drorzel | April 25, 2015This week has been a particularly good one for highlighting how weird my career is. On Thursday, I gave a lecture for the Union College Academy of Lifelong Learning, talking for nearly two hours about Einstein (in Memorial Chapel, shown in the "featured image" above). On Friday, I drove clean across New York State (which is really big, for the record) so I could give my talking-dog quantum physics talk as the after-dinner lecture at the New York State Section meeting of the American Physical Society.
If you told me in 1985 that I would go into a line of work that involved a lot of public…
drorzel | April 23, 2015Neil deGrasse Tyson's TV talk show had its debut Monday night on the National Geographic channel, something that's very relevant to my interests. It airs after I go to bed, though, so I set the DVR to record it, and watched it Tuesday afternoon. Then I was too busy yesterday to write about it...
Anyway, given how regularly I comment on Tyson's other activities, I figured I really ought to say something. Really, though, my main reaction was "What a very odd format..."
If you haven't already seen or read about this, the way it seems to work is that the show is taped in front of a live audience…
drorzel | April 22, 2015It was nice and sunny this morning when I sat down at Starbucks to do some blogging, so I wrote a new Forbes post about the quantum physics that makes sunshine possible. This also brings in xkcd's take on the fundamental forces, and even a little bit of SteelyKid.
Sadly, it's now grey and dreary, but that's spring in New England for you. But if you'd like a small amount of quantum-mechanical sunshine, head on over to Forbes and check it out.
drorzel | April 20, 2015Back when we went to London for Worldcon (and then I went to Sweden for a workshop), I bought a smartphone in Heathrow thinking I could sell it back when I left. That turned out not to work the way we thought, but it's served me well ever since as an e-reader. It can't connect to the local cell network, but I can download stuff via wi-fi, and it's small enough to hold in one hand, and back-lit, which makes it nice for reading in bed and on planes.
The lack of a cell connection, though, means it's just running on its onboard clock, so has gotten out of synch with my US phone. But even that is…
drorzel | April 18, 2015There has been a lot of stuff written in response to the Hugo award nomination mess, most of it stupid. Some of it is stupid to such an impressive degree that it actually makes me feel sympathetic toward people who I know are wrong about everything.
One of the few exceptions is the long essay by Eric Flint. This comes as a mild surprise, as I've always mentally lumped him in with the folks whose incessant political wrangling was a blight on Usenet's rec.arts.sf.written back in the day; now I can't remember if he was actually one of the annoying idiots, or if I've mistakenly put him in with…
drorzel | April 17, 2015"Hey, Daddy, did you know that in five or six million years the Sun is going to explode."
"It's five or six billion years, with a 'b.'"
"Right, in five or six billion years, the Sun's going to explode."
"Well, a star like our Sun won't really explode. It'll swell up really big, probably swallow the Earth, and then kind of... go out."
"Right, and then it would be dark all the time. So we'd need to build a really big lamp."
"Well, in five or six billion years, maybe we'd just build a new star."
"How would we do that?"
"Well, you know, you just get a really big bunch of hydrogen together."
"Oh,…
drorzel | April 17, 2015So, the mysterious strings of digits that I wrote about the other day seem to be part of a class assignment from the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Students are being asked to go read and comment on blogs, and the random digits are individual student identifiers.
This makes sense given the form and content of the other comments, and makes me sorry we live in a world where my first guess regarding this was that it was some sort of con. But, you know, I was led there by gigabytes of email from ersatz Nigerian widows.
I would, however, like to send one message to whoever it is at the…
drorzel | April 15, 2015One of the things I struggle with a bit when it comes to writing about cool modern physics is how much to play up the weirdness. On the one hand, people just can't get enough of "spooky action at a distance," but on the other hand, talking too much about that sort of thing makes quantum physics seem like a completely bizarre theory with no applications.
Which is unfortunate, because quantum physics is essential for all manner of everyday technology. For example, as I try to explain in a new post at Forbes, quantum physics is essential to the cheap alarm clock that wakes me up in the morning.…
drorzel | April 15, 2015So, I get a lot of comment spam here, probably a couple of orders of magnitude more than I get real comments (sigh). The vast majority of this gets blocked by built-in filters, so none of the stuff pitching medically implausible treatments for whatever makes it to a point where I have to see it. There's one new category of junk comment, though, that slips through the filters and requires human moderation (i.e., I have to approve or reject it), and I find this utterly baffling.
The comments are sorta-kinda relevant to the post that they're sent to, albeit with dubious English, and they don't…
drorzel | April 14, 2015I continue to struggle to avoid saying anything more about the Hugo mess, so let's turn instead to something totally non-controversial: gender bias in academic hiring. Specifically, this new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science titled "National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track" with this calm, measured abstract that won't raise any hackles at all:
National randomized experiments and validation studies were conducted on 873 tenure-track faculty (439 male, 434 female) from biology, engineering, economics, and psychology at…
drorzel | April 14, 2015I've been falling down on the job of informing you about promotional events for Eureka, mostly because the pace of these has slackened. But I'll be on the radio today, on WYPR's "Midday with Dan Rodricks" based in Baltimore (I'll be in the usual studio in Albany for this...). This is scheduled for a full hour, 1-2pm Eastern time.
So, if you're in Charm City, tune in. Or listen via the Internet from basically anywhere.
drorzel | April 13, 2015I continue to read way too much about the ongoing Hugo mess, and will most likely eventually lose my battle not to say anything more about it. In an attempt to redirect that impulse in a productive direction, I wrote a thing for Forbes about some of my favorite treatments of science in SF:
Of course, now that I’m a professional scientist, I end up finding a lot of stories about science to be lacking. Not just in the usual “the laws of physics don’t apply” sense, where science is bent to serve the purpose of the story– I’m generally pretty accepting of that, because sticking too strictly to…
drorzel | April 12, 2015The Pip is in a big superhero phase at the moment, and all of his games revolve around being a superhero of some sort. He has also basically memorized a couple of 30-page Justice League books, after demanding them over and over at bedtime. As I did with SteelyKid, I make a game out of reading the wrong words from time to time, and as a result, he can now "read" at least two books all the way through, as you can see from this cell-phone video shot at bedtime:
His superhero pretend games have the bizarre inventiveness you expect from a pre-schooler, mixing and matching from all the various…
drorzel | April 11, 2015The folks on the Hold Steady fan board arranged a Mix CD exchange recently, and I agreed to take part, putting together a playlist of stuff and sending off a bunch of electronic files a couple of weeks ago (I don't know if the drive on my desktop can even burn CD's any more, even if I had blank CD's on which to burn songs). As there's basically zero overlap between there and here, it's probably safe to share the track list.
The title I used for it was "Bright Lights and Up-Tempo Tracks," a reference to this Hold Steady song:
(Including this on the actual playlist would be a little too…
drorzel | April 10, 2015We're into admitted student season, that muddy period when large numbers of anxious high-school seniors visit college campuses all over the nation, often with parents in tow, trying to decide where to spend the next four years. As a result, I'll be spending a good deal of time over the next few weeks talking to high-school students who are interested in physics, trying to convince them to come here.
So, since I'm putting time into that anyway, I typed out a version of the argument in favor of going to a small liberal arts college (Williams, or Union, or some lesser school) to major in science…
drorzel | April 9, 2015This Hugo nomination scandal continues to rage on, and much of what's going on is just a giant sucking vortex of stupid. Standing out from this, though, is the guest post by Bruce Schneier at Making Light, which cuts through the bullshit to get to what's really important, namely using this as an excuse to do some math.
One of the many terrible ideas being floated is to use some analysis of the clustering of ballots to identify "slate voters," and having done that... something. Target their address with orbital lasers, maybe, or just sternly "Tsk tsk" in their general direction. This depends,…
drorzel | April 7, 2015The editor at Forbes suggested I should write something about the re-start of the Large Hadron Collider, so I did. But being me, I couldn't just do an "LHC, yay!" post, but talk about it in a larger context, as one of three major approaches to filling the gaps in the Standard Model:
The big physics story over the weekend was the re-start of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was initially started in 2008, but some key circuits failed shortly after it was switched on. A relatively quick patch job allowed it to operate at half its…
drorzel | April 6, 2015Last week, Steven Weinberg wrote a piece for the Guardian promoting his new book about the history of science (which seems sort of like an extended attempt to make Thony C. blow a gasket..). This included a list of recommended books for non-scientists which was, shall we say, a tiny bit problematic.
This is a topic on which I have Opinions, so I wrote a recommended reading list of my own over at Forbes. I'm more diplomatic about Weinberg than Phillip Ball was, but I have ego enough to say that I think my list is way better...
I won't pretend that it's a truly comprehensive list, though, so…
drorzel | April 6, 2015So, as alluded to over the weekend, the Hugo nominations this year are a train wreck. The short fiction categories are absolutely dominated by works from the "slates" pushed by a particular collection of (mostly) right-wing authors and that prion disease in human disguise "Vox Day." The primary purpose of the "slates" is to poke a stick in the eye of people on the other end of the political spectrum within SF, which is why three of the five nominees in one category got to John C. Wright channeling the spirit of Ayn Rand. If you want a round-up of the entirely predictable reactions to this…
drorzel | April 4, 2015I was thinking about writing something about the 2015 Hugo Award nominations train wreck, but you know what? Life's too short. So here's a couple of cute-kid photos from this morning's trip to the Children's Museum of Science and Technology over in Troy. They have these awesome construction toys, consisting of wooden rods with holes through them, and long bolts, washers, and wing nuts to connect them, and we spent most of our time in the building room.
On the left, you see The Pip, having picked up one of the screwdrivers that go with the set, and wearing his "fixing goggles." Because eye…