Physics Buzz: A day at the International Submarine Races "Last weekend, travelers at a rest stop in Minnesota became alarmed when a group of college kids pulled up in a U-haul truck, carefully unloaded a large, sleek object from the back, and set to work on it with power tools. About the length of a person, it was painted white and resembled a torpedo. Fearing the worst, someone called the police." (tags: science physics gadgets blogs physics-buzz) Views: Poverty Studies - Inside Higher Ed "Now that acute socioeconomic suffering has hit home or threatens to hit home among university…

The National Science Foundation uses a computerized proposal-and-report submission system called FastLane. When I first submitted a proposal, this required three things to log in: your last name, your Social Security number, and a password of your choice. Sometime in the last year, they stopped using the SSN, and switched to a randomly generated nine-digit ID number. Which they sent me in a massage that somehow manages not to include the strings "NSF," "FastLane," or "National Science Foundation." "ID" by itself returns too many results in GMail to be useful. On the bright side, at least I…

I'm not entirely sure why I keep responding to this, but Bruce Charlton left another comment about the supposed dullness of modern science that has me wondering about academic: The key point is that a few decades ago an average scientist would start working on the problem of his choice in his mid- to late-twenties - now it is more likely to be early forties or never. In the UK most people got a 'tenured' university lectureship straight after their PhD (or before) - created a lot of 'dead wood' but also gave people time and security to be ambitious. Longer time spent as a doctoral student plus…

While I've seen him on tv a bunch of times (both on NOVA and on the Comedy Central fake-news shows), I have somehow managed not to read anything by Neil deGrasse Tyson before. I'm not sure how that happened. After his appearance on The Daily show last year, and especially after the Rubik's Cube thing the next day, I figured I needed to read something of his, so I picked up a copy of Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries. Kate actually got to it before me (I was working on my own book, and didn't have much time for reading other people's non-fiction), but it's been serving as bedtime…

Cocktail Party Physics: dial-a-scientist "It all started Wednesday, when I got an email from Brandon Webb, who handles PR for the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at UT Dallas. He wanted to know if I could talk to a reporter who wanted to know whether a Styrofoam cup could break a windshield. (That's an advantage to being officially mediagenic - I don't get contacted directly now - they go through my 'people' a.k.a Brandon.)" (tags: physics journalism media science cocktail-party blogs) Faraday's Cage is where you put Schroedinger's Cat - Cats are great subjects for bad…

One of the fun thing about being at home for a weekend is that I get to see a close-up view of the death of the American newspaper. When I was a kid, Binghamton had two daily papers, the Sun-Bulletin and the Evening Press, published in the morning and evening, respectively (bet you couldn't've guessed that). They merged into the Press and Sun-Bulletin in the early 80's, and ave been declining ever since. These days, it takes about fifteen minutes to read the whole thing cover to cover. Twenty on Sunday. Today's edition, though, includes a story on self-publishing, which is a sad reminder that…

The following is the (approximate) text of the speech I gave Friday night at the Whitney Point High School graduation. Or, at least, this is what I typed out for myself Thursday night-- what actually comes out of my mouth on Friday might be completely different. That's why they do these things live, after all... ----------------------- When I agreed to speak here, one of the first things I thought of as I tried to decide what to say was my own college graduation, where the speaker began by noting that nobody ever remembers anything said by a graduation speaker. We all thought that was pretty…

Hacker News | I was a theoretical physicist for 13 years, and struggled a lot with this questi... "One unusual but very useful style was to set a goal like reading 15 papers in 3 hours. I use the term "reading" here in an unusual way. Of course, I don't mean understanding everything in the papers. Instead, I'd do something like this: for each paper, I had 12 minutes to read it. The goal was to produce a 3-point written LaTeX summary of the most important material I could extract: usually questions, open problems, results, new techniques, or connections I hadn't seen previously. When time…

I'm headed home to give a speech at my old high school's graduation. Which is a weird feeling-- I don't feel like I'm really old or successful enough to be on the lecture circuit. Then again, it is twenty years since I graduated there myself, which means I've been out of high school longer than most if not all of them have been alive, so... Anyway, to give you something to look at while I'm off speechifying, here's some video of SteelyKid: In this clip, she shows off two new ridiculously cute behaviors: the "hold my toy" game where she hands something to you, then takes it back; and tool use…

"What are you doing?" "Hmm? Oh, I'm trying to think of a Dorky Poll question to post to the blog, because I'm going to be away from the computer for a while." "Why are they always human polls?" "Um, because the vast majority of my readers are human?" Yeah, but why don't I ever get to pick poll questions, huh?" "OK, fine. What's your question?" What are you chasing?(survey software)

The Dean Dad slaps his forehead and asks a question: We have anecdotal evidence that suggests that students who actually take math for all four years of high school do better in math here than those who don't. We also have anecdotal evidence that bears crap in the woods. Why the hell do the high schools only require two years of math? Silly Dean Dad-- math is too hard. It would be completely unreasonable to make kids take more math, and anyway, it's perfectly ok to know nothing about math. (That's sarcasm, by the way. Click on the link.) The comments to the original post are well worth…

Chris Mooney has an explanation of the "accommodationist" position that deserves better than to be buried in a Links Dump: I don't see a need to pry into how each individual is dealing with these complicated and personal matters of constructing a coherent worldview. Rather, from a political and public perspective, I want them all to integrate modern science into that worldview. And, from a civil libertarian perspective, I don't want their religion telling me what to do. (Especially interfering with my access to alcohol on Sundays!) Insofar as I'm an accommodationist, then, it's not because I…

Technology & Middle Earth : Built on Facts "Why doesn't anyone just use a telescope or binoculars? Ok sure, it's ancient middle earth and presumably a Galileo hasn't been born yet. But I see no reason that this ought to stop them. Middle Earth is not a completely pre-technological environment, there's science of some sophistication." (tags: books literature SF silly blogs built-on-facts physics science technology) BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | 'Stoned wallabies make crop circles' Best. Headline. EVER. (tags: animals drugs biology silly) RIP Michael Jackson | Music | A.V. Club "Jackson…

SteelyKid is pondering a life as a costumed crime-fighter-- she's got the pseudonym for it, after all-- and here we see her trying out a catchphrase to strike fear into the hearts of naughty people: "Spooooon!!!" Actually, that's lifted from somebody else. Probably needs more work. The traditional Appa-for-scale picture: The spoon doesn't have any food on it, but it's soft plastic, and she likes to chew on it. Whatever makes her happy.

Just a quick reminder post to note that you can win an advance proof copy of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in one of two ways: By captioning pictures of the dog with physics apparatus By writing short poems about dogs and physics Regarding the last one, I'm thinking of adding a second poetry prize for "Best poem by somebody who isn't the Cuttlefish." So if you've been intimidated by squidly verse, don't be... Entries for both contests are open through this Sunday, June 28th.

Over at Skulls in the Stars, gg has a very good response to the polemic about the dullness of modern science that I talked about a few days ago. He takes issue with the claim that modern science is "dull" compared to some past Golden Age, and does a good job of it-- go read it. I think he makes some very good points, but my own main problem with the piece is a different sort of thing. Fundamentally, the article strikes me as a "Fans are slans" argument dressed up ina lot of science-y jargon. And "fans are slans" arguments drive me nuts. The basic argument is laid out in a comment by Bruce…

Consecutive entries in my RSS reader yesterday: Salty ocean in the depths of Enceladus Discovery could have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life An enormous plume of water spurts in giant jets from the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus. In a report published in the international science journal Nature today (25 June), European researchers provide evidence that this magnificent plume is fed by a salty ocean. The discovery could have implications for the search for extraterrestrial life as well as our understanding of how planetary moons are formed. and: Jets on Saturn's…

I've been reading a bunch of posts at Infinite summer lately, where they're planning to spend the summer (re)reading David Foster Wallaces most magnum of opuses, Infinite Jest. In a development that surely nobody could see coming, I've decided to spend some of my infinite (hah) free time re-reading it myself. If you're not familiar with the book, this is not a trivial undertaking. The main text is some thing like 1000 pages, with an additional hundred-odd endnotes. Many of those endnotes are just names of drugs (this makes sense within the book), but a fair number of them contain information…

Confessions of a Community College Dean: An Unmarked Car "[A]t work, I can wear, say, a gray suit, and be both situationally appropriate and utterly impersonal. On dress down days, the alternate uniform of tie-less Oxford and khakis (or a close variant) gets the job done. There's nothing terribly interesting about either ensemble, but that's precisely the point. I don't have to think about them, and neither does anybody else. They're like driving unmarked cars. I go where I want without calling undue attention to myself. Except that they aren't. Over the last couple of weeks, on three…

Via email, a news story from San Francisco with the headline "Physics discussion ends in skateboard attack": A homeless man is on trial in San Mateo County on charges that he smacked a fellow transient in the face with a skateboard as the victim was engaged in a conversation about quantum physics, authorities said today. Jason Everett Keller, 40, allegedly accosted another homeless man, Stephan Fava, on the 200 block of Grand Avenue in South San Francisco at about 1:45 p.m. March 30. At the time, Fava was chatting with an acquaintance, who is also homeless, about "quantum physics and the…