is the physics book that's generating the most buzz just at the moment, by noted string theorist Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky, based on a general-audience course Susskind's been running for years. It's doing very well, with an Amazon rank in the 300's, which is kind of remarkable for…
February 28, 2013
Every now and then, I run across a couple of items that tie together a whole bunch of different issues that weigh heavily on my mind. That happened yesterday courtesy of Timothy Burke, whose blog post about an NPR story is so good that there aren't enough +1 buttons on the entire Internet for it.…
February 26, 2013
Over in Twitter-land, Ben Lillie of the Story Collider asked an interesting question, which sparked some discussion that he's Storified on a Tumblr blog (just in case the date stamp wasn't enough to mark this as 2013...). The original question was:
Partly I’m wondering if there is a reason to have…
February 22, 2013
We've got calls out to the local grad programs, and I've mentioned this on Twitter a couple of times, but it can't hurt anything to post it here as well: we've got a huge overabundance of first-year engineering students that is forcing us to open extra sections of our intro physics classes to…
February 19, 2013
This past weekend, I was at Boskone, where I appeared on a few science-y panels. One of these was on the possibility of beaming power down from space:
Energy From Space
Beam me down some juice, Scotty? Let's talk about the possibilities -- and practicalities -- of really long-distance power…
February 15, 2013
Yesterday's post about differences between intro physics and chemistry sparked an interesting discussion in comments that I didn't have time to participate in. Sigh. Anyway, a question that came up in there was why we have physicists teach intro physics courses that are primarily designed to serve…
February 14, 2013
Not long ago, I had a meeting with the Dean, who is a chemist. One of the things I talked about was my plan for distributing teaching assignments in the next few years, which ran into an interesting cultural difference. I explained how I was trying to make the distribution of assignments a little…
