drorzel | December 21, 2012We're at that time of year where people publish lists of top stories of the year, but as many crazy people will be happy to remind you, this Friday marks the end of another calendrical period, in the Mayan calendar. So, I'm going to steal an idea from a college classmate on Facebook, who wrote:
When I look back on Baktun 13, I'm going to remember all the wonderful things that happened. What's your best memory from the last 144,000 days?
This seems like a good way to get some more cheerful and science-y content on the front page of the blog. So, without further ado (or very much thought),…
drorzel | December 17, 2012As I'm sure you wish you hadn't heard, there was another school shooting in Connecticut on Friday, one that was hellishly awful even by the standards of such things. The Internet, of course, instantly exploded with the depressingly predictable standard response. And it's hard to put into words just how depressing it is that there's a standard response to this-- The Onion pretty well nailed it back in July, but amazingly, they managed to do it again this time.
I shut social media down for most of the day-- and, anyway, I was home with a sick SteelyKid-- but the usual flamewar was still in full…
drorzel | December 15, 2012It was a long and irritating week, for reasons that I can't discuss on the blog, and just when it finally looked like there might be some motion in a positive direction, I got a call from day care saying that SteelyKid had a fever and needed to be picked up immediately. But, on the bright side, it was a nice day today, and SteelyKid rallied long enough to help pick out and decorate a Christmas tree:
Chateau Steelypips Christmas Tree 2012
So, there's your happy thought for the weekend. The Pip is sort of puzzled as to why there's suddenly an evergreen in the library, and he's not too keen on…
drorzel | December 6, 2012I have made allusions to a work-in-progress at various points recently, but my general policy is not to reveal any details until things become official. Well, as you can see from the above photo of signed contracts, it's official: I sold the work-in-progress to Basic Books, my publisher for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. The contract calls for 70,000 words (which most likely means the first draft will clock in at 110,000...) of a work tentatively titled How to Think Like a Scientist (because I'm only allowed to publish books with "How to..." in the title...).
So, what is this? Well,…
drorzel | November 29, 2012In the comments to yesterday's post about college admissions, Joseph Yoon quoted my statement that "I'm somewhat sympathetic to claims that Asians have a difficult position in higher education," and shot back with:
I wonder if you will feel more strongly about this in 10 years when your kids are near college. Will you advise them to not check the Asian box if it decreases their chances?
As a general matter, I try to avoid responding to comments when my initial reaction is "Oh, go fuck yourself." But I'll make an exception here, because I think it goes to a more general issue about college…
drorzel | November 28, 2012In which the skewing of a data plot in Ron Unz's epic investigation of college admissions makes me more skeptical of his overall claim, thanks to the misleading tricks employed.
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Steve Hsu has a new post on a favorite topic of his, bias against Asians in higher ed admissions. This is based on a giant article by Ron Unz that I don't have time to read, and illustrated with the graphic that's the "featured image" for this post (which I will also reproduce below for the convenience of RSS readers).
What does this show? There's a tangle of colored lines representing the fraction of…
drorzel | November 27, 2012In which I unpack a cryptic paper title and explain how quantum superposition lets you use light to keep things from interacting with light.
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I joined AAAS a couple of years ago to get a break on the registration fee for their meeting, and I've kept up the membership mostly because I like having individual access to Science articles, so I can read them in the coffee shops where I get actual work done. This also gives me access to articles in the "advance online publication" stage, which is hilarious because Union's institutional subscription doesn't include those articles-- if I'…
drorzel | November 20, 2012I've got a bunch of browser tabs open on my various computers that have been there for weeks, one of which is Alastair Reynolds on writing science fiction. This is mostly a response to a not-terribly-interesting complaint that the science fiction genre has been "exhausted," but there was a bit in there that resonated with me, where Reynolds talks about how he started writing one of his books:
That reaction, for me, encapsulates something fairly central to my subsequent relationship with SF. I don't care for a lot of it. Never have done, never will. But at the same time, I doubt that I'd feel…
drorzel | November 16, 2012Over at Tor.com, Kate has begun a chapter-by-chapter re-read of The Hobbit, and has some thoughts on Chapter 1. It's full of interesting commentary about characters and literary technique, but let's get right to the important bit: Physics!
Kate mentions in passing in the post that the Hobbit style round door with a knob in the middle seems a suboptimal design choice, however pretty it may look once Peter Jackson's set designers get done with it. This draws a couple of comments noting that the doorknob-in-the-middle thing is an English affectation, and pointing to the Prime Minister's…
drorzel | November 15, 2012Everybody and their siblings have been linking to this Minute Physics video, an "open letter" to President Obama complaining about the way that most high school and even intro college physics classes don't teach anything remotely modern:
I'm not entirely sure where the date of 1865 comes from, but it's true, the standard intro physics sequence doesn't really touch what's normally called "modern physics," a term which is itself laughably out of date, as it generally refers to special relativity and quantum mechanics as it stood around 1935. We don't teach really new stuff until about the 300…
drorzel | November 14, 2012OK, it's a paper I mentioned here before, when it went up on the arxiv, but the "Comments on Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics" article I wrote this summer is up on the Physica Scripta web site now, and for the next not-quite-thirty days it's free to read and download:
Searching for new physics through atomic, molecular and optical precision measurements
We briefly review recent experiments in atomic, molecular and optical physics using precision measurements to search for physics beyond the Standard Model. We consider three main categories of experiments: searches for changes in…
drorzel | November 12, 2012Over at Slate, John Dickerson has a piece expressing amazement that "numbers guy" Mitt Romney was so badly misinformed about the election. While I'll admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude about the general bafflement of the Romney campaign and the Republicans generally, this particular slant (which Dickerson isn't the only one to take, just the latest in a series) is more annoying than entertaining.
You would think that the 2008 economic meltdown, in which the financial industry broke the entire world when they were blindsided by the fact that housing prices can go down as well as up,…
drorzel | November 9, 2012In which I use my double license as a physicist and a science fiction fan to engage in some half-assed futurism spinning off Chris Hayes's much-discussed book.
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I don't read a lot of political books, because I tend to find them frustrating. They're usually surprisingly ephemeral, trying to spin Deep Meaning out of a collection of recent events that are highly dependent on short-term context. They also tend to be much better at identifying problems than suggesting plausible solutions, coming off like that famous Sidney Harris cartoon with a bunch of equations on the left side of a…
drorzel | November 8, 2012Now that we've apparently elected Nate Silver the President of Science, this is some predictable grumbling about whether he's been overhyped. If you've somehow missed the whole thing, Jennifer Ouellette offers an excellent summary of the FiveThirtyEight saga, with lots of links, but the Inigo Montoya summing up is that Silver runs a blog predicting election results, which consistently showed Barack Obama with a high probability of winning. This didn't sit well with the pundit class, who mocked Silver in ways that made them look like a pack of ignorant yokels when Silver's projected electoral…
drorzel | November 7, 2012...and The Pip will be five. Happy birthday, Little Dude!
Oh, yeah, there was also some kind of election. In which a bunch of crazy people lost, and a guy I played rugby with was elected a US Senator. Which is a great way to celebrate the one-year anniversary of this momentous occasion.
And here's the "featured image" pasted into the post, for those reading via RSS. It's a grainy cell-phone picture from a couple of days ago, when Grandma and Grandpa brought up a big birthday balloon:
It's hard to be a little dude with a great big balloon.
Here's a somewhat better picture, of The Pip…
drorzel | November 6, 2012If you're in the US, it's Election Day, so go vote. I'd like to say something here about how I don't care who you actually vote for, but of course that's not true-- I would strongly prefer it if you were to vote for Barack Obama and other Democrats, and against Mitt Romney and a Republican party that sees sneering contempt for modern science as a path to electoral victory.
But more than that, I prefer to live in the sort of country where people actually exercise their hard-won rights to help determine the future course of the nation. So, go vote. Even if it's for the wrong guy.
And if your…
drorzel | October 26, 2012In which I discuss the manner in which and the degree to which Twitter is ruining the media.
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Yesterday, Kevin Drum posted saying that Twitter is ruining political journalism, calling out its role in solidifying media groupthink before events are even completed. That seemed like a pretty good criticism to me, but like a true squishy liberal, Kevin later retracted his comments in the face of criticism. I saw the second link come across Kevin's Twitter feed, and responded there, saying:
You were right the first time. But Twitter's only the latest step in the continuing degradation…
drorzel | October 25, 2012I'm barely keeping my head above water with the day job at the moment, so I'm a bit behind the curve on this. It's October, though, which means it's time for a DonorsChoose fundraiser. If you've been following this blog for any length of time, you've seen a few of these. If not, there's too much to explain, but let me sum up: DonorsChoose matches people with money with schools that need money, and takes donations to support specific projects proposed by teachers in needy school districts. A whole host of fine science blogs have been recruited to raise funds through blog-specific pages, and a…
drorzel | October 25, 2012For various reasons I can't talk about, I'm not in a good mental place for deep and thoughtful blogging just at the moment. But prompted by yesterday's Surviving the World, I'll revisit a past post topic, and suggest some abstract ideas you could dress as for Halloween, if you're so inclined.
The Doppler Effect: Wear an outfit that's blue in the front and red on the back. Answer questions from people in front of you in a high-pitched voice, questions from people behind you in a deep voice. Bonus points if you carry small bottles of helium and sulfur hexafluoride to inhale for the appropriate…
drorzel | October 19, 2012In which we look at commemorating an important anniversary, an unusual way to publish more articles, one of the best discussions of fraternities and sororities I've seen, an article calling for more flexibility in academia, and a bit of political silliness.
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Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
"Niels Bohr’s atomic model has had an immense impact on the history of physics and is an icon of the scientific revolutions of the 20th century. The History Programs of the American Institute of Physics and the Niels Bohr Archive, Denmark, celebrate the model’s 100th anniversary with this calendar…