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A Note On Comment Policy

In the left side bar, I have had a standing policy on comments for the past year. Here's what it says: Keep it substantive, serious minded, on topic, and respectful. Somewhat curiously, the only time I actually have to take action to enforce the comment policy is when a swarm of ardent faithful from PZ Myers' blog suddenly surges over here to complain about any criticism of PZ or any suggestion that diverts from the path of militant atheism. It's what physicist Chad Orzel describes in this post as the "screechy monkey" problem.

Fresh Meat, Fresh Data

Posted to the homepage on January 20, 2012 On Aetiology, Tara C. Smith shares the results of her latest study into methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. She and her team "looked at not only conventional meats, but also 'alternative' meat products" labeled "raised without antibiotics" or "raised without antibiotic growth promotants." Smith writes, "In our previous paper, we found MRSA on 1.2% of 165 meat samples. In the current study, we found a higher prevalence—6.6% of 395 samples were contaminated with MRSA." She believes the current, higher number more accurately reflects the…

SAT Challenge update: Casual Friday postponed until Monday

We are nearly finished grading the 109 entries for the Blogger SAT Challenge. Chad Orzel has designed a way for our readers to view and rate the essays themselves, but it's not quite ready yet. We're going to take the weekend to make everything perfect (well, nearly perfect), and then we'll unveil the rating system and the official, professionally graded results. I think it will be worth the wait. Suffice it to say, this has been a larger undertaking than Chad and I could have imagined at the outset. We've had some amazing volunteer graders who went beyond the call of duty to make sure…

Quick Picks on ScienceBlogs

It's the latest and the greatest of them all! Jake Young reports breaking news from the AP: President Bush does veto the stem cell bill Dr Free-Ride follows up on a story about allegations of widespread plagiarism in the Engineering Department at Ohio University Shelley Batts on New Orleans doctors being prosecuted for second-degree murder in connection with the deaths of hospital patients during Hurricane Katrina Chad Orzel chimes in to the growing debate about the future of nuclear energy in America Orac punches some holes in a study blaming iPods and cell phones for a rise in autism…

Uncertain Dots 17

After a bit of a hiatus because of scheduling issues, Rhett and I are back to talk about... stuff. Mostly summer classes, World Cup soccer, and Twitter. Also, how we've each gotten a blog comment from Neil deGrasse Tyson. Miscellaneous links: -- My long-ago book review and Rhett's more recent complaint about Cosmos, where we each had a brush with scientific celebrity. -- My silly cat tweet that's generated a huge amount of traffic: Busy day at Schroedinger Industries... RT @EmrgencyKittens: How to organize your cats. pic.twitter.com/z3QS0fnSdL — Chad Orzel (@orzelc) June 24, 2014 -- Rhett's…

Why Teaching a Dog Physics is Important

Ok, back from Christmas hiatus which I, uh, forgot to announce. But I am pleased that I survived a full 96+ hours with exactly zero internet access. Didn't even miss it. Much. Over that break, I happened to be in a bookstore in exurban Atlanta. Gravitating as I tend to do toward the science section, I saw this book: It is of course How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, by ScienceBlogs' own Chad Orzel. I can't review it yet because I haven't sat down and read it yet (I have a copy in the mail), though based on my bookstore perusing I am certain it will be as brilliant as expected, which is…

Recalculating Round Numbers

The price of human genome sequencing has fallen spectacularly since the turn of the century; what then cost $100,000,000 is now promised for only $1000. This race toward zero makes even Moore's Law look like a snail's pace, but the $1000 price tag does come with a couple asterisks. For one, providers will need high demand to pay off the multi-million dollar sequencing array that makes it possible, and low demand should result in higher prices.  For two, $1000 will only buy you a rough draft of your genome. On Discovering Biology in a Digital World, Todd Smith writes "While some sequencing…

Imagining the Future

On Universe, Claire L. Evans interviews sci-fi world-builder Ursula K. Le Guin. Their conversation centers on the Google Books Settlement, which seeks to "circumvent existing U.S. copyright law." While Le Guin hopes her books will become more accessible in the future, she says "the vast and currently chaotic electronic expansion of publishing should not be controlled solely by corporations." On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel reviews China Mieville's new novel The City and the City, which is about two cities that enforce very strict boundaries despite being "co-located" on the same real…

I Am a Unique Flower

The "How many people have your name?" thing has come across my RSS feed a dozen or so times already, most recently via the very common John Lynch. I was finally bored enough to put my name in, and here's what I get: There are 0 people in the U.S. named Chad Orzel. While both names you entered were found in our database, neither was common enough to make it likely that someone in the U.S. has that name. There's also nobody in the US named "Kate Nepveu." In fact, they don't register anyone at all with the surname "Nepveu" (there are apparently 570 Orzels, many of them my cousins...). What are…

073/366: Doubly Social

Another day with a staged-for-talk-prep photo: My desk, with social media on both computers. I needed a picture of social-media apps on computer screens for an upcoming talk, so I took one. After first tweeting a cute-kid photo: Cute-kid photo because I want to take a picture of Twitter to use in a talk. pic.twitter.com/QIYHTda0vL — Chad Orzel (@orzelc) November 12, 2015 Yeah, it's shameless. But look at them, they're adorable! And the reminder of their adorableness was really needed today, because it's been an incredibly frustrating week, kid-wise. I should note that I do not actually…

links for 2008-10-07

Interview with Chad Orzel It's me, doing a blog interview on how I got into science, how I got into blogging, and the future of science outreach. (tags: science blogs physics academia) xkcd - A Webcomic - Depth Negative powers of ten, xkcd style. (tags: science comics xkcd) Seeing race and seeming racist? Whites go out of their way to avoid talking about race "Our findings don't suggest that individuals who avoid talking about race are racists," Apfelbaum explained. "On the contrary, most are well-intentioned people who earnestly believe that colorblindness is the culturally sensitive…

What I'm Saying at AAAS

Since I had to have the slides for my AAAS talk ready well in advance, I might as well let you look at them more or less as I give the talk. So, courtesy of SlideShare, here's the presentation I'll be giving right around the time this is scheduled to post: What Physics Knowledge Is Assessed in TIMSS Advanced 2008? View more presentations from Chad Orzel. the question I was asked to talk about is whether the released questions from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey test from 2008 do a reasonable job of covering what we want physics students to know coming in. The…

Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters, and How Weblogs Can Help

My talk at Maryland last Thursday went pretty well-- the impending Snowpocalypse kept the audience down, as people tried to fit in enough work to compensate for the Friday shutdown, but the people who were there seemed to like it, and asked good questions. If you weren't there, but want to know what I talked about, here are the slides on SlideShare: Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters and How Weblogs Can Help View more presentations from Chad Orzel. This flattens out some of the more animation-dependent jokes, but gets you the basic idea. It is, of…

"Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs" at Vanderbilt, Thursday 3/26/15

I mentioned last week that I'm giving a talk at Vanderbilt tomorrow, but as they went to the trouble of writing a press release, the least I can do is share it: It’s clear that this year’s Forman lecturer at Vanderbilt University, Chad Orzel, will talk about physics to almost anyone. After all, two of his popular science books are How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. Orzel, an associate professor of physics at Union College in New York and author of the ScienceBlog “Uncertain Principles,” is scheduled to speak on campus at 3 p.m. Thursday, March 26. As…

Politics Weekly Channel Highlights

In this post: the large version of the Politics channel photo, a comment from a reader, and the best posts of the week. A parade of flags at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. From Flickr, by WorldIslandInfo.com Reader comment of the week: In An Ethical Dialogue, Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles provides a unique take on the PZ Myers vs. Catholic League Crackergate scandal. ScienceBloggers debated intensely in the last week about whether Myers stepped over the line when he offered to publicly desecrate the Eucharist, a wafer Catholics believe is the body of Christ. Chad…

Last Minute Presents for Physicists

Books, of course, but which books...? One of these "be careful what you wish for" things, is that I now get a lot of requests to review books (and DVDs and online games etc), just as I reach the stage of my life where I spend most of my time doing reading reformatting paperwork instead of reading fun new things... which is a shame, because the books I get sent are pretty much generally exactly those I spent most of my very limited disposable income on when I was younger... One day soon I'll catch up on the backlog. In the meantime, here are three good looking physics books that any good…

Various updates

First, the interviews will continue....when I get some answers from one of the six people I sent questions to.... I will also be sending questionnaires to more people soon. Second, there are some responses now to the 1-2-3, the Goosed/Book meme. First, Chad Orzel provides several interesting quotes. And now Tom Levenson responded with not one but two elaborate, illustrated posts: I've Been Tagged! Reading and writing and all that jazz. and I've Been Tagged! -- Darwin follow up. Update: Eric Roston and Jennifer Ouellette did it, too. And Vanessa as well. I was also tagged by another meme,…

The Buzz: Scientists Tune In

A recent NEA survey of the arts revealed a dismaying trend: a consistent decline in public participation across nearly every discipline studied, including music, theater, dance and the fine arts. And while ScienceBlogger Chad Orzel points out that the survey neglected to include rock or pop music, film, or other video art, he also speculates that weakening musical education programs might contribute to the decline in appreciation for "high art"--particularly, classical music. As Scicurious explains on Neurotopia, an ear for classical music might help some scientists listen for subtle…

Not True Enough to Be Good?

On Pharyngula, PZ Myers criticizes a stirring new short film imagining humanity's presence on the far-flung worlds of our solar system. PZ writes, "There’s nothing in those exotic landscapes as lovely and rich as mossy and majestic cedars of the Olympic Peninsula, or the rocky sea stacks of the nearby coast." So let's not get ahead of ourselves in turning Earth into a dust bowl. On Respectful Insolence, Orac considers the demerits of a new monograph on 'integrative oncology,' saying it's a false dichotomy polarizing aspects of actual science and pure wishful thinking. And on Uncertain…

One, Two, Many, Lots...

Union College Physics and Astronomy Colloquium Feb. 16, 2006 Speaker: Dr. Chad Orzel, Union College Title: "Counting Atoms for Astrophysics: Atom Traps, Neutrino Detectors, and Radioactive Background Measurements" Abstract: A new generation of neutrino and dark matter detectors is currently under development, using liquid neon or xenon as a detection medium. These detectors offer unprecedented sensitivity, but in order to reach their full potential, the liquid in the detector must be purified to an extraordinary degree to avoid contamination by radioactive krypton isotopes. I will describe a…

My Life Is Weird

1) If you search Amazon for my name, you get four results: the book-in-production, two books where I'm mentioned in the acknowledgments, and a fourth book where I am apparently cited as a source for the "assume a spherical cow" joke. 2) Weirdly, I have a fan site, of sorts. I have no idea who's responsible for that. 3) The publicity copy on the inside cover of the bound galleys starts out: In the New York Times bestselling tradition of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar, author Chad Orzel uses the seemingly ordinary-- a family pet-- to explore and explain the complex and deeply cool world…

links for 2009-03-14

The Washington Monthly "Watching the evisceration, I couldn't help but wonder why it takes a comedian on Comedy Central to do the kind of interview the non-fake news shows ought to be doing. When the media establishment marvels at Jon Stewart's popularity, they tend to think it's his humor. It's not. It's because he calls "bullsh*t" when most major media players won't. He did so last night, and it made for important viewing." (tags: politics economics stupid television journalism business) Tournament of Books - Shadow Country v. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks - The…

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog in the Washington Post

If you're allergic to hype, you might want to tune this blog out for the next couple of days, because How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is officially released tomorrow, so it's all I'm going to talk about for a little while. Because, well, I'm pretty excited. And tonight's exciting finding is that it's mentioned in the Washington Post: If "Physics for Dummies" left you baffled, maybe it's time to go a step further: Why not physics for pets? In "How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog," physics professor Chad Orzel attempts to explain Einstein's theory of relativity via a dialogue with his dog,…

The 2010 World Science Festival

We are just two short weeks away from this year's World Science Festival, and things are heating up. For those not in the know, the World Science Festival is a one-of-a-kind series of talks, tours, performances, and panels all designed to convey the wonder and awesomeness of science to the rest of the world. And as the official blogging partner of the festival, ScienceBlogs has you covered with everything you need before, during, and after the week's festivities. On the new 2010 World Science Festival blog, you'll find previews--like of this conversation between Chuck Close and Oliver Sacks…

What's So Interesting About AMO Physics?

That's the title of my talk this morning at DAMOP, where I attempt the slightly insane feat of summarizing a meeting with over 1000 presentations in a single 30-minute talk. This will necessarily involve talking a little bit like the person reading the legal notices at the end of a car commercial, and a few of the guide-to-the-meeting slides will have to flash by pretty quickly. Thus, for the benefit of those who have smartphones and care about my categorization of talks, I have put the slides on SlideShare in advance, and will embed them here: What's So Interesting About AMO Phyiscs?…

What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics (2.0)

This is the presentation I gave to the International Baccalaureate class from Schenectady High School today. I tend to re-use talk titles a lot, but this is substantially different than the last talk with this title, as the previous group had read How to Teach Physics to Your Dog first. For this group, I spent more time on applications, and took out a few details. What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics View more presentations from Chad Orzel. We were pressed for time, so I ended up not being able to show the video embedded in the next-to-last slide (this one), which is a shame.…

SIZZLE Reviews: Nature vs. Variety

Here we have it now, pretty much formalized. We spotted the pattern last November in our first test screenings of non-science friends in Hollywood vs. scientist friends. As the Sizzle Tuesday reviews popped up, Chad Orzel noted it among the Science Bloggers. Then Chris Mooney identified the pattern and editorialized on it. Now we can look at the reviews of the most authoritative voice in the science world, Nature, versus the most authoritative voice in the entertainment world, Variety. The divide is almost exactly the same. The former says the "comedy falls flat," the latter raves about…

Leaving Light in the Dust?

Last month, a team of researchers announced that their neutrinos appeared to be travelling faster than the speed of light. Ethan Siegel explains that the mass of a neutrino is "less than one-millionth the mass of the electron, but still not equal to zero" and "should move at a speed indistinguishable from the speed of light." Meanwhile the OPERA team had to smash 1020 protons just to detect 16,000 neutrinos—and account for every source of delay an uncertainty in their experimental setup. On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel explains that the researchers used GPS satellites to measure the…

Too funny to ignore

Chad Orzel posted a cute bit about True Lab Stories: The Party Game. I like these things because, yes, they make it clear that those of us who do science put coffee cups on top of our cars and drive off, just like everyone else. For those of who are thinking about careers in science, you don't always have to be brilliant, what you need is perseverance. I can share one story from the lab where I was a graduate student. One day, one of our visiting scientists came to me with a thermometer. "It's not working!" he said. I was skeptical, but I took a look. The thermometer was really dirty…

How Alien Can a Spacefarer Be?

As our planet makes more and more noise, we can't help but wonder why no one is paying attention. Are we alone in the universe? Or alone in our desire to discover new worlds? PZ Myers says "Spaceship building is never going to be a selectively advantageous feature — it’s only going to emerge as a spandrel, which might lead to a species that can occupy a novel niche." Humanity could tread that path, following our dreams to the stars. But even then, we might only find extraterrestrials in the form of well-adjusted slime blobs, content in their otherworldly ecosystems. If there are other tech-…

"Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs: Social Media for Communicating Science"

That's the title of the talk I gave yesterday at Vanderbilt, and here are the slides: Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs: Social Media for Communicating Science from Chad Orzel The central idea is the same as in past versions of the talk-- stealing Robert Krulwich's joke contrasting the publication styles of Newton and Galileo to argue that scientists spend too much time writing technical articles aimed at an audience of other experts, and need to do more "Galileian" publication aimed at a broad audience. And that social media technologies offer powerful tools that can enable those who are…

Yes, There Are Religious Scientists, and They Aren't the Enemy

In fact, I happen to be one of them. Admittedly, my religion (Judaism) and theological beliefs are very different from theopolitically conservative Catholics and Protestants. But ScienceBlogling Chad Orzel makes a really good point about religious scientists (and I thought all he did is teach physics to dogs): ...it is not in any way an "unconscionable" political statement for professional scientific organizations to state that science and religion are compatible. It's a statement of fact, an acknowledgment that in the real world, there are numerous examples of people who are both…

And the Three Billion Dollar Grant Goes to...

Chad Orzel offers the following dorky poll: If $3 billion were yours to spend on scientific research, how would you spend the money? ... For the sake of variety, let's restrict it to your own particular subfield, so, for example, how would I spend three billion dollars on physics? If I had three billion dollars to throw at a single area of physics, I would obviously throw it at geophysics - but that kind of smart-alecky answer isn't going to cut it in the hypothetical world. No, the unspoken terms of the question demand that I spend $3,000,000,000 on a single project in geology. Moreover,…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Is Out Today!

Today is the official publication date for How to Teach Physics to your Dog! I've got another reason or two why dogs should love quantum physics that I'll probably post later, but if the ones posted so far haven't sold you on the book, how about a really nice review from Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing: Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is an absolutely delightful book on many axes: first, its subject matter, quantum physics, is arguably the most mind-bending scientific subject we have; second, the device of the book -- a quantum physicist, Orzel, explains quantum physics to Emmy,…

A Brief History of Timekeeping

I gave a guest lecture this morning in a colleague's sophomore seminar class about time. She's having them look at time from a variety of perspectives, and they just finished reading Longitude, so she asked me to talk about the physics of clocks and the measurement of time. I've long considered using "A Brief History of Timekeeping" as the theme for a general education course-- there's a ton of interesting science in the notion of time and timekeeping. This was just a single class, though, so I didn't go into too much detail: A Brief History of Timekeeping View more presentations from Chad…

Quantum Physics for Dogs: Many Worlds, Many Treats?

On Saturday at Boskone, I gave a talk on the Many-Worlds Interpretation of QM. This was held up a bit by waiting for the projector to arrive (I was busy enough with other stuff that I didn't notice that I hadn't received confirmation of my request for a projector until late Thursday night, so this was entirely my fault). They were able to come up with a projector, sparing people the need to squint at my tiny tablet PC screen, but it took some time off the beginning of the talk. The talk consisted of me reading the dog dialogue from Chapter 4 (not to different from the original post), then…

Cool Science Elsewhere

You know what I've been delinquent in? Posting about some of the other blogs out there that I take for granted as being great, because they are. A random sampling of good stuff: Swans on Tea discussing entanglement in the popular press. Chad Orzel on the physics of Rumpelstiltskin. Dirac Sea on the fine art of research, and its ludicrous slowness. Cocktail Party Physics gives Isis a run for her money with the physics of jewelery. Would you like to learn how to generate Pythagorean triples in one post? Yes you (and I) would! Arcsecond will teach you how. Here's Fryeburg Academy Physics on…

Icarus at the Edge of Time, by Brian Greene

Review by Chad Orzel from Uncertain Principles Originally posted on: Tue, Jan 13, 2009 9:26 AM Or, Brian Greene Writes a Kid's Book... This is a very odd book. It's printed on boards, like a book for very small children, but the story is a bit beyond what I would imagine reading to a normal kid of the age to want books of that format. It's too short and simple, though, to have much appeal to significantly older children, aside from the fact that the story is written over the top of 15 absolutely gorgeous reproductions of pictures of astronomical objects. This is probably one of those objects…

The Science Fiction of the Gaps

A little while ago, James Nicoll posted about the shifting subject areas of SF: In fact, a fairly consistent pattern in SF is to retreat away from areas that have come under the light of scientific examination. When probes began to visit the planets, SF retreated to the stars (There are very few novels these days set in the solar system). In fact, Trouble on Titan starts off with an essay by Nourse explaining that the attraction of Titan for him was that so little was known about it that he could set almost anything there and not have to fear contradiction from scientists. It's the same…

Life Science and Physical Science Channel Update 9-29-08

In this post: the large versions of the Life Science and Physical Science channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Life Science. A cheetah in the San Diego Wild Animal Park. From Flickr, by HBC4511 Physical Sciences. A Foucault pendulum in Milan, Italy. From Flickr, by sylvar Reader comments of the week: This week on the Life Science Channel Ed Yong looked at a study showing Elephants recognise themselves in mirror. Based on similar experiments performed on primates, the experiment places a piece of tape on an animal's face and has the animal look in a…

Drawing lines between chemistry and physics.

Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel tries to explain the fundamental difference between physics and chemistry: My take on this particular question is that there's a whole hierarchy of (sub)fields, based on what level of abstraction you work at. The question really has to do with what you consider the fundamental building block of the systems you study. Chad's rough breakdown is fine as far as it goes. But it wouldn't (in my experience) be a terribly accurate guide to discerning what (say) a physical chemist actually worked on in his or her research. Chad describes the corresponding…

Best Science Books 2010: Physicsworld.com

Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure. The Tunguska Mystery by Vladimir Rubtsov Coming Climate Crisis? Consider the Past, Beware the Big Fix by Claire L Parkinson How It Ends: From You to the Universe by Chris Impey Lake Views: This World and the Universe by Steven Weinberg The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It by Scott Patterson Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by…

Standardization Walks a Fine Line

On Denialism Blog, Mark Hoofnagle argues that unless homeschooling is better regulated, it should be banned altogether.  He writes "universal primary and secondary education is part of why our country has been so successful."  While Rick Santorum can teach his kids that global warming is a hoax and the earth was created in a day, other parents can withhold sexual education, or, in one example, forbid their daughters from getting a GED.  Hoofnagle concludes, "for parents to say it's a matter of religious freedom to deny their children education, or a future outside their home, can not be…

How to Engage an Undergrad?

It's mid-August, and the school year is nigh. On Dynamics of Cats, Steinn Sigurðsson provides a blueprint for a successful academic term, and yes, you should take notes. Steinn writes, "Ideally, the primary teaching delivery would be a wise person at the end of a log [...] unfortunately wise people are in desperately short supply." More often the wise person is on the floor of a crowded auditorium. But Steinn believes the lecture is a strong foundation for learning—as long as students build on it "after class, over coffee, on the library steps, over lunch, drinking beer and during the…

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog in the New York Times

I was going to post something noting that the great WordPress transition will begin at 7pm tonight, and comments after that time will be lost like Roy Batty's tears. However, I have much happier news: tomorrow's Science Times (available on the Web already) will include a review of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog! I considered reading this book aloud to my dog, even though I doubted he would understand relativity, even as explained by the witty and clear-thinking Chad Orzel. Maxwell does seem to show some interest in Newton's first law: A body at rest tends to remain at rest, and a body in…

links for 2008-09-14

Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator: Make Your Own Palin Baby Name "Chad Orzel, if you were born to Sarah Palin, your name would be: Bush Gator Palin" (tags: politics US internet silly) Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / A Chance to Show Off: the first line game "Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire, I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town." (tags: books blogs games literature) Op-Ed Contributor - The Origins of the Universe - A Crash Course - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com Brian Greene explains what to expect from the…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Festive Update

There's no rest for the wicked, as last weekend's hectic running around is followed by another busy weekend, with some on-campus stuff on Sunday as part of our annual Accepted Students Days. More importantly, though, I will be on a panel at the Empire State book Festival on Saturday from 12:45-1:30 pm: BLOOK: Going from Blog to Book Empire State Convention Center, Meeting Room 4 Books derived from blogs are a publishing phenomenon of the past few years. Why is there an audience for previously digital content in analog form, and what does this say about the future of the book? Hear from a…

The Bohr-Einstein Debates, With Puppets

Back during the DonorsChoose fundraiser, I promised to do a re-enactment of the Bohr-Einstein debates using puppets if you contributed enough to claim $2,000 of the Hewlett-Packard contribution to the Social Media Challenge. I obviously aimed too low, because the final take was $4064.70, more than twice the threshold for a puppet show. So, I put together a puppet show. It took a little while, because I couldn't find any Niels Bohr puppets (maybe in Denmark?). I found an acceptable alternative, though, and put together a video of the Bohr-Einstein debates, using puppets. Here's the whole thing…

Why science fiction was better in the past

Perhaps because we only remember the good stuff? Or only the good suff & famous authors get reprinted. I'm prompted to offer this hypothesis in response to Chad Orzel's commentary that there was a lot of bad space opera even during the "Golden Age" of science fiction. I recall that Zadie Smith once noted that 99.99% (or something to that effect) of Victorian fiction is forgotten and out of print. All that remains read are the "classics," so contemporary audiences have a biased perspective as to the median quality of Victorian-era writers. Of course the insight can be generalized to the…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog

Because I'm a bad busy person, this review of Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is only, oh, about 8 months late. You have probably all bought it already. But in case you haven't, I'll tell you what you're getting into. If you wander over to your local bookstore's science section, you'll see plenty of physics books. There's the standard pontifications by string and high-energy theorists, there's "The Physics of [pop culture fad]" books, there's probably some egregious pseudoscience ("Heal your hernias with positive quantum thinking!"), and if you're in a college town probably…