drorzel | March 26, 2009Tonight on Thursday Night Wrestling: SteelyKid versus Sky Bison!
Roar! Roar! ROAR!
SteelyKid wins!
(Apologies to Bob Shea of Dinosaur vs. Bedtime...)
Special bonus roaring: Bob Shea on YouTube:
drorzel | March 26, 2009As a scientist with a blog, I am apparently contractually obligated to link to the New York Times Magazine profile of Freeman Dyson. If I don't, they'll take away my privileges as a scientist. (Of course, since those consist mostly of the right to review grant applications for the NSF, maybe it'd be worth the risk...)
I don't mind linking to it, though, because it is a nice piece of work. The focus is mostly on Dyson's (relatively) recent climate skepticism, because that's a high-profile offbeat opinion to have these days, but it gives a nice sketch of his background and accomplishments.
One…
drorzel | March 26, 2009I'm teaching the intro mechanics course next term, starting on Monday, and my colleagues who just finished teaching it in the Winter term used WebAssign to handle most of the homework. They speak very highly of it, so I'm probably going to use it next term.
I'm curious to know what other people think, though. The reasons my colleagues give for liking it sound good from a faculty perspective, but I'm not sure how well it would go over with students (for one thing, it's another $15 on the price of the text). Does anybody have experience with using WebAssign, either as a student or as an…
drorzel | March 26, 2009A few days ago I asked people's opinions regarding drop deadlines for students who decide they no longer want to be in a class. As usual, I forgot a few qualifiers, and nobody used the categories I gave, but after sorting the answers into roughly the categories I gave, here are the results:
A drop deadline four weeks into the ten-week term is the clear favorite, with just over half of the votes (I eliminated one "students should never be allowed to drop, ever," which would've made it exactly half). How does this map onto what we actually do?
Amusingly, our actual drop deadline is in the gap…
drorzel | March 26, 2009
Step away from the curve § Unqualified Offerings
"The ideal curve would have a mean of about 50%. If itâs too much above 50%, then most of what youâre putting on there is easy for everyone, so it should just be a given. If itâs too far below 50%, then most of what youâre putting on there is too hard for everyone, so it should just be a given that they canât do it and testing them is pointless." Yikes. And we wonder why physics has a bad reputation.
(tags: science physics education academia)
Itâs What You Know That Just Ainât So § Unqualified Offerings
"[O]ne of the wisest sales reps I…
drorzel | March 25, 2009The Female Science Professor had a nice post about working with someone who was afraid to write a paper:
Out of desperation, I told the graphophobe to meet me at a particular cafe at a particular time, with the latest draft of the manuscript and whatever other notes or references he needed. We met, I copied the manuscript to my laptop, scrolled to the first extremely incomplete section of the text and said "Tell me what you think should go in this section." He talked and I typed.
We worked our way through the manuscript that way, discussing each section. What should go in it? What was the…
drorzel | March 25, 2009I fell behind on course reports from my modern physics class a few weeks back, but I do mean to get back to them, when I have more time. The material remaining is the end-of-term sprint through a bunch of topics in modern physics-- three classes on atoms and molecules, three classes on solid state physics, three classes on nuclear and particle physics.
It's a mad dash through a lot of material (as the eventual course-wrap-up post will make clear), which raises one of the eternal questions of academia:
When teaching undergraduate students about a discipline, which is more important, breadth or…
drorzel | March 25, 2009
Hulu - Cosmos
All 13 episodes of Carl Sagan's landmark series. Because if you're going to watch video on your work computer, it might as well be something good.
(tags: science astronomy television space video)
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Humorous Humanist Armageddon: Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimanâs <em>Good Omens</em>
"Itâs an interestingly odd book, hilariously funny, very clever and not much like anything else. Heaven and Hell are trying to bring about Armageddon. Their agents on Earth, an angel called Aziraphale (who runs a second-hand bookshop)…
drorzel | March 24, 2009Steve calls me out for not commenting on new stories about "cold fusion":
Becky and I have been having much more regular access to the internet since the power was fixed. We check e-mail just about everyday and can even skim yahoo news. Or Professor Orzel's blog. I heard on BBC radio yesterday that there are people who have claimed to have evidence of cold fusion - which made me immediately think of a physics graduate who worked on sonoluminescence (bubble fusion) and of a talk given at Union last year about bubble fusion. Which made me immediately think of Professor Orzel and his skepticism…
drorzel | March 24, 2009One of the NCAA pools I'm in has a copy of Obama's bracket entered, and the last I checked, I'm a couple of games up on him. This means I'm as qualified as anyone else to offer a plan to fix the financial crisis, and I have just the plan we need.
On the question of the AIG bonuses, I'm pretty much in agreement with the people who say that it's not worth making too much fuss over less than a tenth of a percent of the total bailout funding they're received. Passing laws to punish specific individuals is a lousy precedent, and it's not worth corrupting our principles for such a pittance. Let the…
drorzel | March 24, 2009
Ten photons per hour « A Quantum Diaries Survivor
"The small speck of light shown in the upper left of the picture above, labeled as MGC 10-17-5, is actually a faint galaxy in the field of view of NGC3690. It has a visual magnitude of +15.7: this is a measure of its integrated luminosity as seen from the Earth. It is a really faint object, and barely at the limit of visibility with the instrument I had. The question I arrived at formulating to myself this morning was the following: how many photons did we get to see per second through the eyepiece, from that faint galaxy ?"
(tags: science…
drorzel | March 23, 2009Chris and Sheril announced today that The Intersection has gone over to the Dark Side moved to Discover's growing collection of high-quality science blogs. They're now available at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection.
This is not entirely unexpected, but I wish them well in their spiffy new digs. They're the second blog to move from ScienceBlogs to Discover (after Carl Zimmer), and I believe the first of the original 14 blogs to move elsewhere (a couple have shut down, but the rest of us are still here). It's probably too early to really say whether this constitutes a trend or not.
drorzel | March 23, 2009I handed in my final grades for the term this morning, and am now on "Spring Break" which is the misleading term for the week of frantic preparation for next term's classes that our schedule allows. Here's a poll question for you, though:
We operate on ten-week "trimesters." How late into the ten-week term should students be allowed to drop a course without special permission?
A) By the end of the second week.
B) By the end of the fourth week.
C) By the end of the sixth week.
D) By the end of the eighth weeks.
E) By the end of the tenth week.
Leave your answers in the comments. If you'd like…
drorzel | March 22, 2009My computer is starting to run slow in that way that indicates that either Microsoft has released an important update, or it's just been on too long without a reboot. Either way, I need to clear some browser tabs before restarting, and there are a bunch of articles that I thought were too interesting to put in a links dump, but where I don't quite have a clear enough opinion to write a blog post. These split into two rough groups, both of which are concerned with definitions.
One bunch of posts has to do with the recent poll about science knowledge, showing that a majority of Americans are…
drorzel | March 22, 2009
The Mid-Majority: Respect, Resilience, Joy and Despair Â
"This must be a lot of fun for you, this March Madness. It must be pleasant to rally behind something until you have no use for it anymore, to adopt and dispose the efforts of a team, to judge its efforts without any real consequence. But the idea that your gambling stories are somehow as thrilling as the on-court action is misguided at best. The delusion, however great or small, that any of the participants care who you've picked in your brackets is the luxury of narcissism. It's the same Princess of the Universe mentality that…
drorzel | March 21, 2009The good news is, I'm solidly ahead of Barack Obama in my NCAA pool. The bad news is, the success rate of my serious picks is distressingly close to that of the Physics Grad Programs backet...
Various and sundry thoughts on the first two days of NCAA tournament action:
-- Not that many big upsets, and six of the ten lower seeds to win were from power conferences, and thus deficient in charm. The USC win over Boston College, in particular, was quite possible the dullest close win by a double-digit seed that I've ever seen. Even the crowd seemed bored.
Compare that to, say, East Tennessee State…
drorzel | March 21, 2009
weir3 / Instant Mentor / Advice / Home - Inside Higher Ed
"Unless youâre a botanist or geologist thereâs no pedagogical reason to teach outside. The first gorgeous day of spring semester will bring a clamor to meet underneath the spreading maple students spy from the window. Donât do it! That hour will pass with female students tugging at short skirts to maintain modesty, men in khakis seeking not to get grass stains on their trousers, fidgeting when everyone realizes the ground isnât as comfy as it looks, attention lapses every time someone walks by, the cupping of ears to hear comments…
drorzel | March 20, 2009I carry some of my gear to and from the lunchtime basketball game in a red and white canvas-and-mesh bag. The zipper doesn't work, and hasn't for years, and the logo on the side is almost worn off, but if you look closely, you can still make out the New York State Public High School Athletic Association logo.
The bag was a freebie when my high school basketball team played in the NYSPHSAA championships in my senior year. That was twenty years ago this week-- I'm pretty sure that bag is older than some of the students who play with us at lunchtime.
I should note that I was a deep bench player…
drorzel | March 20, 2009The nominees for this year's Hugo Awards were announced last night. The most important category is, as always, Best Novel:
Anathem by Neal Stephenson (Morrow; Atlantic UK)
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen; HarperVoyager UK) — Free download
Saturn's Children by Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit UK)
Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi (Tor)
Surprisingly, I've already read four of the five. This is either blind luck, or a sign that I'm better in tune with the tastes of SF fandom than ever before. I'm not sure which I'd prefer.
The as-…
drorzel | March 20, 2009
slacktivist: The Immortals
"I'm something of an expert on the demographic implications of the baby boom. I've developed this expertise from copy editing hundreds, probably thousands, of articles* on the effect of the baby boomers' impending retirement on Social Security. Based on what I've learned from those articles, and from closely watching the ongoing political debate over the Future of Social Security, I can say a few things, with confidence, about what this new generation will be like."
(tags: blogs politics economics stupid society culture slacktivist)
Tips for presenting at a…