drorzel | January 6, 2012On last month's post about the public innumeracy of a Florida school board member, Tom Singer posts an update, which includes a link to a follow-up at the Washington Post blog that started the whole thing. In the course of rounding up reactions to the original, the author, Valerie Strauss, writes:
In fact, there were a lot of readers who responded to the posts saying exactly what Roach suggested: He's been out of school too long. Others questioned why a successful businessman couldn't pass 10th-grade math. (I looked at FCAT 10th-grade questions and couldn't do them myself, but math has always…
drorzel | January 6, 2012
Frontier experiments: Tough science : Nature News & Comment
As the media spotlight shines on the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and its high-profile hunt for a certain boson, other scientists are pressing forward with experiments that are just as challenging -- and just as potentially transformative. These often unsung researchers are willing to spend years or even decades getting a finicky instrument to run smoothly; setting up proper controls to minimize spurious results; beating back noise that threatens to swamp their signal; and striving for an ever more painstaking level of…
drorzel | January 5, 2012Anybody who has taught introductory physics has noticed the tendency, particuarly among weaker students, to plug numbers into equations at the first opportunity, and spend the rest of the problem manipulating nine-digit decimal numbers (because, of course, you want to copy down all the digits the calculator gives you. Many faculty, myself included, find this kind of maddening, as it's pretty much the opposite of what professional physicists do-- we tend to work primarily with equations in abstract, symbolic form, and plug numbers in only at the very end of the problem.
Thus, very few people…
drorzel | January 5, 2012
The Messenger - Ta-Nehisi Coates - Politics - The Atlantic
I've thought a lot about Farrakhan, recently, watching Ron Paul's backers twist themselves in knots to defend what they have now euphemistically label as "baggage." I don't think it makes much sense to try to rebut the charges here. No minds will be changed. Still let us remember that we are faced with a candidate who published racism under his name, defended that publication when it was convenient, and blamed it on ghost-writers when it wasn't, whose take on the Civil War is at home with Lost-Causers, and whose take on the Civil…
drorzel | January 4, 2012As mentioned a few times previously, the class I'm teaching this term is a "Scholars Research Seminar" on time and timekeeping. As this is an entirely new course, and will be consuming a lot of my mental energy, I plan to post occasional reports on what I'm doing to the blog.
Today was the first day of class, so a good chunk of the time was spent on introducing the basics of the course (my PowerPoint slides, for those who care), and going through one slightly silly example.
The stated learning goals for SRS courses (students should learn how to formulate a research question, find and evaluate…
drorzel | January 4, 2012It's the first day of class today (for me, anyway-- classes technically started yesterday, but I don't teach on Tuesdays this term). This, of course, means that something will go horribly wrong. The question is, what?
What will go wrong on the first day of class today?
This is a class for first-year students, so quantum superpositions of multiple answers are not allowed.
drorzel | January 3, 2012I'm a little late to the Most Popular Posts of the Year list party, partly because I wanted to wait until the year was actually over, and partly because Google Analytics was being Difficult, and I had to switch back to the "old" version to get actual numbers out. Having sorted that out, though, here are the top posts to this blog for the calendar year 2011:
Because 4% of the Energy Controls 100% of the Photons, 28607 pageviews
Links for 2011-09-04, 11470 pageviews
The Innumeracy of Educators; or Mark Twain Was Right, 9048 pageviews
Faster Than a Speeding Photon: "Measurement of the neutrino…
drorzel | January 3, 2012
Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us | Magazine
For "Science" read "Medical Science" throughout, but other than that, it's a good discussion of the problem of biological complexity.
Teach For America: A Review of the Evidence | National Education Policy Center
Teach For America (TFA) aims to address teacher shortages by sending graduates from elite colleges, most of whom do not have a background in education, to teach in low-income rural and urban schools for a two-year commitment. The impact of these graduates is hotly debated by those who, on the one hand, see this as a way to…
drorzel | January 2, 2012My class this term is a "Scholars Research Seminar" with the title "A Brief History of Timekeeping," looking at the science and technology of timekeeping from prehistory through modern atomic clocks. This is nominally an introduction to "research methods," though the class operates under a lot of constraints that fully justify the scare quotes, at least for scientists. As I am a scientist, though, I want the class to include at least one original measurement and the reporting thereof, so I've been thinking of really simple measurements that I can have them do independently and write up. I've…
drorzel | December 31, 2011A while back, a reader from Bulgaria sent me a photo of a highly topical bottle of local spirits:
You can either know where you are, or how much you've drunk, but not both...
Having spent my last day of 2011 taking SteelyKid to the mall for bouncy-bounce and midway games, and then having her help me bake apple pie (which she demanded to do out of nowhere, and wouldn't stop talking about), I could really use a shot of quantum liquor. Or even some classical beer.
Sadly, I'm fighting a wretched cold, so booze is out of the question. But if you're in a partying state, have a drink for me. And…
drorzel | December 31, 2011
Determining the ultimate champion from the year that was - Grantland
It wasn't until I attempted to fill a draw of 64, and got stuck at 7, did I realize what a huge year this was for losers. If you weren't getting financially screwed over, you were probably getting divorced, locked up, or pepper sprayed. That's how I'll always remember 2011. With that said, I was still determined to identify and either celebrate or hate on the winners of 2011. After days of Googling "best _____ of 2011" and "who still has a credit score going into 2012", a draw of 32 was completed, with people, innovations,…
drorzel | December 30, 2011I will eventually do a "Year in Blog" post with a bunch of links to top posts and so on, but not until the year is actually over. At the moment, I'm too busy prepping next term's class to do all the link chasing.
That doesn't mean I can't engage in a little self-promotion, though. After all, my second book, How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog will be out at the end of February. And the first pre-publication review is in, from Publishers Weekly:
Physics professor Orzel follows his How to Teach Physics to Your Dog with a compact and instructive walk through Einstein's theory of relativity,…
drorzel | December 29, 2011
Tests Cast Doubt on F.A.A. Restrictions on Kindle and iPad - NYTimes.com
The Federal Aviation Administration has its reasons for preventing passengers from reading from their Kindles and iPads during takeoff and landing. But they just don't add up. Since I wrote a column last month asking why these rules exist, I've spoken with the F.A.A., American Airlines, Boeing and several others trying to find answers. Each has given me a radically different rationale that contradicts the others. The F.A.A. admits that its reasons have nothing to do with the undivided attention of passengers or the fear…
drorzel | December 28, 2011
Armageddon Rock by Alan Smale | Lightspeed Magazine
The Doomsday Asteroid is coming. An immense boulder with our name on it is cruising through the Solar System, and we all know what will happen when it arrives.
Innumeracy on the Faculty! | Blog
I'm convinced that the Standards for Mathematical Practice are doomed to fail in most schools. Why? Because it seems that most teachers and principals don't understand a simple fact: to teach elementary school math well, you have to know elementary school math really well. And most people (be they teachers, principals or otherwise) simply don't…
drorzel | December 27, 2011One of The Pip's Christmas presents simply demands to be shown off here:
This is a baby blanket knitted by his awesome Aunt Anastasia, with three physics equations on it. They're subtle, but if you look closely, you can read them: E=mc2, V=IR, and F=ma.
All the other babies will be jealous of his knowledge of physics (once he starts day care in March, anyway). For now, here's a show of appreciation from the little dude himself:
He's waving his little fist in the air, saying "Rock on, Aunt 'Stasia!"
(The actual rocking in this case was being done by big sister SteelyKid:
Check out the…
drorzel | December 24, 2011As we started the last week of the advent calendar, I was trying to map out the final days, and was coming up one equation short. I was running through various possibilities-- the Dirac equation, Feynman's path integrals, the Standard Model Lagrangian, when I realized that the answer was staring me right in the face:
This is, of course, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, saying that the product of the uncertainties in position and momentum has to be greater than some minimum value. Strictly speaking, this should've come before the Schrödinger equation, if we were holding to chronological…
drorzel | December 23, 2011A week and a half ago, when the advent calendar reached Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, I said that it was the first equation we had seen that wasn't completely correct. Having done our quick swing through quantum physics, the time has come to correct that equation:
If you say "Einstein equation" to a random person on the street, odds are they'll immediatley think of "E=mc2." If you ask a physicist to think of the Einstein equation, though, this is the one they'll think of. This is the Einstein field equation from general relativity, and while it's not as well known as E=mc2, it's…
drorzel | December 22, 2011Newton's birthday (in the Julian calendar) is Sunday, so we're in the final days of the advent calendar. Which means it's time for the equations that are least like anything Newton did, such as today's:
This is the Schrödinger equation from non-relativistic quantum mechanics. If you want to determine the quantum state of an object that's moving relatively slowly, this is the equation you would use.
It also has probably the greatest origin story of any of the equations we've talked about. Or at least the most salacious origin story of any of the equations we've talked about...
Erwin…
drorzel | December 22, 2011
Reminder: Tis the Season Not to Be an Ass Ä°Ëâ¬" Whatever
But -- but -- what about all those horrible atheists taking over holiday displays with crucified Santa skeletons? Surely that's evidence of a war! Well, no, it's evidence of some non-believers taking a page out of the PETA playbook, i.e., being dicks to get attention and to make a point. I do strongly suspect that if we didn't have some certain excitable conservatives playing The War on Christmas card when a business says "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas," and such, there would be less incentive for certain excitable non…
drorzel | December 21, 2011Today's equation in our march to Newton's birthday is actually a tiny bit out of order, historically speaking:
This is the Rydberg formula for the wavelengths of the spectral lines in hydrogen (and hydrogen-like ions), with R a constant having the appropriate units, and the two n's being two dimensionless integers. This equation was developed in 1888 by the Swedish physicist Johannes Rydberg (who was generalizing from a formula for the visible lines of hydrogen that was worked out by a Swiss schoolteacher, Johann Balmer). As such, it pre-dates Einstein's equation from yesterday, but its…