Tuesday is a heavy teaching day for me-- I'm in lab from 9-4, basically-- so here's something to occupy the time. Oh, no! It's a pop quiz: Pop quizzes are:(survey software) (In case the phrase is an American idiom, a "pop quiz" refers to a short test given in class with no advance warning.) This was inspired by Dermot O'Brien at Inside Higher Ed, who reports on taking his first quiz as a science student. The general topic of quizzes is one that generates a fair bit of heat, though, so I thought I'd see what my readers think of it. My quiz policy as of a year or so ago was to give many short…

Congratulations to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for winning the 2010 Wolf Prize in Phyiscs: The 2010 Wolf Prize in Physics will be shared by Prof. John F. Clauser of the US; Prof. Alain Aspect of France's Ãcole Normale Supérieure de Cachan; and Prof. Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna. The jury in this field praised them "for their fundamental conceptual and experimental contributions to the foundations of quantum physics, specifically an increasingly sophisticated series of tests of Bell's inequalities, or extensions thereof, using entangled quantum states." All…

Is Our Students Learning? « Easily Distracted "That's what I worry about when I hear that there are too many "relativists" around: that the people complaining the most about that supposed surplus are the most supremely relativistic folks you might ever imagine encountering. "a (tags: academia education politics blogs easily-distracted philosophy ethics society culture) Career Advice: Balance Is a Myth - Inside Higher Ed "Most tenure-track faculty members I work with seem to believe that they can achieve harmonious balance in their lives during the tenure-track years. To me, this is a…

The message is: "I have a chair!" SteelyKid's new chair is a kid-sized black fake-leather armchair from Target. We originally set out looking for a kid-sized table and chair set that she could use to draw on, but the only ones on offer at Babysaurus were chintzy particle board things with Disney characters all over them, and we're trying to limit our consumption of both of those. The armchair is kind of silly, but she was too cute climbing in and out of it for me not to buy it. She's talking more and more these days, and has started to pick up adult hand gestures. Here she is explaining to…

Last week, I asked for nominations of the most amazing laser application, with the idea being that I will collect a list, write up the top vote-getters in a series of blog posts, and then we will have a vote to determine what is THE coolest laser application of ALL TIME! At least, you know, as far as you can do that on a blog... Nominations will remain open until next Monday, but I wanted to remind people, and give you a list of the top nominees thus far. These will be pretty hard to top, but there are still lots of laser applications that have not been mentioned, so be sure to get your vote…

Two events in the next couple of weeks at which I will be appearing live and in person: 1) This Thursday, Feb. 4, I will be giving a talk at the University of Maryland, College Park at 3:30 pm in the Lecture Hall (room 1110) in the Kim Engineering Building. The title of the talk is "Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters, and How Weblogs Can Help." Which reminds me, I need to tweak those slides... Lest I get overly nostalgic about Our Nation's Capital, there's snow predicted for Friday and Saturday, just in time to potentially screw up my flight home.…

YouTube - Neil Degrasse Tyson: "If you're scientifically literate the world looks very different to you" "If you're not scientifically literate, in a way, you're disenfranchising yourself." (tags: science education video youtube politics society culture) The Digital Cuttlefish: The Spirit Of Spirit "Why do we care about poor little Spirit? A robot is shutting down; why all the fuss? My theory, assuming you might want to hear it-- It's not just a bot: it's a real part of us." (tags: poetry science astronomy space planets mars robots blogs) Fundamental Examples « Combinatorics and more "…

(I really loathe both the longstanding practice of marking a scandal by appending "-gate" to a name and the newer version "-fail." I don't have a better alternative, but I hate both of those. Somebody get to work on a better scandal signifier.) So, the hot topic of the moment is the hissy-cow being thrown by Amazon and Macmillan over the pricing of e-books. A great many electrons have been expended in discussing this on the Internet, but Jim Henley's take is probably the one I like the best, and links to most of the others. UPDATE: Jim's follow-up post today is even better. It attempts to use…

The Firedoglake Book Salon with Sean Carroll last night was a lot of fun. I was generally impressed with the level of the questions, and the tone of the discussion. We went through all of the questions I had typed out in advance (I type fairly slowly, and revise obsessively, so it's hard for me to do this stuff in real time), and got a decent range of questions from the audience. The introductory post I wrote for the salon is more or less what I would put in a review post here: ean Carroll's From Eternity to Here sets out to explain the nature of time, particularly what's known as the "arrow…

Axe Cop He's a cop, with an axe. His partner is a cop with a flute-- no, a dinosaur soldier-- no, an avocado. Can you tell this was written by a five-year-old? (tags: comics silly internet art kid-stuff) Malkin Grey's LiveJournal - Why Writers Go Nuts, Exhibit Number One Million and Something. "Speaking as both a reader and a writer, this sucks. I do not pretend to know what the ideal price point for an e-book might be (though my pocketbook has its own opinions -- I don't mind paying a higher price for an e-book that in its hardcopy form is fresh on the shelves, but I don't want to still…

A few bits and pieces of news regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: We got and accepted an offer for the audio book rights from one of the biggest audio book publishers. Actually, I think there were two offers for the audio rights, which is amazing. I have no idea when it would be produced or who would read it, but the contract does say they'll consult with me about the reader, so I'll know at some point before it comes out... Speaking of other editions, I'm getting emails from my publisher about the paperback edition already, which just seems weird. The hardcover's only been out for a…

The Mid-Majority : Assistant Palestra Custodian for a Day "I presented my credentials. "I'm non-union, I work hard and I work for free," I told Dan. Usually, that gets me in the door every time. But not here. "Well, you'd better be pro-union," Dan replied. I assured him that my profession had no real national union, much less anything resembling a professional certification process. Besides, I said, I have friends who are high up in the Steelworkers. And that was good enough for Dan Harrell. I was about to take on the greatest temp job I've ever had in my whole entire life: assistant…

I'm having a little trouble typing, because the temperature in my office at the moment is around 55 F, and my hands are getting really cold. This is because of "deferred maintenance," which means "we're saving money by not maintaining the air-handling systems in our academic buildings (among other things)." The budget has been tight every year since I got here, and this building is fairly old, so things don't work as well as they might. The background noise while I'm typing is the sound of construction on the new Wold Building (webcam link). This is a multi-million-dollar new building…

We had a parent-teacher conference this morning with SteelyKid's teacher at day care, who confirmed that she is the cutest and cleverest baby in the universe. OK, not in those words, but that's how I interpreted them. In honor of that, here's a poll: Fish?(poll) There's probably another stanza worth of choices, but unlike my parents, I don't have this one memorized. This ought to do for now.

Hard to believe it's been a couple of days since I posted anything with this title... Anyway, there are a couple of small updates: The vanity search turned up this mention on ScienceBase, in with a bunch of other recent science books that sound pretty good. The Union student paper, the Concordiensis, has a story about the book. I exchanged emails with the author, so it has a couple of new quotes that haven't been in other papers. Once again, if you're in New York's capital district tomorrow, I'm doing a signing at the Book House at 2pm. If you're not in the Albany area, I'll be the host for…

Physics Games - online physics-based games Just in case you were planning to get something done today. (tags: games physics science education internet computing) J.D. Salinger Dead « Whatever "Somewhere Holden Caulfield is pretending he doesn't care." (tags: books literature news blogs) Best Science Books 2009: The top books of the year! : Confessions of a Science Librarian "For the last little while I've been compiling lists from various media sources giving their choices for the best books of 2009. Some of the lists have been from general media sources, in which case I've just…

Tonight was bath night, so here's a fresh and clean SteelyKid, showing off her pink penguin pajamas: I'm pretty beat tonight, so that's all I've got: cute baby, penguin PJ's. That ought to be enough for anyone, though.

I have to go to the Happy Fun Meeting this afternoon, which will be both Happy! and Fun! To keep things lively while I'm there, here's a question that is dorky, but not in the usual way for this blog: What superpower would you most like to have to help you deal with annoying meetings? The most useful meeting-related superpower to have would be:(survey software) Bonus essay question: How does the Justice League/ Legion of Doom function when all the attendees at their regular meetings have superpowers? Wouldn't that get out of hand in a hurry?

Last week's Seven Essential Elements of Quantum Physics post sparked a fair bit of discussion, though most of it was at the expert level, well above the level of the intended audience. such is life in the physics blogosphere. I think it's worth a little time to unpack some of the disagreement, though, as it sheds a little light on the process of writing this sort of thing for a general audience, and the eternal conflict between broad explanation and "dumbing down." And, if nothing else, it lets me put off grading the exams from last night for a little while longer. So, what's the issue? The…

I've toyed around in the past with ways to use the Amazon sales rank tracker to estimate the sales numbers for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. It's geeky fun, but not especially quantitative. Yesterday, though, I found a reason to re-visit the topic: calibration data! OK, "calibration data" is probably too strong a description. "Calibration anecdote" is more accurate. Yesterday when I went into work a little after 10, a comment somebody made sent me to the actual Amazon page for the book, where I saw a little note next to the price information saying "Only 5 left (more are coming)-- order…