Back in October or so, SteelyKid's first-grade class started a weekly journaling exercise. Every Monday, we were supposed to send in a sheet with some prompts on it-- words about something interesting that happened over the weekend, and the kids started the day writing about... whatever it was. I was a little dubious about having six-year-olds write journal entries, but, you know, I'm happy to defer to professional teachers, so we did it. Most weeks. some days we forgot, or SteelyKid would get all muley and refuse to help think of a topic and words. Yesterday was the end-of-year party for…

I'm massively short on sleep today, and wasn't going to blog until I saw somebody on Facebook mention that June 5th 1995 is the date of record for the first Bose-Einstein condensate at JILA in Boulder. I couldn't let that pass, so I wrote it up for Forbes: Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1995, I was a young grad student having just finished my second year at Maryland, and one morning I packed into the conference room at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg (where I worked in the group of Bill Phillips) with most of the rest of the Atomic Physics…

Over at Wired, Rhett has a post providing mathematical proof that he takes too many photos. As is traditional, he includes homework at the end of the post, specifically: Now it is your turn. Find the number of photos you have taken each year. Is it possible for you to detect changes in your life by significant changes in the image rate? Maybe you purchased a new phone or had a new addition to your family which resulted in an increase in images. That would be cool if you could see that in your data. Well, I can't really resist a challenge like that, so I went looking at my own photo…

As much for my own future reference as anything else, some thoughts on the bits of the Hugo ballot that aren't Best Novel (which I've already talked about). At this point, I've probably read as much of the voter packet as I'm going to (though if I've left out something actually good, I could go back and pick it up...). That doesn't mean I've read everything-- there are quite a few things on there I'm not going to bother with because, you know, life is just too short-- but I've read those that seemed worth a shot. In the short fiction categories, two of the longer nominees were weirdly…

Last week, the blog Last Word On Nothing did a piece on the best and worst sciences to write about, and the two writers tapping physics as the worst said things that were really disappointing to hear from professional writers. I nearly wrote an angry rant here in response, but Jennifer Ouellette covered it more diplomatically than I would've, so I opted to try for a more positive response over at Forbes: Four Reasons to Not Fear Physics. Would've been better to get this out much earlier in the week, but it's the next-to-last week of the term, and I was buried in grading all this week, and it'…

Last week, I did a post for Forbes on the surprisingly complicated physics of a light bulb. Incandescent light bulbs produce a spectrum that's basically blackbody radiation, but if you think about it, that's kind of amazing given that the atoms making up the filament have quantized states, and can absorb and emit only discrete frequencies of light. The transition from the line spectra characteristic of particular atoms to the broad and smooth spectrum of black-body radiation is kind of amazing. The way you get from the one to the other is through repeated off-resonant scattering. The…

As the Hugo nomination debacle unfolded, one of the few bright spots was the replacement of Marko Kloos's novel with The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, who is apparently a Big Name in SF in China. This got a good deal of buzz when it was released in the US, and I've sorta-kinda been meaning to read it for a while. Having it move onto the Hugo ballot provided a great excuse to finally crack it open. And given that I wasn't blown away by the other two non-Puppy nominees on the slate, or the one Puppy book that I had already read, I had great hopes this would redeem the category. Alas, it was…

I was proctoring an exam yesterday in two different sections of the same class, so I had a lot of quite time. Which means I wrote not one but two new posts for Forbes... The first continues a loose series of posts about the exotic physics behind everyday objects (something I'm toying with as a possible theme for a new book...), looking at the surprisingly complicated physics of an incandescent light bulb. A light bulb filament emits (to a reasonable approximation) black-body radiation, which is historically important as the starting point for quantum physics. But when you think about it, it's…

One of the highlights of teaching introductory mechanics is always the "karate board" lab, which I start off by punching through a wooden board. That gets the class's attention, and then we have them hang weights on boards and measure the deflection in response to a known force. This confirms that the board behaves like a spring, and you can analyze the breaking in terms of energy, estimating the energy stored in the board, and the speed a fist must have to punch through the board. As a sort of empirical test, we can drop a half-kilogram mass from the appropriate height to match the…

The big social media blow-up of the weekend was, at least on the science-y side of things, the whole "boys with toys" thing, stemming from this NPR interview, which prompted the #GirlsWithToys hashtag in response. I'm not sorry to have missed most of the original arguments while doing stuff with the kids, but the hashtag has some good stuff. The really unfortunate thing about this is that the point the guy was trying to make in the interview was a good one: there's an essentially playful component to science, even at the professional level. I took a stab at making this same point over at…

One of the points I make repeatedly in teaching introductory mechanics (as I'm doing this term) is that absolutely every problem students encounter can, in principle, be solved using just Newton's Laws or, in the terminology used by Matter and Interactions, the Momentum Principle. You don't strictly need any of the other stuff we talk about, like energy or angular momentum. Of course, just because you can solve any problem using the Momentum Principle doesn't mean that you want to solve those problems that way. As an example of a problem that's really annoying to solve with just the Momentum…

A few things about the academic job market have caught my eye recently, but don't really add up to a big coherent argument. I'll note them here, though, to marginally increase the chance that I'll be able to find them later. -- First, this piece at the Guardian got a lot of play, thanks in part to the dramatic headline Science careers: doomed at the outset but even more thanks to the subhead "Has it become harder for graduate students to thrive, and are our best potential scientists giving up on academia?" Most of the people I saw re-sharing it used basically just that last clause, often…

I've been sort of falling down on my obligation to promote myself-- I've written two blog posts for Forbes this week, and forgotten to post about them here. The first is a thing about philosophy in physics, and how Einstein illustrates both the good and bad aspects of a philosophical approach. The second is a bit on the listicle side, looking at some types of diagrams that physicists draw when talking about physics. It's prompted by a ZapperZ post noting that scientists talking about science always draw pictures, but other subjects get by with just talking. These are both quickly-dashed-off…

A couple of weeks ago, after one of my Forbes posts, I got contacted by a publicist working for Makey Makey. They really wanted publicity in Forbes, but that's above my pay grade; I did, however, say that it sounded like the sort of thing my kids would get a kick out of, and I could mention it here... So, they sent me one. It's a small circuit board with a USB connector and a bunch of places for alligator-clip leads, and functions as an input device for the computer-- if you complete a circuit from one of the clip leads to ground, it records that as a mouse click, or a key press of some sort…

A week or so ago, this statistical analysis of listening trends in pop music got a bunch of play on Twitter and Facebook, but I was too busy to do anything with it. The headline result, reported with all the accuracy you should expect of such things is people stop listening to popular music at 33. By coincidence, in another part of the social-media universe, some friends were sneering at Top 40 music by way of highlighting a list of the current Top 40 chart to show how little of it they knew. As I'm currently marking time until I can call my doctor to get some help with what I suspect is a…

I'm still in the late stages of an awful cold, but shook it off a bit to write a new conversation with Emmy, the Queen of Niskayuna over at Forbes: “HEY! YOU POODLES! STAY OFFA MY LAWN!” “Emmy! Stop barking!” I sit up. She’s at the gap between the fences, where she can see into the front yard. “But, those poodles..” “We’ve had this conversation. It’s a public street, other dogs are allowed to walk on it. No barking.” She comes over, sheepishly. “Why can’t you just lie down and enjoy the nice day, hmm?” “Well, I would. But, you know… Quantum.” “What?” “I would love to just lie in the sun, but…

So, Kate and I hired a babysitter last night, and went to see the new Avengers movie. You might not have heard of it, it's kind of obscure... (There will be some mild SPOILERS below; if you're intensely opposed to that sort of thing, don't read the rest of this...) So, I didn't realize it at the time, but it was a big mistake to watch this excellent video about Jackie Chan's style yesterday morning: (in a sorta-kinda related vein, this Max Gladstone blog post is also very interesting...) Having watched that video in the morning, and its discussion of how Jackie Chan's fight choreography and…

A month or so back, when I went to Vanderbilt to give a talk, I met Robert Scherrer, the department chair down there, who mentioned he was starting a blog soon. That blog is Cosmic Yarns, and has now been live for a while, but I've been too busy to do a proper link. He's using it to look at the science of science fiction, and has a bunch of nice posts up, including a good explanation of why you don't need to worry about giant ants: Has this ever happened to you? While you are enjoying a relaxing picnic in the New Mexican desert, your lunch is overrun by ants: not ordinary ants, but 12-foot…

As mentioned over the weekend, I gave a talk last week for UCALL, part of a series on "The Radical Early 20th Century." I talked about how relativity is often perceived as revolutionary, but isn't really, while Einstein's really revolutionary 1905 paper is often overlooked. And, having put the time into thinking about the subject, I turned the basic theme into a new blog post over at Forbes: Albert Einstein is easily one of the most recognizable people in history, and everybody thinks they know why. He’s the guy who, in 1905, completely revolutionized physics, overthrowing the prior order…

Over the last month or so, it's been kind of hard to avoid this book, even before it hit stores. Big excerpts in the New York Times and The Guardian generated a good deal of buzz, and arguments on social media. Unsurprisingly, as one of the main elements of the book is a look at the phenomenon of social-media shaming, so anybody who had participated in or even watched one of these unfold had an opinion. I've enjoyed Ronson's previous books a great deal, because he brings a real empathy to all the interviews and profiles he does. Even when he's profiling really problematic people, like some of…