February 26, 2012
Hey, you might not know this, but I wrote a book...
The official release date for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog isn't until Tuesday, but a friend reported buying a copy in Missouri, so when I was headed out to do some work this afternoon, I went to the cafe at the local Barnes&Noble so I…
February 25, 2012
Once again, Kate is running an auction to benefit the Con or Bust project providing financial support for fans of color(*) to attend science fiction/ fantasy conventions. The auction is run via LiveJournal, with a variety of cool items on offer in individual posts to that community, with an overall…
February 24, 2012
The other controversial thing this week that I shouldn't get involved in is the debate over whether Brian Cox is talking nonsense in a recent discussion of the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Tom at Swans on Tea kicked this off with an inflammatory title, and Cox turned up in the comments to take…
February 24, 2012
It's not a good week for me to be writing about anything remotely controversial, but if I want to keep my physics blogging license, I need to say something about the latest fast neutrino news. This has followed the usual trajectory of such stories, with the bonus farcical element of people who…
February 24, 2012
Experimental Theology: The Bureaucrat
The second most common question I get is this, "Do you like being a Department Chair?" My answer is complicated, a yes and a no. On the one hand I don't like managing the administrivia of a bureaucracy. I struggle with this part of the job. Plus, I keep waking…
February 23, 2012
I'm grading exam papers at the dining room table when Emmy trots in. "Hey, dude," she says. "Where do we keep the superconducting wire?"
I'm not really paying attention, so I start to answer before I understand the question. "Hmm? Wire is in the basement, next to the--wait, what?"
"The…
February 23, 2012
On How Not to be Foxhog College | Easily Distracted
Excessive hedgehoggery makes it impossible to talk of change except as loss and violation, makes all planning into trauma. But a blithe fox, in love with his or her own humbuggery, tramples on the passions that sustain scholarly research and…
February 22, 2012
A correspondent from the UK sends along this picture from the Waterstones outlet in Heathrow airport:
As you can see, How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog is #55 on their bestseller rack, just ahead of Confessions of a London Call Girl. I'm not sure what this says about London call girls, but…
February 22, 2012
Astro-Physical Calculator
A JavaScript calculator with all manner of physical constants already programmed in, in different systems of units.
College Misery: I'm Baffled At My Students And Their Inability to Conquer "Some" Technology.
My students are whiz bang on all their electronic gear,…
February 21, 2012
The Bouletcorp » Darkness
I think my roommate is DARK...
Ingenious Infographic: U.S. Highways, Mapped Like A Subway System | Co.Design: business + innovation + design
Chucking geographic accuracy for a Tube-style schematic makes much more sense for plotting routes on the U.S. interstate system.…
February 20, 2012
This was the title of the group discussion I led at Boskone on Saturday, and since it's probably relevant to the interests of people reading this blog, I figure it's worth posting a quick recap. Of course, between the unfamiliar format and Friday's travel with the Incredible Screaming Pip, I didn't…
February 20, 2012
Online Python Tutor
Gives a nice visual representation of what's going on in a Python code snippet. If only it handled VPython...
Chip MacGregor .com: Does the publisher lose money if my book doesn't earn out?
Remember, every business can lose money. Retail shops, service business, even…
February 18, 2012
I'm at Boskone this weekend, and this morning went to a fairly frustrating panel on "SF/F/H As a Mirror on Society," described thusly:
It's simplistic to say genre fiction maps to current politics. Vampires are bankers, zombies are the revengeful victimized classes, and werewolves are the media in…
February 17, 2012
Xpress Reviews: Nonfiction | First Look at New Books, February 17, 2012 -- Library Journal Reviews
Playing Gracie Allen to Orzel's George Burns is the endearing Emmy, the canine star of his previous book. No matter whether Emmy thinks she will be younger by pulling fast on her leash or that she…
February 16, 2012
One of SteelyKid's favorite bedtimes reads is Good Night, Gorilla, which is very short and mostly pictures. We've read it about a million times, so to mix things up (and further my goal of convincing her that I'm a blithering idiot), I'll give it different titles when I hold it up before reading it…
February 16, 2012
Regular reader Johan Larson sends in a good question about academic physics:
You have written about teaching various courses in modern physics, a subject that has a fearsome reputation among students for skull-busting difficulty. That suggests a broader question: what is the most difficult course…
February 16, 2012
Problem solving like a physicist | Science Edventures
Another way, which looks the same on the surface, is to break the nasty problem into a sequence of steps. "First, find the relationship between A and B. Then, calculate B for the given value of A. Next, substitute A and B into C and solve for C…
February 15, 2012
Proton Collisions Vs. Quark/Gluon/Antiquark Mini-Collisions | Of Particular Significance
Keep in mind that the total number of 7 TeV = 7000 GeV proton-proton collisions that took place in ATLAS while they were accumulating the data for the plot above was about 100,000,000,000,000. [The total 2011…
February 14, 2012
As I've said a bazillion times already this term, I'm teaching a class that is about research and writing, with a big final paper due at the end of the term. Because iterative feedback is key to learning to write, they also have to turn in a complete rough draft, which I will mark up and have them…
February 13, 2012
So, the big How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Photoshop contest concluded on Friday. We got five really good entries, and the judges (me and Kate) had a hard time reaching a decision. After long deliberation, though, we've come up with a solution.
But first, the entries:
Jane Di Giuseppe has Emmy…
February 13, 2012
I've been falling down a little in the area of shameless self-promotion, but I will be at Boskone this coming weekend, where I'll be doing three program items:
Reading: Chad Orzel (Reading), Fri 19:30 - 20:00
This will be a section from the forthcoming book, probably involving Emmy and particle…
February 13, 2012
The Virtuosi: Time Keeps On Slippin'
Alright, so how do we go about quantifying how "good" a watch is? Well, there seem to be two main things we can test. The first of these is accuracy. That is, how close does this watch come to the actual time (according to some time system)? If the official…
February 12, 2012
We send SteelyKid to preschool at the Jewish Community Center in Schenectady, because when we looked at day care programs back in the day, they had the one we liked best. This is a mixed blessing in a number of ways-- they close for a lot of religious holidays when nothing else closes, creating…
February 11, 2012
Jeremy Lin, Landry Fields unveil nerdiest handshake in NBA history - San Jose Mercury News
Jeremy Lin and Landry Fields of the New York Knicks may comprise the most intelligent starting backcourt in NBA history. It's certainly hard to top a duo that boasts college degrees from Harvard (Lin) and…
February 10, 2012
Prompted by a number of people using the phrase "vast majority" recently, I wonder where the line between "majority" and "vast majority" is. Thus, a poll:
What is the minimum level of support that constitutes a "vast majority"
Assume for the sake of argument that the issue in question is a simple…
February 10, 2012
Why the Proponents of a Gay Marriage Ban Will Soon Be Speechless - Slate Magazine
So there you have it: That's the best case that can be made against gay marriage. An appeals court dissent that rests on the premise that states needn't act rationally, or offer evidence of rationality, or even be…
February 9, 2012
In a book that I read recently (either The Cloud Roads or The Serpent Sea-- I finished the first and immediately started the second), as some characters are traveling from one place to another, there's a passing mention that they weren't able to hunt at night because the moon wasn't out and it was…
February 9, 2012
Why The Planet Doesn't Care About Your Eco-Friendly Lifestyle | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation
Co.Exist:What does the average environmentalist get wrong? Wagner: Environmentalists, all too often, think that the best way to go about solving the problem is to get everyone to do as…
February 8, 2012
Through a weird quirk of scheduling, I haven't actually taught the intro modern physics course since I started writing pop-science books about modern physics. So, this week has been the first chance I've really had to use material I generated for the books to introduce topics in class.
In the…
February 8, 2012
I have a Google alert set up to let me know whenever my name or the title of one of my books turns up in one of the sources they index. This is highly imperfect, sometimes missing interesting articles, and often blorting out 57 different pages on which my name appears in a sidebar link. It comes in…
