April 10, 2012
Between unpleasant work stuff and the Dread Stomach Bug wiping out the better part of five days, I only got my student evaluation comments for my winter term class last week, and I'm only getting around to writing the post-mortem now. This was, for those who may not have been obsessively following…
April 10, 2012
Gymkata proves that tiny gymnasts make tough heroes | Film | Films That Time Forgot | The A.V. Club
Plot: At the height of the Reagan era, someone had the bright idea to turn diminutive, soft-voiced, mulleted gymnast Kurt Thomas into an international action star. How? By positing him as a master…
April 9, 2012
I'm trying not to be Neurotic Author Guy and obsessively check online reviews of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog every fifteen minutes. I've actually been pretty successful at it, so successful that I didn't notice the first posted review at Amazon until my parents mentioned it to me. It's a…
April 9, 2012
SteelyKid has recently become obsessed with the Disney Junior show Jake and the Never Land Pirates, demanding to watch it all the time. Thanks to her two recent bouts with this year's stomach bug, I've had to watch, or at least listen to her watching in the next room, every episode that Time Warner…
April 8, 2012
Today is Easter Sunday, which we celebrated in the manner of my people, by chasing soap bubbles around the backyard:
OK, that's not an actual tradition, but it was a beautiful day today, and SteelyKid got a big bottle of bubble stuff from her great-grandmother, so it seemed like the right thing to…
April 7, 2012
The murky water of chastising and celebrating NFL violence - Grantland
Of course, it's 2012 -- the Year of Internet Self-Righteousness -- which means we need to feign disgust, pile on the Saints, argue for Williams to receive the NFL's death penalty and basically freak out that a football coach…
April 6, 2012
I'm killing time waiting for something I can't talk about yet, so here's a silly poll to pass the time, brought to you by a couple of songs served up on the radio this morning while I was running errands:
Which of these awkward song lyrics is the worst lyrical crime against English grammar?
I…
April 6, 2012
I want a story. The story about one little pig, and the wolf.
I'll need you to help me with it, OK?
Yeah.
OK, once upon a time, there was one little pig, and he... What did he do?
He built a house out of straw.
Right. He was a little bit silly, so he built himself a house out of straw. Which is a…
April 6, 2012
Texts from Hillary
"So then I sent her a text saying I think I left my favorite sunglasses in the desk."
Swans on Tea » Do You Have My Back?
So this whole "get back to doing science" kind of hits me where I live. I've seen budgetary fallout from recent events, and I know I'm not alone in that…
April 5, 2012
While none of the college basketball teams I root for made the Final Four in their respective tournaments, I probably really ought to note that there is a team that might loosely be termed "mine" that's playing in the national semifinal. Then again, since they've gotten this far without me saying…
April 5, 2012
Over in Scientopia, SciCurious has a nice post about suffering from Impostor Syndrome, the feeling that everyone else is smarter than you are, and you will soon be exposed as a total fraud. Which is nonsense, of course, but something that almost every scientist suffers at some point. The post ends…
April 5, 2012
Two things I was forwarded or pointed toward this week, that interact a little oddly. First chronologically is from the New York Times, which has a story about how Harvey Mudd College has boosted the number of female computer science majors, by committing serious resources to reforming the intro…
April 5, 2012
The Gravitational Force in Angry Birds Space | Wired Science | Wired.com
As anyone that has played the game can tell you, this air looking stuff surrounding an asteroid defines a region in which the angry birds will interact with the rock. If the bird is outside of this region, there will be no…
April 4, 2012
Over in Twitterland, we have a question from WillyB:
If you had to pick one topic to cover in Physics, which do you think is the most important for the gen. public?
This sounds like a job for the Internet! To the polling machine!
If you had to pick one topic to cover in Physics, which do you think…
April 4, 2012
While reading bits of Neil deGrasse Tyson's Space Chronicles yesterday, I ran across this quote, attributed to "an Assyrian clay tablet from 2800 BC":
Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common;…
April 3, 2012
While in the past, I've written a bunch about basketball here, I've been unusually silent on the subject this year, confining my commentary to the occasional Links Dump item from Grantland and other sites. This isn't because the past season was not noteworthy-- indeed, it was a rather eventful year…
April 3, 2012
June 22, 2012 will mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of this blog. While I would like to one day be famous enough to be able to staple together a collection of loosely related blog posts and call it a book, I'm not there yet. This particular arbitrary numerical signifier does, however,…
April 3, 2012
Science teacher: Why kids love science anyway...
We grow beans and basil in class, edible stuff from the breath they exhale--at first they resist the idea, as any reasonable creature would, and I don't give them any particular reason to believe it, but some do anyway. Kids like this. Many of the…
April 2, 2012
So, the infamous OPERA result for neutrino speeds seems to be conclusively disproven, traced to a problem with a timing signal. Matt Strassler has a very nice explanation of the test that shows that the whole thing can almost certainly be traced to a timing error that cropped up in 2008. This…
April 2, 2012
MacRecipes | Fathom
Have you ever wondered in how many different episodes MacGyver has made an arc welder (answer: 3 times in episodes 6, 52, and 87)? Or perhaps you forgot about your favorite episode (season 1, episode 12) when Mac escapes via a casket that transforms into a jetski. And how many…
April 1, 2012
In comments to yesterday's post, Andrew G asked:
Speaking of writing, is there an errata list somewhere for "How to teach relativity to your dog"?
No, but there probably should be. I believe there's an error in one of Maxwell's equations (an incorrect sign, though you should've seen the first…
March 31, 2012
Here are some excerpts from the introductory sections of the very first drafts of some book chapters:
[BLAH, BLAH, BLAHBITTY BLAH]
and
[Introductory blather goes here]
and
Blah, blah, stuff, blather.
There's a good reason for this, based on the basics of scientific writing, namely that the…
March 31, 2012
Physics - Cultivating Extra Dimensions
The search for ways to unify and understand physical phenomena goes back to Kaluza and Klein, who in the 1920s tried to combine electromagnetism with gravity by adding a fourth spatial dimension to the usual three (plus time). More recent theoretical work has…
March 30, 2012
One of the slighter slight flaws in my character is an unaccountable fondness for bad Americanized Chinese food. When I go to Starbucks to write, I walk right past a Chinese buffet restaurant, and it's a real effort not to run in and overdo it.
I occasionally try to cook stuff in this general…
March 30, 2012
Steve Hsu has a post comparing his hand-drawn diagrams to computer-generated ones that a journal asked for instead:
He's got a pretty decent case that the hand-drawn versions are better. Though a bit more work with the graphics software could make the computer ones better.
This reminded me, though…
March 29, 2012
The Virtuosi: Money for (almost) Nothing
I am not typically interested in lotteries. They seem silly and I am seriously beginning to question their usefulness in bringing about a good harvest. But this morning I read in the news that the Mega Millions lottery currently has a world record jackpot…
March 29, 2012
Last Saturday, at my book signing in Vestal, The Pip spit up a lot, several times, and wouldn't stop crying. This lasted a few hours, and by the next day, he was more or less back to normal. When I dropped him off at day care on Monday, I mentioned this, and the teachers in his room said "Oh, the…
March 28, 2012
The Religious Frenzy of a Court You Can't Believe In - Esquire
There are better places on the Intertoobz than this one to look either for a general overview of what may happen in the Court over the next three days -- Ezra Klein's joint did a masterful job this morning -- and, if you're looking for…
March 27, 2012
I was thinking about attitudes toward physics the other day, and realized that whenever I meet somebody (not a physicist) for the first time and tell them that I'm a physicist, their initial responses most frequently fall into one of three general categories:
"You must be really smart."
"I hated…
March 27, 2012
I mentioned this in the Links Dump this morning, but Timothy Burke's post on the inherent tensions in the residential part of small college life is really excellent stuff, and deserves more than the 1000 characters I can quote in Delicious:
At Swarthmore this semester, for example, some students…
