drorzel | June 3, 2012In which we look at the very latest in amphibian science.
------------
The embedded video shows one Prof. S. Kid describing her latest observations in detail. It's a very comprehensive study.
drorzel | June 3, 2012In which we look at one of the great spoofs of all time, a clever twist on a viral physics video, one of the great cartoons of all time, the puzzling lack of relationship between violence and the NFL's popularity, the new approach of the US National soccer team, one of the greatest musicians of all time, and the diary of a Yankee.
-------------
The Great Moon Hoax of 1835
In which Richard Adams Locke wins the Internet 150 years before it existed.
Day 170: Horizontally Dropped Slinky - Noschese 180
You probable know what happens when you drop a slinky vertically, but what happens when you…
drorzel | May 31, 2012In which I talk about the common complaint that we teach students physics that "isn't true," and the limits on that statement.
------------
Frequent commenter Ron sent me an email pointing to this post by David Reed on "What we “know” that t’aint so…. and insist on teaching to kids!":
he science we teach is pretty old. Mostly 19th century ideas about the world around us are taught as “facts” with little but anecdotal data to support it. We teach it via an ontology that replays the history of science, thus the newest and most powerful scientific understandings are viewed as “too advanced”. If…
drorzel | May 31, 2012In which we look at creepy fairytales, the writing of science books, when overfishing is actually okay, and what it means to be an experimental physicist.
------------
10 Creepy Details Glossed Over By Modern Versions Of Fairy Tales
A surprising number of these can still be found in SteelyKid's fairy tale books.
Making the leap from news to books: Critical questions |
Authors of science books often begin as writers of science news. As a science journalist who is looking to write a book, I’ve become very curious as to how other science journalists made the leap forward. I suspected that the…
drorzel | May 30, 2012In which I get a little ranty about basketball.
-----------
Over at Slate, Matt Yglesias has a column about why everybody ignores the Spurs.:
America—at least in its own imagination—stands for certain things. For the idea that hard work and sound judgment bring success, and that success deserves celebration. That winners should be celebrated as long as they play by the rules. That teamwork, leadership, loyalty, and excellence all count for something. And that’s why the San Antonio Spurs, currently riding a stupendous run of 19 straight victories, are America’s favorite professional basketball…
drorzel | May 30, 2012In which we compare a couple of different systems for evaluating teachers, looking at what's involved in doing a fair assessment of a teacher's performance.
--------
Another casualty of the great blog upgrade, in the sense of a post that was delayed until the inspiration for it has been forgotten by most of the people who might want to talk about it, was this Grant Wiggins post on accountability systems:
[The Buckingham, Browne, and Nichols prep school where he taught in the 80's] had a state of the art teacher performance appraisal system back in the 80’s (we’ll need current or recent folks…
drorzel | May 30, 2012In which we look at the evolution of Republican attitudes toward higher education, the early days of nuclear secrets, the science of communicating science, the amazing things you find in textbooks, and the unwritten rules of science journalism.
------------
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Thoughts on Romney and Higher Ed
Over the past decade or so, though, Republicans -- as opposed to conservatives, which they are not any more in any meaningful sense -- have shifted their position. Now they’re openly hostile to higher education, except in for-profit form. Rick Santorum’s “what a…
drorzel | May 29, 2012In which I talk about why it is that particle physics and cosmology are so over-represented in popular physics, and why my own books contribute to that.
[The too-short excerpts on the new front page are beyond my ability to change, so I'll be doing Victorian-style "In which..." summaries at the start of posts as a work-around, so a casual visitor has some idea what a psot is about before clicking through.]
One of the maddening things about the recent upgrade of the ScienceBlogs back end has been that a lot of things have been posted during that time that I wanted to respond to. Near the top…
drorzel | May 29, 2012In which we look at relativistic rockets, scientific revolutions, and the mathematical connection between entanglement and nonlocality.
The Relativistic Rocket
Science fiction writers can make use of worm holes or warp drives to overcome this restriction, but it is not clear that such things can ever be made to work in reality. Another way to get around the problem may be to use the relativistic effects of time dilation and length contraction to cover large distances within a reasonable time span for those aboard a space ship. If a rocket accelerates at 1g (9.81 m/s2) the crew will…
drorzel | May 28, 2012In which we post a new collection of random links in an effort to see if the RSS feeds actually work now but aren't showing anything because I haven't posted anything.
Craig Sager's Suits and Sideline Sartorial Disasters - Grantland
You've been blown off your couch and knocked from your barstool with disbelief — even though you know it's coming. The structure of an "NBA on TNT" broadcast never really changes, so you always know! Still: Cue the beer spit take and the salsa sliding off the nacho you can't remember to put into your gaping mouth. Because you can never bring yourself to believe…
drorzel | May 25, 2012The blog is recovering from the transition to WordPress, but I'm still not fully confident in it. So We'll turn to another corner of the social media universe for my procrastinatory needs this morning: Having Emmy answer physics questions on Twitter.
The same deal as when we've done this before: If you've got a physics question you'd like my dog to answer, post it to Twitter with the hashtag #dogphysics (or leave it in a comment, or email it to me), and Emmy will answer via Twitter, where she's @queen_emmy.
drorzel | May 23, 2012So, as you may or may not have noticed, ScienceBlogs has gotten a makeover. If you read via RSS, you might not notice anything, but if you come to the blog itself, you'll see a new look. The previous three-column layout is gone, and posts on the front page now show only short excerpts and "featured" images. This makes us look more like the blogs at National Geographic, the new Corporate Masters (for a good while now, actually, but they only just did the redesign). On the back end, we've changed from Movable Type to WordPress, which will take a little getting used to, but which lots of people…
drorzel | May 21, 2012I was going to post something noting that the great WordPress transition will begin at 7pm tonight, and comments after that time will be lost like Roy Batty's tears. However, I have much happier news: tomorrow's Science Times (available on the Web already) will include a review of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog!
I considered reading this book aloud to my dog, even though I doubted he would understand relativity, even as explained by the witty and clear-thinking Chad Orzel. Maxwell does seem to show some interest in Newton's first law: A body at rest tends to remain at rest, and a body in…
drorzel | May 21, 2012Because I need to test out some features of the new WordPress system, including the image handling, here's a place-holder post with a bonus SteelyKid photo:
This is SteelyKid kicking back at Niska-Day over the weekend (the annual community fair here in Niskayuna). Don't be deceived by the lazy look of this image-- she was seriously fired up, and went on a whole bunch of rides, including four trips on the "roller coaster," proving she is her mother's daughter. She also took two pony rides, but happily hasn't demanded one yet.
So, how was your weekend?
drorzel | May 21, 2012Back of the Envelope Problems
A collection of classic estimation problems, with answers, written by E.M. Purcell for the American Journal of Physics back in the day.
nanoscale views: The unreasonable clarity of E. M. Purcell
Purcell had the insight that in a cavity, the number of states available for photons is not quadratic in frequency anymore. Instead, a cavity on resonance has a photon density of states that is proportional to the "quality factor", Q, of the cavity, and inversely proportional to the size of the cavity. The better the cavity and the smaller the cavity, the higher the…
drorzel | May 18, 2012So, you find yourself living in the San Francisco Bay area, and you maybe have a dog who would like to know something about relativity, or you maybe want to someday have a dog who will want to know something about relativity, or you maybe want to know something more about relativity yourself, in case you ever find yourself cornered in a dark alley by a Rhodesian ridgeback who snarls "Explain time dilation to me, or I'll eat your face!" Well, in that case, you definitely want to be at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park on the evening of June 14th, when I'll be doing a book promotion thing for How to…
drorzel | May 18, 2012The poor and their time are soon parted § Unqualified Offerings
Why do I bring this up? I bring it up because I read this article about how the poor get trapped in a system that rains shit down on them. No, I'm not here to offer the poor advice on how to find good prices. They know far more about that than I do. Rather, I do this to point out that good decision-making depends in part on having the time and space to make a good decision, somethign that is harder if you are caught in Catch-22 situations, things that pile one nasty consequence after another onto the smallest of mistakes.…
drorzel | May 17, 2012This has been out for a little while now, and Chris has been promoting it very heavily, and it's sort of interesting to see the reactions. It's really something of a Rorschach blot of a book, with a lot of what's been written about it telling you more about what the writer wants to be in the book than what's actually in it. A lot of conservative responses to it are basically case studies in the sort of motivated reasoning Chris is writing about, but I've even seen some liberals jumping on it as completely confirming their own pre-existing biases, for example, claiming that this means Chris…
drorzel | May 16, 2012n+1: Lions in Winter, Part One
A very long and thorough history of the New York Public Library, how its current plans to gut the main research library came about, and what they mean for the idea of a public research library.
Correcting the Record on College Graduates and Job Prospects by Joshua Tucker | Washington Monthly
Using the same American Community Survey for 2009 and 2010 as Fogg and Harrington, but focussing on actual unemployment by major, Carnevale, Cheat and Strohl (Hard Times, Georgetown University, Center for Education and the Workforce, 2011) have similar findings (p. 7).…