drorzel | January 6, 2011I've reached a point in the book-in-progress where I find myself needing to talk a little about particle physics. As this is very much not my field, this quickly led to a situation where the dog asked a question I can't answer. But, hey, that's why I have a blog with lots of smart readers...
The question is this:
What are all these extra particles for?
Or, to put it in slightly more physics-y terms: The Standard Model contains twelve material particles: six leptons (the electron, muon, and tau, plus associated neutrinos) and six quarks (up-down, strange-charm, top-bottom). The observable…
drorzel | January 6, 2011Not an exhaustive list, but since I'm noodling around with my calendar, I might as well note some of the stuff I'll be doing this year:
I'll be on a panel about international science testing at the AAAS Annual Meeting in February. This will be a different experience-- not only have I never been to a AAAS meeting before, the whole thing appears to be organized in a different manner than any meeting I have been to. I'm doing a bit of a drive-by for this-- coming in Friday afternoon, leaving Sunday evening-- but I have classes to teach.
I've been invited to give a Saturday Morning Science…
drorzel | January 6, 2011
The decline of the serial killer. - By Christopher Beam - Slate Magazine
Serial killers just aren't the sensation they used to be. They haven't disappeared, of course. Last month, Suffolk County, N.Y., police found the bodies of four women dumped near a beach in Long Island. Philadelphia police have attributed the murders of three women in the city's Kensington neighborhood to one "Kensington Strangler." On Tuesday, an accused serial stabber in Flint, Mich., filed an insanity plea.
But the number of serial murders seems to be dwindling, as does the public's fascination with them. "It does…
drorzel | January 5, 2011Kate and SteelyKid have colds (well, they're sharing the same cold), so SteelyKid is waking up a lot during the night. Since Kate needs rest as well, she put earplugs in last night (she's a much lighter sleeper than I am), and I took baby-soothing duty. So I was up half the night.
I come in for my 9:15 class, turn on the projector so I can project my slides, and the projector is dead. A bunch of fiddling with it reveals that it's not just a blown bulb (which happened Monday morning), but a broken projector. So, no lecture slides.
"All right," I say, "I'll just do a chalk-talk using my…
drorzel | January 5, 2011Back in the fall, I got an email from my UK publisher asking me if I'd be willing to read and possibly blurb a forthcoming book, The Four Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality by Richard Panek. The book isn't exactly in my field, but there really wasn't any way I'd turn down a request like that. Coincidentally, I received an ARC of the book a few days later from the US publisher. They weren't asking for a blurb, but I'm always happy to get free books.
From the title, I expected this to be another book laying out the now-standard model (if not…
drorzel | January 5, 2011
To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor - NYTimes.com
"Today, however, Brazil's level of economic inequality is dropping at a faster rate than that of almost any other country. Between 2003 and 2009, the income of poor Brazilians has grown seven times as much as the income of rich Brazilians. Poverty has fallen during that time from 22 percent of the population to 7 percent.
Contrast this with the United States, where from 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the increase in Americans' income went to the top 1 percent of earners. (see this great series in Slate by Timothy Noah on American…
drorzel | January 4, 2011There was a faintly awful essay by Melissa Nicolas at Inside Higher Ed yesterday, giving MLA job candidates advice on how to dress:
Let's start with your shoes. Anyone who has been to MLA knows that it is a big conference, and whether you are on a search committee, attending sessions, or interviewing, you are most likely going to be doing a lot of walking. In a city. Often in the cold (though not this year!). While it is certainly inappropriate to come in your Wellies, teetering into the room on heels that are as stable as a university's endowment sends the message that you might not be a…
drorzel | January 4, 2011
nsf.gov - SRS The End of Mandatory Retirement for Doctoral Scientists and Engineers in Postsecondary Institutions: Retirement Patterns 10 Years Later - US National Science Foundation (NSF)
"Mandatory retirement in postsecondary educational institutions ended in 1994. In this paper, examination of retirements in 1993 (just before the end of this practice) and again 10 years later shows that by 2003, the age distribution of doctoral scientists and engineers working in postsecondary institutions had shifted, with a larger proportion being older than 56 years of age, compared with 1993. However…
drorzel | January 3, 2011The clock in my classroom for this term appears to be set five minutes slow. Which is an improvement over the one in the hall that's ten minutes slow, but kind of plays hell with starting and ending class on time. It is, however, a great excuse for a poll:
Clocks in academic buildings should be set:survey software
Combine the odd clock settings with our daft class schedule (to make our ten-week terms nominally equivalent to standard semester classes, we teach in 65-minute blocks instead of the more typical 50-minute blocks. This means that classes start and end at odd times, which I've…
drorzel | January 3, 2011It's the first day of the new term, and the projector bulb that was working on Friday decided to stop working by Sunday. After that bit of excitement this morning, plus my lecture, I'm beat. I always forget how much talking is involved in intro physics lectures.
My class for the term is the first term of introductory physics, which seems like a good idea for a poll:
What is your favorite part of Newtonian physics?online survey
Given the book we use, "The Momentum Principle," "The Energy Principle," and "The Angular Momentum Principle" would be better names for what I've got in mind, but it'…
drorzel | January 3, 2011
Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems
"I know what you're thinking : crystallographic and thermodynamic data of ternary alloy systems is a such a hackneyed plot device. But Landolt-Börnstein work their magic in such a subtle and layered way that at 3am when you are reading just one more page, you suddenly realise how they have completely turned everything on its head and produced the most breathtakingly original work. Not to mention the most spellbinding. "
(tags: amazon books technology engineering nuclear silly)
ScienceLeaks
"This blog exists…
drorzel | January 2, 2011Because I'm sure everybody is as fascinated by blog stats as I am, here's the traffic to this blog for 2010, in graphical form:
In case you can't numerically integrate that in your head, I'll tell you that the total number of pageviews represented there is a bit more than 908,000. We have yet to crack the million mark in any one year, but the total number of pageviews over the history of ScienceBlogs is just short of 3.9 million. Not too shabby.
Looking at the overall traffic states for the five years (five years!) that I've been blogging at ScienceBlogs, the thing I'm happiest about is this…
drorzel | January 2, 2011I had vaguely meant to do a year-in-review post yesterday, like every other blogger running on the Gregorian calendar, but SteelyKid blew that plan to bits by refusing to take her nap until 2pm. It's also kind of difficult to say much of anything coherent about 2010. It was a good year in a lot of ways-- How to Teach Physics to Your Dog officially came out in 2009, but most of the stuff about it was in 2010, and I sold a second talking-to-the-dog book over the summer-- but there were also parts of it that sucked-- pretty much anything to do with politics prior to December, for example.
If I…
drorzel | January 2, 2011
What's stats got to do with it? - Expression Patterns Blog | Nature Publishing Group
"I recently learned that I have an above average number of legs. This is no cause for concern: most of you do, too. It was something I first learned when watching Hans Rosling's The Joy of Stats BBC documentary. He pointed out that, since there are a few people with only one leg or none at all, the average number of legs is about 1.99 - just short of most people's two.
It shows that sometimes statistics are meaningless. There is no practical application to knowing the exact average number of legs per person…
drorzel | January 1, 2011
How can I be a more awesome crackpot?
"Let me begin by saying that the vast, vast majority of the emails and questions I get are really good. But every now and again, I'll get an email where the implied question (if there is any) isn't so much,"Is this theory any good?" but:
How can my crackpot theory be more awesome?
While I've gotten a few that admit of no correction whatsoever, there are a few that still need a bit of work before making it to crackpot greatness.
As a public service (and as a bit of a respite after my last few relatively hardcore columns), let me tell you what separates…
drorzel | December 31, 2010Late last year, Matthew Beckler was nice enough to make a sales rank tracker for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Changes in the Amazon page format made it stop working a while ago, though, and now Amazon reports roughly equivalent data via its AuthorCentral feature, with the added bonus of BookScan sales figures. So I've got a new source for my book sales related cat-vacuuming.
Still, there's this great big data file sitting there with thousands of hourly sales rank numbers, and I thought to myself "I ought to be able to do something else amusing with this..." And then Corky at the Virtuosi…
drorzel | December 31, 2010Lookit the shiny:
That's a new Droid X smartphone, and it's mine. I got it yesterday after discovering the existence of a slightly cheaper "data only" plan that is so secret only about 10% of Verizon Wireless employees know it exists. As my previous phone was a freebie LG flip phone from about three years ago that didn't even have a camera, let alone any "apps," this is a big step.
I activated it late last night (early this morning, really), but haven't done anything more than really basic set-up on it. I am not allowed to play with it until after I finish the revisions to Chapter 5 of the…
drorzel | December 31, 2010
Christopher Guest | Film | Gateways To Geekery | The A.V. Club
"No comic filmmaker is more intimately associated with improvisation than Christopher Guest, an alum of The National Lampoon Radio Hour and Saturday Night Live who made his name as a filmmaker co-writing, directing, and co-starring in improvised films riffing loosely on show business and music. In his most beloved films as a director, Guest comes up with a loose framework for a film with collaborator Eugene Levy, then has a cast of skilled, veteran improvisers fill in the blanks with their comical genius. "
(tags: avclub movies…
drorzel | December 30, 2010I nearly forgot to post tonight's Toddler Blogging photos, which would've been a Bad Thing, as you can tell from this picture. Toddler Blogging is Serious Business:
That's not the best Appa-for-scale picture, but I love the intense look on her face. This was taken in our spiffy, newly refinished basement, which is the new permanent home of SteelyKid's kitchen:
Here, she is holding forth on the virtues of chili powder. Appa's perched on the back of the futon we have down there, because he's not entirely convinced about her cooking.
You can get a better sense of the room, and the…
drorzel | December 30, 2010I've shifted the iTunes shuffle from the Christmas-music playlist over to the top-rated songs of the year playlist because, well, it's the time of year when anybody with any pretension of writing about pop culture does some sort of Top N list to wrap up the year. And, since I've got "pop culture" right up there in the masthead, that means I should do one as well.
The following list is all the five-star rated songs that iTunes has a "2010" date for, with a bunch of remastered Rolling Stones tracks deleted, because really, while "Sweet Virginia" is a fantastic song, it's not remotely a 2010…