drorzel | July 23, 2010Earlier this week, there was some interesting discussion of science communication in the UK branch of the science blogosphere. I found it via Alun Salt's "Moving beyond the 'One-dinosaur-fits-all' model of science communication" which is too good a phrase not to quote, and he spun off two posts from Alice Bell, at the Guardian blog and her own blog, and the proximate cause of all this is a dopey remark by a UK government official that has come in for some justifiable mockery.
Bell and Salt both focus on the narrowness of the "dinosaurs and space" approach-- a reasonably representative quote…
drorzel | July 23, 2010This week's big story in physics is this Science paper by a group out of Austria Canada (edited to fix my misreading of the author affiliations), on a triple-slit interference effect. This has drawn both the usual news stories and also some complaining about badly-worded news stories. So, what's the deal?
What did they do in this paper? The paper reports on an experiment in which they looked at the interference of light sent through a set of three small slits, and verified that the resulting pattern agrees with the predictions of the Born rule for quantum probabilities.
What does Matt Damon…
drorzel | July 23, 2010The Dean Dad is worried about remedial math:
In a discussion this week with someone who spends most of her time working with students who are struggling mightily in developmental math, I heard an argument I hadn't given much thought previously: students who have passed algebra and even pre-calc in high school frequently crash and burn when they hit our developmental math, because the high schools let them use calculators and we don't.
[...][P]art of me wonders if we're sacrificing too much on the altar of pencil and paper. It's great to be able to do addition in your head and long division on…
drorzel | July 23, 2010
slacktivist: Credit scoring and unemployment
"Say you're unemployed and you decide to work your tail off to land a new job, so you send out 40 résumés a week. Half of the companies might decide to do a credit-check before getting back to you. This sets off alarm-bells at the credit-rating agencies. Twenty credit-checks in one week? There goes your credit score. And there goes your hope of landing a new job.
This is what the use of credit scoring in employment decisions means: Looking for a job disqualifies you from being hired."
(tags: politics economics class-war blogs slacktivist US…
drorzel | July 22, 2010After a hard day of toddling, sometimes you just need to kick back on the couch with your sky-bison, and munch on a fruit strip:
You know what I mean?
drorzel | July 22, 2010Over at A Most Curious Planet, Alexandra Jellicoe offers a story with the provocative headline Is Science Sexist?, which spins off an anecdote from astronomy:
I was listening to Radio 4 a few months ago and the discussion about gender intelligence lodged in the deeper recesses of my brain unthought-of until recently when I went to see Jocelyn Bell Burnell talking of her 'Eureka' moment. She discovered the existence of neutron stars called Pulsar's in 1967 and I think she can safely be considered one of England's most pioneering and gifted scientists. I was struck by her comments that she…
drorzel | July 22, 2010A bit more than a month ago, I got a Sony Reader as a birthday present, upgrading my electronic book-reading platform from an old Palm Pilot. this is, obviously, not as sexy as a Kindle or a Nook, but then again, it doesn't involve me paying fees to use wireless services and further stoke my Internet addiction, so that's more or less a wash. Anyway, since I've been using this extensively for a month, now, I thought I'd post a few impressions:
-- First and foremost, the e-ink display is very nice. The one crippling flaw of the Palm Pilot method was that I couldn't read outdoors or in bright…
drorzel | July 22, 2010Pretty much what the title implies: for a variety of reasons, I find myself in a position where people keep holding or suggesting conference calls as a way of getting the relevant players together on the phone if not in person. I'm not wild about this, but I'm curious what other people think:
Conference calls are:customer surveys
Note that I'm talking about what Mike Kozlowski would probably call "legacy teleconferencing," which does not involve video of the conferees. Video conferencing is a different thing, with its own set of problems.
drorzel | July 22, 2010
More Online Astronomy Resources for Writers
"A few years ago I compiled a list of online astronomy resources for writers following that year's Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers. Every year there are new links we pass around and discuss, so I wanted to do an addendum, if you will, adding more links to the ones I've previously posted (and which I feel are still excellent resources)."
(tags: books writing blogs science astronomy internet)
Books vs. reviewers, in pictures « The Book Publicity Blog
"One of a book publicist's jobs is to get reviews for books. Which is tricky these…
drorzel | July 21, 2010Here's a picture of the ornamental pond we have in our back yard, showing the fountain that we run to keep the water circulating so it's not just a mosquito ranch:
You can see the brick that we have sitting on top of the pump housing to keep it submerged (it tends to tip over otherwise-- the filter box is a little top-heavy), and also the spray of water shooting up into the air.
You can't tell without some reference, but the pond level is actually a little lower than I like it at the moment. The lining leaks slowly, and every so often I need to put more water in. How do I judge the level,…
drorzel | July 21, 2010If you're in the UK, you may very well be thinking "You know, I love the idea of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, but I find American idiom very intimidating. If only there were an edition just for people like me..."
Well, hypothetical UK person, your prayers have been answered:
This is the cover for How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, coming this fall from Oneworld books to a bookshop on the high street near you. With "yard" changed to "garden," and other minor linguistic tweaks to make it more comprehensible in Merrie Olde England and other such places. Also, an index, which the…
drorzel | July 21, 2010
Physics Buzz: APS hits ComicCon with the first superhero science comic
"For the rest of this week I'll be blogging from the madness that is sure to be ComicCon 2010. APS will be the first professional society to bring a comic book, so us public outreach folks are excited to be rolling in with 2.5 tons of Spectra comics. For you unaquanited, the convention combines all things nerd under one massive roof for a week every year. All those people in Princess Leah or Batman or Wolverine or extra #554 from scene 3 on Tatooine in A New Hope comtumes? This is their summer sanctuary. I'm not knocking…
drorzel | July 20, 2010Yesterday's post about how nobody cares about condensed matter physics produced a surprising number of comments of the form "I was really hoping you would post about topological insulators," which surprised me a bit. Anyway, since people asked for it, I'll give it a shot. The important caveats here are that 1) this isn't my field, and 2) I have not read a great deal of the primary literature on this, so my understanding is not that deep.
We'll do this in Q&A format, as that's been working well for ResearchBlogging posts lately.
So, what's a "topological insulator," anyway? You make a…
drorzel | July 20, 2010The fallout from the Pepsi incident continues to suck all the oxygen out of science blogging, with the latest news being the departure of Bora Zivkovic. If you don't have time to read his farewell novel, here's the short version: Seed Media Group management are insufficiently attentive to the blogs, and stuck in an old-media mentality. They should've re-invented themselves as entirely a blog company, and scrapped everything else. Really, if you've read Bora's stuff before, you can pretty much reconstruct the whole thing without reading it.
This post is being cited all around blogdom as…
drorzel | July 20, 2010
NASA Mercury Messenger Finds Surprises - NYTimes.com
"On its third swing past Mercury, NASA's Mercury Messenger spacecraft discovered an unexpectedly young lava plain, rapid rufflings of the planet's weak magnetic field and an unanticipated dance of elements in the thin atmosphere.
"I think the biggest surprise for the community is that the planet is turning out to be much more dynamic than people appreciated," said Sean C. Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington who is the principal investigator for the Messenger mission. "
(tags: science astronomy planets nytimes space)
The…
drorzel | July 19, 2010I had planned to spend some time this weekend trying to make sense of this new result on topological insulators, and maybe even write up the relevant paper for ResearchBlogging. Family life intervened, though, and I didn't have the time. I get enough of it to understand the basics of what's going on, but there's a whole lot I don't understand about topological insulators generally, so I'd need to do a bunch of reference chasing to get to something I can understand well enough to work back up to this week's Nature paper.
And, to put it bluntly, there just isn't that much reward for the work…
drorzel | July 19, 2010Over at Jeff Vandemeer's blog, Rachel Swirsky has a series ofm guest posts (start here if you prefer direct post links) about the recently completed Launch Pad workshop. this is a NASA funded workshop bringing a group of writers together for six days of lectures on modern astronomy from working astronomers. From the workshop web site:
Launch Pad is a NASA-funded education/public outreach effort supplementing Mike Brotherton's space-based astronomical research. Our budget allows us to provide a workshop that is essentially free to participants. Our primary goal is to teach writers of all…
drorzel | July 19, 2010
Language Log » The "pound sign" mystery
"Yesterday, in discussing Kevin Fowler's song Pound Sign, there was some debate about the origin of the term "pound sign" for the symbol #. I suggested that it all started with the substitution of # for £ on American typewriter keyboards, but others argued that # was a standard symbol for pound(s) avoirdupois. I've heard this theory before, but I expressed skepticism about it because I've never actually seen the symbol used that way.
Today, after some further research, I'm still not completely sure. But I've found a new theory, which I think has a…
drorzel | July 18, 2010SteelyKid has clearly inherited her father's fondness for basketball. Unfortunately, she doesn't quite understand how to play, yet. She does know that involves throwing a ball up in the air and jumping, though:
She'll get the rest of it eventually.