drorzel | January 28, 2010
Resolving the Red Controversy? : Starts With A Bang
"Earlier this week, I introduced you to the Red Controversy, the observations recorded around 2000 years ago in Europe asserting that the star, Sirius, appeared red.
Now, taking a look at Sirius today, it is clearly not red:
And, based on what we know about stars, they don't change color on timescales that quickly. "
(tags: science astronomy blogs starts-with-bang pictures history)
Cambridge physicist wins Glamour magazine award | Varsity Online
"The award gives Professor Donald a chance to bring attention to the under-representation of…
drorzel | January 27, 2010Two upcoming events related to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
This Saturday, January 30, I will be doing a signing at 2pm at the book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, on Western Ave. in Albany. I may or may not read something-- I'm not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do as part of this, never having done a book signing before.
Next Thursday, February 4th, I'll be giving a talk sponsored by the Maryland Chapter of SPIE 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…
drorzel | January 27, 2010Via SFSignal's daily links dump, Lilith Saintcrow has a terrific post about the relationship between authors and editors:
YOUR EDITOR IS NOT THE ENEMY.
I don't lose sight of the fact that I am the content creator. For the characters, I know what's best. It's my job to tell the damn story and produce enough raw material that we can trim it into reasonable shape. (Which means I am responsible for my deadlines, but we knew that.) I'm also way too close to the work to be able to see it objectively. So, 99% of the time, the editor is right.
Read it. It's good, and very true.
"Yeah, but that's…
drorzel | January 27, 2010Dennis Overbye is a terrific writer, but I have to say, I hate the way that he falls into the lazy shorthand of using "physics" to mean "theoretical particle physics" in this article about a recent conference built around debates about the state of particle physics. He's got lots of great quotes from Lisa Randall and Lawrence Krauss and others about how things are really bleak on the theory side, and these are barely tempered by enthusiasm from experimentalists.
So, yeah, theoretical particle physics may well appear to be in crisis. But, look, theoretical particle physics is always in crisis…
drorzel | January 27, 2010Cheryl Morgan has a post urging people to nominate for the Hugo Awards. While I don't place the same priority she does on the gender distribution of who gets nominated, I applaud her for doing this now, while there's a chance to influence the actual ballot, rather than waiting until April to complain about it. If you care about what science fiction and fantasy works win awards, go read what she says about it.
I will also toss out another cheap way to influence the Hugo ballot and eventual winner. As a member of last year's Worldcon, I am entitled to nominate for this year's award. Here is my…
drorzel | January 27, 2010This Timothy Burke post on the current political moment deserves better than to be buried in the Links Dump. He's beginning to despair because it looks like "there are many things which could happen which would improve the lives of many Americans which are not going to happen and perhaps cannot happen."
Take health care, for example. I can read and parse and think about the proposed legislation that actually exists and see it without hyperbole, as an okay if scattered series of modest initiatives. Whatever. I think I have a fairly good handle on the underlying cultural and social…
drorzel | January 27, 2010
Science Channel Refuses To Dumb Down Science Any Further | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
"Along with Bunting's remarks, the Science Channel issued a statement claiming that it currently airs more than 150 programming hours that are tangentially, and often laughably, related to science, and that staff members are unable to bring themselves to make those hours even more asinine. "
(tags: science television onion silly education)
The Mid-Majority : In the Band for a Day
"Several minutes before tipoff, the director made a short announcement. "We have a guest today," he said. "…
drorzel | January 26, 2010A few days back, Matthew Beckler added the Kindle edition to his sales rank tracker for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Given my well-known love for playing with graphs of data, it was inevitable that I would plot both of these in a variety of ways.
So, what do we learn from this? Well, we learn that people in the Albany. NY area don't own Kindles:
OK, maybe that's not obvious to everybody...
When you look at that graph, the blue line is the Amazon sales rank of the physical book edition, while the red line is the Amazon sales rank of the Kindle edition. The two track each other pretty…
drorzel | January 26, 2010Way back in the early days of ScienceBlogs, I ran a competition of sorts to determine the greatest physics experiment in history. I collected a bunch of nominations, wrote up a post about each of the top 11 entries, and then asked people to vote for their favorite.
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the laser, let's take a stab at something similar:
What is the coolest thing you know of that's done with lasers?
Lasers are all over the place these days, from UPC scanners to telecom networks to optical drives to hospitals. All sorts of fascinating things have been done with lasers over the…
drorzel | January 26, 2010Kevin Drum checks in with the latest from the class wars:
In the middle of a rant about healthcare reform and the compromise over the Cadillac tax, one of Andrew Sullivan's readers says this:
The idea that public employees make less than those in the private sector is a myth that needs to die. Most already have cadillac plans and in most places their salaries are ahead of private workers whose taxes go pay for their income. On top of that they get much better benefits and pensions, so to let them out of a tax that private industry workers will have to pay who work at the same income level is…
drorzel | January 26, 2010
Physics Buzz: A Star Class is Born
"Scientists have proposed that there is a new, exotic type of star living in our universe that we haven't seen yet. The so-called "electroweak stars", if they exist, will be difficult to detect because they mostly emit neutrino's - subatomic particles which, for the most part, don't interact with ordinary matter."
(tags: science astronomy gravity particles blogs physics-buzz)
Three Papers On The Muon Anomaly
"Today my attention was caught by a triad of papers casually listed one after the other: written by different authors, but all on topics closely…
drorzel | January 25, 2010The great thing about using Google to vanity search for articles about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, or at least one of the great things about it, is that it's world-wide. Thus, this Dutch roundup of new books, which includes mine. This is what they have to say:
Een erg geestig boek is 'How to Teach Physics to Your Dog'. Chad Orzel gebruikt scenarios uit de echte wereld om kwantummechanica uit te leggen. Dit doet hij dankzij conversaties met zijn hond Emmy. De leuke gesprekken zorgen er voor dat veel vragen worden opgelost over kwantummechanica. Het boek is niet voor de absolute beginner…
drorzel | January 25, 2010As mentioned previously, I've been reading Sean Carroll's Wheel arrow of time book, which necessarily includes a good bit of discussion of "Maxwell's Demon," a thought experiment famously proposed by James Clerk Maxwell as something that would allow you to cool a gas without obviously increasing entropy. The "demon" mans a trapdoor between a sample of gas and an initially empty space, and allows only slow-moving gas atoms to pass through. After some time, the empty volume is filled with a gas at lower temperature than the initial sample, while the gas in the original volume is hotter than…
drorzel | January 25, 2010There was a flurry of stories last week about an arxiv preprint on optical trapping of an ion. Somewhat surprisingly for an arxiv-only paper, it got a write-up in Physics World. While I generally like Physics World, I have to take issue with their description of why this is interesting:
In the past, the trapping of atomic particles has followed a basic rule: use radio-frequency (RF) electromagnetic fields for ions, and optical lasers for neutral particles, such as atoms. This is because RF fields can only exert electric forces on charges; try to use them on neutral particles and there's…
drorzel | January 25, 20102010 marks the 50th anniversary of the invention of the laser. To mark the occasion, the American Physical society has launched LaserFest, which will involve a large number of public events over the next year. The website includes a bunch of cool things explaining the physics of lasers, and a timeline of laser history with one glaring bug that you'll have to figure out for yourself. Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer Ouellette has an excellent historical survey of her own, saving me a lot of typing.
(Fun fact: Gordon Gould, who eventually won a lengthy patent fight, was a Union alumnus…
drorzel | January 25, 2010
The American Spectator : Osama bin Elvis
"Seven years after Osama bin Laden's last verifiable appearance among the living, there is more evidence for Elvis's presence among us than for his. Hence there is reason to ask whether the paradigm of Osama bin Laden as terrorism's deus ex machina and of al Qaeda as the prototype of terrorism may be an artifact of our Best and Brightest's imagination, and whether investment in this paradigm has kept our national security establishment from thinking seriously about our troubles' sources. So let us take a fresh look at the fundamentals. "
(tags: war…
drorzel | January 24, 2010A few weeks back, I spoke on the phone with a freelance writer who was doing a piece for the Albany Times Union. She was putting together a joint article on How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and the Atomville book put together by Jill Linz and Cindy Schwarz (at Skidmore and Vassar, respectively). The piece was published today: "Physics without limits: Area writers explain quantum mechanics to adults, kids."
Unfortunately, the Times Union has a policy of reserving some stories for the print edition, and so there's no way to link to it. So, unless you have a way to get your hands on a paper…
drorzel | January 24, 2010I'm currently a bit less than halfway through Sean Carroll's From Eternity to Here, which has leaped to the top of the literary inbox because I'll be hosting a Book Salon at firedoglake next Saturday evening. If you want to see how my limited typing skills work in a live chat setting, be sure to stop by. (I plan to type out a bunch of questions in advance, and then cut-and-paste them as needed.)
A little while back, somebody on Twitter referred to this as "Sean's arrow of time fetish book," which is a little unkind, but also funny and memorable. Sort of. My subconscious, trained by spending…
drorzel | January 24, 2010... are welcome in the DogPhysics Pet Gallery. Even aquatic ones:
We've currently got seventeen dogs, six cats, two horses, a lizard, and these fish. If you've got a pet, of whatever species, and a copy of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, take a picture of the one with the other, and send it to queen_emmy@steelypips.org, and we'll add it to the Gallery.
drorzel | January 23, 2010Having seen other authors led into destruction by responding to customer reviews on Amazon, I tend to approach the customer reviews of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog with some trepidation.
It turns out, though, that they're really good. And I don't mean that in a Harriet Kalunser kind of way-- the positive reviews are thoughtful and positive, and the negative comments that have been made are for the most part legitimate criticisms of the book. And then there's this one:
My 11 year old son is nuts about physics, so I got this book to see how it would go over with him. It did, perfectly. The…