Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education "Beam makes light of Adler's inflexibility, but he does not entirely embrace the by-now clichéd disdain for the Great Books, because they represent something admirable that, perhaps, should be revived in our culture: "The animating idea behind publishing the Great Books, aside from making money for Britannica and the University of Chicago," Beam observes, "was populism, not elitism." The books were household gods. They shared the living room with the television, and they made you feel guilty…

We're six days into the DonorsChoose challenge, and at the time of this writing, ten people have contributed just over $1,700 to the Uncertain Principles challenge entry. That's an impressive average, and I thank you all for your generosity. I also offered a number of incentives, and Lauren Uroff is claiming one: I'd like to take you up on your offer to answer questions. The first question I'd like help with is telling me how to tell my teenager about wave-particle duality, the classic experiments that show light is both a particle and a wave, and why he should care. As It happens, I have…

The sneaky folks at the Nobel Foundation have thrown a spanner in the works when it comes to the Physics prize. All the speculation has surrounded exotic quantum effects and theoretical esoterica, and they turn around and give it to something -gasp- practical... The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics is split three ways: half to Charles K. Kao "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication," and the other half to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit - the CCD sensor." Now these aren't…

Career Advice: I'm Sorry I Published - Inside Higher Ed "Given that it seems to be common wisdom that publications are helpful, two anecdotes I heard in the past week or so scare me a little bit. Both anecdotes are about departments that were searching or are planning a search. Both departments see their department as mainly a teaching department, but they do have research requirements (I think 3/3 or 3/2 loads). Also, according to both anecdotes, these departments consider publications in top journals as counting against a candidate!" (tags: academia jobs philosophy humanities stupid)…

In this week's issue of Publishers Weekly there's a short review (scroll down) of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog (which will be released December 22): How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Chad Orzel. Scribner, $24 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4165-7228-2 What do dog treats and chasing squirrels have to do with quantum mechanics? Much more than you might imagine, as Orzel explains in this fun introduction to modern physics based on a "series of conversations" with his dog Emmy. Dogs make the perfect sounding board for physics talk, because they "approach the world with fewer preconceptions than humans, and…

The Nobel Prize in Medicine has been awarded to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak for "for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase." Who's HI, you ask? HI is the commenter who picked Blackburn and Greider in the official Uncertain Principles betting pool. Congratulations to Blackburn, Greider, and Szostak, who get to split about a million dollars. And Congratulations to HI, who gets the right to author two! guest posts on this blog. Send me an email from the address you left in the comment form, HI, and we'll get this set up.

As you may or may not have heard, there's a new Stargate franchise on the SyFy channel with John Scalzi as a creative consultant. It may have slipped by without you noticing, because John is too modest to hype it much... Anyway, given the Scalzi connection, I checked out the pilot on Friday, and it was fine. I'm not a huge fan of the other series in the Stargate family, but they're reliably entertaining when nothing else is on, and this will probably fall into that category. I doubt I'll be re-arranging my social calendar for this, but it was pretty good. The show did do one thing that really…

Sunday morning, Chateau Steelypips: Everybody's in the library. Why does SteelyKid look so pleased with herself, you ask? Because she's found a new game: On the bright side, Emmy's opinion of SteelyKid has moved beyond "grudging acceptance"...

Posthumous Novels by Vladimir Nabokov, David Foster Wallace and Ralph Ellison - WSJ.com "A new wave of posthumous books by iconic authors is stirring debate over how publishers should handle fragmentary literary remains. Works by Vladimir Nabokov, William Styron, Graham Greene, Carl Jung and Kurt Vonnegut will hit bookstores this fall. Ralph Ellison and the late thriller writer Donald E. Westlake have posthumous novels due out in 2010. " (tags: books literature humanities history culture publishing writing) Airborne Laser Burns Things Good - Fine Structure "Boeing has unleashed it's ATL (…

Effect Size (Again) « Easily Distracted "I agree that if a researcher can establish that a particular effect or phenomenon has a statistically significant influence or role in social behavior, it matters, that this is a finding worth reporting. The problem is, as McCloskey notes, that some findings matter more than other findings, and that the reason they matter more or less can only be worked out through something other than statistical argument, that the weight we should give such a finding has to come from some philosophical, moral, political or normative claim. " (tags: statistics…

Via His Holiness, there is an aggressively stupid paragraph in a New York Times movie review today: Did you hear the one about the guy who lived in the land of Uz, who was perfect and upright and feared God? His name was Job. In the new movie version, "A Serious Man," some details have been changed. He's called Larry Gopnik and he lives in Minnesota, where he teaches physics at a university. When we first meet Larry, in the spring of 1967, his tenure case is pending, his son's bar mitzvah is approaching, and, as in the original, a lot of bad stuff is about to happen, for no apparent reason.…

I'm teaching my Quantum Optics class again this term, out of a completely different textbook than last time around-- I'm using Mark Fox's Quantum Optics from the Oxford Master Series in AMO Physics, which is more of a regular textbook. I've got six students-- four junior and senior physics majors, one senior chemistry major, and a retired scientist from GE who is interested in catching up on the latest new stuff. Last time around, I posted my lecture notes as I went through the class, but I've forgotten to do that thus far this term, here in the Freezing Hell of Lab Grading. So here's a big…

We're currently in the early stages of the annual DonorsChoose fundraiser, helping to raise money for educational projects. This is especially important in the current economic climate-- even before things went south, many schools and classrooms were strapped for cash, but now it's even worse. But I can understand if that's not a noble enough cause for you. Helping poor people isn't enough for everyone. So here's something to sweeten the deal: PETA doesn't like DonorsChoose because some of the science classes seeking funds are looking for dissection equipment for biology classes. Janet gives…

Physics Buzz: Space invaders: cosmic rays arrive for their 100th birthday "Cosmic rays constantly bombard earth's atmosphere at a rate of about 100 per square meter per second, but they don't make it through intact. They collide with atmospheric molecules, setting of a cascading shower of secondary particles, such as neutrinos and muons. Researchers probably wish there was less stuff between us and them; because they're messengers from the deep, so to speak, they could offer clues to black holes and supernova. But most of what eventually reaches the ground is very low in energy; above the…

SteelyKid says, "Baby Blogging time again? Can it wait? I'm in the middle of a book..." She is her parents' daughter... And also a Great Big Baby, as you can see from this picture of her cuddling Appa: To really appreciate the contrast, look at this shot from Week 2 of Baby Blogging: She's grown juuuust a little in the last 58 weeks...

"OK, thanks very much. I'll pick it up at six, or a little after." I hang up the phone. I can feel the dog's eyes on my back. "So what was that about?" she asks. "Oh, that was the Ford dealer," I say casually. "They're done with my car." The dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree a few days ago when I was leaving work-- all sorts of brake-related idiot lights, plus the odometer went completely blank. I spent the weekend driving a rented Kia. "What was wrong with it?" she asks, with exaggerated casualness. "Oh, you know, some problems with the wiring..." "What kind of problem with the wiring…

As you may have seen on some other ScienceBlogs blogs, it's time again for the annual DonorsChoose fundraiser: If you haven't been here in past years, DonorsChoose is a charity dedicated to education. They take specific proposals from school teachers looking for items to help their classes-- anything from pens and paper to classroom furniture, to smart boards and computer projectors-- and allow donors to choose specific classroom projects that appeal to them. We've run a fundraiser for them every year since ScienceBlogs was started. This year, they've expanded beyond blogs, to a more general…

slacktivist: In the belly of the fish "My fundie Bible teachers considered this the main, or even the only, point of this story worth considering. Their task, as they saw it, was to defend the story as being "literally" true, and so they'd share legends (see Bartley, James) of sailors swallowed by whales and go to great lengths to argue that such a thing was possible. This led to some rather strange and uninspiring sermons, the main point of which seemed to be that God is capable of creating a fish that could swallow a man whole and keep that man alive for several days. The message of those…

I'm a little fried from yesterday's frantic running around, so while there are a couple of physics things I'd like to write about, I have neither the time nor the brainpower. So here's a silly little poll, prompted by the large amount of ice I go through at home (I'm trying to lose some weight, so I'm drinking a lot of ice water these days). How do you like your cold beverages to be served? How do you like your drinks?(online surveys) (It was that, or a rant about the silly faux-controversy over the Angels' post-game celebration, which is taking up wayyyy too much time on sports shows.)

I've gotten a couple of emails asking what I think of the fact that the new president of Williams College is a theoretical physicist. So, here are my (very brief) thoughts on the matter: 1) As a general matter, I'm happy to see scientists in administrative positions. They tend to have a better appreciation of the demands of scientific research than humanists, and they tend to approach the running of things in a manner that's a little closer to my own preferences. Having a physicist as president is highly unlikely to result in the diversion of vast sums of money to fund physics research,…