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Kooks With Prestigious Prizes

The Times today has an article on famous scientists who have nutty ideas, inspired by the James Watson kerfuffle of the last couple of weeks. Of course, they had to mention at least one kooky physicist, leading to this wonderful set of paragraphs: Sometimes the wandering from one's home turf extends all the way to the paranormal. In 2001, when officials of the Royal Mail, the British postal service, issued a package of stamps commemorating the centenary of the Nobel Prize, they sought the counsel of Brian Josephson, who shared the prize for physics in 1973 for his superconductivity research.…

Don't Wear Red or Mention Montana

The Science Times this week appears to be the Special Coturnix Issue, at least judging from the titles in my RSS reader-- a huge stack of articles about sleep and biological clocks. Bora must be thrilled. Mixed in there, though, are two articles about NASA. One bears the dramatic headline "NASA Faces House Hearings on Air Safety," while the other is a detailed profile of the astronauts for the next Shuttle mission. The first one turns out to be about the "aeronautics" rather than "space" part of NASA-- it's about a survey of pilots about safety issues in air travel-- but the combination is…

Concerned About Science

The Union of Concerned Scientists emails me fairly regularly with news items and calls to action-- one of the benefits of being a C-list blogger, I guess. This week's is a "Call your Senator" item opposing Executive Order 13422: Government agencies need to use the best available science to protect our health--setting standards that limit toxins in our drinking water and pollutants in the air we breathe. But a recent presidential directive would give the White House excessive control over the work of federal agencies, making science more vulnerable to political interference. Unless something…

Phyiscs Pictures Wanted

As noted a little while ago, ScienceBlogs has recently redesigned the channel pages on the front page, and they now include images supplied by the bloggers. For example, the doomsday weapon photo that currently graces the Physical Science page is a picture of my lab. Now, any idiot can take pictures of cute fuzzy animals, but physics pictures are a little harder to come by. So, the corporate masters are soliciting pictures from you, the readers of this blog: It's not too hard: the image needs to be at least 465 pixels wide. Readers should send their photos to photos@scienceblogs.com. They…

Links for 2010-08-01

Kwiat Quantum Information Group The quantum physics version of "24." Can Professor Paul Kwiat save his research group from striking grad students, visiting sponsors, broken lasers and a missing password without violating the University of Illinois ethics regulations? (tags: physics academia silly video television quantum) Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Best & Worst Job Prospects in the Urban Fantasy Economy for 2011 "WORST PROSPECTS We do not recommend the following fields for 2011: 1. Physicist This profession has abnormally high levels of insanity in the urban…

Links for 2010-05-21

PHD Comics: Grading Rubric Sounds about right. Maybe a little too generous on the lower row. (tags: comics piled-higher academia education silly) Producing novel semiconductors en masse - physicsworld.com "John Rogers, working with colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a related company, offer a production method by adapting a transfer-printing technique that they have been developing for the past few years. They begin by growing stacks consisting of multiple layers of gallium arsenide and aluminium gallium arsenide, which they then "peel" off one-by-one using a…

I'm back! I'm exhausted!

My travels are done for a whole week now (according to my calendar, I'm going to have to go to Washington DC next week), and I'm very, very tired. I'll put up some of my thoughts on the Beyond Belief conference later (short summary: exhilarating!), but for now I'll acknowledge the wonderful time I had at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. It was a big audience — much bigger than I expected — and they asked really sharp questions and tossed back a few important ideas on communicating science that I appreciated. Special thanks to my host, Miriam Goldstein. I promised to mention the Three…

Belated Baby Blogging 040210

As I was headed upstairs to bed last night, I stopped in the library, and said "There's something I ought to be doing..." but couldn't remember what. This morning, while walking Emmy, it hit me: Baby Blogging! It's weird that I forgot, because I went to the trouble of taking pictures and everything: This is SteelyKid hanging out on the swing in the back yard, drinking some juice. As you can tell by the short sleeves, it's Fake Summer here, and the backyard was warm and pleasant last night after day care. I have some other pictures where she and Appa aren't cropped as tightly as they are here…

Research Blogging Awards

The winners of the first Research Blogging Awards were announced today, and I was very pleasantly surprised to find that this blog was named the "Best Blog -- Chemistry, Physics, or Astronomy." I knew that I was nominated-- I was one of the judges, and while I abstained from voting on my own blog, I did see it in the list with many other excellent blogs. Given that research blogging is only a small part of what I do, I didn't expect to win at all. (In the manner of such awards, I now feel guilty for not having done any ResearchBlogging posts in ages, so I've queued one up for tomorrow morning…

Photo Shop on Windows vs. Ice Cream (ice cream wins)

So, Amanda had some 400 photographs that needed to be viewed, selected from (maybe a several dozen selected), then each chosen photo converted to jpeg format, resized to 100o pixels wide and saved. She began the process on her Windoze laptop. The first photograph took about a minute or two. Realizing that the conversion of the photo had to happen before she could decide whether to use that image or not, I quickly calculated that she had about an hour of work in front of her. The photos happen to be on a flash card. So, I intervened. "Let me have those photos for a minute." "What are you…

Edwards for President!

I sure hope time straightens out the race for the presidency, since I find myself unimpressed by the entire field. John Edwards has just moved to the bottom of my list of acceptable Democratic candidates, after Hillary Clinton (after Hillary! That's pretty low) since he has just allowed Amanda Marcotte to resign. I am unimpressed by the lack of loyalty he's shown to his employees; I'm not an absolutist on that point, since I think loyalty can be carried too far, to the point of stupidity (case in point: GW Bush). But what pisses me off is that he failed to support her in the face of genuinely…

Homeschooled child snatched from the jaws of life by religious mother

I really have nothing against homeschooling, but it must be admitted that among the homeschoolers, there is a disproportionate share of crazy people that should not be allowed near children. And, the way homeschooling operates politically, the children of homeschooling families are less likely to be rescued from their abusing parents (when there are abusing parents) than other kids. That is a simple fact, and all the homeschoolers who are not abusing their own children but who maintain that society must simply turn away are part of the problem, not the solution. In this context it is not…

A good day for birds.

This was not an intensive bird watching day. This was a day driving to the cabin, sitting in the cabin writing, looking out the window, driving to run an errand, going to town for dinner, sitting in the cabin looking out the window some more, etc. But the birds insisted on performing. So I thought I'd give you a list., En route north from the Twin Cities: Two probable trumpeter swans heading west. A flock of about 45 cormorants heading north. Leech Lake look out! Near Fort Ripley: Rough Legged Hawk? Blue Jay Nisswa, overlookng Round Lake: Bald Eagle in tree Lesser Scaup (small flock)…

Nigeria oil unrest 'kills 1,000'

Violence in Nigeria's oil region left 1,000 people dead and cost $24bn (£16bn) last year, a report says, according to an official and activist. Ledum Mitee, chairman of the Niger Delta Presidential Technical Committee, says the figures only cover the first nine months of 2008. Militants and criminal gangs often attack oil installations, leading to reprisals from the military. The unrest has cut Nigeria's oil output by about 25% in recent years. Last week, President Umaru Yar'Adua said his government was considering granting amnesty to violent groups if they disarm. Hat Tip, Elle. Read the…

What can boys and girls aspire to in science?

According to this film, lifted from ABATC I made a list using whatever gender cues were given of what was seemingly suggesed for boys vs. girls to aspire to. No great surprizes. Well, actually, there are few slightly surprising items on the girls' list. 1 For Boys: astro-scientist/Astronaut chemist biology physics sports star who knows about science musician who knows about science medicine security destruction/evil scientist Nobel peace prize cure world hunger civil engineer professor agricultural science electrochemical engineer astronomy pharmacology philosophy statesmen minister…

How to Tell the Difference Between Science and Bunk. Massimo Pigliucci on Atheists Talk

... Being interviewed by ME! (So don't expect this to go well!!!!) Sunday March 1, 2009 Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, of the Stonybrook Institute in New York, is a biologist and a philosopher who has published about a hundred technical papers and several books on evolutionary biology. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, selected "for fundamental studies of genotype by environmental interactions and for public defense of evolutionary biology from pseudoscientific attack." Massimo is also an atheist, and has published articles in Skeptical Enquirer,…

The more ignorant you are, the easier it is to disprove evolution

Uh-oh. Evolution has just been refuted by a very sophisticated simulation. Try it; you'll quickly discover how frustratingly boring evolution can be, and you'll give up on it. The 'simulation' is simple: put some random text in a box, click on a button, it randomly substitutes a random letter for some other letter, and whoa…you'll notice that your excerpt from the libretto of Figaro hasn't been transformed into the Gettysburg address. Therefore, evolution is false. Seriously, it's that bad, and the author actually does think he has accomplished something significant. It's a simulation that…

Sing the Atheist Anthem!

... so, you think can sing, eh? Well, Desiree Schell, talk show host with Q. Transmissions of Edmonton, Canada, has asked me to tell you about a contest. Q Transmissions wants YOU to sing us what is sure to be the next smash hit on the Skeptical charts... Fervent Unbeliever! ... Perform your best rendition of the song. YouTube, your blackberry, your laptop... it doesn't matter how you do it as long as we hear your lovely (or not so lovely) voice serenading us. Like this! Get all the fame and prestige that a skeptical talk-show on a community radio station can provide. And a prize! Go to Q…

PoliBits

Not surprizingly, PZ Myers has passed both Obama and McCain in the polls. Details here. GO PZ (but keep an eye out for Dave Bacon) We are asking for submission to the Remove Michele Bachmann web carnival, which will be hosted at Tangled Up in Blue Guy next Monday. Please submit your suggestions here. (If that link does not work, just send the submission to me and I'll pass it on, or contact Mike directly via his blog). Palin Gaffe on Vietnam: "John McCain knows how to win a war." The only war that I know of in which John McCain played a part as a combatant was the Vietnam War.…

Benefit for Cuban Hurricane Victims

At 1st Ave. (Twin Cities Area) On September 23, First Avenue/7th Street Entry nightclub in Minneapolis will be the venue for a star-studded musical and dance benefit for Cuban hurricane relief. In the past weeks, Cuba has suffered tremendous damage from Hurricanes Gustav and Ike. Close to one million people were evacuated and more than 300,000 houses and other structures have been destroyed or damaged, and the United Nations estimates losses of between $3 and $4 billion. The U.S. government's offer of $100,000 in aid to Cuba is cruel and insulting; because of the U.S. embargo, ordinary…

Wearing a Miniskirt is like Walking Naked in the Streets ... and other matters.

The same man who said "God will protect us against gays" and who has done much more for repression of diversity generally in East Africa than the average person has gotten all hot under the collar (or somewhere) about women's skirts that end above the knees. He wants them banned like cell phones. James Nsaba Buturo has also served in Uganda as Minister of Information where is he generally known to have been more corrupt than the average government minister in East Africa. Uganda generally needs to be (and I think mostly is) embarrassed by this guy. By the way, gayness is a life in prison…

A Big Month for Chess Fans

For anyone who likes chess, the next few weeks are going to be very good indeed. The United States Chess Championships started today in St. Louis. The first round started a little over ninety minutes ago, but there has already been a strange occurrence. Have a look at this position: Playing white was Alexander Stripunsky, On the black side was Alexander Onischuk. We are eleven moves in to a very unusual line of the Caro-Kann Defense, with white to move. He uncorked the interesting 12. d3?? It seems natural enough, since it prepares to develop the bishop and attacks the black queen…

The Reason For the Ambivalence Towards the Philosophy of Science

If you spend any significant amount of time doing science or mathematics then some amount of philosophical reflection is inevitable. At some point you are going to take a step back and wonder what it is you are actually doing. I think it is good that there are people out there who ponder such things professionally. That said, I think it is also true that scientists and mathematicians tend to view the philosophers of their disciplines as a bit eccentric. As far as I know, I have never met a mathematician who finds it interesting to ask whether numbers exist, or who enjoys debating the…

The Antarctica Files: Whale whirls!

Writing grants + papers + stress + migraines + beautiful weather apparently = me not blogging. :-/ Luckily, others are and Dr. Dolittle at LifeLines put up a post on how whales use bubbles to hunt: Blowing Bubbles While that sounds like part of a Monty Python bit ("First you get the comfy chair... and then... BUBBLES! NO ONE EXPECTS THE BUBBLES!"), that is actually how whales hunt for fish, and I actually got to see this irl in Antarctica! NOTE: These are NOT my pictures! These are pics from folks on the trip that had awesome cameras, and they donated them to the DVD of photos everyone got…

Question for the hivemind: Allergy meds

I love Oklahoma... except for one thing. You might think that one thing has something to do with insane Christian Evangelicals or creepy perverted 'Conservative' Republicans, but really, you just get used to those sorts of things. I think I would genuinely miss them if they were gone. No, the 'one thing' is... allergies. As Ive loled about before-- I never had allergies until I moved to OK. Grew up surrounded by trees, but in Oklahoma, Im apparently allergic to tree pollen (I also think its funny that my dog also has allergies, to trees and grass. A DOG.) Now normally I harass bug my…

... NEW T-SHIRT!!!

I like irreverent things. Wrong things. Smiley faces with drops of blood on their shiny yellow heads. Murderous, cherub faced dolls. Death rainbows. Bad horses. 'Wrong' things make me genuinely happy. Thats why, despite its understated design, I LOVE our departmental T-shirts!!! E. coli is a celebrity. Its always in the news for tainting this and contaminating that. Oh most E. coli are harmless, its just that some of them have been hanging out with naughty viruses: E. coli is a gram-negative enterobacterium which diverged from the Salmonella lineage about 100 million years ago. Many…

Greene on the LHC

Brain Greene had a useful op-ed in yesterday's New York Times. He's discussing all the fuss about the Large Hadron Collider: After more than a decade of development and construction, involving thousands of scientists from dozens of countries at a cost of some $8 billion, the "on" switch for the collider was thrown this week. So what we can expect? The collider's workings are straightforward: at full power, trillions of protons will be injected into the otherwise empty track and set racing in opposite directions at speeds exceeding 99.999999 percent of the speed of light -- fast enough so…

Me Dot Com

You may not know this, but I have a book coming out in about a week. I know, I've been pretty quiet about it... Anyway, this being the modern era, I thought there probably ought to be some sort of central web presence for the book, but unfortunately, it shares a name with a vacuum cleaner manufacturer, a SyFy show that was pretty good before it was canceled, and a famous exclamation by some dude from Syracuse. So the namespace containing obvious forms of the book title is pretty comprehensively gobbled up. And, of course, this is my third book, and I've been doing a bunch of other…

Thanksgiving 2014

SteelyKid's first-grade class has been doing a bunch of Thanksgiving stuff. A lot of this is the lies-to-children version of the first Thanksgiving, and some of that is a little dubious (they had a dress-up "feast" on Tuesday, where SteelyKid was an Indian with a construction-paper vest and feathered headband, and oh, the parental eye-rolling...). This has also included some reflection on gratitude, though-- as mentioned on Twitter, the list of non-human things she's thankful for includes "dogs, world, sun, moon, toys, games, trees, books, food, water, air, stars, beach." (There were other…

Physics Hangout in Need of Better Title

What with the umpteen zillion articles declaring the Death of the Blog, I've been toying with the idea of doing something podcast-ish for a while. Rhett Allain from Dot Physics was game, too, and suggested using Google+ to do a video hangout, so here we are talking about our classes this term: The video quality is kind of crap on my end, which is a recurring problem here when we Skype with the grandparents. I probably should've closed more programs and tabs, but I'm an idiot. Also, I fidget a lot. But this is meant to be fairly casual, and I really do talk with my hands like that. Anyway,…

260 Weeks

Long-time readers will remember that I used to do weekly kid-blogging, posting pictures of SteelyKid with a reference animal, Appa the sky-bison from the Avatar cartoon. I stopped a couple of years ago, because SteelyKid started being reluctant to pose for the pictures every week. I got her to pose for a few yesterday, though, so we can see what a difference 260 weeks makes. Here's the first really good Appa-for-scale picture, one week after she was born: SteelyKid and Appa at age one week, back in 2008. And here they are on her fifth birthday (also the "featured image" for this post…

The Downside of Evolution in Action

From Yahoo News: Fish have lost half their average body mass and smaller species are making up a larger proportion of European fish stocks as a result of global warming, a study published Monday has found. “It's huge,” said study author Martin Daufresne of the Cemagref Public Agricultural and Environmental Research Institute in Lyon, France. “Size is a fundamental characteristic that is linked to a number of biological functions, such as fecundity - the capacity to reproduce.” Smaller fish tend to produce fewer eggs. They also provide less sustenance for predators - including humans - which…

Myers on Eagleton

As a follow-up to yesterday's post about Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton, go have a look at P. Z. Myers' lengthy review of Eagleton's book. It seems that Myers was trapped on a very bad plane ride with only Eagleton for reading material. So what did Myers think? As I was marking up his little book with these questions, something routine happened: the plane hit some turbulence, bounced about for a bit, and I looked out the window and had the fleeting, morbid thought, "What if we crashed?" We've all had that thought, and I usually dismiss it with little concern, but this time I had a new…

Get out there and party like it's MMMMMMX!

Oh, no … we've almost missed it! Now we have to make a mad scrabble for birthday hats and noisemakers and cake and ice cream. It's the big 6010th birthday for planet earth, according to Ed Darrell and Phil Plait and these guys in Austin. Hmmm. Maybe we should at least make a quick trip to the Dairy Queen. Oh, wait. I don't believe that crap. Neither do any of the people I linked to above. But some of the wacky people at World Net Daily do. But the author of the book frequently described as the greatest history book ever written, said the world was created Oct. 23, 4004 B.C. - making it…

What People Think About Scientists

Just in time to feed into the discussion surrounding Unscientific America, there's a new Pew Research Poll about public attitudes toward science. As is usually the case with social-science data, there's something in here to bolster every opinion. The most striking of the summary findings, to me, is the second table down, in which the fraction of people saying that "Science/ medicine/ technology" is the greatest achievement of the last 50 years has dropped from 47% to 27% since 1999. About half of that shifted to "Civil rights/ equal rights," which is hard to begrudge, but the other half seems…

links for 2009-06-29

Cocktail Party Physics: dial-a-scientist "It all started Wednesday, when I got an email from Brandon Webb, who handles PR for the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at UT Dallas. He wanted to know if I could talk to a reporter who wanted to know whether a Styrofoam cup could break a windshield. (That's an advantage to being officially mediagenic - I don't get contacted directly now - they go through my 'people' a.k.a Brandon.)" (tags: physics journalism media science cocktail-party blogs) Faraday's Cage is where you put Schroedinger's Cat - Cats are great subjects for bad…

links for 2009-06-20

symmetry breaking » Blog Archive » The science of talking so people want to listen "Connecting science to everyday experiences in jargon free terms is key to science outreach, something Turner excels at doing. He shared his insights and tips from more than a decade worth of talks with scientists at Fermilabâs annual Usersâ Meeting this month. The meeting featured a special Outreach Workshop with talks to help scientists adjust to a changing climate that requires every scientist be able to explain the value of research in language a banker with no science background would understand." (…

Nobody Expects the Vector Product

Today is the first day of the last week of class, hallelujah. Unfortunately, it's also the first class on rotational motion and angular momentum. This is unfortunate because it's the hardest material in the course-- angular momentum doesn't behave in as intuitive a manner as linear momentum, and the math involved is the most complicated of anything we do in the course. This mostly has to do with the vector product, or "cross product." Angular momentum can be written as the product between the position vector from the axis of rotation to the moving object and the linear momentum of the moving…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in Languages I Don't Speak

I'm still recovering from DAMOP, so no really substantive blogging today. I did want to mention a couple of recent developments regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I think I mentioned a while back that the Portugese rights had been sold. Not long after that, the Korean rights were sold, and last week, the Chinese rights sold. So, there are editions in the works for languages I don't even share a character set with. I don't envy whoever has to translate this into Chinese. Then again, somebody already translated "Many Worlds, Many Treats", so maybe it isn't that bad... This is cool not…

Sunday with Mother Teresa

An announcement from Minnesota Atheists: Mother Teresa: Closet Atheist or Teflon Saint? Sponsored by Minnesota Atheists Sunday, Nov. 18, 2007 1:30-2:30 p.m. Bedlam Theatre, Minneapolis Around the world Mother Teresa has become an unassailable icon of charity, love and endless toil for the benefit of the "poorest of the poor." Her image as the savior of the poor people of Calcutta earned untold millions in donations, multitudes of awards, including the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, and a fast track to sainthood. Persons who have questioned her mode of operation and publicized the true nature of…

Thursday Toddler Blogging 102810

Inspired by the anti-flash-photography article in the morning's links dump, this week's Toddler Blogging offers you a choice of two different pictures. Here's one with the flash: And one without: (Appa's been feeling self-conscious about SteelyKid's growth lately, and asked for a little forced perspective in the second shot. SteelyKid was too busy reading Dr. Seuss to notice.) A proper comparison would, of course, use the same composition and framing. No such plan survives contact with a toddler, though-- by the time I switched modes on the camera, she had lost interest in the book she was…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Around the World

Between my long-ago high-school French and Google Translate, I can tell that this is a good review of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. It does note, though, that reading the book requires knowledge of English to understand it, which is a problem. And, as far as I know, French translation rights haven't been sold yet... French publishers, je vous regarde. In other foreign-edition news, we've sold German and Turkish rights, so there will be editions in those languages eventually. Emmy was very happy to hear that the book will be published in Turkey, though that was mostly a case of preposition…

Links for 2010-09-01

This is why I "support" majoritarian rule. - Acephalous "As a means of registering my discontent with conservative claims that the fact that 70 percent of Americans abhor the idea of the "Ground Zero Mosque" means it should be abandoned, I hereby present other things that 70 percent of "certain" Americans once hated." (tags: politics us blogs acephalous race religion society) Square Signals : An Anesthetic Default "I have this problem. When I get home from work, I sit down on my couch and open my laptop. When I'm waiting for the next bus, I pull out my iPhone. Then there's the unconscious…

Links for 2010-08-29

dirtcandy : HOME The third part of a series (with links to parts 1 and 2) on the making of an episode of Iron Chef America that will air Sunday night. (tags: food television blogs culture) Liberal Arts Chemistry: If Hemingway were a Chemist ... There is a reason why some reagents and some chemical reactions have not been reported yet. When it comes to some binary and trinary combinations of elements the path to the chemistry textbooks is very ... Darwinian. And let's face it boys and girls, the true measure of success in chemistry is not measured in prizes. True impact is when your…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Update

The college bookstore has set up a display table right at the front of the store with a bunch of copies of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, which is kind of a kick. Some of my students asked me about it in lab yesterday. The big news, though, is that the Associated Press review ran Monday. I've known they were working on one for a while, now, but didn't see it before it went live. It's not a great review-- it ends "For people who are smarter than the average mixed-breed dog, this might be a good way to learn about the nature of microscopic particles. But I'm waiting for Orzel to write…

Climate, Weather, and Public Opinion

There's a Kenneth Chang article in the New York Times this morning on the ever popular topic of "If the globe is warming, why is it so darn cold?" It's a good explanation of the weather phenomenon that's making the morning dog walk at Chateau Steelypips so unpleasant. This reminded me of something I've wondered about the public perception of climate change. There was a good deal of hand-wringing on blogs over some recent polls showing depressingly low numbers of Americans believing in global warming (see this one, for example). This was mostly attributed to the successes of the right-wing…

links for 2009-04-05

peake: What you won't read "Nevertheless, just possibly because of my own slight interest in the outcome, I have been following the responses to this yearâs shortlists [for the Hugo and other SF awards] rather more intently than I might otherwise. And I have been struck by a number of observations. Nothing earth shattering about them, they are the sorts of observations that occur year in year out, which is itself sadly interesting; but unavoidable observations for all that." (tags: movies SF books awards) Page 1 | How to Write about Africa | Granta 92: The View from Africa | Magazine |…

No purposes but those we create for ourselves

Those sneaky rascals at the Templeton Foundation have asked one of those ridiculous questions that gets some otherwise rational people stumbling over themselves to give an inoffensive answer: does the universe have a purpose? Of course, the irrational people have no trouble piping up with a happy "Yes!", which should clue everyone in, as Larry notes, that it's a gimmick question designed to provoke a range of waffly answers … and waffles, especially the tepid, limp kind, are the stock-in-trade of the Templeton House of Waffles. I'd say "no, there is no evidence of universal purpose and no…

Semi-Dorky Poll: Low-Tech Writing

A few weeks ago, Neil DeGrasse Tyson was on the Daily Show telling stories about Pluto, and mentioned getting a letter from a little kid who added the postscript "Please write back, but not in cursive, because I can't read cursive yet." We were talking about this in the car yesterday, because Kate's been reading one of these books, and I realized that I don't think I could write a letter in cursive, even if I wanted to. I did learn how to write in cursive, back in the day, but my handwriting was always borderline illegible, and I switched back to printing pretty much as soon as the teachers…

How Do You Teach Critical Thinking?

I went to a panel discussion yesterday on teaching critical thinking skills. It was more of a panel presentation than a panel discussion-- the panelist-to-allotted-time ratio was too high to allow much discussion-- but it was interesting to see how different disciplines approach the task of teaching students to think critically, and support arguments with evidence. I thought the best comment of the panel was from a chemist, who said that the best test of the development of critical thinking skills is involvement with undergraduate research. This is a big emphasis for us, and one of the things…