drorzel | September 10, 2016Another in the sadly delayed wrapping-up of my photo-a-day project. These are all pictures from a hike in the Vischer Ferry Nature Preserve over in Clifton Park. We took the kids over there one time, but a thunderstorm started coming in before we got very far. While the kids were at my parents', I decided to go over one afternoon and take a more thorough walk around the place. This ended up going quite a bit longer than I had expected, as I misremembered part of the trail map, but I got some good photos out of it.
344/366: Fake Jungle
Part of the old Lock 19 from the Erie Canal, cosplaying…
drorzel | September 8, 2016I've got a big backlog of photo-a-day pictures, but finding time to edit and post them is a major challenge. I've got nearly all the editing done, now, so I'll start putting blocks of stuff up when I have time (generally very early in the morning, as I'm awake before everyone else in Chateau Steelypips). Since we've long since stopped even pretending that these are date-specific, I'll just collect together groups by vague themes:
Panorama-rama
At some point this summer I started playing around with stitching together bunches of shots to make panoramic photos. Some of this involves playing…
drorzel | August 31, 2016It's been a while since the last Forbes links dump, but since it's the last day of the month, I figure I might as well sum up a bit. Only two posts, but they have a connection that I'll expound on a bit to make up for the lack of material...
-- Can A Tesla Model S Really Accelerate Faster Than Gravity?: I got pointed to a story about the 0-60mph time for a Tesla, and said "That seems fishy..." After climbing back out of the Google rabbit hole, I tried to explain why that seemed unlikely to me, and the funny timing thing that might explain the result.
-- The Hardest Thing To Grasp In Physics?…
drorzel | August 21, 2016It's been over a month since I did a photo-a-day post, largely because I haven't been taking many pictures for a variety of reasons. I do still mean to get a year's worth of good photos done, but the "daily" part has completely disintegrated at this point.
As a way of getting somewhat back on track, I've edited up the best of the shots I took in the loooong break since the last batch I posted. This spans all the way up to the present, and a few are just cell-phone snaps, but it's better than nothing. since these aren't really associated with particular days, I'll group them thematically…
drorzel | August 12, 2016Several weeks of silence here, for a bunch of reasons that mostly boil down to "being crazy busy." I've got a bunch of physics posts over at Forbes during that interval, though:
-- The Camera Trick That Justifies The Giant Death Star: I busted out camera lenses and the kids' toys to show how you might make the Death Star appear as huge as on the Rogue One poster.
-- How Quantum Physics Could Protect You Against Embarrassing Email Hacks: Using the DNC email leak as an excuse to talk about quantum cryptography.
-- Four Things You Should Expect To Get Out Of College: Some advice for students…
drorzel | July 20, 2016It's been a month since the last links dump of posts from Forbes, though, really, I took a couple of weeks off there, so it's been less than that in terms of active blogging time. But I've put up a bunch of stuff in July, so here are some links:
-- The Physics Of Ancient Roman Architecture: First of a couple posts inspired by our trip to Rome, this one looking at the basic mechanics of the key structural element of Roman building, the arch.
-- What Ancient Roman Buildings Teach Us About Science And Engineering: Second post about Roman construction, in which looking into the question of how…
drorzel | July 15, 2016A delayed photo dump this week, because I was solo-parenting last week while Kate was traveling for work, and then I took the sillyheads down to Long Island to visit my grandmother while Kate was at Readercon. Recovering from all that took a lot of time, plus there was a bunch of computer wrangling in there. But, on the bright side, you get several cute-kid photos in this set...
And here's a bonus image, which captures something of the flavor of travel with the sillyheads:
Selfie in the car with the kids engrossed in their tablets.
(That was stopped at a light, not actively driving, so don…
drorzel | July 14, 2016A question for the more politically plugged-in folks out there: If I want to donate money this election cycle, who should I be looking at giving it to?
OK, that probably needs some unpacking, but given Internet attention spans, I wanted to get the basic question right up front before a passing Pokemon draws people away...
So, the last couple of presidential elections, I donated to the Obama campaign, but it doesn't really look like Hilary Clinton desperately needs my money. And I've given to the Democratic party more generally (DSCC and DCCC) in the past, but given their track record in…
drorzel | July 5, 2016Periodically, some scientific celebrity from the physical sciences-- Neil deGrasse Tyson or Stephen Hawking, say-- will say something dismissive about philosophy, and kick off a big rush of articles about how dumb their remarks are, how important philosophy is, and so on. Given that this happens on a regular basis, you might wonder why it is that prominent physicists keep saying snide things about philosophy. But never fear, the New York Times is here to help, with an op-ed by James Blachowicz, an emeritus philosopher from Loyola, grandly titled There Is No Scientific Methods.
It's actually…
drorzel | July 3, 2016A while back, I went down to Vroman's Nose in Middleburgh to go for a hike, and found a sign saying that peregrine falcons are known to nest on the cliffs. Since the peregrine falcon is SteelyKid's absolute favorite bird, and the subject of her school research project, this seemed like a good location for a family hike, so I took the kids down there yesterday. And even though that was really only one day out of a whole week, I got a bunch of really good photos from it, so it will supply all the material for this week's photo dump.
300/366: Panorama
Panorama of farmland from the top of Vroman…
drorzel | June 29, 2016When I was going through the huge collection of photos I have from the Forum in Rome, I kept running across pictures containing two young Asian women (neither of them Kate). This isn't because I was stalking them, but because they were everywhere, stopping for long periods in front of virtually every significant ruin and striking exaggerated poses for each other to take photos of. I had to carefully frame a few of my own photos to avoid them, but I did also take a few that deliberately included their posing, because it was so amusingly over the top.
Tourists taking photos of each other in…
drorzel | June 27, 2016Kate and I spent last week in Rome, to attend the wedding of a friend of mine from college, who was marrying an Italian woman. I've always wanted to see Rome, so this was a great excuse, and of course I took a lot of pictures-- over 1,600 all told.
This happens in part because when I'm visiting a major tourist site with a camera, I'm trying to do two things at the same time. One, of course, is to get good photos of the big attractions, to supplement my memories of the actual sites. But this is always constrained a bit by the knowledge that, you know, major tourist destinations have plenty of…
drorzel | June 18, 2016As of today, I can officially no longer claim to be in my "early 40's," so here's a great song with a thematically appropriate title:
(The lyrical content has no particular relevance to my life, I hasten to add...)
I'm taking a bit of a social-media hiatus at the moment, but it is very nice to see all the well-wishes from Facebook friends and acquaintances. Though I found it a little creepy to go to Google and see a special birthday-cake doodle with "Happy birthday, Chad!" as the mouseover text...
Kate and I are leaving tonight for Rome, to go to a friend's wedding there. So you can expect…
drorzel | June 17, 2016The NPR program Here and Now has been running segments this week on Science in America, and one of these from yesterday featured me talking about science literacy. We had some technical difficulties getting this recorded-- it was supposed to happen at a local radio studio last week, but they had some kind of glitch, so instead we did it via Skype from my office on campus. (Where there was some sort of heavy equipment running outside my window before and after the interview, but miraculously, they took a coffee break for the crucial fifteen minutes of the actual call...)
You can listen to the…
drorzel | June 17, 2016Another week, another batch of photos. This is coming on Friday rather than the weekend because I'm going to be incommunicado for most of the next week, and have some free time now.
284/366: LIGO, Eat Your Heart Out
Gravity wave clouds above our house.
Sure, LIGO detected gravitational waves from a second pair of merging black holes, but I found me some gravity waves.
(The pattern was much more pronounced 5-10 minutes before this was taken, but I was in the car driving when SteelyKid pointed it out.)
285/366:
SteelyKid with her hand-written report on the peregrine falcon.
SteelyKid's…
drorzel | June 12, 2016Shortened "week" this week, because I did the last photo dump on Tuesday. 80% of these are also from a single day, this Friday, when I decided to call a Mental Health Day and get away from stuff that was annoying me by driving down to Scoharie County to hike up Vroman's Nose.
279/366: Road
Rt. 30 from the top of Vroman's Nose.
Vroman's Nose is a huge rock outcrop in the middle of a valley, with a moderately steep trail going up through woods to a dramatic cliff with views over the valley. These are very cool when you're there, but the camera really dilutes the impact of those kind of…
drorzel | June 9, 2016Another few weeks of physics blogging at Forbes, collected here for your convenience.
-- Commercialization Of Space: Three Cheers For The Mundane: Some belated but brief comments on the SpaceApps conference I went to down in NYC.
-- How Studying Atoms On Earth Helps Us Learn About Other Planets: As a snobby grad student in cold-atom physics, I thought of old-school spectroscopy as boring and pointless, but a recent DAMOP session showed how those classic atomic physics studies still have a lot to offer for studies of astrophysics.
-- Are The Constants Of Nature Changing, And How Can We Tell?:…
drorzel | June 7, 2016The Pip is nuts about superheroes, so when he and his speech teacher made a book, naturally, it introduced a new super hero: Lightning Bolt. It's only a couple of sheets of paper folded in half and stapled, and the text and illustrations were done by his teacher, but the contents are 100% our Little Dude, so I'll reproduce it here.
LIGHTNING BOLT by [The Pip] Orzel
[Illustration: Lightning bolt's Mask]
Alternate Identity Len Boom
Occupation: Scientist
Speciality: Studying super powers. In his lab there's a computer that can communicate with Lightning Bolt.
Home Town: Lightning Bolt City…
drorzel | June 6, 2016Last in a series of themed collections of pictures. These ones are showcasing my rudimentary GIMP skills, pasting together multiple pictures into composites.
276/366: Sky-Bison for Scale
One of the earliest happenings in the three-week period I'm dumping photos from was SteelyKid getting strep throat again. She spent a Friday at home, and I took the opportunity to introduce her to Avatar: The Last Airbender on DVD. They're now a few episodes into the third season, so that was a big hit.
This reignited an interest in our stuffed Appa toy, which I used to use for scale in baby-blogging photos,…
drorzel | June 6, 2016This one, we'll do sorta-kinda chronologically:
268/366: Niska-Parade
Why is it always bagpipes?
One of the big temporal landmarks of the recent stretch without photo-blogging posts was "Niska-Day," the annual community festival here. This kicks off with a parade, the route for which comes right to the end of our street. Here's one of the first marching elements, the local bagpipe group.
269/366: Niska-Ride
SteelyKid is on this somewhere.
Of course, if you're a kid, the real highlight of Niska-Day is the bit with the carnival rides. SteelyKid is on this, having dragged one of her more…