drorzel | March 24, 2017I mentioned in passing in the Forbes post about science funding that I'm thoroughly sick of hearing about how the World Wide Web was invented at CERN. I got into an argument about this a while back on Twitter, too, but had to go do something else and couldn't go into much detail. It's probably worth explaining at greater-than-Twitter length, though, and a little too inside-baseball for Forbes, so I'll write something about it here.
At its core, the "CERN invented WWW" argument is a "Basic research pays off in unexpected ways" argument, and in that sense, it's fine. The problem is, it's not…
drorzel | March 24, 2017A bunch of people in my social-media feeds are sharing this post by Alana Cattapan titled Time-sucking academic job applications don't know enormity of what they ask. It describes an ad asking for two sample course syllabi "not merely syllabi for courses previously taught -- but rather syllabi for specific courses in the hiring department," and expresses outrage at the imposition on the time of people applying for the job. She argues that the burden falls particularly heavily on groups that are already disadvantaged, such as people currently in contingent faculty positions.
It's a good…
drorzel | March 6, 2017Another month, another collection of physics posts from Forbes:
-- Quantum Loopholes And The Problem Of Free Will: In one of those odd bits of synchronicity, a previous post about whether dark matter and energy might affect atoms in a way that allowed for "free will" was followed shortly by a news release about an experiment looking at quantum entanglement with astronomical sources acting as "random number generators." This pushes the point when local interactions might've generated any correlation between measurements back in time a thousand-plus years, which in turn ties into the question…
drorzel | February 2, 2017It's a new month now, so it's time to share links to what I wrote for Forbes last month:
-- Small College Astronomers Predict Big Stellar Explosion: I mostly leave astronomy stories to others, but I heard about this from a friend at Calvin College, and it's a story that hits a lot of my pet issues, so I wrote it up.
-- For Scientists, Recognition Is A Weird And Contingent Thing: Vera Rubin tops the list of great women in science who died in 2016, but AMO physics lost two great women but less famous women as well. I spent a while thinking about why they had such different levels of status…
drorzel | February 1, 2017So, I tweeted about this yesterday, but I also spent the entire day feeling achy and feverish, so didn't have brains or time for a blog post with more details. I'm feeling healthier this morning, though time is still short, so I'll give a quick summary of the details:
-- As you can see in the photo (taken with my phone at Starbucks just before I took these to the post office to mail them), I signed a contract for a new book. Four copies, because lawyers.
-- The contract is with Oneworld Publications in the UK, who had a best-seller on that side of the pond with How to Teach Quantum Physics to…
drorzel | January 13, 2017This one's late because I acquired a second class for the Winter term on very short notice. I was scheduled to teach our sophomore-level "Modern Physics" class, plus the lab, but a colleague who was scheduled to teach relativity for non-majors had a medical issue, and I'm the only other one on staff who's ever taught it, so now I'm doing two courses instead of one. Whee!
Anyway, here are my December posts from Forbes:
-- Science Is Not THAT Special: Another in a long series of posts grumbling about the way we set science off from other pursuits and act as if the problems facing it are unique…
drorzel | December 4, 2016There are only a couple of bands I'd drive a significant distance to see live, and now I've made the trip to NYC to see two of them. I went to see the Afghan Whigs in 2014, and this past Friday, I drove to Brooklyn for a Hold Steady show. And this time, I have a cool picture as a bonus...
Me with Craig Finn of the Hold Steady.
The origin of the picture, obviously, needs a little explaining. The current set of shows is a four-night stand (originally three, but they added one after the first three sold out) at the Brooklyn Bowl, reuniting with keyboardist Franz Nicolay for the 10th…
drorzel | December 1, 2016I'm not posting as much as I did last year, when I was on sabbatical (gasp, shock, surprise), so making Forbes-blog links dump posts a monthly thing is probably just about sustainable.
-- What Math Do You Need For Physics? It Depends: Some thoughts about, well, the math you need to learn to be a physicist. Which may not be all that much, depending on your choice of subfield. Prompted a nice response from Peter Woit, too.
-- Physics And The Science Of Finding Missing Pieces: One of several recent-ish posts prompted by my last term teaching from Matter and Interactions.
-- How To Make A White…
drorzel | December 1, 2016This is going to be a bit of a rant, because there's a recurring theme in my recent social media that's really bugging me, and I need to vent. I'm going to do it as a blog post rather than an early-morning tweetstorm, because tweets are more likely to be pulled out of context, and then I'm going to unfollow basically everybody that isn't a weird Twitter bot or a band that I like, and try to avoid politics until the end of the year. Also, I'll do some physics stuff.
This morning saw the umpteenth reshared tweetstorm (no link because it doesn't matter who it was) berating people who write about…
drorzel | November 22, 2016At dinner the other night, Kate mentioned this podcast, which excerpts a bit of a Jon Brion interview from 2006 where he makes a distinction between "songs" and "performance pieces." As an example of the latter, he uses Led Zeppelin, saying that their recordings, as great as they are, are about those specific people in that specific time, and nobody is all that excited to hear reworked Led Zep covers.
It's an interesting claim, but I don't really agree (influenced in part by the fact that I don't especially care for the examples he uses as "songs"). I had a hard time coming up with a…
drorzel | November 19, 2016People have been raving about the new movie Arrival, which is an adaptation of Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," which I did a guest lecture on for a colleague's class on science fiction some year ago. It's unusual enough to see a science fiction movie hailed for being smart that Kate and I actually arranged a babysitter for the night, and caught it in the theater.
It's a surprisingly credible effort at adapting a story I would've guessed was unfilmable. I wasn't as blown away as a lot of the folks in my social media feed, though. I think that's largely because I'm too familiar with the…
drorzel | November 12, 2016I'm teaching introductory mechanics for the umpteenth time, using the Matter and Interactions curriculum, as we have for a while. This is going to be my last time teaching out of M&I, though, because last year the department decided to switch to a different book. Starting this winter term, we'll be using Halliday, Resnick and Walker.
My physics blogging over at Forbes tends toward the contemplative anyway, for a variety of reasons, but knowing that this is the last time through M&I has had me thinking even more along those lines. Thus, recent posts on really simple physics and what it…
drorzel | November 12, 2016Here's a thought that occurred to me during one of this week's sleepless nights: Donald Trump is Marion Barry for rural white people.
That's probably too cryptic for a lot of people, since I'm now an old man who yells at clouds, but what I'm referring to is Barry's second election as mayor of DC, the one after he served time in federal prison for being busted smoking crack. Even prior to the bust, Barry was pretty much a disaster due to his drug problems, so when he ran again it was widely seen as a joke. But then he won.
I was in grad school at Maryland at the time, and remember a lot of…
drorzel | November 3, 2016As the post title says, it's been a whole two months since the last time I did a round-up of my physics blog posts for Forbes. That's less content than you might think, though, because with the new academic term starting and some deadlines I had for other stuff, I posted basically nothing for most of September. October was a little busier, amounting to more than enough for a links post here:
-- How The History Of Measurement Shapes The Language Of Physics: While writing up some stuff about blackbody radiation, I ran up against the weird thing in optics where we default to talking about…
drorzel | October 20, 2016As I've mentioned several times, I just finished a two-month sentence on a grand jury in Schenectady County (well, technically, I have to go back for one more day, because they didn't finish everything). I'm not allowed to talk about the details of the cases we heard, but I have some general thoughts about the process that I think are blog-safe.
Several people I've talked to about this who also did grand jury service at one point reported finding the experience more interesting than annoying; sadly, I can't say the same. I have an extremely low tolerance for people inconsiderately wasting my…
drorzel | September 25, 2016Back before The Pip was born, our previous departmental administrative assistant used to bug me-- in a friendly way-- about how Kate and I ought to have another kid. (She had two kids of her own, about two years apart in age.) "When are you guys going to have another baby?" she would ask, and I always said "We're thinking about it."
About a week passed between the last time we had that exchange and the day I came in and taped ultrasound photos of the prenatal Little Dude to my door. "You sonofabitch!," she said (again, in a friendly way), "You were expecting this whole time!" "Yeah," I said…
drorzel | September 21, 2016There's a piece in Inside Higher Ed today on yet another study showing that student course evaluations don't correlate with student learning. For a lot of academics, the basic reaction to this is summed up in the Chuck Pearson tweet that sent me to the story: "Haven't we settled this already?"
The use of student course evaluations, though, is a perennial argument in academia, not likely to be nailed into a coffin any time soon. It's also a good example of a hard problem made intractable by a large number of assumptions and constraints that are never clearly spelled out.
As discussed in…
drorzel | September 18, 2016A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to speak on a panel about teaching during Union's new-faculty orientation. We had one person from each of the academic divisions (arts and literature, social science, natural science, and engineering), and there was a ton of overlap in the things we said, but here's a rough reconstruction of the advice I gave them:
1) Be Wary of Advice
Because it's always good to start off with something that sounds a little counter-intuitive... What I mean by this is that lots of people will be more than happy to offer advice to a new faculty member-- often without being…
drorzel | September 12, 2016And now, the photo-a-day project straggles in to the finish line, with a final five photos dominated by the kids:
362/366: Kid Art I
A set of figures drawn by The Pip at day care over the summer.
363/366: Kid Art II
Awesome owl drawing by SteelyKid.
One of the official end of summer activities is cleaning off the "art shelf" in the bookcase in the dining room, where we pile the various projects the kids bring home from school and day care. I sort these, and take photos of the best, for historical documentation purposes, and these are two of my favorites from the lot. The four round-…
drorzel | September 11, 2016Another day, another batch of photos from August.
353/366: Trail Blaze
One lost sock next to the hiking path in the Reist bird sanctuary.
This is actually a slight reversal of chronology, as the hike through Vischer's Ferry was the day after I went for a hike in the H. G. Reist Wildlife Sanctuary. The pictures from Vischer's Ferry were better though, as despite the name I didn't see much wildlife in the Reist Sanctuary. I did, however, find this bright pink child-size sock sitting next to the trail right after a fork. Presumably a way for some wandering toddler to find their way home...…