drorzel | August 7, 2014Our little hangout thing is now old enough to drink, in episode-years anyway, and to celebrate, we finally figured out how to get live audience feedback during the hangout. Which takes the first couple of minutes of the video, because we're highly trained professional scientists.
Once we got that sorted, we talked about a bunch of stuff, including but not limited to crazy space drives, the history of major concepts in physics, space probes and asteroids, and "native advertising" and how it relates to blog history. Some links:
-- My post on the impossible space drive, which has links to…
drorzel | August 5, 2014Over at FiveThirtyEight, they have a number-crunching analysis of the number of papers (co)authored by women in the arxiv preprint server, including a breakdown of first-author and last-author papers by women, which are perhaps better indicators of prestige. The key time series graph is here:
Fraction of women authors on the arxiv preprint server over time, from FivethirtyEight.
This shows a steady increase (save for a brief drop in the first couple of years, which probably ought to be discounted as the arxiv was just getting started) from a bit over 5% women in the early 90's to a bit…
drorzel | August 4, 2014I've gotten a few queries about this "Impossible space drive" thing that has space enthusiasts all a-twitter. This supposedly generates thrust through the interaction of an RF cavity with a "quantum vacuum virtual plasma," which is certainly a collection of four words that turn up in physics papers. An experiment at a NASA lab has apparently tested a couple of these gadgets, and claimed to see thrust being produced. Which has a lot of people booking tickets on the Mars mission that this supposedly enables.
Most physicists I know have reacted to this with some linear combination of "heavy sigh…
drorzel | August 2, 2014...if you're a first-grader in Niskayuna, anyway.
We've got 10-15 elementary school kids who are supposed to descend upon our house a bit before lunchtime. Morituri te salutamus...
SteelyKid's birthday party invitation.
Kidding aside, it's worth it, because SteelyKid is awesome, and she's super excited to have a whole mob of her friends over. I just hope the rain holds off, because I don't know where we'll put everybody if it doesn't...
(The photo is SteelyKid after taekwondo practice a month or so ago. She was demonstrating one of the forms, I think Taegeuk Il Jang, and I shot some…
drorzel | August 1, 2014I took a short nap yesterday, and of course as soon as I lay down on the bed, Emmy erupted in the furious barking that signals the arrival of a package. When I went out to get it, I found shiny new bound galley proofs of Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist:
The just-arrived galley proof for my forthcoming book. Laptop included for scale.
I knew these were coming, but didn't expect them so quickly. I asked for several to take to the UK, on the off chance that we're seated next to somebody really famous on the flight to London, who says "Gosh, I've always wanted to blurb a book about…
drorzel | July 30, 2014In which Rhett and I talk about awful academic computing systems, Worldcon, our Wikipedia pages, and AAPT meeting envy.
Some links:
-- Rhett's Wikipedia entry
-- My Wikipedia entry
-- The 2014 AAPT Summer Meeting
-- LonCon 3, this year's Worldcon
-- My puzzling Worldcon schedule
We have some ideas for what to do next time, when our little hangout is old enough to drink, but you need to watch all the way to the end to hear those.
drorzel | July 28, 2014Given the recent Feynman explosion (timeline of events), some people may be casting about looking for an alternative source of colorful-character anecdotes in physics. Fortunately, the search doesn't need to go all that far-- if you flip back a couple of pages in the imaginary alphabetical listing of physicists, you'll find a guy who fits the bill very well: Enrico Fermi.
Fermi's contributions to physics are arguably as significant as Feynman's. He was the first to work out the statistical mechanics of particles obeying the Pauli exclusion principle, now called "fermions" in his honor (Paul…
drorzel | July 27, 2014Lance Mannion has a really nice contrast between childhood now and back in the 1970's that doesn't go in the usual decline-of-society direction. He grew up not too far from where I now live, and after describing his free-ranging youth, points out some of the key factors distinguishing it from today, that need to be accounted for before lamenting the lack of kids running around outside:
-- A lot of the houses in "the old neighborhood" are still owned by the people who owned them back in the day, so the only kids around are visiting grandkids,
-- Those homes that are occupied by families with…
drorzel | July 25, 2014I should really know better than to click any tweeted link with a huff.to shortened URL, but for some reason, I actually followed one to an article with the limited-reach clickbait title Curious About Quantum Physics? Read These 10 Articles!. Which is only part one, because Huffington Post, so it's actually five articles.
Three of the five articles are Einstein papers from 1905, which is sort of the equivalent of making a Ten Essential Rock Albums list that includes Revolver, Abbey Road, and the White Album. One of the goals of a well-done list of "essential" whatever is to give a sense of…
drorzel | July 24, 2014This Alberto Cairo piece on "data journalism" has been kicking around for a while, and it's taken me a while to pin down what bugs me about it. I think my problem with it ultimately has to do with the first two section headers in which he identifies problems with FiveThirtyEight and Vox:
1. Data and explanatory journalism cannot be done on the cheap.
2. Data and explanatory journalism cannot be produced in a rush.
The implication here is that "data and explanatory journalism" is necessarily a weighty and complicated thing, something extremely Serious to be approached only with great care.…
drorzel | July 22, 2014In which our hangout turns nineteen; we may need to look into a special guest for the 20th, or something. Or maybe save guest stars for the one after that, when it can drink.
Anyway, Rhett and I chat about grading, lab reports, why Excel sucks, and an online experiment that we really ought to do if we only had the time.
Some links:
-- Why Does Excel Suck So Much?, and "Line Plot" is Never the Right Choice. Perennial favorites on the blog.
-- How Do I Kill the Squirrels Who Are Eating My Car?, another constant source of a small amount of traffic.
-- Rhett's elevator video post.
-- My soccer…
drorzel | July 19, 2014Since lots of other people are posting their Worldcon progrm(me) schedules, I might as well share mine, too. Frankly, I find it a little baffling:
Kaffeeklatsch
Thursday 18:00 - 19:00, London Suite 5 (ExCeL)
Kay Kenyon, Chad Orzel
Banksian
Saturday 11:00 - 12:00, Capital Suite 9 (ExCeL)
'Banksian' has become a commonplace descriptor in SF reviews, but what do we mean by it? What are the characteristics we associate with Iain M Banks' work? How far has his influence travelled? Who is writing Banksian SF today?/>
Chad Orzel (M), Michael Cobley, Jaine Fenn, Paul Kincaid, Ruth O'Reilly
We…
drorzel | July 18, 2014As noted last week, I went to SteelyKid's day camp on Tuesday to talk about being a college professor. This was a little awkward, because I was scheduled to talk to kids ranging from not-quite-three to six-and-a-bit, and really, what do they care about the daily routine of physics faculty?
So, I did a simple demo. While I got a lot of really interesting suggestions in the comments to last week's post, most of them required more props than I wanted to drag with me. And for that age, simple is often enough. So, I just did the tennis-ball-on-a-soccer-ball trick. For the benefit of readers who…
drorzel | July 16, 2014The surest sign that I've become a Real Author is that there are five months yet before Eureka comes out, and I'm already fretting about negative reviews. Negative reviews that haven't happened yet, but that I know will come, in a particular form.
The book, as you probably know from my prior ramblings on this subject, contains a large-ish number of historical anecdotes illustrating particular aspects of the scientific process, and relating them to everyday activities (rough list in this post). The thing that I worry about is that I decided early on to make a conscious effort to keep the whole…
drorzel | July 14, 2014We spent the weekend down in the Boston area, where Kate was doing stuff at Readercon and I was running the kids around the New England Aquarium and the Museum of Science (nominally in the company of a friend form college and his family, and some of Kate's cousins (respectively), but either SteelyKid or The Pip was usually in a different room than everybody else, so there wasn't a lot of adult conversation...). Adding a fun element of excitement to this was the fact that some sort of electrical fault in my car had caused the speedometer to go dead right around the time we reached Boston on…
drorzel | July 11, 2014We got an email from the people running SteelyKid's summer camp asking for volunteers to speak at a career day sort of event early next week. I said "Sure, I can do that, and talk about the glamorous life of a physics professor and book author." They said "Great, you'll be talking to several groups, ranging from second-graders down to 3-4 year olds."
That's... not quite the audience I was expecting (the camp runs up through 5th grade or so). I don't think they're going to care all that much about physics research, so instead, I'll probably say "My job is to teach people about science" and…
drorzel | July 9, 2014Text of the ad we're running for our searches this fall. This will go live on the usual sites at the start of August, but as a sort of experiment in the power of social media, I'm going to share it here first, and see what that gets us.
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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…
drorzel | July 8, 2014In which our series of Google hangouts becomes old enough to vote and buy cigarettes-- but not drink!
Miscellaneous things mentioned in this:
-- My forthcoming book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I turned in the copyedits and figures a week or so ago, and cashed an advance check today, so it's definitely going to happen. Pre-order now, because Hachette bought my publisher, so you don't know how long those buttons will be there.
-- My appearance on the Read Science! hangout.
-- A commentary piece I did for Physics World on the OPERA neutrino story. I wasn't paid for this. (You probably need…
drorzel | July 7, 2014Also coming to my attention during the weekend blog shutdown was this Princeton Alumni Weekly piece on the rhetoric of crisis in the humanities. Like several other authors before him, Gideon Rosen points out that there's little numerical evidence of a real "crisis," and that most of the cries of alarm you hear from academics these days have near-perfect matches in prior generations. The humanities have always been in crisis.
This wouldn't be worth mentioning, but Rosen goes on to offer an attempt at an explanation of why the sense of crisis is so palpable within the humanities, an explanation…
drorzel | July 7, 2014Right around the time I shut things down for the long holiday weekend, the Washington Post ran this Joel Achenbach piece on mistakes in science. Achenbach's article was prompted in part by the ongoing discussion of the significance (or lack thereof) of the BICEP2 results, which included probably the most re-shared pieces of last week in the physics blogosphere, a pair of interviews with a BICEP2 researcher and a prominent skeptic. This, in turn, led to a lot of very predictable criticism of the BICEP2 team for over-hyping their results, and a bunch of social-media handwringing about how the…