January 15, 2010
I'm just about finished packing up, then I'm meeting a former student for lunch, then heading off to the airport to spend the next eight hours or so making my way home to Kate and SteelyKid and Emmy. Which is a good excuse for a non-dorky poll:
Are you checking any bags today?(answers)
(Bag fees…
January 15, 2010
Pondering a Ponderous Pendulum : Built on Facts
"Why the long discussion about the period of a pendulum yesterday? Because we're actually going to take a look at a particular pendulum today. This one hangs in the central atrium of the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental…
January 14, 2010
Kate here:
Since Chad's out of town, you get Substitute Parent Blogging today. It's with my non-DSLR camera (and also taken very fast before she decided she wanted the camera more than what she had), it's with something other than Appa, and it's eloquent of "I miss Daddy and want to be just like…
January 14, 2010
Regular readers will know that I have a bit of a Thing about bad graphs used in the media and on blogs. When people use stupid presentation tricks to exaggerate features of data to make their argument look stronger, it bugs me. But what really irks me is when people use stupid presentation tricks…
January 14, 2010
Even when I'm on the road, I continue to be obsessed...
A nice review at Lean Left that really gets Emmy's role in the book:
The dog asks clear questions and Orzel uses those interjections well. They very often serve as a way to clarify, or to bring up questions that the readers probably has, or…
January 14, 2010
"There was a lot of smoke." « Quantum Moxie
That is how my son, who is in 3rd grade, described a class science experiment gone awry. The experiment involved electrical tape, a battery, lightbulb, and a piece of insulated wire with the insulation stripped off on the ends. Yes, amazingly simple…
January 13, 2010
As I've mentioned before, I have a cell phone that's just a cell phone-- no data plan, no camera, no nothing. It's also a few years old, so the battery life isn't what it could be. I was a little concerned about that, so I made a point of plugging it into the charger last night before bed.
And I am…
January 13, 2010
Miscellaneous book-related items for you to read while I spend most of the day in transit to Austin:
While I have yet to see a copy in a Barnes and Noble store locally, it's selling well enough in the national chain for them to have ordered more copies. Yay!
Relatedly, the publisher has just…
January 12, 2010
Official Google Blog: A new approach to China
"These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have…
January 12, 2010
My flight to Texas tomorrow leaves ungodly early, requiring me to leave for the airport around 6:30 or so. That's earlier than I like to be up, but it's a bit late by my father's standards-- he always books flights that leave at 7am or thereabouts. This seems like a good topic for a poll:
When do…
January 12, 2010
I'm standing in the kitchen, sipping tea and watching snow blowing across the back yard. It's cold enough that the digital thermometer has stopped working, which puts it in the single digits Fahrenheit. I'm not looking forward to walking the dog in this.
"Pretty cold, dude," she says.
"Yeah," I…
January 12, 2010
Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Neutrino Telescope Measures Temperature of the Ozone Layer
"The IceCube neutrino observatory is a kilometre-scale array of photon detectors buried under the ice at the South Pole. When neutrinos pass through the ice, they occasionally bump into atoms creating…
January 11, 2010
Depending on what you read at ScienceBlogs other than this blog, you may have noticed a New Year's fitness theme. Blame Ethan. So, now, everybody's posting workout tips and the like.
Which means, of course, that I'm obliged to post my Fitness Secrets here for free, when I could be charging money…
January 11, 2010
The problem is, "What is Chad going to do in Austin, Texas on Thursday night?"
I have recently been appointed to the APS Committee on Informing the Public, which is having a meeting in Austin this Thursday, January 14th. Of course, as neither Austin nor Albany is a major airport, the travel to and…
January 11, 2010
I was looking at some polling about science over the weekend, and discovered that they helpfully provide an online quiz consisting of the factual questions asked of the general public as part of the survey. Amusingly, one of them is actually more difficult to answer correctly if you know a lot…
January 11, 2010
I've made a few references to book-related things that were in the pipeline in recent Obsessive Updates. The first of those has just gone live, an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed on how the book came about and why more academic scientists should have blogs:
When I started my blog in 2002, I had…
January 11, 2010
Cut This Story! - The Atlantic (January/February 2010)
An essay about how newspaper articles are too long. In keeping with the Iron Laws of the Internet, it could probably stand to be cut down a little.
(tags: journalism writing media internet politics)
Writing About Writers: An article by Bob…
January 10, 2010
There's a Kenneth Chang article in the New York Times this morning on the ever popular topic of "If the globe is warming, why is it so darn cold?" It's a good explanation of the weather phenomenon that's making the morning dog walk at Chateau Steelypips so unpleasant.
This reminded me of something…
January 10, 2010
Every year, John Brockman asks a big selection of smart people to answer some question or another, and posts it on the Internet to provoke discussion. This year's question is "How is the Internet changing the way you think?"
This always seems like a better idea than it ends up being in practice,…
January 10, 2010
Philip Guo - On Popularity
"In sum, whether you are popular in middle and high school is largely out of your control, so it is unreasonable to aspire to become popular if you are not already popular. From my experience, the happiest teenagers are the ones who have accepted their status in the…
January 9, 2010
One of the few sad things about the recent American domination of physics (says the American physicist) is that new physical phenomena are now mostly given boring, prosaic American English names. Don't get me wrong, I like being able to pronounce and interpret new phenomena, but when the pre-WWII…
January 9, 2010
The Atlantic Online | January/February 2010 | What Makes a Great Teacher? | Amanda Ripley
"Until now, Teach for America has kept its investigation largely to itself. But for this story, the organization allowed me access to 20 years of experimentation, studded by trial and error. The results are…
January 8, 2010
Picking on stupid things that sports commentators say is the ultimate "Fish. Barrel. BLAM!" sort of activity, but this morning on the way to drop SteelyKid at day care, Mike and Mike kept repeating one of the absolute dumbest things that football commentators say. They were talking about Larry…
January 8, 2010
Two new links for today's Obsessive Update:
The first is a nice article from Union's press office, with the headline "You can't teach an old dog new tricks, but what about physics?". I spent half an hour or so talking with one of the staff writers (who has a science background, which is a nice…
January 8, 2010
Strange Horizons Reviews: Avatar, reviewed by Roz Kaveney
"As well as being the Great White Saviour, Jake is that most useful of plot devices, the protagonist who has to be told things; he is also the Man Who Learns Better, and discards earlier convictions; he is also someone who cheerfully signs…
January 7, 2010
SteelyKid is seventeen months old today, and how does she celebrate? By scrubbing the floors in the mud room:
Honest to God, she does this all on here own. I think it's driven by the same impulse as the tissue relay-- she'll grab a tissue or a paper towel, run into the mud room, and energetically…
January 7, 2010
Not much news on the book front this morning-- various promotional things are in progress, including an on-campus thing tomorrow afternoon, but there's nothing new to link to.
We do, however, have the first non-mammal added to the DogPhysics Pet Gallery: a lizard, sent in by Marcella McIntyre. It's…
January 7, 2010
A number of people have commented on this LA Times op-ed by Steve Giddings about what physicists expect to come out of the Large Hadron Collider. It includes a nice list of possible particle physics discoveries plus a few things that will annoy Peter Woit, and also includes the obligatory note…
January 7, 2010
slacktivist: Genie in a bottle
"Saudi Arabia's laws against sorcery, it seems to me, are incompatible with its laws against heresy. The heresy laws are based on the idea that there is one and only one true religion. The sorcery laws are based on the idea that other religious beliefs may be…
January 6, 2010
I forgot to include an option about this in the previous Dorky Poll, but this is one of the best ways I know to sort out righteous physicists from heathen mathematicians:
How do you like your angular coordinates?(polls)
Choose wisely.
