drorzel | March 10, 2016I seem to have fallen into a thing where I take pictures more frequently than I edit and post them. I blame the kids-- SteelyKid got sick on Sunday (her third bout with strep in the last five months), and The Pip has decided to get a jump on Daylight Savings by waking up an hour early every day this week. Those both wiped out a lot of time I otherwise would've used for photo processing and blogging.
Anyway, this past Saturday was the big Odyssey of the Mind tournament for SteelyKid and her team. I obviously have a bunch of photos of this; just as obviously they mostly include other people's…
drorzel | March 7, 2016I'm going to be at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore next week. This is the largest physics meeting of the year, with an emphasis on condensed matter physics (which is actually the largest single area of study within physics, though media overemphasis on particle physics and astrophysics might lead you to think otherwise). The program for the meeting is, um, kind of intimidating.
So, this post has two purposes:
1) If you're also going to be at the March Meeting, let me know, and maybe we can arrange some kind of bloggy-people meet-up.
2) More importantly, if…
drorzel | March 6, 2016Thursday was a travel day, the less said about which the better. So, while I do have a couple of cell-phone snaps from the day, I'm just going to ignore it, and give you two better photos from Friday and Saturday. These go nicely together, as you can see in the composite that's the "featured image" for this post.
182/366: Dunking Dude:
The Pip hanging on the rim at the Girl Scout carnival.
Friday night, the local Girl Scouts had a "nickel carnival" as a fundraiser for... something or another. SteelyKid is a scout, and Kate's helping lead her Brownie troop, so they had to go, and I brought…
drorzel | March 6, 2016There's a sort of Internet tradition of posting photos of hotel-room views when traveling, so here's a very slightly artsy version of same:
View from my hotel room in Urbana, IL.
The first time I looked out the window, there was a big-ass truck parked directly in front of it. I like this version a little better, though.
Kidding about the accommodations aside, I had a good time visiting the University of Illinois, and my talk there went very well. The travel to and from Champaign was less than enjoyable, but such is the airline industry in the modern US...
drorzel | March 2, 2016I spent Tuesday flying to Champaign, Illinois, which was probably a big mistake. I should've booked a Southwest flight to Midway Airport in Chicago, and rented a car to drive down to Champaign, but I decided that might be annoying on the way home, so opted to fly the whole way. Which meant a United flight into O'Hare, followed by an American flight to Champaign, both in aircraft that felt like scale models of actual jetliners.
And, of course, there was this:
Snow removal trucks on the runway at O'Hare International Airport.
That's from the plane as we taxied to the gate in Chicago, in a…
drorzel | March 2, 2016Sunday was a beautiful day in Niskayuna, so after going to campus to deal with some paperwork, I went off to a park to take some pictures. There's a town park down on River Road that sits on a high and scenic bluff above the Mohawk, so I figured I'd give that a look. And, indeed, the view of the river is pretty.
But there are also these:
Apparently, I live near the set of a cult British SF show.
That's a fat piece of PVC pipe, painted bright green, rising about 7-8' from the ground. And there are a couple dozen of these dotting the hillside in the park.
I don't really have a clue what…
drorzel | March 2, 2016I'm going to stop posting pictures of the Nott Memorial, really I am. But I got the idea a week or two ago of trying to see if there's an angle where the observatory dome and the Nott dome look the same size, so I keep poking at that.
And, in fact, there is such an angle from the conference room in the Physics department:
The Union college Observatory dome and the Nott Memorial dome.
This involved a bit of precarious leaning-out to get clear of the window, but it's close to what I had in mind. There's another window that might be a slightly better angle, but it's sealed with plastic…
drorzel | March 1, 2016As you probably already know, last year we ran a workshop at the Joint Quantum Institute for science-fiction writers who would like to learn more about quantum physics. The workshop was a lot of fun from the speaker/oragnizer side, and very well received by last year's writers, so we're doing it again:
The Schrödinger Sessions is a three-day workshop for science fiction writers offering a “crash course” in modern physics, to be held at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), one of the world’s leading research centers for the study of quantum mechanics. We will introduce participants to…
drorzel | March 1, 2016A few weeks ago, I traveled down to Jefferson Lab in southern Virginia to give a talk for their Science Series of public lectures. They recorded the talk, and have done a very nice job of editing together the video, which you can see at that link, or right here:
It's a bit under an hour, which must include the Q&A period at the end. So, if you've been wondering what sort of thing I do when I travel to give talks, well, here's an example. And it'll give you something to keep you entertained while I travel to Illinois to give another (different) talk tomorrow...
drorzel | February 28, 2016I've included at least two photos of the Nott Memorial in this series, so I'm a little hesitant to do another. But here's an angle on it that doesn't show up as much:
SteelyKid and The Pip looking down from the third floor railing inside the Nott Memorial,
We went over to campus yesterday looking for a bigger open space in which to fly SteelyKid's RC helicopter, which turned into something of a quixotic quest-- most of the big open spaces I had access to had students in them studying. But this did get us inside the Nott, where the kids enjoyed the view from the third floor down into the…
drorzel | February 28, 2016Again, random and artsy, but this tree in the garden behind the Reamer Campus Center at Union struck me as interesting:
A very symmetric tree, looking a lot like the veins in a leaf.
Is sort of looks like one of those pictures you sometimes see of oblong leaves where most of the surface has been eaten away, just leaving the delicate vein structure in place. (This kind of thing.) At least, that's what it looked like to me, and why I took a shot of it.
drorzel | February 28, 2016Random artsy shot of the moment:
Tiny lines of snow between the "slates" on our roof.
The wild see-sawing of the temperature has continued this week, so we got a little bit of snow, then it all melted, then more snow, then more melting, etc. This is from a couple of days ago, when it was cold, and I liked the way the light dusting of snow we'd gotten had blown into just the gaps between "slates" on the roof over the front window.
"Slates" gets scare quotes because those aren't really rock, but rubber facsimiles. They're made out of old tires, I think, and we have them on the lower roof…
drorzel | February 26, 2016It's been a few weeks since my last summary of physics posts I've been doing at Forbes, so here's the latest eclectic collection:
-- Football Physics And the Myth Of The Dumb Jock: In honor of the Super Bowl, repeating the argument from Eureka that athletes are not, in fact, dumb jocks, but excellent scientific thinkers. Of course, the actual game tat night was horribly ugly, not a compelling display of anything in particular...
-- How Can A Laser Make A Plane Turn Around?: A quick post on the optics of lasers, spinning off a news of the weird story about a flight that had to return after a "…
drorzel | February 26, 2016I've been really, really bad about using this blog to promote stuff I have coming up, but I'll be doing two public-ish appearances in the month of March, and I probably ought to announce those here:
1) Next week, on Wednesday, March 2, I'll be giving the Physics Colloquium at the University of Illinois, on public communication stuff:
"Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs: Social Media for Communicating Science"
Modern social media technologies provide an unprecedented opportunity to engage and inform a broad audience about the practice and products of science. Such outreach efforts are…
drorzel | February 25, 2016As I've mentioned a few times, SteelyKid is part of an Odyssey of the Mind team through her school, working on a problem to build a structure from balsa wood and glue that will hold as much weight as possible. They've been hard at work the last several weeks, and completed a test structure last night, shown here just prior to testing:
SteelyKid's OM team's balsa wood structure, ready for testing.
This ended up supporting about 53 pounds before it collapsed, which means it could've held up at least one of the team members. Not too shabby. The kids were very fired up for the crushing process…
drorzel | February 25, 2016The tagline up at the top of this blog promises "Physics, Politics, and Pop Culture," but unless you count my own photos as pop art, I've been falling down on the last of those. This is largely because, despite being on sabbatical, I've been so busy running after the kids that I don't have much time for pop culture. And also because this is kind of a frustrating pop-culture moment, with a number of media currently dominated by works that just aren't my thing.
That's a critical bit of context for my reaction to a recent Salon interview with music critic Jim Fusilli, which sports the headline "…
drorzel | February 24, 2016The Pip is in pre-school these days, and we have a running joke when I drop him off where I tell him to work hard, and he responds "No, grown-ups do work. You go to work. I'm going to the JCC to play with my friends!"
Of course, his playing does involve a bit of work, in that they do a lot of arts and crafts stuff. And while there was a long period where he wasn't really into drawing on paper, in recent weeks, he's gotten very fired up about drawing, and every day we get a few scibbled-on sheets of paper sent home. Put this together with the steady flow of homework from SteelyKid, and the kid…
drorzel | February 23, 2016I feel a little bad sometimes that I don't really give the Pip his due on the blog. Back when SteelyKid was a toddler and pre-schooler, I had a lot more free time in which to transcribe the various conversations I had with her into super-cute blog posts. The Pip is in the same sort of stage now, and tells some amazing stories, but I have much less time, and by the time I do get free to get to the computer, I usually forget about it.
However, while cleaning up and photographing the Giant Shelf of Kid Art, I ran across a book that he made with... One of his preschool teachers, I guess, because…
drorzel | February 22, 2016Another long photo-a-day gap, because the last week was crazy in a bunch of ways. The weather has slewed wildly between winter and spring; Kate had to go to The City to argue a case leaving me solo-parenting the sillyheads; and I've been fighting the onset of a rotten cold. That last has involved a bunch of frantic work in anticipation of not being able to do much for a couple of days at some point, and today that caught up to me and I decided it was an official recovery day. Which gave me time to sort and GIMP the various pictures I took.
167/366: Brief Winter
We got a bit of an ice storm…
drorzel | February 19, 2016One of the evergreen topics for academic magazines like Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education is faculty "mentoring." It's rare for a week to go by without at least one lengthy essay on the topic, many of which recirculate multiple times through my various social media channels. The latest batch of these (no links, because this isn't about the specific articles in question) prompted me to comment over in Twitter-land that:
Articles about "mentoring" of faculty are great for reminding me of all the ways I'm atypical for an academic personality-wise.
— Chad Orzel (@orzelc)…