drorzel | February 2, 2014Unless you've been marooned on a desert island for the last couple of weeks-- or, you know, foreign-- you're probably at least dimly aware that the Super Bowl is this evening. This is the pinnacle of the football season, and also the cue for lots of people to take to social media proclaiming their contempt for the Super Bowl, NFL football, or just sports in general. This can occasionally be sort of amusing, as with Kyle Whelliston's "Last Man" game, but usually, it's just kind of tedious. The AV Club has pretty much the only necessary response, namely that Nobody Cares That You Don't Care…
drorzel | February 1, 2014SteelyKid is one of the biggest fans of Union's women's basketball games. Not necessarily the team, just going to the games-- she rampages all around the lobby, and as the crowd is generally pretty sparse, everybody is cool with that. The Pip has started coming along this year, and the two of them chase each other all over the place.
This past week, the team scored a big upset over William Smith, the second half of which the kids spent climbing up and down the stands. This is a shot from floor level with my phone, after I got sick of following them up and down, and figured that any major…
drorzel | February 1, 2014Kameron Hurley did a blog post on what it took her to become a writer, which I ran across via Harry Connolly's follow-up. These are fairly long, but well worth reading for insight into what it means to be a writer-- and they're both very good at what they do. You should buy their books, right now.
As always, reading these made me feel really guilty. Maybe I ought to add "the writing life" articles to the list of topics I just don't read, with "Let's make fun of religious people!" and "The Higgs boson is the greatest thing since sliced bread!" Except unlike those two, which just irritate me,…
drorzel | January 31, 2014Topping the looooong list of things I would give a full ResearchBlogging write-up if I had time is this new paper on a ultra-cold atom realization of "Dirac Monopoles". This is really cool stuff, but there are a lot of intricacies that I don't fully understand, so writing it up isn't a simple matter.
The really short version, though, is that a team of AMO physicists have created particles that are analogous to magnetic monopoles-- that is, to a particle that was only a "north" or "south" pole of a magnet, not both together like a conventional bar magnet (leading to my favorite social-media…
drorzel | January 30, 2014Since somebody asks nearly every time I mention my TED@NYC appearance back in October, I can now confirm that I will not be speaking at TED this year. Which I found out the same way as everybody else: when the full speaker list for this year's TED was released today. If you're curious about the outcome of the "talent search" I was part of, the only name I recognized from that event was Zak Ebrahim, who was awesome in New York.
Having said what I won't be doing, let me mention a couple of things I will be doing later this year:
-- Kate and I are going to Loncon 3, the World Science Fiction…
drorzel | January 29, 2014Last week, a comment I made on Twitter about the annoyance of doing merit evaluation paperwork led to some back-and-forth with Rhett Allain and the National Society of Black Physicists Twitter account about whether blogs can or should count toward academic evaluation. This seemed like a good topic for another video hangout with me and Rhett, which we did yesterday. Unfortunately, there were some technical issues with the hangout, which delayed the start and didn't allow live Q&A, but we did get video:
(The camera appears to be on just me for most of this, so it's largely a hangout…
drorzel | January 28, 2014On the bright side, I'm unlikely to read anything more stupid and insulting today than this Inside Higher Ed article arguing that it would be wrong to shrink graduate programs in English, because the higher education market is Special:
When you shrink graduate student enrollments (the supply side), you inevitably also shrink the size of graduate programs, which means, willy-nilly, that you decrease tenured faculty lines (the demand side) because they are the folks teaching in grad programs. Administrators would be happy to shrink our programs and eliminate some tenured lines through…
drorzel | January 28, 2014The Pip was sick this weekend, I had a deadline for a bunch of administrative crap that I pushed off back in December when I was rushing to finish the book, and I'm giving an exam on Thursday. So, I'm not doing lengthy blogging right now, but two quick notices:
1) A reminder (I think I posted this before) that the Union College Department of Physics and Astronomy is hiring a visitor, for up to three years (contingent on performance). If you're in the market for an academic job, albeit a temporary one, check out the ad. If you know anybody who might be interested, point it out to them.
2)…
drorzel | January 24, 2014The local sports-talk radio station is running a bunch of commercials from a tax prep service in which a loud announcer declares that "People who did their own taxes left one billion dollars on the table last year. That's billion with a 'b.'" and urges people to "Get your billion back!" by paying for their tax-return service. Which, you know, sounds like quite a bit.
Only, there are upwards of 300 million people in the US. So, a billion dollars is about $3 per person. So, it's maybe not as impressive as they want you to think.
Of course, a lot of those people are too young or too old to be…
drorzel | January 23, 2014I realize people are getting sick of reading me talk about this charged-tape business, which has run to one, two, three, four posts at this point. Truth be told, I'm losing enthusiasm for it myself. So this will be the final post, at least for now...
As I mentioned on Twitter, as I type this stuff up for the blog, I've toyed with the idea of hanging onto it instead, and writing it up for The American Journal of Physics or The Physics Teacher, so I could get a little professional credit for it. There are two problems with that (other than that some stick-in-the-mud editor or reviewer might…
drorzel | January 23, 2014Ashutosh Jogalekar has a response to my post from yesterday complaining about his earlier post on whether multiverses represent a philosophical crisis for physics. I suspect we actually disagree less than that back-and-forth makes it seem-- he acknowledges my main point, which was that fundamental theoretical physics is a small subset of physics as a whole, and I don't disagree with his point that physics as a discipline has long been characterized by a reductionist sort of approach-- always trying to get to smaller numbers of fundamental principles.
Our real point of disagreement, I think,…
drorzel | January 22, 2014The very last section of the book-in-progress (at least the draft that's with my editor right now...) is titled "Science Is Never Over," and talks about how there are a nearly infinite number of phenomena that you can investigate scientifically. The universe is a never-ending source of amazement and wonder, with surprisingly rich dynamics in the simplest of things. I mean, look at the thousands of words I've gotten out of talking about sticky tape...
This is why I sigh heavily whenever I see a title like Ashutosh Jogalekar's "Should Physicists Stop Looking for Fundamental Laws. This is, at…
drorzel | January 22, 2014In the previous post about simulating the attraction between sticky tapes using VPython, I ended with a teaser mentioning that there was a discrepancy between the simulation and the theoretical solution from directly solving the equations. The problem is kind of subtle, but clearly visible in this graph from that post:
Data for the toy model version of the system, showing the equilibrium position as a function of initial separation.
In this, we see the equilibrium position that the mass-on-a-spring settles into as a function of the initial separation between the charges in the toy model.…
drorzel | January 21, 2014What with the umpteen zillion articles declaring the Death of the Blog, I've been toying with the idea of doing something podcast-ish for a while. Rhett Allain from Dot Physics was game, too, and suggested using Google+ to do a video hangout, so here we are talking about our classes this term:
The video quality is kind of crap on my end, which is a recurring problem here when we Skype with the grandparents. I probably should've closed more programs and tabs, but I'm an idiot. Also, I fidget a lot. But this is meant to be fairly casual, and I really do talk with my hands like that.
Anyway,…
drorzel | January 21, 2014Having spent a lot of time solving equations related to sticky tape models, including trying to work solutions in my head while driving to Grandma and Grandpa's with the kids, and making some measurements of real tapes, there was only one thing left to do: try simulating this problem in VPython. Because I'm a physics nerd who knows just enough about programming to be dangerous...
Finding the full solution to the real sticky tape scenario is kind of a miserable process, because it involves a long continuous tape with charge all down its length, which is kind of complicated, and then there's a…
drorzel | January 20, 2014I've gotten out of the habit of blogging about the books I read for fun here, mostly because I've gotten out of the habit of reading for fun. Not for lack of desire, but because between my job and the kids and the massive amounts of research reading for the book-in-progress, I haven't had time.
Of course, I make the occasional exception, and when one of my very favorite SF authors comes out with a new one, that's a great reason to read a little fiction. Robert Charles Wilson isn't the most prolific author, but he's consistently excellent, and always thought-provoking, so I was very happy to…
drorzel | January 18, 2014Kate is off at Arisia this weekend, so I took the kids to Grandma and Grandpa's. Where we've had good fun sledding and playing with a variety of toys. I'll be driving home Sunday afternoon, and my parents will be bringing the kids back on Monday, which is the MLK holiday in the US, so a day off for people who aren't college faculty.
In honor of all this, I give you the unique musical stylings of SteelyKid and The Pip, performing their hit song "Oh My Gosh" live in Grandma and Grandpa's basement:
Hope your weekend was a tenth as much fun as theirs.
drorzel | January 17, 2014In addition to making a toy model to show the tipping-point behavior of charged pieces of sticky tape, I spent some time on Tuesday trying to do something quantitative with this. Of course, Tuesday is the one day of the week that I don't teach, and I didn't want to go to campus to do the experiment, so I put it together from the incredibly sophisticated materials I had available at home: Lego bricks and a tape measure belonging to SteelyKid and The Pip.
Having built this high-tech rig, I set up my new video camera on the tripod, and shot some videos of the key phenomena. First, there's the…
drorzel | January 17, 2014About five minutes into my class Wednesday, my cell phone rang. I silenced it right away, but recognized the number as the kids' day care. And I knew right away what it was: The Pip has had a bit of a cough for a while, and wasn't all that happy that morning. Sure enough, when I got back to my office there was a series of emails waiting for me between Kate and the director of the JCC pre-school program, about how The Pip was just feverish enough to need to be sent home.
Wednesday was a particularly inauspicious day for this, as Kate had a court argument in Rochester on Thursday, and I have a…
drorzel | January 16, 2014"Daddy, you know what? I bet you didn't know, but my school bus can fly."
"Really? I didn't know that."
"Yeah, there's a button up at the front with a picture of a flying bus, and if you press the button, the bus flies."
"That's amazing."
"Yeah, and guess what? The other day, the bus driver called me, and said '[SteelyKid] come up here, and press the button,' and I pressed the button, and the wings came out, and we went flying."
"Wow. Where did you fly to?"
"Um, to school. And then to the JCC."
"You didn't go anywhere else interesting in between, ith the flying bus?"
"Well, we flew to Grandma…