drorzel | April 23, 2012Via Joerg Heber on Twitter, a great post on gender divisions in STEM by Athene Donald:
As children try to work out their personal identities, the difference between 'boy' and 'girl' is as fundamental and omnipresent as it gets - and they receive the clear messages that collectively society gives out about the attributes implicitly associated with that distinction. Inevitably they are likely to 'hear' the message that boys are noisy, into everything and generally vigorous and enquiring, whereas girls are 'expected' to be good, docile, nurturing and passive. Parents may do all they can to…
drorzel | April 23, 2012How do I get my students to prepare before coming to a flipped class? - Turn to Your Neighbor: The Official Peer Instruction Blog
A whole lot of words about the virtues of Peer Instruction and Just-in-Time Teaching, followed by a one-paragraph response to the question in the title. Don't blink or you might miss it.
Screening Out the Introverts - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education
While I have some sympathy, I'm not sure how far you can really go to lessen the strain on introverts in academia given that one of the primary professional activities necessarily involves talking to a room…
drorzel | April 21, 2012Dark Matter: Now You See It, Now You Don't | Of Particular Significance
Both claims that I'm about to describe use novel techniques, and their analyses have not been repeated by anyone else. At this point you should understand that both are tentative, and (based on the history of radical claims) the odds are against them. Both might be wrong. That said, both analyses look to me as though they've been reasonably well done, and if a mistake has been made, it will require someone far more expert in dark matter studies than I am to point it out. So let me describe them in turn, to the best of my…
drorzel | April 20, 2012Reading Ethan Zuckerman's recap of the awful things people said to Xeni Jardin during a recent "twttier bomb" fiasco, it would be very easy to slide into "People suck" mode. Particularly since a large part of my day yesterday was spent in New York traffic. So here's a quick antidote, also from yesterday:
When I got back here yesterday evening, after driving 500-ish miles in the last two days, and not getting a whole lot of sleep, I was pretty fried. So much so that on the way to pick the kids up from day care, I lost my phone. Apparently, I put it on top of the car when I got in, and it fell…
drorzel | April 20, 2012Yesterday was the funeral for my great-aunt Mildred, known within the family as "Auntie" (first syllable "ont" not "ant"), who fell and bumped her head last Friday, and just never woke up. On the one hand, she was 97, so this shouldn't be too surprising, but a few years ago she moved out of a retirement community, because she preferred to be on her own. We always assumed she'd outlive us all, through sheer orneriness, so this was a nasty shock.
She had a really interesting life. Born a month before WWI, as a teenager during the Depression she got a job for the telephone company and moved out…
drorzel | April 18, 2012Yesterday's post on applying intro physics concepts to the question of how fast and how long football players might accelerate generated a bunch of comments, several of them claiming that the model I used didn't match real data in the form of race clips and the like. One comment in particular linked to a PDF file including 10m "splits" for two Usain Bolt races, including a complicated model showing that he was still accelerating at 70m into the race. How does this affect my argument from yesterday?
Well, that document is really a guide to fancy fitting routines on some sort of graphing…
drorzel | April 18, 2012What's up in the solar system in April 2012 - The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary Society
Lest you get too depressed about the mothballing of the Space Shuttles, a roundup of all the cool space probes out there producing real science.
Yes, I Took My Ninth Grader on a College Tour (and It Was Worth It) - NYTimes.com
The purpose of bringing busloads of middle-school children to campuses is not to emphasize a particular place. Mr. O'Hara says he downplays the names of particular campuses. They visit student centers, libraries and dorms, take in a varsity basketball game, and meet with…
drorzel | April 17, 2012Over at Grantland, Bill Barnwell offers some unorthodox suggestions for replacing the kickoff in NFL games, which has apparently been floated as a way to improve player safety. Appropriately enough, the suggestion apparently came from Giants owner John Mara, which makes perfect sense giving that the Giants haven't had a decent kick returner since Dave Meggett twenty years ago, and their kick coverage team has lost them multiple games by giving up touchdowns to the other team.
Anyway, one of Barnwell's suggestions invoked physics, in a way that struck me as puzzling:
Idea 3: The receiving team…
drorzel | April 17, 2012A few thoughts on Hilary Rosen, moms and work
But instead of engaging Rosen's points, the media storm is about how Democrats Hate Mothers. Or, Democrats Hate GOOD Mothers -- you know, the kind who stay at home. The women the Democrats like are those slutty Planned Parenthood sluts, or something. And while all the Democratic and Republican spokespeople (including President Obama) seem to agree that being a mother is THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB IN THE WORLD: -None of the men who think parenthood is THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB IN THE WORLD seem willing to do it full-time themselves, even when, like Mitt…
drorzel | April 16, 2012My Google vanity search for my name and the book titles is really frustratingly spotty, often missing things in major news outlets that I later find by other means. For example, I didn't get a notification about this awesome review in the Guardian, from their children's book section:
I am a ten year old who likes Physics. What is Physics, you might ask! Well, Physics is the science of pretty much everything around you. It asks big questions like where did we come from? How long ago was the Big Bang? Quantum Physics is the part of physics which talks about atomic and sub atomic particles,…
drorzel | April 16, 2012Sparks Fly Over Shoestring Test Of 'Holographic Principle'
" "The beauty of it is that we have the people who can come up with this low-risk, high-reward experiment," says Fermilab's Raymond Tomlin. "It's one shot, and if you discover something you go to Stockholm [to collect a Nobel Prize]. And if you don't see anything, you set a limit." Not everyone cheers the effort, however. In fact, Leonard Susskind, a theorist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and co-inventor of the holographic principle, says the experiment has nothing to do with his brainchild. "The idea that this…
drorzel | April 15, 2012We found out yesterday that one of my great-aunts, who recently moved out of a retirement community because she wanted to live by herself, fell and banged her head badly. While she apparently seemed okay at the time, a short while later she collapsed, and is vanishingly unlikely to recover. While it seems weird to say that someone who's 97 is dying too soon, well, we always assumed she would outlive us all through sheer orneriness, so this is a nasty shock.
Thus, we're badly in need of some cute around here. Happily, the kids' day care was closed on Friday for Passover, and my mom came up…
drorzel | April 14, 2012Microsoft Word is cumbersome, inefficient, and obsolete. It's time for it to die. - Slate Magazine
Nowadays, I get the same feeling of dread when I open an email to see a Microsoft Word document attached. Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone's archaic habits. A Word file is the story-fax of the early 21st century: cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology. It's time to give up on Word. It took years for me to get to this point. I came of age with Word. It's the program I used to write my college papers, overcoming old-fashioned page…
drorzel | April 13, 2012As threatened a little while ago, this is the first of ten hopefully weekly posts looking back at the ten years this blog has been in operation. This one covers the period from the very first post on June 22, 2002 to June 21, 2003.
When I started doing this look back, I was more than a little afraid that it would prove cringe-inducing. It's been ten years, after all, and in that time I've gone from a wet-behind-the-ears, recently married assistant professor to a tenured father of two and a published author. That's enough external change that I was expecting my early posts to seem, well,…
drorzel | April 12, 2012The big publishing news this week is the US Department of Justice bringing an anti-trust suit against the major book publishers and Apple for allegedly colluding to force the "agency model" of ebook pricing on Amazon and other retailers, resulting in higher prices for consumers. I already links dumped an article about the detailed charges, and three of the six companies involved have agreed to a settlement that will change the way their books get priced. A couple of the publishers, particularly Macmillan, whose nasty public spat with Amazon kicked this whole thing off, have decided to fight…
drorzel | April 12, 2012I'm re-instituting the quota system for the moment-- no blogging until I make some substantive progress on the current work-in-progress-- but I'll throw out a quick post here to note a media appearance: Physics World has a podcast about books on quantum physics up today:
Since its inception in the early part of the 20th century, the theory of quantum mechanics has consistently baffled many of the great physicists of our time. But while the ideas of quantum physics are challenging and notoriously weird, they seem to capture the public imagination and hold an enduring appeal. Evidence of this…
drorzel | April 12, 2012What Is Science? From Feynman to Sagan to Curie, an Omnibus of Definitions | Brain Pickings
So, what exactly is science, what does it aspire to do, and why should we the people care? It seems like a simple question, but it's an infinitely complex one, the answer to which is ever elusive and contentious. Gathered here are several eloquent definitions that focus on science as process rather than product, whose conduit is curiosity rather than certainty.
Inside the DOJ's ebook price-fixing case against Apple: an analysis | The Verge
We just got our hands on the DOJ's antitrust complaint against…
drorzel | April 11, 2012A passing mention in last week's post about impostors and underdogs got me thinking about Michael Faraday again, and I went looking for a good biography of him. The last time looked, I didn't find any in electronic form, probably because the Sony Reader store has a lousy selection. I got a Nook for Christmas, though, and this time, Alan Hirshfeld's 2006 biography, The Electric Life of Michael Faraday was right there, so I picked it up and read it over the weekend.
It was a fast read, both because this is a short popular biography-- 250-odd pages-- and because Faraday's life story makes for…
drorzel | April 11, 2012I've had limited success with this query on Twitter, probably because not that many people were reading late last night when I posted this, but I can give a little more context here, so it's worth repeating:
As part of something I'm working on but won't talk about yet, I'm interested in learning something about the context in which Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species.... For that reason, I'm looking for a recommendation of a book about the book, as it were: ideally something fairly concise that talks about the antecedents of Darwin's work. I'm sort of dimly aware that there were other…
drorzel | April 11, 2012Denim and Tweed: Asking permission
Last May, the Republican-controlled state legislature voted to amend the Minnesota Constitution, adding a thirteenth section to the "Miscellaneous Items" of the Constitution's Article XIII to declare, "Only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Minnesota." The Democratic governor's veto was purely symbolic; in Minnesota, the fate of constitutional amendments proposed by the legislature is determined by statewide ballot. So seven months later, I started calling total strangers and asking them to vote against the…