April 27, 2012
9:30am Thursday, Starbucks
Work steadily on the work-in-progress, researching a few points here and there, adding a bunch of words, making various line edits.
11:15am Thursday, Starbucks
Realize that the stuff I added would work better if split off into a new subsection.
11:30am Thursday, Union…
April 27, 2012
Somebody on Twitter linked this article about "brogrammers", which is pretty much exactly as horrible as that godawful neologism suggests. In between descriptions of some fairly appalling behavior, though, they throw some stats at you, and that's where it gets weird:
As it is, women remain acutely…
April 27, 2012
Animals Disappointed in your College Performance
This ostrich begs to differ with you. Grammar does matter.
Boston Review -- Claude S. Fischer: The Loneliness Scare
Social scientists have more precisely tracked Americans' isolation and reports of loneliness over the last several decades. The real…
April 26, 2012
I've been falling down on the shameless self-promotion front, lately, but that doesn't mean I'm not tracking How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog obsessively, just that I'm too busy to talk about it. Happily, other people have been nice enough to talk about it for me, in a variety of places:
The…
April 26, 2012
What Particle Are You? | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
I am not a particle! I am a HUMAN BEING!!
Studies in Everyday Life: Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist: My Comments on the Limits to Growth
This is my response to the recent post by UCSD physicist Tom Murphy, in which he…
April 25, 2012
For something I'm working on, I'm trying to come up with good examples of interdisciplinarity making a difference in science. Specifically, I'm looking for cases where somebody with training in one field was able to make a major advance in another field because their expertise let them look at a…
April 25, 2012
Taking in a concert doubleheader with Creed and Nickelback, the world's most hated bands - Grantland
The moment you tell people you're seeing Creed and Nickelback in concert -- on the same night, at roughly the same time, in two different venues -- it suddenly becomes a stunt. Just describing the…
April 24, 2012
The schedule called for this to appear last Friday, but as I was just back from a funeral, yeah, not so much. I had already gone through and bookmarked a whole slew of old posts, though, so here's a recap of the 2003-2004 blogademic year (starting and ending in late June).
This year saw a few…
April 24, 2012
Over in Twitter-land, there's a bunch of talk about how this is National Physics Day. I don't know how I missed that, what with all the media coverage and all.
I have too much other stuff to do to generate any detailed physics content today, so we'll settle for an informal poll to mark the occasion…
April 24, 2012
Fire - Flint & Steel - Some Clarifications
"I started a fire with flint and steel." Often heard, at least in some circles. But, what does this really mean? Well, there are two very different processes that might be being talked about: Traditional Flint and Steel: Striking a hardened piece of…
April 23, 2012
Via Joerg Heber on Twitter, a great post on gender divisions in STEM by Athene Donald:
As children try to work out their personal identities, the difference between 'boy' and 'girl' is as fundamental and omnipresent as it gets - and they receive the clear messages that collectively society gives…
April 23, 2012
How do I get my students to prepare before coming to a flipped class? - Turn to Your Neighbor: The Official Peer Instruction Blog
A whole lot of words about the virtues of Peer Instruction and Just-in-Time Teaching, followed by a one-paragraph response to the question in the title. Don't blink or…
April 21, 2012
Dark Matter: Now You See It, Now You Don't | Of Particular Significance
Both claims that I'm about to describe use novel techniques, and their analyses have not been repeated by anyone else. At this point you should understand that both are tentative, and (based on the history of radical claims)…
April 20, 2012
Reading Ethan Zuckerman's recap of the awful things people said to Xeni Jardin during a recent "twttier bomb" fiasco, it would be very easy to slide into "People suck" mode. Particularly since a large part of my day yesterday was spent in New York traffic. So here's a quick antidote, also from…
April 20, 2012
Yesterday was the funeral for my great-aunt Mildred, known within the family as "Auntie" (first syllable "ont" not "ant"), who fell and bumped her head last Friday, and just never woke up. On the one hand, she was 97, so this shouldn't be too surprising, but a few years ago she moved out of a…
April 18, 2012
Yesterday's post on applying intro physics concepts to the question of how fast and how long football players might accelerate generated a bunch of comments, several of them claiming that the model I used didn't match real data in the form of race clips and the like. One comment in particular…
April 18, 2012
What's up in the solar system in April 2012 - The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary Society
Lest you get too depressed about the mothballing of the Space Shuttles, a roundup of all the cool space probes out there producing real science.
Yes, I Took My Ninth Grader on a College Tour (and It…
April 17, 2012
Over at Grantland, Bill Barnwell offers some unorthodox suggestions for replacing the kickoff in NFL games, which has apparently been floated as a way to improve player safety. Appropriately enough, the suggestion apparently came from Giants owner John Mara, which makes perfect sense giving that…
April 17, 2012
A few thoughts on Hilary Rosen, moms and work
But instead of engaging Rosen's points, the media storm is about how Democrats Hate Mothers. Or, Democrats Hate GOOD Mothers -- you know, the kind who stay at home. The women the Democrats like are those slutty Planned Parenthood sluts, or something.…
April 16, 2012
My Google vanity search for my name and the book titles is really frustratingly spotty, often missing things in major news outlets that I later find by other means. For example, I didn't get a notification about this awesome review in the Guardian, from their children's book section:
I am a ten…
April 16, 2012
Sparks Fly Over Shoestring Test Of 'Holographic Principle'
" "The beauty of it is that we have the people who can come up with this low-risk, high-reward experiment," says Fermilab's Raymond Tomlin. "It's one shot, and if you discover something you go to Stockholm [to collect a Nobel Prize]. And…
April 15, 2012
We found out yesterday that one of my great-aunts, who recently moved out of a retirement community because she wanted to live by herself, fell and banged her head badly. While she apparently seemed okay at the time, a short while later she collapsed, and is vanishingly unlikely to recover. While…
April 14, 2012
Microsoft Word is cumbersome, inefficient, and obsolete. It's time for it to die. - Slate Magazine
Nowadays, I get the same feeling of dread when I open an email to see a Microsoft Word document attached. Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone's archaic habits. A Word file is…
April 13, 2012
As threatened a little while ago, this is the first of ten hopefully weekly posts looking back at the ten years this blog has been in operation. This one covers the period from the very first post on June 22, 2002 to June 21, 2003.
When I started doing this look back, I was more than a little…
April 12, 2012
The big publishing news this week is the US Department of Justice bringing an anti-trust suit against the major book publishers and Apple for allegedly colluding to force the "agency model" of ebook pricing on Amazon and other retailers, resulting in higher prices for consumers. I already links…
April 12, 2012
I'm re-instituting the quota system for the moment-- no blogging until I make some substantive progress on the current work-in-progress-- but I'll throw out a quick post here to note a media appearance: Physics World has a podcast about books on quantum physics up today:
Since its inception in the…
April 12, 2012
What Is Science? From Feynman to Sagan to Curie, an Omnibus of Definitions | Brain Pickings
So, what exactly is science, what does it aspire to do, and why should we the people care? It seems like a simple question, but it's an infinitely complex one, the answer to which is ever elusive and…
April 11, 2012
A passing mention in last week's post about impostors and underdogs got me thinking about Michael Faraday again, and I went looking for a good biography of him. The last time looked, I didn't find any in electronic form, probably because the Sony Reader store has a lousy selection. I got a Nook for…
April 11, 2012
I've had limited success with this query on Twitter, probably because not that many people were reading late last night when I posted this, but I can give a little more context here, so it's worth repeating:
As part of something I'm working on but won't talk about yet, I'm interested in learning…
April 11, 2012
Denim and Tweed: Asking permission
Last May, the Republican-controlled state legislature voted to amend the Minnesota Constitution, adding a thirteenth section to the "Miscellaneous Items" of the Constitution's Article XIII to declare, "Only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or…
