drorzel | May 2, 2012A week or so ago, lots of people were linking to this New York Review of Books article by Steven Weinberg on "The Crisis of Big Science," looking back over the last few decades of, well, big science. It's somewhat dejected survey of whopping huge experiments, and the increasing difficulty of getting them funded, including a good deal of bitterness over the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider almost twenty years ago. This isn't particularly new for Weinberg-- back at the APS's Centennial Meeting in Atlanta in 1999, he gave a big lecture where he spent a bunch of time fulminating…
drorzel | May 2, 2012I've been busily working on something new, but I'm beginning to think I've been letting the perfect be the enemy of the good-enough-for-this-stage, so I'm setting it aside for a bit, and trying to get caught up with some of the huge number of things that have been slipping. Which includes getting the oil changed in my car, hence, I'm sitting in B&N killing time, which is a good excuse to do some ResearchBlogging.
Last week was a banner week for my corner of physics, with three really cool experiments published. Two of those are on the arxiv, which means I can use images from the paper (…
drorzel | May 2, 2012Self-enhancement and imposter syndrome: neither is good for your teaching | Science Edventures
McCrickerd points out it is only through dissatisfaction that we change our behavior. An instructor with an overly-enhanced self sees no reason to change when something bad happens in class. "Not my fault they didn't learn..." And who else does a lot of teaching? Teaching assistants, that's who. Graduate students with a raging case of imposter syndrome. When something goes wrong in their classes, "It's my fault. I shouldn't even be here in the first place..." Yeah, that's a real motivator.…
drorzel | May 1, 2012Delayed again by the need to do actual, you know, work, here's a look back at the third year of this blog's existence. You can also read posts covering year one and year two.
2004-2005 was the last complete year before the move to ScienceBlogs in January of 2006, after which the making of these posts will become more complicated, because my posting rate went way up. For this year, though, I was still sticking to one post a day, and the blog had settled into a pretty decent groove.
The year did feature a brief foray into silly physics-related fiction, which might possibly be called a precursor…
drorzel | May 1, 2012McSweeney's Internet Tendency: The Only Thing That Can Stop This Asteroid is Your Liberal Arts Degree.
Don't think I don't have my misgivings about sending some hotshot Asian Studies minor into space for the first time. This is NASA, not Grinnell. I don't have the time or patience for your renegade attitude and macho bravado. I can't believe the fate of mankind rests on some roughneck bachelor of the arts. I know your type. You feed off the thrill of inference and small, instructor-led discussion. You think you're some kind of invincible God just because you have cursory understandings of…
drorzel | April 30, 2012I'm about a week late talking about this, but I've mostly resigned myself to not doing really topical blogging these days. Anyway, there was a lot of excitement last week over the announcement that an all-star team of nerd billionaires is planning to do commercial asteroid mining. (The post title is a reference to the Sean Connery movie, not the post-Bloom County comic.) I find it kind of amusing that this made the news while I'm doing retrospective blog posts (the next of which is coming), which have turned up a bunch of old posts where I say skeptical things about space in general. So I…
drorzel | April 30, 2012Confessions of a Community College Dean: Class Dismissed
In my darker moments, I sometimes wonder if the root of the problem with public higher education in America is that it was designed to create and support a massive middle class. And we've tacitly decided as a society that a massive middle class is not a priority. We're trying to fulfill a mission that the country has largely abandoned. When the goal of a prosperous middle class was tacitly dismissed, dominos started to fall. The meme making the rounds last week was the announcement that outstanding student loan debt in America…
drorzel | April 29, 2012SteelyKid: Daddy, would you like to go to visit Jake and the Never Land Pirates?
Me:: In principle, sure. But it's a cartoon. We can't go there, it's not a real place.
SteelyKid: Yes it is. Never Land is real, we can go there.
Me: Well, look, if you find some pixies dust that we can use to make us fly, we can try to fly to Never Land. Let me know if you find any.
SteelyKid: No, Daddy, we don't need to find pixie dust. We just need to go to the store and buy some pixie dust.
Me: I'm pretty sure they don't have pixie dust at the stores around here. Though, there are persistent rumors that they'…
drorzel | April 28, 2012Learning about science education from the experts: Kids « Boundary Vision
By far the best panel on science education I've seen recently was given by a few of the most important people in the field: kids.
drorzel | April 27, 2012This is apparently my day to be annoyed at the reporting of pieces about gender differences in STEM, because a bunch of people are linking to this PBS NewsHour article about women in engineering, which is linked to an interview with Maria Klawe of Harvey Mudd College, who I ran across a few weeks back thanks to a New York Times profile/article. While the general thrust of the piece is very good, there are a couple of areas where the reporting really breaks down, in a way that is pretty annoying.
One of these is just the usual breakdown whenever anything remotely quantitative comes up in media…
drorzel | April 27, 20129:30am Thursday, Starbucks
Work steadily on the work-in-progress, researching a few points here and there, adding a bunch of words, making various line edits.
11:15am Thursday, Starbucks
Realize that the stuff I added would work better if split off into a new subsection.
11:30am Thursday, Union College
Meeting with the Dean. No writing. Sigh.
1:30pm Thursday, Barnes and Noble
Revise material written earlier in the day to split new stuff off into its own subsection. Research some additional points, add a whole bunch of words. Struggle with transition between old stuff and new subsection.
5:…
drorzel | April 27, 2012Somebody on Twitter linked this article about "brogrammers", which is pretty much exactly as horrible as that godawful neologism suggests. In between descriptions of some fairly appalling behavior, though, they throw some stats at you, and that's where it gets weird:
As it is, women remain acutely underrepresented in the coding and engineering professions. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics study, in 2011 just 20 percent of all programmers were women. A smaller percentage of women are earning undergraduate computer science degrees today than they did in 1985, according to the National…
drorzel | April 27, 2012Animals Disappointed in your College Performance
This ostrich begs to differ with you. Grammar does matter.
Boston Review -- Claude S. Fischer: The Loneliness Scare
Social scientists have more precisely tracked Americans' isolation and reports of loneliness over the last several decades. The real news, they have discovered, is that there is no such epidemic; there isn't even a meaningful trend. If we turned to historians to measure Americans' degree of isolation over the centuries, they would probably find periods of growing and lessening social connection. The rough evidence indicates a…
drorzel | April 26, 2012I've been falling down on the shameless self-promotion front, lately, but that doesn't mean I'm not tracking How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog obsessively, just that I'm too busy to talk about it. Happily, other people have been nice enough to talk about it for me, in a variety of places:
The most significant, in terms of probable impact on sales, is this excerpt at BoingBoing, which is the text for the dog dialogue from Chapter 8. This is the same dialogue that became the "Looking for the Bacon Boson" video, and, indeed, they were nice enough to include the video in the post, too. Woo-hoo…
drorzel | April 26, 2012What Particle Are You? | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
I am not a particle! I am a HUMAN BEING!!
Studies in Everyday Life: Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist: My Comments on the Limits to Growth
This is my response to the recent post by UCSD physicist Tom Murphy, in which he questions an economist about the physical limits of energy consumption and its implications for economic growth. Following Murphy, I'll respond in four acts.
drorzel | April 25, 2012For something I'm working on, I'm trying to come up with good examples of interdisciplinarity making a difference in science. Specifically, I'm looking for cases where somebody with training in one field was able to make a major advance in another field because their expertise let them look at a problem in a different way, and bring a different set of techniques to bear on it.
I can think of a decent number of examples within physics-- techniques from NMR being adopted by atomic physicists, atomic physics techniques being used to address problems in condensed matter, the whole Higgs boson…
drorzel | April 25, 2012Taking in a concert doubleheader with Creed and Nickelback, the world's most hated bands - Grantland
The moment you tell people you're seeing Creed and Nickelback in concert -- on the same night, at roughly the same time, in two different venues -- it suddenly becomes a stunt. Just describing the premise seems schlocky; it's like Def Leppard playing on three different continents in 24 hours, or maybe something David Blaine would attempt if he worked for the Fuse network. The immediate assumption is that this is some type of sonic endurance test, and that no person could possibly enjoy the…
drorzel | April 24, 2012The schedule called for this to appear last Friday, but as I was just back from a funeral, yeah, not so much. I had already gone through and bookmarked a whole slew of old posts, though, so here's a recap of the 2003-2004 blogademic year (starting and ending in late June).
This year saw a few milestones, though not quite as many as the previous year. I got a grant, passed my third-year reappointment review (the first big hurdle on the way to tenure), and we had a visiting speaker from Yale one week who mentioned in passing an idea that became central to my research program.
Probably the most…
drorzel | April 24, 2012Over in Twitter-land, there's a bunch of talk about how this is National Physics Day. I don't know how I missed that, what with all the media coverage and all.
I have too much other stuff to do to generate any detailed physics content today, so we'll settle for an informal poll to mark the occasion:
Who is your favorite physicist, other than Einstein, Newton, or Feynman?
The qualifier is just to knock out the too-obvious answers, and force a little more thought. Everybody likes Einstein and Newton and Feynman, but we hear about them all the time. For a major holiday like Physics Day, let's…
drorzel | April 24, 2012Fire - Flint & Steel - Some Clarifications
"I started a fire with flint and steel." Often heard, at least in some circles. But, what does this really mean? Well, there are two very different processes that might be being talked about: Traditional Flint and Steel: Striking a hardened piece of carbon steel with a very hard rock, often flint, to generate sparks. Ferrocerium: Scraping a "magic" stick (trade names: Fire Steel, Blastmatch, Metal- Match) with something "sharp" to generate sparks. Why do we care about making a distinction?
Facts, 360 B.C.-A.D. 2012 - Chicago Tribune
Over the…