drorzel | March 9, 2015
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And caused me no small amount of panic For traveling both of them would be good But there simply was no way I could Until I remembered quantum mechanics.
So half my wavefunction I sent left And rightward steered the other half Both pieces of me with equal heft And thanks to calculations deft, I knew the end would sum both paths
Plenty of physicists claim to know Or at least will confidently speculateThat collapse, or a pilot wave's flow, Or decoherence act to make it so. Me, I just shut up and calculate.
So in the woods I went two ways To return together…
drorzel | March 6, 2015I've updated the detailed blog post describing our summer workshop introducing writers to quantum physics to include a link to the application form. For the benefit of those who read via RSS, though, and don't follow me on Twitter: the application form is now live, and will be for the next few weeks. We expect to make acceptance decisions around April 1.
So, if you make up stories and the idea of spending a few days at the Joint Quantum Institute learning about quantum physics from some of the world's leading experts sounds like fun, well, send us an application.
drorzel | March 6, 2015There was some Twitter chatter the other night about a new arxiv paper called The Gender Breakdown of the Applicant Pool for Tenure-Track Faculty Positions at a Sample of North American Research Astronomy Programs:
The demographics of the field of Astronomy, and the gender balance in particular, is an important active area of investigation. A piece of information missing from the discussion is the gender breakdown of the applicant pool for faculty positions. For a sample of 35 tenure-track faculty positions at 25 research universities advertised over the last few years in astronomy and…
drorzel | March 5, 2015SteelyKid's school does a "March Math Madness" thing, and this year all the kids in her class are being asked to practice "Math Facts" for ten minutes a night. This appears to be motivated by some requirement that students be able to rattle off basic addition problems at high speed. So there are flash cards and the like.
She's good at this, but quickly gets bored, and does not hesitate for an instant in letting her boredom be known. It'll be sort of interesting to see how this plays out if they actually expect her to answer 30 addition questions in a minute, or whatever the ridiculous…
drorzel | March 4, 2015As previously mentioned, SteelyKid has started to get into pop music. In addition to the songs in that post, she's very fond of Katy Perry's "Roar," like every other pre-teen girl in the country, and also this Taylor Swift song:
I've seen a bunch of people rave about this, but honestly, I found it pretty forgettable until I read Jim Henley's Twitter exegesis in which he shows that the song is really about the tryst with an alien that left Swift with a faceless hybrid infant. That is, a blank space-baby. Now I can't get the idiot song out of my head.
Anyway, a week or two ago, I actually went…
drorzel | March 3, 2015
A few years back, I became aware of Mike Brotherton's Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, and said "somebody should do this for quantum physics." At the time, I wasn't in a position to do that, but in the interim, the APS Outreach program launched the Public Outreach and Informing the Public Grant program, providing smallish grants for new public outreach efforts. So, because I apparently don't have enough on my plate as it is, I floated the idea with Steve Rolston at Maryland (my immediate supervisor when I was a grad student), who liked it, and we put together a proposal with their Director of…
drorzel | March 2, 2015While I'm running unrelated articles head-on into each other, two other things that caught my eye recently were Sabine Hossenfelder's thoughts on scientific celebrities (taking off from Lawrence Krauss's defense of same) and Megan Garber's piece on "attention policing", spinning off that silliness about a badly exposed photo of a dress that took the Internet by storm.
Like Sabine, I'm generally in favor of the idea of science celebrities, though as someone whose books are found on shelves between Lawrence Krauss's and Neil deGrasse Tyson's, there's no small amount of self-interest in that.…
drorzel | March 1, 2015Back on Thursday when I was waiting to be annoyed by a speech, one of the ways I passed time was reading stuff on my phone, which included This Grantland piece about Charles Barkley and "advanced stats". In it, Bryan Curtis makes the argument that while Barkley's recent comments disparaging statistical tools seem at first like just the same old innumeracy, it's really a question of ownership.
But Barkley was firing a shot in a second war. Let’s call it Moneyball II. This clash doesn’t pit a blogger versus a newspaperman in a debate over the value of PER. It pits media versus athletes in a…
drorzel | February 27, 2015Yesterday was Founders Day at Union, celebrating the 220th anniversary of the granting of a charter for the college. The name of the event always carries a sort of British-boarding-school air for me, and never fails to earworm me with a very particular rugby song, but really it's just one of those formal-procession-and-big-speaker events that provide local color for academia.
This year's event started, as always, with a classical music performance-- a song by Aaron Copeland, this time, so we've at least caught up to the 20th Century. (I'm not sure I want to live long enough to see a Bob Dylan…
drorzel | February 27, 2015SteelyKid has developed a habit of not answering questions, whether because she's genuinely zoning out, or just not acknowledging adults, it's not clear. (She's going to be a real joy when she's a teenager, I can tell...) In retaliation, I've started giving imaginary answers for her, which generall snaps her out of it, but I've been waiting to see what the next step was.
Which was taken last night: in the car on the way to taekwondo sparring class, I asked "What are you guys doing in art class these days?" silence.
"Hey, [SteelyKid]? What are you doing in art these days?"
Silence
"Oh,…
drorzel | February 26, 2015There have been some good comments on last week's post about the Many-Worlds Interpretation, which I find a little surprising, as it was thrown together very quickly and kind of rant-y on my part, because I was annoyed by the tone of the original Phillip Ball article. (His follow-up hasn't helped that...) But then maybe that's why it succeeded in generating good comments. Tough call.
Anyway, I let these slide for a while because of day-job stuff, so I'm going to promote this to a new post, and try to address some of these. Because, apparently, we are never out of universes in which I'm…
drorzel | February 26, 2015Jon "Men Who Stare at Goats" Ronson has a new book coming out, and has been promoting it with excerpts in major newspapers, most notably the New York Times Magazine and the Guardian. In these, he tracks down people whose lives were wrecked by massive public shaming campaigns over idiotic things they wrote on social media, and talks to them about what happened, and what they've been doing since.
Ronson's whole career is built around profiling unusual and often unpleasant people in a way that is ultimately sympathetic without endorsing their problematic aspects-- it belatedly occurs to me that…
drorzel | February 25, 2015Paige Brown Jarreau, who blogs at From the Lab Bench is in the throes of writing her dissertation about science blogging, and plowing through a lot of interview data. She's sharing some of the process on the blog, and a lot more on Twitter, where it's prompted a good deal of discussion.
One of the big things she's brought up recently is the question of why scientists seem to blog about their own research only on rare occasions (Storify link). My own answer is in there somewhere: blogging about something you're actively working on doesn't feel like a departure from doing work. If you're going…
drorzel | February 24, 2015There's a new-ish book review podcast covering pop-science books, BookLab, hosted by Dan Falk and Amanda Gefter, and their latest episode includes my Eureka as the third of three books being discussed (a bit more than 40 minutes in, though their discussion of the other books is also interesting...).
It's sort of an odd experience listening to other people talking about my book; most of the audio I've heard about it is listening to my own interviews, where I'm actively participating (I recorded another radio interview yesterday; not sure when it will air, but I'll post a link). Happily, they…
drorzel | February 24, 2015I'm rooting around in my bag for a pen, and pull out a laser pointer by mistake. Since I'd really prefer not to be grading, I flip it on and shine it on the floor next to the spot where Emmy is half-dozing. She immediately leaps up (she's pretty spry for a dog of 12...), and pounces on it. Or tries to, as I flick the spot across the room.
"Get the dot! Get the dot! Getthedotgetthedotgetthedot!" she mutters as I lead her on a lively chase around the room. After a few minutes, I click the laser off, and put it down. Emmy comes over, panting, and I scratch behind her ears.
"That was fun, eh,…
drorzel | February 23, 2015A sort of follow-up to last week's post about the STEM "pipeline". In discussions on Twitter sparked by the study I talked about last week, I've seen a bunch of re-shares of different versions of this graph of the percentage of women earning undergrad degrees in physics:
Fraction of BA/BS degrees in physics awarded to women over time. From AIP Statistical Research.
You can clearly see that after a fairly steady rise through the 80's and 90's, this trend has flattened out over the last decade. If you crop the horizontal axis to start in the early 2000's, you can actually see a decline from…
drorzel | February 20, 2015Phillip Ball has a long aggrieved essay about the Many-Worlds Interpretation, which is, as Sean Carroll notes, pretty bad. Ball declares that Many-Worlds is "incoherent, both philosophically and logically," but in fact, he's got this exactly backwards: Many-Worlds is, in fact, a marvel of logical and philosophical coherence, while Ball's objections are incoherent and illogical.
The fundamental problem with Many-Worlds is that every argument about it devolves very quickly into stoner dorm-room bull session nonsense about parallel worlds and identity and morality. But none of that is physics.…
drorzel | February 20, 2015I didn't see this before yesterday's post about Twitter, but over at SciLogs, Kirk Englehardt gets evangelical, offering a very chipper list of "Ten Reasons for Academic Researchers to Use Social Media." I'll just put the item headers here, though each of these has a more complete description, with links to lots of other stuff:
10. You’re in the Driver’s Seat
9. It’s About the Network
8. It’s Newsy and Trendy
7. Promotion (may) = Citations and Downloads
6. Spreading Your Love of Science
5. Setting the Record Straight
4. Sharing Interesting Things
3. Enhancing Your Research
2. It’s Easy
1. It…
drorzel | February 19, 2015The AAAS annual meeting was last week, which apparently included some sessions on social media use. This, of course, led to the usual flurry of twittering about the awesomeness of Twitter, and how people who don't use Twitter are missing out. I was busy with other stuff, so I mostly let it pass, and of course I can't find representative examples now because Twitter.
The truth is, though, Twitter is kind of useless. Or, rather, it's only useful for certain kinds of things-- it's social media, and much more social than media.
So it's a great medium for talking to people you're not physically…
drorzel | February 19, 2015Over at Quantum Progress there was a recent series of guest posts about a social-justice-in-physics curriculum used by high school teacher Moses Rifkin. I sort of glanced at it, said "Huh, that's sort of interesting," and moved on, but this got picked up by some right-wing sites, and exploded. To the point where the awful people on Fox's awful morning show did a segment hating on it.
The angle of attack is, of course, that this is wasting time that ought to be spent on teaching physics. And, you know, I applaud Fox News's sudden concern for the teaching of physics-- if they'd like to have me…