I'm probably about the last person with an interest in such things to get around to watching Phil Plait's (in)famous "Don't Be a Dick" speech, but I finally got around to it, and it's really excellent: Phil Plait - Don't Be A Dick from JREF on Vimeo. Phil has posted about the speech itself, online reactions to it, and the in-person response after the talk. His thoughts are well worth reading, to put the whole thing it better context. I really don't have anything to add, which is fine, because I should spend less time typing blog stuff anyway.

Swans on Tea » Politics and the Star Trek Effect "There are a couple of episodes of Star Trek that I can recall having some fundamental physics failures, which would lead one to believe that in the Star Trek universe, one cannot do an integral over time. The episodes that come to mind (and it's been a while, so I may have some details wrong) are The Paradise Syndrome from ToS, and Déjà Q fom TNG. In both episodes, the Enterprise needs to transfer some energy and momentum to an object, and in each episode, they go for the Big Effort⢠and lose. " (tags: science physics television blogs…

Johan Larson emails a suggestion for a post topic: How many profs would it take to offer a good, but not necessarily excellent, undergraduate physics degree? I can give you an empirical answer to this: Six. I say that because in the course of my undergraduate physics degree at Williams, I took classes from only six different professors. Five-and-a-half, really, because one of those was half of a team-taught course. I had three-and-a-half classes with one professor, and two others for two classes each. Of course, that's not a hard lower bound. Some have even suggested that the number could be…

It's nearly time for classes to resume, which means it's time for a zillion stories about Beloit College's annual Kids These Days List, listing off a bunch of things that this year's entering college class, who were mostly born in 1992, have always taken for granted. A sample: 1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive. 2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail. 3. "Go West, Young College Grad" has always implied "and don't stop until you get to Asia...and learn Chinese along the way." 4. Al Gore has always been animated. 5. Los Angelenos have always been trying…

In my post about how we know photons exist, I make reference to the famous Kimble, Dagenais, and Mandel experiment showing "anti-bunching" of photons emitted from an excited atom. They observed that the probability of recording a second detector "click" a very short time after the first was small. This is conclusive evidence that photons are real, and that light has discrete particle-like character. Or, as I said in that post: This anti-bunching effect is something that cannot be explained using a classical picture of light as a wave. Using a wave model, in which light is emitted as a…

An 18 Billion Mile Journey is almost complete! : Starts With A Bang In honor of the upcoming completion of Neptune's first full orbit since its discovery, a discussion of how it was found. (tags: science astronomy planets blogs starts-with-bang) Fixing a Hole: The Beatles' Imaginary Post-1970 Albums, Part 1 | Popdose "I'm actually quite surprised there isn't something like this out there already. A few web searches I did unearthed one article in Reader's Digest that did put together three such albums out of the early '70s material, but then stopped. But why stop at three? I'm going to…

Many of SteelyKid's first words have been transportation-related ("Truck! Vroom Vroom!"), which makes the four-level wooden parking garage she got from her Aunt Erin even more awesome. And it's pretty awesome: As you can see, she grasped the idea almost immediately. That's from last night, after we got it put together. Below the fold, you can see her demonstrating how to work the elevator for Appa: Being both larger than the garage and capable of flight, Appa's not terribly interested. SteelyKid loves it, though, and that's the important thing.

Everybody's favorite science-and-politics blogger has posted a video clip showing part of what's wrong in science communication. It's a clip from the BBC from last December, featuring one of those head-to-head quasi-debates about "Climategate" between Prof. Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia and political consultant Marc Morano, who has made himself a nice little media niche as the go-to guy for climate change denial: I don't think this is quite as damning as Chris says, but it's pretty bad. What you see here is a competition between a scientist and somebody who knows how the…

At the tail end of Tuesday's post about wind and temperature, I asked a "vaguely related fun bonus question:" If the air molecules that surround us are moving at 500 m/s anyway, why isn't the speed of sound more like 500 m/s than 300 m/s? This is another one that people are sometimes surprised by. The answer is simply that in a sound wave, the air molecules don't really go anywhere. When something creates a sound-- say a foolish dog barking at a perfectly harmless jogger going by outside, to choose an example completely at random-- there isn't any actual thing that travels from the noisy dog…

Kevin Drum posts about the latest outrage from the airline industry: To summarize, then: (1) Airlines spent years hassling customers about their carry-on bags and persuading them to check their luggage instead. (2) After that finally started to work, they suddenly began charging for checked luggage. (3) As customers scurried to adapt once again, overhead space disappeared. (4) So now they begin charging for early boarding to avoid the crush of bags in the overhead bin. Has there ever before been an industry that's so actively tried to piss off their entire customer base? You almost have to…

slacktivist: Please forgive me for the actions of extremists I have never met who commit acts of violence that I have never advocated "As a white male Baptist, it is my duty today to denounce the violence perpetrated by Patrick Gray Sharp, 29, who yesterday attacked the police headquarters in McKinney, Texas, in a heavily armed but ineffectual assault involving a high-powered rifle, road flares, "gasoline and ammonium nitrate fertilizer." I understand that this denunciation must be swift and unambiguous and that, in the absence of such denunciations made by and on behalf of every and all…

Daniel Lemire has a new blog post arguing that working long hours is stupid. This collided with Bee's Backreaction post on what keeps physicists up at night, included in this morning's Links Dump. This got me to thinking about academic work habits, which led to the following poll: How long will you keep working, continuously, on a difficult problem?Market Research A bonus follow-up question, that I won't bother putting in poll form, is: How long should your subordinates spend working, continuously, on a difficult problem?

We picked up a used copy of Charles Mann's pop-archeology book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus a while back. I didn't read it at the time, because I was a little afraid that it would be rather polemical in what I think of as the Neil Young mode-- wildly overstating the awesomeness of pre-Columbian cultures, and exaggerating the evil of the European invaders (Neil's recorded some great stuff, but the lyrics to "Cortez the Killer" are pretty dopey). It came up several times recently in discussions elsewhere, though, and seemed like it would make a nice break from the…

Most of the time, when we talk about seeing quantum effects from light, we talk about extremely weak beams-- looking at intensities where one photon more or less represents a significant change in the intensity of the light. Last week, though, Physics Buzz wrote up a paper that goes in the other direction: they suggest a limit on the maximum strength of a laser pulse due to quantum effects, specifically the creation of particle-antiparticle pairs. This is a little unusual, in that most of the time when people talk about really intense lasers, they end up discussing them as an oscillating…

The Should I Skip Class Today? Calculator Here's a clue: If you need to use a web-based "calculator" to decide whether to go to class or not, it doesn't matter whether you go to class or not. (tags: education academia stupid internet) Backreaction: Worries "At first sight, physicists seem like normal people. But ask what keeps them up at night and you realize the magnitude of their outworldliness. " (tags: science physics academia politics society culture blogs backreaction) Teach the indirect measurements § Unqualified Offerings "It occurs to me that while the vast majority of "just a…

So, I blew off stuff I should've been doing, and went to see a matinee of the Scott Pilgrim movie this morning (it's very much not Kate's sort of thing, and I would feel guilty ditching her with SteelyKid to see it during the evening or on a weekend). Actually, first I went to Borders for half an hour to read the last volume of the comic, so I could compare the two endings-- I should probably buy these, because I really like the story, but I balk at shelling out that much money for something that I can read in half an hour in a bookstore. I liked it a lot, but then, I'm a sucker for this sort…

I got forwarded a physics question last night asking about the connection between wind and temperature, which I'll paraphrase as: Temperature is related to the motion of the atoms and molecules making a substance up, with faster motion corresponding to higher temperature. So why does it feel warmer when the air is still and why does wind make you feel cold? This is a moderately common point of confusion, so while I responded to the question in email, I'll also appropriate it for a post topic. So, why doesn't "windy" equal "hot," given that wind consists of moving air molecules? The full…

At Inside Higher Ed this morning, they have a news squib about a new report blaming the high cost of college on "administrative bloat." Coincidentally, the Dean Dad has a post pre-emptively responding to this in the course of arguing with a different group: In terms of administration, what would you cut? Should we stop trying to comply with the ADA? Should we stop evaluating faculty altogether, and just trust that everybody is perfect? Perhaps we should stop giving financial aid, since it requires so many staff. Who cares about accreditation? Who cares about IT? Who cares about payroll? (…

For Lean Budgets, a Plug-and-Play Solar System - Green Blog - NYTimes.com You know you're a physical scientist when "Plug-and-Play Solar System" suggests something like "... then you put Jupiter here, and you're all set. See, they're orbiting already! And it's open-source, so it's free." Sadly, this is actually about some home photovoltaic thing. (tags: science astronomy planets environment energy nytimes blogs) News: Parenthood Gaps and Premiums - Inside Higher Ed "Linda Grant of the University of Georgia [and] Kimberly Kelly of Mississippi State University noted that many experts would…

A couple of "kids these days are bad at math" stories crossed my feed reader last week, first a New York Times blog post about remedial math, then a Cocktail Party Physics post on confusion about equals signs. The first was brought to my attention via a locked LiveJournal post taking the obligatory "Who cares if kids know how to factor polynomials, anyway?" tack, which was obvious bait for me, given that I have in the past held forth on the importance of algebra for science students (both of these are, at some level, about algebra). Of course, these articles aren't about science students, so…