drorzel | April 1, 2012In comments to yesterday's post, Andrew G asked:
Speaking of writing, is there an errata list somewhere for "How to teach relativity to your dog"?
No, but there probably should be. I believe there's an error in one of Maxwell's equations (an incorrect sign, though you should've seen the first typeset version...), but given the length and complexity of the book, there are almost certainly other mistakes. So, if you've spotted an error, in physics, grammar, or anything else, leave a comment here, and I'll compile a list of things to fix if we ever get the chance.
drorzel | March 31, 2012Here are some excerpts from the introductory sections of the very first drafts of some book chapters:
[BLAH, BLAH, BLAHBITTY BLAH]
and
[Introductory blather goes here]
and
Blah, blah, stuff, blather.
There's a good reason for this, based on the basics of scientific writing, namely that the Introduction should give the reader a rough guide to the complete work-- exactly what you're going to say, before you go on and say it. In order to do a good job with the Introduction, you need to have a very solid idea of the shape of the finished product, and exactly what you need to mention up front…
drorzel | March 31, 2012Physics - Cultivating Extra Dimensions
The search for ways to unify and understand physical phenomena goes back to Kaluza and Klein, who in the 1920s tried to combine electromagnetism with gravity by adding a fourth spatial dimension to the usual three (plus time). More recent theoretical work has suggested that a theory of everything may need 11 spacetime dimensions. Boada et al. are suggesting an experimental strategy for investigating how matter behaves in extra dimensions. Their idea is to encode a fourth spatial dimension in an internal degree of freedom offered by atoms trapped in an…
drorzel | March 30, 2012One of the slighter slight flaws in my character is an unaccountable fondness for bad Americanized Chinese food. When I go to Starbucks to write, I walk right past a Chinese buffet restaurant, and it's a real effort not to run in and overdo it.
I occasionally try to cook stuff in this general category at home, with fairly mixed results. One thing that I've often tried to do at home is fried rice, with fairly mixed results, mostly because I don't generally have the right kind of rice on had (we mostly use medium grain rice from the "Hispanic" section of the supermarket, for no really well…
drorzel | March 30, 2012Steve Hsu has a post comparing his hand-drawn diagrams to computer-generated ones that a journal asked for instead:
He's got a pretty decent case that the hand-drawn versions are better. Though a bit more work with the graphics software could make the computer ones better.
This reminded me, though, of something I've always found interesting about scientific publishing, namely the evolution in the use of figures through the years. Whenever I need to do literature searching, I always suspect you could guess the approximate date of a paper's publication by looking at the figures.
If you go back…
drorzel | March 29, 2012The Virtuosi: Money for (almost) Nothing
I am not typically interested in lotteries. They seem silly and I am seriously beginning to question their usefulness in bringing about a good harvest. But this morning I read in the news that the Mega Millions lottery currently has a world record jackpot up for grabs. In fact, the jackpot is so big...
Tonight Show Audience: HOW BIG IS IT?
It is so big that I decided to do a little bit of analysis on the expected returns. Zing!
Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning
How did this captain know - from fifty feet away - what the father couldn't…
drorzel | March 29, 2012Last Saturday, at my book signing in Vestal, The Pip spit up a lot, several times, and wouldn't stop crying. This lasted a few hours, and by the next day, he was more or less back to normal. When I dropped him off at day care on Monday, I mentioned this, and the teachers in his room said "Oh, the stomach bug. Yeah, that's going around."
Kate stayed home Monday, feeling wretched, but was back to normal by Tuesday. Tuesday afternoon while picking SteelyKid up I started to feel achy and nauseous, and had a rotten night, but was more or less OK by Wednesday afternoon (which accounts for the lack…
drorzel | March 28, 2012The Religious Frenzy of a Court You Can't Believe In - Esquire
There are better places on the Intertoobz than this one to look either for a general overview of what may happen in the Court over the next three days -- Ezra Klein's joint did a masterful job this morning -- and, if you're looking for pundits to support your own personal opinions on what should happen, you don't need me to help you find them. But this picture makes the whole affair ring a little hollow already. What exactly are these people praying for? Are they praying for a return to the way things were? For the denial of…
drorzel | March 27, 2012I was thinking about attitudes toward physics the other day, and realized that whenever I meet somebody (not a physicist) for the first time and tell them that I'm a physicist, their initial responses most frequently fall into one of three general categories:
"You must be really smart."
"I hated that when I took it in high school/ college."
"Can you explain string theory to me?"
It occurs to me that this helps explain why physicists are not generally considered scintillating conversationalists. Because, really, where can you go from any of those starting points?
Anyway, that got me wondering…
drorzel | March 27, 2012I mentioned this in the Links Dump this morning, but Timothy Burke's post on the inherent tensions in the residential part of small college life is really excellent stuff, and deserves more than the 1000 characters I can quote in Delicious:
At Swarthmore this semester, for example, some students were deeply annoyed that the administration attempted to enforce a rule against parties between midnight and 2am on Thursday nights (or Friday mornings, to be more precise). Other students are this very minute angry that the administration has not acted more forcefully, rapidly or directly against…
drorzel | March 27, 2012Once upon a time, there were three giant hippopotamuses...
No, Daddy, it was three little pigs.
This is a completely different story, honey.
Once upon a time, there were three giant hippopotamuses, who lived together in a river in Africa.
They lived in a house.
Well, hippos spend most of their time in the water, so they really lived in the river.
But they had a house on the bank of the river, which was very nice.
OK.
And one day, something happened, which was...?
A big bad wolf came to their house!
No, honey, hippos live in Africa. They don't have big bad wolves in Africa.
Oh. Ummm... A…
drorzel | March 27, 2012No More Mister Nice Blog
The paranoia of George Zimmerman had a large, race-specific fear component, but I'd say it also had elements of pleasure. I see this in what gun fans say all the time -- they like thinking of themselves as besieged, and as people who have the means to defend themselves if attacked. They really want their paranoid fantasies to come true, because it turns what's largely a matter of personal enjoyment (they like guns) into a matter of being heroes of society. They hope they get to stop scary hordes of "urban" marauders from committing horrendous crimes of violence. They…
drorzel | March 26, 2012The title says it all: an animated video of Heisenberg singing about the Uncertainty Principle:
So, you know, there's that. It's pretty good, but he's no Feynman:
And that's your silly musical break for the day.
drorzel | March 26, 2012 Richard Feyman famously once said that the double-slit experiment done with electrons contains everything that's "'at the heart of quantum physics." It shows both particle and wave character very clearly: the individual electrons are detected one at a time, like particles, but the result of a huge number of detections clearly traces out an interference pattern, which is unambiguously a wave phenomenon. The experiment has been done lots of times, but a particularly nice realization of it comes from Hitachi's R&D department, where you can see both still images and video of their experiment…
drorzel | March 26, 2012Tutorial and Critique Services -- Debra Doyle, Ph.D.
Now-a-days, lots of folks are self-publishing. I'm doing it myself. If you're planning to self-publish, and if you haven't yet heard the advice that since you're now a publisher you need to hire an editor, well, you will. Other folks want to learn to write. A one-on-one session with an experienced teacher can teach you to fish. If you know what I mean. Therefore: I am putting my writing and teaching expertise up for sale. What I will do: Critique and line-edit your novel. A critique generally runs 3-5 pages, and covers structural and…
drorzel | March 25, 2012I had a signing yesterday at the Barnes & Noble in Vestal, NY, which drew a smallish crowd mostly of friends and family. SteelyKid came, of course, and while she spent most of her time bopping about other parts of the store, she came over to the signing area while I was signing books for people after reading a bit. They had a big stack of copies of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, and she started picking them up and handing them to me.
"No, honey," I said, "Those are for other people. Give them to somebody else." So she happily ran one over to my mother. And then to one of my aunts.…
drorzel | March 23, 2012So, the previous post poses a physics question based on some previous fooling around with modeling my commute:
A car starts from rest at the beginning of a straight 1km course, accelerates up to some speed, cruises at constant speed for a while, then decelerates to a stop at the end of the course. A second, identical car does the same course, but decelerates to a stop at the halfway point. It then immediately accelerates back to its cruising speed, and then decelerates to a stop at the end of the course.
How much faster does the second car have to go in order to complete the course in the…
drorzel | March 23, 2012Back in the summer, I did a post mathematically comparing two routes to campus, one with a small number of traffic lights, the other with a larger number of stop signs, and looked at which would be faster. Later on, I did the experiment, too.) Having spent a bunch of time on this, I was thinking about whether I could use this as a problem for the intro physics class. I decided against it last fall, but something else reminded me of this, and I started poking at it again.
So, I played around a bit with some numbers, and came up with the following possible framing for a question. I'll throw…
drorzel | March 23, 2012The quick publicity items for this weekend:
1) I will be on the Science Fantastic radio show either Saturday or Sunday, depending on when your local affiliate runs it (or when you choose to livestream it over the Internet). The interview has already been recorded, which leaves me free for:
2) I will be signing and possibly reading from the new book at the Barnes and Noble store in Vestal, NY at 2pm on Saturday. If you're fortunate enough to live in the Southern Tier, stop by and say hi.
drorzel | March 23, 2012Not To Us, And To Us | Storied Theology
"Not to us" is an important step in biblical interpretation. We need to have ears to hear how a story would have resonated with Babylonian exiles; we need ears to hear how "Jesus is Lord" might have resonated, or caused dissonance, for a first century Roman. We need to know that when we read, "Expel the immoral brother!" that it is a word for a first century church and might not be God's word to us about, say, the man in our meetings with a flatulence problem. "Not to us" is a significant moment in our biblical interpretation.
Every scientist's worst…