drorzel | February 16, 2016It's been a ridiculously mild winter here, with occasional bursts of extreme cold. The last few days, we've gotten about as much snow as we've gotten all winter, which is not a terribly impressive amount:
Our front bushes, fully protected against snow damage.
These bushes sit right under the bow window in front of our house, and a few years ago snow sliding off the roof crushed them pretty good. so I got these heavy wooden frames to protect them. Which has been a little excessive this year, but if I didn't set them up when doing the other winterizing activities I do every fall, I'd…
drorzel | February 16, 2016One of my favorite modern tales of scientific discovery is the Mpemba Effect, named after Erasto Mpemba, a schoolboy in Tanzania who noticed while making ice cream that hot mix put in the freezer solidified faster than cold. This counter-intuitive result has been replicated a bunch of times, and physicists and chemists continue to debate the reason for it.
It was bitterly cold this weekend, dipping down into the negative Fahrenheit, which wasn't great for, you know, leaving the house, but did provide an opportunity to test the Mpemba Effect. Because when the icy winds of winter blow, that's a…
drorzel | February 15, 2016It was bitterly cold over the weekend here in the Northeast, with daytime high temepratures in the single digits Fahrenheit. This has little to recommend it in terms of, you know, leaving the house, but it did provide an opportunity to try some SCIENCE!
Unfortunately, I left the notepad with the data (such as it is) on it at home when I came to Starbucks to write, so I can't do the detailed write-up. I'll use it for the photo of the day, though, from which you can probably guess what I was trying to do:
Starting condition for a science experiment.
Detailed explanation of methods and…
drorzel | February 15, 2016This weekend's photos were mostly of the kids, and mostly had other people's kids in them, as they did a double play-date on Saturday afternoon. I'm going to lump two days together, because they're really just repeating previous themes. Here are the kids eating dinner at the Union women's basketball game Friday night:
SteelyKid and The Pip eating dinner at a basketball game.
(They went absolutely bonkers after this-- it's hard to describe how hyped up they were Friday.)
And here's yet another fort:
SteelyKid watching tv from inside the tunnel fort she built on the couch.
This one was…
drorzel | February 13, 2016SteelyKid was sent home on Wednesday with strep throat, and so needed to be home thursday as well. she was very disappointed to be missing school, as her class was preparing for a Valentine's Day party on Friday. I picked up a bunch of work for her, including a heart-shaped paper pouch to hold the cards the kids would exchange.
You wouldn't've known she was officially sick on Thursday-- her energy level was basically at normal. She powered through a bunch of homework, and then set to decoarting the pouch with hearts and happy stick figures in a rainbow of colors. And also a fishtank:
Detail…
drorzel | February 12, 2016Some time back, I posted a photo of my usual spot at the Starbucks in Niskayuna. When I was in Newport News earlier this week, of course, I had to find a different space from which to rant about Twitter. Here's that spot:
My "office" when I was in Virginia.
As you can see, the principal difference between the two is that I didn't bring my stainless-steel travel mug with me on the trip. The store in Newport News is laid out almost exactly the same way as my regular one in Niskayuna.
I'm probably more amused by this than any of my readers will be, but then, this was the only remotely photo-…
drorzel | February 10, 2016I did bring my good camera with me to Newport News, and took it on the tour of Jefferson Lab yesterday, but despite the existence of DSLR pics, you're getting a cell-phone snap for the photo of the day:
That's the audience about 10-15 minutes before my talk last night, so it was a good turnout. And they laughed in the right places, and asked some really good questions last night. I also got asked to appear in a selfie with a bunch of students from a local school, so they could prove they were there to get extra credit for their science class...
The talk went well, though we had some…
drorzel | February 9, 2016As I go through my daily routine, I find myself sort of out of phase with a lot of the Internet. My peak online hours are from about six to ten in the morning, Eastern US time. That's when I get up, have breakfast, and then go to Starbucks to write for a few hours.
This means that most of the other people awake and active on my social media feeds are in Europe or Australia. And my standard writing time ends right around the time things start to heat up in the US. I do continue to have access to the Internet through the afternoon, of course, but unless I have a deadline coming up, I'm often…
drorzel | February 9, 2016I'm in Newport News, VA, to give a talk tonight at Jefferson Lab, and they're putting me up at the on-site Residence Facility. The rooms at this are apparently sponsored associated with institutions that use the facility, with big signs on all the doors. Here's mine:
Door to my room at JLab's Residence Facility.
So, I guess my stay is in some sense subsidized by the University of Manitoba. It's a perfectly adequate hotel room, so, thanks, Manitoba.
As I am a Sooper Geeenyus, I forgot to pack the dress pants I usually wear when giving talks. Sigh. Happily, this is a public lecture, so jeans…
drorzel | February 8, 2016Since our recent trip to Vermont, SteelyKid has been obsessed with building blanket forts. These have mostly been in the living room, leading to a bit of angst at the end of the day when we need the blankets back. So i did a little reorganizing in the basement, and dug some sheets out of storage, allowing the construction of a longer-duration fort.
The blanket fort du jour in the basement of Chateau Steelypips.
This covers the basement comprehensively enough that it's probably a little hard to appreciate how much stuff is inside. The critical thing, though, is that SteelyKid is satisfied…
drorzel | February 8, 2016I've been remiss in my self-promotional duties, but I'm giving a public lecture tomorrow night in Newport News, VA, as part of the Jefferson Lab Science Series. This will be my traditional "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk, with the sad addition of a slide honoring the late, great Queen of Niskayuna (visible as the "featured image" with this post). This isn't the first dog-physics talk I've given since her death in December, but the previous one was the relativity talk, which has less Emmy-specific content. This one includes one of the video clips I made around a dog…
drorzel | February 7, 2016We spent most of Saturday at a taekwondo tournament-- the AAU Adirondack Championship, or some permutation of those words. This was held in the gym over at Hudson Valley Community College, and was fairly big:
The taekwondo tournmanet from way up in the bleachers.
It was, however, 99% waiting around. They did black-belt sparring in the morning, and said that staging for the colored belts would be at 1pm, so we were there at noon. But they did the forms competition before the Olymopic sparring (SteelyKid's event), so it was 3:45 before they called her group to be sorted into age and weight…
drorzel | February 7, 2016Random artsy shot from our back yard. This is the little bit of roof right over our back door. It's the only bit of roof left on the house that's asphalt shingle-- the main roof was always slate, and we got the bit of shingle above the garage replaced with fake slate not long after we bought the house. As a result, it collects crap in a way that the other bits don't. But it looks kind of cool and decrepit:
Pine needles and moss on the small roof over our back door.
Or maybe not. I dunno. Anyway, I noticed it, and it looked cool to me, so I took a photo.
drorzel | February 7, 2016A few days ago, The Pip came home with a "present" for me and Kate, wrapped up in construction paper. This turned out to be another sheet of paper, which is actually a launch control panel:
The Pip's rocket control panel. (One of his teachers wrote the words for him...)
The layout of the "buttons" is all him, but he got one of his teachers to do the labels. On the other side, it says "The missle will launch in one minute," which I assume he also dictated.
He's got a rich inner life...
drorzel | February 5, 2016In yesterday's post about the lack of money in academia, I mentioned in passing that lack of funding is part of the reason for the slow pace of progress on improving faculty diversity. That is, we could make more rapid progress if we suddenly found shitloads of money and could go on a massive hiring binge, but in the absence of flipping great wodges of cash, change comes more slowly.
This, naturally, sparked a sort of morbid curiosity about whether the scale of this problem would be quantifiable, and of course, there's the AIP Statistical Research Center offering numbers on all sorts of…
drorzel | February 5, 2016A long-ish stretch of time, but I was basically offline for a bunch of that because I needed to finish a chapter I was asked to contribute to an academic book. So there are only four physics posts from Forbes to promote this time:
-- 'The Expanse' Is A Rare Sci-Fi Show That Gets Simulated Gravity Right: Another post on the SyFy adaptation of "James S. A. Corey"'s books, talking about a nifty bit of visual effects that nods at the Coriolis force you'd see on a rotating space station.
-- What Is The Quantum Pigeonhole Principle And Why Is It Weird?: A paper published in the Proceedings of the…
drorzel | February 4, 2016Early in this photo-a-day thing I tried to get in the habit of bringing the camera with me when I ran errands, to get pictures of random interesting stuff outside of the immediate neighborhood of our house. I fell out of that, though, when it was actually cold, because I didn't like leaving the camera in the car in freezing temperatures.
I had it with me last night, though, because I was taking SteelyKid to Odyssey of the Mind practice. Which was good, because while we were getting our traditional fast-food dinner beforehand, there was a really cool-looking sunset:
Sunset over Niskayuna.…
drorzel | February 4, 2016Here in the US, we're slowly transitioning to the European system of chip-based credit cards (I got email at work saying that my new card there will actually be chip-and-PIN, wonder of wonders). This is not uniformly distributed yet, though, so about half of the retailers I deal with regularly want the chip, the other half want the old-school swipe. If you guess wrong about a particular store, the terminal will blat loudly and annoyingly at you, so I end up asking cashiers all the time "Are you guys doing the chip thing yet?"
One local store apparently got sick of that, and modified their…
drorzel | February 4, 2016Over in Twitter-land, somebody linked to this piece promoting open-access publishing, excerpting this bit:
One suggestion: Ban the CV from the grant review process. Rank the projects based on the ideas and ability to carry out the research rather than whether someone has published in Nature, Cell or Science. This could in turn remove the pressure to publish in big journals. I’ve often wondered how much of this could actually be drilled down to sheer laziness on the part of scientists perusing the literature and reviewing grants – “Which journals should I scan for recent papers? Just the big…
drorzel | February 2, 2016This one was a whole bunch of work for one smallish shot...
So, in past rounds of "science-y things with my fancy camera," I looked at the effect of ISO settings and apertures. This time out, I wanted to look at something moving, and the way that it blurs with increasing exposure time.
My initial thought was to try to take pictures of a falling ball, but it's too hard to get that to work consistently without setting up some kind of electronic trigger, and I wasn't willing to do that. But, of course, a swinging pendulum will always be in a relatively narrow range of positions, making it a…