drorzel | May 30, 2009I don't intend to turn this entirely over to Video Baby Blogging, but SteelyKid has been adding new tricks at an amazing rate, and I have the camera... Here, she showcases her newfound mobility, and her inherited taste in entertainment:
The odd one-leg-under crawling style seems to be a local maximum-- she can get up on all fours in the classic crawling posture, but she doesn't have the mechanics entirely worked out, and makes faster progress with her left leg folded under. In the tradition of her experimentalist father, she doesn't see an immediate need to fix what's basically working.
The…
drorzel | May 29, 2009
Could an iphone tell if your parachute didn't open with its accelerometer? | Dot Physics
"The first and simplest answer would be ânoâ."
(tags: physics education science technology gadgets dot-physics blogs)
Robert J. Lang Origami
Awesome origami art, and science as well.
(tags: art math science)
Don't Be Such a Scientist
Everybody with a blog has a book deal these days...
(tags: science politics blogs books society culture)
Who Can Name the Bigger Number?
"In an old joke, two noblemen vie to name the bigger number. The first, after ruminating for hours, triumphantly announces "Eighty-…
drorzel | May 29, 2009SteelyKid's day care is closed today for a Jewish holiday, so she's spending the day at home with her grandmother. It was a real struggle to get my mother to come up for the day...
Something I'm sure is on the agenda is playing with her shape sorter box, which she was good enough to demonstrate on video:
Note the highly advanced technique-- if it's not quite working, pound on it. She gets that from me.
I cheated a tiny bit with the video, arranging it so the round hole was closest to her, and handing her one of the round objects. She hasn't really grasped the idea of the different shapes, yet…
drorzel | May 29, 2009Why do we have two meter sticks taped together back to back?
What is the dark stain obscuring the markings between 30 and 70 cm on half of the meter sticks?
Where the hell are all the stopwatches?
Why are the demo magnets sticky?
Why do we still have six meters worth of a rusting, broken torsional wave demonstration?
Why are the springs sorted into drawers with color labels ("Springs-Red") when all the springs are the same color, and there's no particular correlation with the spring constant?
Why do we have five hundred yellowing sheets of newsprint?
Why are the metal projectiles stored in an…
drorzel | May 28, 2009
The Washington Monthly
"This is one of the things I love most about blogs: Barack Obama nominates Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court; I, a non-lawyer, wonder what her record is like, and find the summaries in newspapers much too shallow and focussed on the politics of her appointment rather than her record; but voila! SCOTUSBlog has anticipated my every whim by running a series summarizing a whole lot of her decisions."
(tags: blogs law politics US)
David Foster Wallace | Books | A.V. Club
"David Foster Wallace wrote about lots of subjects with lots of strategies, all of them vehement.…
drorzel | May 28, 2009This week, a special Literary Edition:
Those are the first pass typeset proofs for the book, which just arrived in the mail today. Aren't they adorable?
Oh, okay, fine. You're just here for the conventional cute baby pictures:
SteelyKid's rapidly expanding bag of tricks now includes standing up. More or less. She can haul herself up into a standing position more often than not, and can steady herself on solid objects. Kate's ready to catch her if she falls, but not really holding her in this picture.
She doesn't really crawl in the usual way, but she can scoot around surprisingly quickly…
drorzel | May 28, 2009We're having some technical difficulties on the ScienceBlogs back end, so this may be futile, but I've got a 9am lab class, so here's a Dorky Poll in hopes that the comments will work well enough to be entertaining. Today's lab is the "ballistic pendulum," in which students use conservation of energy and conservation of momentum to measure a projectile's velocity, and next week's lectures are on conservation of angular momentum, so the poll topic seems obvious:
What's your favorite conservation law?
Conservation of energy? Conservation of linear momentum? Conservation of angular momentum? If…
drorzel | May 28, 2009I already mentioned this in a Links Dump, but there's enough buzz that it's probably worth a full post: the people at Three Quarks Daily have decided to offer prizes for blog writing:
Starting next month, the prizes will be awarded every year on the two solstices and the two equinoxes. So, we will announce the winner of the science prize on June 21, the arts and literature prize on September 22, the politics prize on December 21, and the philosophy prize on March 20, 2010.
About a month before the prize is to be announced we will solicit nominations of blog entries from our readers. The…
drorzel | May 27, 2009
Race and the Full Court Press at Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture
A good piece on the creepy racial subtext of that Malcolm Gladwell article. (I can stop posting about that any time I want to. Really.)
(tags: race culture sports basketball society)
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Men
"I mentioned a little while back that it's raining men here. The percentage of male students here has been climbing for the last several years, and the recession seems to be giving it a conspicuous boost. Male students are still a minority, though mostly in the over-21 age…
drorzel | May 27, 2009A thousand curses on Kevin Drum for making me read some idiocy from the National Review's attempts to find things wrong with Sonia Sotomayor:
Deferring to people's own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English (which is why the president stopped doing it after the first time at his press conference), unlike my correspondent's simple preference for a monophthong over a diphthong, and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn't be…
drorzel | May 27, 2009Tuesday night was the annual Sigma Xi induction banquet on campus (I'm currently the president of the local chapter, and have been scrambling to organize the whole thing in between all my other responsibilities these past few weeks). Sigma Xi, for those not familiar with it, is the scientific research honor society-- like Phi Beta Kappa for science nerds. We had thirty-odd students nominated for membership based on research they have done as undergraduates, and had a little banquet and induction ceremony to celebrate their accomplishments.
Tradition for this sort of thing calls for an after-…
drorzel | May 27, 2009It's that time of year when I check in to the giant methadone program that is the NBA, to help ease my way from college basketball season into the long, dull, summer when nothing worthwhile happens, sports-wise. Thus, I watched the second halves of most of last week's playoff games (I didn't get back to the hotel room until roughly halftime), and have been putting the games on in the evening here. From this, I have learned that:
1) Cleveland's entire offense consists of passing the ball around and hoping that LeBron James will do something spectacular. Nobody else appears to want to shoot the…
drorzel | May 26, 2009
Unscientific America: The Table of Contents | The Intersection | Discover Magazine
2009 promises to be a good year for science-y books by people with blogs.
(tags: books science social-science society politics intersection culture)
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Is the right book winning the Hugo?
"The problem we usually have with arguing about what won awards is that weâre too close to them, or else too far away. 1990 is long enough ago that we should have some perspective, and with these lists, we also have the perspective of the people who were there. Looking at…
drorzel | May 26, 2009We no longer do what is possibly my favorite lab in the intro mechanics class. We've switched to the Matter and Interactions curriculum, and thus no longer spend a bunch of time on projectile motion, meaning there's no longer room for the "target shooting" lab.
It's called that because the culmination of the lab used to be firing small plastic balls across the room and predicting where they would land. In order to make the prediction, of course, you need to know the velocity of the balls leaving the launcher, and making that measurement was the real meat of the lab. The way I used to do it,…
drorzel | May 25, 2009
At NIF, a Quest for Fusion Energy (or Maybe Folly) - NYTimes.com
"The $3.5 billion site is known as the National Ignition Facility, or NIF. For more than half a century, physicists have dreamed of creating tiny stars that would inaugurate an era of bold science and cheap energy, and NIF is meant to kindle that blaze.
In theory, the facilityâs 192 lasers â made of nearly 60 miles of mirrors and fiber optics, crystals and light amplifiers â will fire as one to pulverize a fleck of hydrogen fuel smaller than a match head. Compressed and heated to temperatures hotter than those of the core of a…
drorzel | May 25, 2009I'm still recovering from DAMOP, so no really substantive blogging today. I did want to mention a couple of recent developments regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I think I mentioned a while back that the Portugese rights had been sold. Not long after that, the Korean rights were sold, and last week, the Chinese rights sold. So, there are editions in the works for languages I don't even share a character set with.
I don't envy whoever has to translate this into Chinese. Then again, somebody already translated "Many Worlds, Many Treats", so maybe it isn't that bad...
This is cool not…
drorzel | May 25, 2009Over at the Inverse Square Blog, Tom Levenson is doing a series of blog posts walking through the steps involved in getting a book published. Unfortunately, there isn't a compact way to link to the whole series, but the posts to date are:
Part 0: Introduction to the Series
Part 1.0: The Proposal (with an example to look at)
Part 2.0: Agents
Part 2.5: Agents and Publishers
I'm not all the way through the publishing process for my first book yet, and my path into the whole business was sufficiently idiosyncratic that I'm not all that comfortable giving advice, but I don't have any hesitation…
drorzel | May 24, 2009
The Physics of The (Football) Wave : Built on Facts
Why people at a football game are like atoms in a gas.
(tags: science physics blogs built-on-facts)
The Speed of Short People : The Frontal Cortex
Modern neuroscience explains why I have so much trouble keeping up with short little guards.
(tags: science neuroscience biology blogs sports)
Rad Geek Peopleâs Daily 2009-05-06 â Wednesday Lazy Linking
"After the end of the Civil War, many former slavers tried to contact the black men and women they had once enslaved â even those who had escaped during the war and headed north â to try to…
drorzel | May 24, 2009Friday morning at DAMOP was probably the thinnest part of the program, at least for me. Annoyingly, this was the day that my cold (or possibly allergies-- whatever it was that had my head full of goo) let go, so I was the most awake and alert I managed for the entire conference.
I watched a few talks in the ultracold molecules session, where I heard about the remarkable progress being made in producing large numbers of ultra-cold molecules, generally diatomic alkali molecules (Rb2, KRb, LiCs, etc.). This is an area where relatively standard techniques seem to work surprisingly well. This is…
drorzel | May 22, 2009The release date for the forthcoming How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is December 22, seven months from today, and I got a look at some sample pages yesterday, so things are moving right along. To mark the occasion, and give you something to entertain you while I'm spending another day at DAMOP, I thought I'd offer some video:
This is me reading the dog conversation that goes with Chapter 3, on the Copenhagen Interpretation. The cheap computer microphone doesn't do that great a job picking up the Dog Voice, but it'll give you the basic idea. The images that go with it were mostly taken by…