drorzel | May 15, 2012Tell me a story. Tell me the story about the three hippopotamuses.
Ummm... OK.
Once upon a time, there were three hipopotamuses. And they lived in Africa, in a river.
Right, it was a great big long river, that had so much salt in it that they could float!
Well, salt does help things float, but rivers are usually fresh water. Anyway, hippos are pretty fat, so they can float in fresh water.
OK
And one day... What happened then?
One day, a nice giraffe came to the river and said "Please can I drink a little bit of your water."
And the hippos said "OK." Then the giraffe drank a little bit of…
drorzel | May 14, 2012Surviving the World - Lesson 1395 - Arguing
And, once again, the internet has been explained in under 20 words.
If Publishing Is Dead, What Happens to Non-Fiction? « Maureen Ogle
Consider: I started working on the meat book in early 2007. I finished it in early 2012. You do the math. I spent five years researching and writing the beer book, and of that, a great deal of money and time was spent on traveling to specialized libraries. The Key West book took me two years to research and write. How did I pay for that? By entering into a partnership with a traditional publishing house that…
drorzel | May 11, 2012As mentioned previously, the crack technical team at ScienceBlogs HQ is working on shifting us from our creaky Movable Type system to a shiny new WordPress system. Part of that process involves moving all the old posts over, which has been done... sort of. At present, any post since April 18 has not been moved, and will need to be shifted by me, by hand. Worse yet, the comments to posts between April 18 and whenever the switch finally happens are currently going to be lost forever.
This is, obviously, highly sub-optimal, and efforts are being made to find a better solution. Until and unless…
drorzel | May 11, 2012Next Time, Fail Better - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Humanities students should be more like computer-science students. I decided that as I sat in on a colleague's computer-science course during the beginning of this, my last, semester in the classroom. I am moving into administration full time, and I figured that this was my last chance to learn some of the cool new digital-humanities stuff I've been reading about. What eventually drove me out of the class (which I was enjoying tremendously) was the time commitment: The work of coding, I discovered, was an endless round of…
drorzel | May 10, 2012There's been a bunch of discussion recently about philosophy of science and whether it adds anything to science. Most of this was prompted by Lawrence Krauss's decision to become the Nth case study for "Why authors should never respond directly to bad reviews," with some snide comments in an interview in response to a negative review of his latest book. Sean Carroll does an admirable job of being the voice of reason, and summarizes most of the important contributions to that point. Some of the more recent entries to cross my RSS reader include two each from 13.7 blog and APS's Physics Buzz.
I…
drorzel | May 10, 2012A rare interview with former no. 1 overall pick Greg Oden about his injury-plagued career - Grantland
He was just ... Greg. For instance, as we were finishing our meal, three separate groups of fans approached him and asked for autographs and pictures. Like always, he granted their requests with an annoyed expression, didn't say any more than three words to anyone, and then shook his head as they walked away. "You're a fun-loving guy with a ton of personality," I said. "So why do you hate it so much when people approach you in public? Why don't you let your personality shine through and smile…
drorzel | May 9, 2012One final thought on the Big Science/ Space Chronicles stuff from last week. One of the things I found really frustrating about the book, and the whole argument that we ought to be sinking lots of money into manned space missions is that the terms of the argument are so nebulous. This is most obvious when Tyson or other space advocates talk about the need for "inspiring" people, but it shows up even in what ought to be relatively concrete discussions of actual science.
Take, for example, the argument over humans vs. robots. Given the success of the robotic missions to Mars and other bodies,…
drorzel | May 9, 2012Confessions of a Community College Dean: Adjuncts on Food Stamps
The general idea isn't new, of course, but the numbers are. The story notes a threefold increase just from 2007 to 2010 in the number of people affected. I have to admit that my first response was "there but for the grace of God." Anyone who clings to the myth of the academic meritocracy is invited to explain the speed of the increase in people in this position. Yes, I work hard at my job, but so do plenty of other people; denying the role of luck is just ungracious. That said, though, I wonder if this article - and others…
drorzel | May 8, 2012I go back and forth about the whole question of scientific accuracy in tv shows and movies. On the one hand, I think that complaining "Explosions don't make noise in space!" is one of the worst forms of humorless dorkitude, and I'm generally happy to let bad science slide by in the service of an enjoyable story. On the other hand, though, I am a professional physicist, and it's hard to turn that off completely.
Weirdly, one thing that tends to push me toward complaining about the science is when people start doing "The Science of ______" pieces, as both MSNBC and io9 did for The Avengers, and…
drorzel | May 8, 2012Continuing the blog recap series, we come to the "split year" of 2005-2006. The blog was initially launched in late June, so that's when I'm starting the years for purposes of these recaps, but ScienceBlogs launched in January 2006, so this year was half Steelypips and half ScienceBlogs. This post will cover the Steelypips half, June-January; I'll do the ScienceBlogs stuff in a second post, once I figure out the best way to go through those posts (the ScienceBlogs archives aren't set up well for reading straight through).
In reading through this, I was amused to discover this pan of Seed's…
drorzel | May 8, 2012A Visual Approach to Simplifying Radicals (A Get Out of Jail Free Card) | Reflections in the Why
Consider a square with an area of 24. The side has length â24. This square can be divided into 4 smaller squares, each with an area of 6. The sides of these smaller squares have length â6. Two of these lengths make up the side length of the large square, so â24 = 2â6. 24 can also be divided into 3 rectangles, each with an area of 8. Again, correct, but not helpful. How to simplify â45 as 3â5 and â72 as 6â2 are also shown above. Again, factors that are perfect squares are key.
Papercore
The number…
drorzel | May 7, 2012Some time back, I reviewed a cool book about Fermi problems by Aaron Santos, then a post-doc at Michigan. In the interim, he's taken a faculty job at Oberlin, written a second book on sports-related Fermi problems, and started a blog, none of which I had noticed until he emailed me. Shame on me.
Anyway, his new book is just out, and he's running an estimation contest with a signed copy as the prize. So, if you're the sort of person who enjoys Fermi problems, read his post then grab a convenient envelope and start estimating on the back. You have until June 1.
drorzel | May 7, 2012Since I've gotten a bunch of questions via email and Twitter, this probably deserves its own post: Yes, I'm aware that the ScienceBlogs front page and the Last 24 Hours and ScienceBlogs Select RSS feeds have gone dead.
Here's the story: The crack technical team and ScienceBlogs Headquarters is working around the clock to upgrade the back end from the creaky and kludgey Movable Type set-up we've had since the beginning to a shiny new WordPress system. They're moving posts over from MT to WP, and setting up new blog templates, and all that fun stuff.
While I have not been officially told that…
drorzel | May 7, 2012Confrontation with my grand dad-The difficult task of proving the earth is round! « lazychemist
To have grown up with an idea that earth is not flat, it never occurred to me that I will ever need to prove that to anyone, at least not to someone in my own family. But given that my grand dad (a very religious guy), who never had any formal education and who never came out of a hilly village in a poor part of an already poor country, we finally had yet another science versus religious 'commonsense' confrontation. He, like many other elders of the village where firm that Earth is flat, and…
drorzel | May 4, 2012Enough slagging of beloved popularizers-- how about some hard-core physics. The second of three extremely cool papers published last week is this Nature Physics paper from the Zeilinger group in Vienna, producers of many awesome papers about quantum mechanics. Ordinarily, this would be a hard paper to write up, becase Nature Physics are utter bastards, but happily, it's freely available on the arxiv, and all comments and figures are based on that version.
You're just obsessed with Zeilinger, aren't you? All right, what have they done this time? The title is "Experimental delayed-choice…
drorzel | May 4, 2012Amazon.com: The Best Science Writing Online 2012 (9780374533342): Jennifer Ouellette, Bora Zivkovic: Books
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way we think about science-- from fluids to fungi, poisons to pirates. Featuring noted authors and journalists as well as the brightest up-and-comers writing today, this collection provides a comprehensive look at the fascinating, innovative, and trailblazing scientific achievements and breakthroughs of 2011, along with elegant and…
drorzel | May 3, 2012I was tremendously disappointed and frustrated by this book.
This is largely my own fault, because I went into it expecting it to be something it's not. Had I read the description more carefully, I might not have had such a strong negative reaction (which was exacerbated by some outside stress when I first started reading it, so I put it aside for a few weeks, until I was less mad in general, and more likely to give it a fair reading). I'm actually somewhat hesitant to write this up at all, for a number of reasons, but after thinking it over a bit, I think I have sensible reasons for being…
drorzel | May 3, 2012A few more links that have turned up of people talking about either How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog:
Andrew Johnston has a review of the UK edition, praising it because "it's bang up to date, and goes beyond the basic quantum concepts into more complex areas like decoherence, entanglement and quantum teleportation," which I like to see because that's one of the things I especially wanted to do.
Natasha Zaleski, a grad student, has a review of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, which is good but not great, because it hit the usual failure mode: the…
drorzel | May 3, 2012Is Cosmology in Shambles? « Galileo's Pendulum
I'll fill in more about each of these studies shortly, but note in both cases, the authors make very strong statements about the very existence of dark matter, including the quotations that begin this post. In fact, the National Geographic coverage of the second article states things even more strongly than the paper. Pavel Kroupa, the third author of the study, is quoted as saying, "It means that we have to completely and utterly rethink cosmology.... Cosmology is basically in a shambles now." You can probably guess already that I don't see…
drorzel | May 2, 2012I've gotten really bad about posting pictures of the kids, but we got the official school picture proofs today, featuring a smiling SteelyKid and an insouciant Pip:
Both pictures pretty accurately reflect them at this stage, which is kind of nice. SteelyKid's kind of camera-averse at the moment, and it apparently took some doing to get her to agree to sit for this, so I'm surprised it came out this well. The Pip doesn't have as much ability to fuss about having his picture taken, so I've got some shots of him in his play gym:
He's a happy and active little dude, and when he figures out how…