drorzel | September 13, 2014Two very brief notes about high-profile scandals in academia:
1) While it involves one of my faculty colleagues, I have no special insight to offer into the case of Valerie Barr's firing by the NSF over long-ago political activity. I know and like Valerie as a colleague, and she did some really good stuff as chair of the CS department, but that's all I know.
As reported by Science, the government's actions in this case seem like that very special kind of stupid that you get in extremely large organizations, where this probably isn't really about her at all. Either somebody in a position to…
drorzel | September 12, 2014I got a royalty statement yesterday for How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to Your Dog (it continues to sell steadily, which is very gratifying), which includes a breakdown of the sales in terms of different formats. That reminded me of a particular annoying quirk of many recent discussions of the state of modern publishing, which is the often unsupported assertion that everything is ebooks these days, and paper books (and book stores) are just a small residual element that publishers and authors cling to out of historical affection.
Since I happen to have my royalty statements in front of me,…
drorzel | September 12, 2014Via a whole bunch of people on social media, there's a new study of gender roles in academia, which the Washington Post headlines "Study: Male scientists want to be involved dads, but few are". This is not inaccurate. Some quotes that jumped out at me:
“Academic science doesn’t just have a gender problem, but a family problem,” said Sarah Damaske, a sociology professor at Penn State and one of the report’s authors. “We came to see that men or women, if they want to have families, are likely to face significant challenges.”
The study, Damaske said, showed there was potential for change, in…
drorzel | September 10, 2014Matt "Dean Dad" Reed has a post about the issue of academic conference travel, which is expensive and often the first thing cut out of college budgets. Which leaves faculty either disconnected from their field, or paying out-of-pocket to attend meetings that they need to demonstrate their scholarly productivity. This, in turn, tends to skew research meetings even more toward those at elite schools with big budgets.
This is a hard problem to crack, because the issue isn't just money but time. Reed suggests dropping "the charade of the last half day" because it requires an extra night in a…
drorzel | September 9, 2014One of the weirder experiences I had at the Nordita Workshop for Science Writers a couple of weeks ago was having people ask me "How are you so productive?" (or the equivalent). That caught me off guard, because I don't feel like I'm especially productive-- in fact, I tend to feel like I'm falling behind on things I would like to get done.
And yet, this image is kind of at odds with objective reality, a sort of tenured-white-guy version of Impostor Syndrome. I mean, I'm not Neil de Grasse Tyson, but I've actually got a pretty nice career going as a C-list public intellectual. And, of course…
drorzel | September 8, 2014The new academic year starts this week-- first day of classes is Wednesday-- and I'm dealing with the usual chaos associated with the influx of a new class of students. Who now look to me only a tiny bit older than SteelyKid and the Pip in the above picture (and if you think that sharing that extremely cute photo is part of the motivation for this post, well, you're not wrong...).
This year, the madness of the new term is complicated by having been away for essentially all of August, and by the fact that I'm teaching an entirely new class this term: Astronomy 052: Relativity, Black Holes, and…
drorzel | September 4, 2014Three weeks in Europe means a lot of time on planes and trains, so I actually got to read some fiction for a change. I'm stuck in a meeting all day today, and need a morale boost on the way in, so I'll go back to my book-blogging roots and type up the books that I read:
-- Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land. Conclusion of the trilogy begun with The Magicians back in the day, and while it's a better book than the first one, if you didn't like the first book, you probably won't like this. Mostly because of the characters, who are very much a like-them-or-hate-them crew.
Personally, I think it's…
drorzel | September 3, 2014I've posted this before, but a reminder can't hurt: We're hiring two tenure-track faculty this fall. The targeted research fields:
We invite applications for two tenure-track Assistant Professor positions starting in September 2015, one in any area of theoretical physics or astrophysics, the other with a strong preference for biophysics or soft condensed matter (either experimental or theoretical). We encourage applications from interdisciplinary scientists and those who could make use of the college’s shared instrumentation resources (including AFM, SEM, micro-Raman and micro-FTIR…
drorzel | September 3, 2014Having just returned from a long trip where I gave three talks, one of the first things I saw when I started following social media closely again was this post on how to do better presentations. The advice is the usual stuff-- more images, less text, don't read your slides, and for God's sake, rehearse the talk before you give it-- and it's generally very good. Given the two very different types of presentation I gave over the last few weeks, though, I think it's important to add one note about the design of the visuals, which is this: when you're putting a talk together, keep the final…
drorzel | September 2, 2014If you're making your weekly check of the ebook editions (Kindle, Nook) of my quantum book (I'm not the only one who regularly looks at these, right?), you may have noticed a change: they're no longer sporting the original black cover you'll see in the right sidebar, but a new cover based on the smash hit UK edition. This isn't a database glitch, but a new release, with a new cover and adding the word "Quantum" to the title.
I've made allusions on Twitter a few times to having exciting news I wasn't ready to share-- this is one of those things. The original edition sold reasonably well and…
drorzel | September 2, 2014I didn't write a summary of the third day of "Quantum Boot Camp" to go with my Day One and Day Two summaries for a simple reason: I would've needed to do that on Saturday, and I spent Saturday in transit back to the US. More than that, though, it was harder to summarize than the other two days, because my talk was the middle of three, and thus I spent most of the first talk fiddling with my slides and fretting, and most of the third fighting off the post-talk adrenaline crash.
Happily, Sedeer at Inspiring Science offers a summary of the first two talks, namely Larus Thorlacius from Nordita…
drorzel | September 1, 2014I'm up way too early with jet lag, looking over Twitter, and ran into Nick Falkner's report on the TED panel I moderated at Worldcon, which reminded me that I never did write anything about the con. Late is probably still better than never, so here are some quick long-after-the-fact comments about my program items:
-- Only one person showed up for my Kaffeeklatsch, probably because it was at dinnertime on the first day of the con, and also the Kaffeeklatsch rooms were in a place that didn't look like somewhere you were allowed to go. My one guest was a guy I've exchanged emails with for many…
drorzel | August 28, 2014The second day of the "Quantum Boot Camp" was much lighter on talks. The only speaker was Ray Laflamme from the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, who gave a nice introduction to quantum technologies. While he did spend a bit of time at the start going through Shor's algorithm for factoring numbers (following up a discussion from Wednesday), he mostly focused on ways to use quantum physics to improve sensors of technological interest.
So, for example, he talked about how efforts to develop techniques for error-correcting codes in liquid state NMR quantum computing led to the…
drorzel | August 27, 2014Since this part of the trip is actually work-like, I might as well dust off the blog and post some actual physics content. Not coincidentally, this also provides a way to put off fretting about my talk tomorrow...
I'm at the Nordita Workshop for Science Writers on quantum theory, which a couple of the attending writers have referred to online as boot camp, though in an affectionate way. The idea is to provide a short crash course on cool quantum physics, so as to give writers a bit more background in subjects they might need to cover.
The first talk was from Rainer Kaltenbaek (whose name I…
drorzel | August 24, 2014While I kill time waiting for it to be a reasonable time to call Kate and the kids back in the US, a list of most of the pubs I've visited during this trip to London. Because why not?
In more or less chronological order:
The Victoria in Lancaster Gate. Or maybe Paddington, going from the URL. The naming of London neighborhoods is an enduring mystery to me. Anyway: given the name and location (two blocks from Hyde Park), I expected to be hip-deep in American tourists, but it was mostly a local crowd. Lots of Queen Victoria pictures, which mostly made me think of Eddie Izzard calling her "One…
drorzel | August 21, 2014OK, the photo above is a recent picture of me-- yesterday, in fact. But the spiral-carved rock I'm standing next to was carved that way a bit more than five thousand years ago, so that ought to count as a throwback...
We've been in Dublin the last few days, and on Thursday we took a bus tour out to Newgrange. this is one of the things I wanted to make sure to see while we were here, as I make reference to it in the forthcoming book, and at least two classes that I teach. And it is, indeed, spectacular; the reconstructed white wall might be historically dubious, but the interior passage and…
drorzel | August 15, 2014Small observations of things that have struck me as weird during our UK stay to this point:
-- There is no alarm clock in our hotel room.
-- There are no drinking fountains in public spaces.
-- The travel-on-the-left thing would be easier if it were consistently applied. About one stairway in three asks people to go up the right side instead, and for some reason the escalator etiquette is to stand on the right, walk on the left. (That last is sort of a moot point at Worldcon, given the tendency of many fans to just plop themselves squarely in the middle of the steps and block everything up…
drorzel | August 13, 2014Kate and I had a very nice time doing touristy things in Bath yesterday during the day-- old church, very old hot spring, Georgian architecture-- then went on to Bristol where I gave a talk on the forthcoming book, as you can see in the picture above. I would ordinarily include a SlideShare link to the slides I used for the talk, but the talk is so image-heavy and the hotel wi-fi so grindingly slow that I'm not even going to attempt uploading it.
The first bit, as you might guess from the photo above, was basically the same as my TED@NYC talk last fall, making an analogy between the…
drorzel | August 12, 2014I figured I probably ought to post something to let the wider world know we made it safely to London, and have been engaging in tourism. So, please take the above photo of St. Paul's with a backdrop of the ominous dark clouds that have been chasing us around the city as proof of our location.
We also dropped by the offices of Oneworld Publications, the nice folks who published the UK edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. While there, I took these:
Covers for the UK editions of my first book and Sean Carroll's second, displayed in the publisher's offices.
Good company to be in...…
drorzel | August 9, 2014...of the Atlantic. After a few stress-inducing bits the less said about which the better, preparations are basically complete, and we're heading out for London tonight. In the highly unlikely event that I haven't done enough plugging of my appearances, here's a compact list of where you'll be able to find me if you happen to be in Europe the next couple of weeks:
-- I'm giving a talk about the material in the new book on Wednesday the 13th at 6:30pm in Bristol, at the Institute of Physics. I'm doing this one TED-style, with no words on the slides, so it's both exciting and terrifying.…