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Talks in Copenhagen, More on CRU Emails

A potentially historic climate change conference began in Copenhagen Monday and will run for the next two weeks as leaders and diplomats from around the world attempt to reach an agreement about global warming. Meanwhile, the stolen emails of Climategate are still making some headlines, but why? Dismissing cries of conspiracy, ScienceBloggers have moved on to consider the broader implications of the event. Josh Rosenau on Thoughts from Kansas decries the invasion of privacy, writing "I'm sure the server contained private notes to the researchers' loved ones and family and a host of other…

Fundamentally Too Fast

After announcing in September that they had detected neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light, OPERA researchers immediately set out to replicate their results. On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel says they reconfigured the neutrino beam, which originally fired 10,000-nanosecond pulses, "to produce much, much shorter pulses—less than 10ns. And while they've only been running this way for a few weeks, they've already got 20 neutrino detections from the shorter pulses, and they see exactly the same timing anomaly." This confirmation rules out problems with the original experimental…

Feats of Engineering

It seems like every time we turn around, there's another new smartphone or robotic butler pouring coffee in our laps. On Uncertain Principles, the engineering breakthroughs du jour are "technical advances in ion trap quantum computing." Chad Orzel explains, "previous experiments have used optical frequencies to manipulate the states of the ions, using light from very complicated laser systems." Such lasers (though effective) are unwieldy, and researchers are now using simple microwaves to perform the same functions. This promises quantum computers on a chip—eventually. Meanwhile, on the…

Making Waves

On Built on Facts, Matt Springer writes that "there's really no such thing as a purely continuous monochromatic light wave" and "any pulse of light that lasts a finite amount of time will actually contain a range of frequencies." Pass this pulse of light through a medium such as glass, which "can have a different refractive index for each frequency," and some very weird things start to happen. On Life at the SETI Institute, Dr. Lori Fenton explains her study of "aeolian geomorphology - how wind shapes a planetary surface." As it does on Earth, weather makes wave patterns in the dunes of…

NYC Meetup - pictures 1

A bunch of Sciblings meeting at the Seed offices in New York City on Friday Afternoon....updated with a couple of more pictures and links....(several more people came late, after my batteries died...) Chris Rowan Jennifer Jacquet Katherine Sharpe Katherine Sharpe Katherine Sharpe, Virginia Hughes and Mo Costandi Katherine Sharpe, Virginia Hughes and Chris Rowan Catharine Zivkovic Chad Orzel Chris Mooney Chris Mooney Chris Mooney, Ginny Hughes, Karmen Franklin, Janet Stemwedel and me. Chris Rowan and Mo Costandi Evil Monkey, PZ Myers and Tara Smith Ginny Hughes Ginny Hughes…

Perfect for Readers Who Already Have Eaten Cheese in Physics

The great thing about using Google to vanity search for articles about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, or at least one of the great things about it, is that it's world-wide. Thus, this Dutch roundup of new books, which includes mine. This is what they have to say: Een erg geestig boek is 'How to Teach Physics to Your Dog'. Chad Orzel gebruikt scenarios uit de echte wereld om kwantummechanica uit te leggen. Dit doet hij dankzij conversaties met zijn hond Emmy. De leuke gesprekken zorgen er voor dat veel vragen worden opgelost over kwantummechanica. Het boek is niet voor de absolute beginner…

Basic Concepts: The List

This is the top level list of Basic Concepts in Science posts. Welcome to the Basic Concepts blog. This is not your ordinary blog. Instead of regular posts, it has a few post pages that will track and link to new posts of Basic Concepts in Science, and to pages that will list them by field or discipline. Below the fold are the topic page links, or you can click on the new posts below. New posts: De Broglie Equation (quantum physics) by Wandering Primate Paleomagnetism by Chris Rowan at Highly Allochthonous The Pharyngula Stage by PZ Myers at Pharyngula Estimation and DImensions by…

Making Atoms Cold

While the superstar of the particle physics world, the Large Hadron Collider, gets all of the attention (and the glamor shots), there's plenty of interesting science that can be done on the atomic level within an otherwise ordinary laboratory on the campus of an update New York university. Consider, for instance,the lab of Uncertain Principles' Chad Orzel, who has recently taken his readers on a four-part tour of his scientific specialty: making atoms extra cold. While the LHC sends protons whizzing through miles of underground beam pipes in order to more spectacularly crash them together,…

Monday Miscellany

A bunch of smallish items that have been failing to resolve into full-fledged blog posts for a little while now, thrown together here because I don't have anything better to post this morning: -- When is doubt, start with self-promotion: Physics World includes How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in their holiday gift books guide, and says wonderfully nice things about it: Chad Orzel talks to his dog about quantum physics. It is not clear what the dog gets out of this arrangement, but the rest of us ought to be grateful for it, because Orzel's book about their "conversations" is sure to become a…

Links for 2012-01-30

BOOK REVIEW: How To Teach Relativity To Your Dog By Chad Orzel - Science News It may sound like a strange setup, but the somewhat kooky concept works well for explaining a field of physics that can sound, well, kooky to the uninitiated. Emmy is the stand-in for the everyman (or everydog) who has never quite managed to grasp the idea of spacetime, or why moving clocks tick slower than stationary ones. The imagined back-and-forth banter between author and dog keeps the book engaging while Orzel lays out the theoretical framework of particle physics, explains why neither dogs nor neutrinos can…

Negotiations Break Down Again; Administration Warns of Possible Depression

(A white house, Niskayuna, NY) Negotiations stalled for the 125th consecutive minute, dashing early hopes that a compromise might be reached in the tense talks that have gripped this otherwise quiet suburban neighborhood. As the crisis enters its third hour, both sides reiterated their long-standing positions. "It's 8:45pm, MythBusters is over, it's time to go to bed," said a spokesperson for the administration of Chad Orzel and Kate Nepveu. "Let's go upstairs, read some books, and go to sleep." "I no WANNNNA!!!" replied SteelyKid, the final syllable rising to a pitch that only neighborhood…

In which people cannot read

Ophelia and Larry are upset. In particular, they are upset that Chad Orzel and I thought it was OK to have a panel about how scientists reconcile their religious faith and their scientific work but not to include panelists who reject the panel's premise. This was the point that Chad and I were raising, at least, but it is not quite clear that Ophelia and Larry realize what we were saying. Thus, Larry writes: Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles [Extremists Aren't Interesting] and Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas [Talking Sense] take the same position. Non-accommodationist atheists shouldn…

Some Sunday Links

Here are some links for you; science first: Whenever I hear creationists talk about 'information theory', it's always pretty clear that they don't know what they're talking about. ScienceBlogling Mark smacks once such creationist around. Conservapedia mistates mutation (I know, dog bites man). Well, it's related to squid: cool footage of an octopus munching some seafood. The other stuff: While I disagree with the title of PZ's post, he's absolutely right in calling attention to the Cult of Anointing, something I have noted before too. Steven Perez wants his CNN back. Are we headed for a…

The Buzz: Linking Fact and Fiction

Good science takes time, but good science fiction hinges on impatience. Why wait for the invention of real technological marvels when you can imagine them yourself or see them on TV? On The Quantum Pontiff, Dave Bacon ponders the formative links between fantasy and reality, spurred by an Intel talk on the possibilities of "fictional prototyping." He writes, "the creative act of telling a story shares many similarities with the creative act of developing a new research idea or inventing a new technology." On Built on Facts, Matt Springer compares phasers with lasers, writing "it's a nice job…

Schooling SAT Gamers (The Slow Way)

Testing behemoth ETS announced a re-revised SAT for 2015, trying to stay one step ahead of its rival and the legions of teenagers who game standardized tests. Suggesting the vocabulary section was intended as "a proxy test for wide reading," Chad Orzel says memorizing obscure words is "dumb and pointless, but probably takes less time than getting a large vocabulary the 'right' way." Indeed, in the contemporary college prep atmosphere of clubs, sports, musical instruments, and hours of homework, who has time to read anyway? Even English students are likely to stick to SparkNotes (whose…

A is for Average

On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, Dr. Isis solicits hypotheses for the increase in the number of A's awarded to students at American universities. In 1960's, one out of six students got an A (and C used to be the most Common). Now an A is most common, and the number of C's (and D's) has fallen by half. Dr. Isis says, "It's interesting that the real change in grading appears to have occurred in the period between 1962 and 1974, probably coinciding with the increase in conscription for the Vietnam War." Mike the Mad Biologist offers, "I think it's pretty obvious what happened:…

A Few Head Scratchers

Love it or hate it, physics is a demanding subject. It defines much of our knowledge and experience in a daunting variety of ways. But really, you do love physics, don't you? On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel describes a modern implementation of "Maxwell's Demon," a dreamed-of 19th century device that could "cool a gas without obviously increasing entropy." While this may smack of perpetual motion, researchers have taken first steps toward realizing Maxwell's mechanism, using angled traps and lasers to winnow lower-energy atoms from a gas sample. On Starts With A Bang, Ethan Siegel…

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…

Nerd-off

Janet declared a nerd-off, so I must join the throng. Here is a colour-coded table of SciBloggers results in the Nerd test. Nerd Score SciBlogger 99 Nerd God Mark C. Chu-Carroll 99 Nerd God Tim Lambert 99 Nerd God Shelley Batts 99 Nerd God PZ Myers 99 Nerd God afarensis, FCD 99 Nerd God Orac 99 Nerd God Mike Dunford 99 Nerd God Tara C. Smith 99 Nerd God Josh Rosenau 98 Nerd God GrrlScientist 98 Nerd God John Lynch 98 Nerd God Joseph j7uy5 97 Nerd God Dr. Joan Bushwell 97 Nerd God Evil Monkey 97 Nerd God Karmen 94 Supreme Nerd Kevin Beck 93 Supreme Nerd John…

Scienceblogs snipe-back!

Two can play this game—Chad Orzel, who sometimes likes to blame his insufficient popularity on his off-puttingly deep wisdom and excessive sense of moderation and fair play, notes approvingly that "All the world's stupidest people are either zealots or atheists," and that "certainty only comes from dogma," both rather interesting statements coming from a scientist. My certainty that I shouldn't step out of my second-story window, or that I shouldn't eat a large cake of rat poison, don't come from personal experience, but they aren't dogmatic, either—although I'm awfully darn certain that…

Life Science & Physical Science Weekly Channel Update

Getting back in the swing of things with Channel posts, what's inside: The large versions of the Life Sciences and Physical Sciences channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Life Science. This cuttlefish was thrilled to celebrate International Cephalopod Appreciation Day on October 8. From Flickr, by Pear Biter It always amazes me when creatures such as these are captured on camera. This one looks rather curious. Physical Science. A long-exposure photo of momentum in action. From Flickr, by velo steve When I first looked at this picture I thought there…

Me in the Media: Two New Interviews

I've been slacking in my obligation to use this blog for self-promotion, but every now and then I remember, so here are two recent things where I was interviewed by other people: -- I spoke on the phone to a reporter from Popular Mechanics who was writing a story about "radionics" and "wishing boxes," a particular variety of pseudoscience sometimes justified with references to quantum mechanics. The resulting story is now up, and quotes me: It is hard to investigate the ethereal thinking around radionics, but physics is something that can be parsed. So I got in touch with Chad Orzel, a…

More Than One Right Answer

On Life Lines, Dr. Dolittle examines the fascinating parallels between hummingbird and insect flight. He and/or she writes: "The researchers placed nontoxic paint on the wing of a ruby-throated hummingbird at 9 different spots then videotaped the animal flying at 1,000 frames per second with 4 cameras simultaneously." Despite being far removed from insects on the phylogenetic tree, hummingbirds "stir up air around their wings in a way similar to insects like mosquitoes and dragonflies." This is an example of convergent evolution, as natural selection engineers similar solutions for very…

Friday Blog Roundup

Bloggers react to the news of Obama's picks for top enviornmental posts: Kate Sheppard at Gristmill gathers reactions from both environmental advocates and business-oriented think tanks. (Myron Ebel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute warns that Carol Browner shares many of Al Gore's "wildest opinions.") Frances Beinecke at NRDC's Switchboard considers Obama's choices to be proof that he's serious about protect the planet and tackling global warming. Dave Loos at EnviroWonk is "cautiously thrilled" about Steven Chu heading the Department of Energy. Elsewhere: Matt Madia at Reg Watch…

If scientists want to educate the public...but is that the right question to begin with?

Yesterday, Chris Mooney published an article in Washington Post, If scientists want to educate the public, they should start by listening. It has already received many comments on the site, as well as on Chris' blog posts here and here and here. It will be followed by a longer paper tomorrow, at which time this link will work and you will be able to read it. The blogosphere has not remained silent, either, with responses by, among others, Orac, Pal MD, Evil Monkey, Isis and P.Z.Myers. Most of them, as I do, agree with the article about 3/4 through, and are, as I am, disappointed in the…

Sb Has 19 Active Blogs

I'm not a big blog reader, sad to tell, and I have almost no insight into what's going on elsewhere in the science blogosphere including ScienceBlogs. But a few days ago I got curious about what the network I'm on is like these days, and I did some investigating. I was surprised by what I found. In the following, when I talk about active blogs, I mean blogs that have seen an entry in the past month. On 24 January, ScienceBlogs had only 19 active blogs.* Eleven of these opened in 2006, Sb's first year. The network had no less than 112 inactive blogs, most of which started after 2006. This…

Links for 2011-01-20

Andrew Lownie Literary Agency | What Editors Want A big list of editors talking about what they're looking for at their publishing houses, including this, from Oneworld i the UK: "We also love quirky non-fiction for our Autumn list, when shoppers are looking for something a bit different. We had great success last year with How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel and Mary Roach's hilarious Packing for Mars (popular science) as well as Peter Cave's Do Llamas Fall in Love (philosophy). Books like these that offer intelligent but highly readable introductions to interesting…

Great Moments in Vanity Searching -or- The Hotness of Physics

I was Googling for "How to Teach Physics to Your Dog" last night, to check whether a review of said book that I know is coming has been posted yet (side question: Does anybody know a good way to exclude the umpty-zillion versions of Amazon and other sellers from this sort of search? Most of the results are just product pages at one online retailer or another.). The review I was looking for isn't up yet, but I did find a goodreads page, a nice entry at the Cincinnati public library calling it "abstract science delivered painlessly," and this pre-publication alert from Library Journal. "Wait a…

Another Great Reaction to "Framing Science"

There have been a lot of oddities when it comes to the reception of our Science piece. One is how many people can't even correctly spell Nisbet's name. Another is the seemingly dismissive attitude towards much communication research. Perhaps the best comment on this phenomenon came from Chad Orzel: ...the people who are most adamant about Nisbet and Mooney being way off base are the people who are most outraged whenever somebody with an engineering degree dares to say something stupid about biology. The irony here is that this framing business is exactly Nisbet's area of expertise. Now,…

Academic Ambivalence

The start of the new term brings not just new students and qualifying exams, but another round of introspection and soul-searching among the academic set. Which is a good thing for lazy bloggers, because it provokes lots of interesting articles to link to... First up is the always interesting Timothy Burke, who is concerned about last year's students: Right around September, a lot of last year's graduates from liberal arts colleges are discovering that they appear to be qualified for approximately none of the jobs that they might actually want to have. There are exceptions: students who have…

Undead Science

On Aetiology, Tara C. Smith continues her series on the science of The Walking Dead, explaining how diseases spread and how they might cause zombiism. One thing that would be observed in any real contagion would be an incubation period— the time between when a virus (for example) enters your body and you start showing symptoms of infection. For a virus like the flu, this could be about two days during which you don’t feel sick but could still be infecting people around you—even if you don’t bite them. Tara also expresses nerd rage at the show's "doctors" pursuing antibiotics to treat the flu…

Too Much; Not Enough

On Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel investigates the hamstringing of the James Webb Space Telescope. Originally scheduled to launch in 2013 at a cost of $5.1 billion, the JWST was pushed to 2015 and $6.5 billion by a government review panel that faulted NASA mismanagement. But the revised numbers counted on timely infusions of cash, and because "a miserly US Congress" withheld them, the cost of the project ballooned to $8.7 billion, with a new launch date of 2018. Although its unprecedented mirrors are nearly finished—along with its electrical instruments and their housing—the JWST still…

What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics

I gave a talk today for a group of local home-school students and parents, on the essential elements of quantum physics. The idea was to give them a sense of what sets quantum mechanics apart from other theories of physics, and why it's a weird and wonderful thing. The title is, of course, a reference to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, and the second slide was an embedded version of the Chapter 3 reading. I set the talk up to build toward the double-slit experiment with electrons, using the video of the experiment made by Hitachi. Here's the talk on SlideShare: What Every Dog Should Know…

Interesting Stuff at Boskone

I usually post something here about what panels look interesting when the Boskone program goes up on the web. This year's program went up over the weekend, and I'm just now getting around to making a list of worthwhile items. This tells you what kind of week I'm having. Anyway, I looked the program over this morning, and here's what I came up with: Friday 7:30pm Independence: Reading Rosemary Kirstein We won't be able to leave Schenectady until 4pm or so, so the odds of making it to this are pretty slim. I'm really curious to know what the status of the Steerswoman books is, though. Friday…

My New Favorite Review of How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to Your Dog

My Google vanity search for my name and the book titles is really frustratingly spotty, often missing things in major news outlets that I later find by other means. For example, I didn't get a notification about this awesome review in the Guardian, from their children's book section: I am a ten year old who likes Physics. What is Physics, you might ask! Well, Physics is the science of pretty much everything around you. It asks big questions like where did we come from? How long ago was the Big Bang? Quantum Physics is the part of physics which talks about atomic and sub atomic particles,…

Science in the 21st Century

The Perimeter Institute will be hosting a workshop in September on "Science in the 21st Century": Times are changing. In the earlier days, we used to go to the library, today we search and archive our papers online. We have collaborations per email, hold telephone seminars, organize virtual networks, write blogs, and make our seminars available on the internet. Without any doubt, these technological developments influence the way science is done, and they also redefine our relation to the society we live in. Information exchange and management, the scientific community, and the society as a…

Blogging's impact on my life

This seems like an interesting meme. I was tagged by Babel's Dawn, who asks the following: What have you learned so far from visitors to your blog? To be aware of who I'm writing to: a very bright, sometimes expert audience -- though not always expert in the particular field I'm writing about. Also, that I'm a poor predictor of what will be interesting to my audience, so I'd better be doing my best no matter the topic. If somebody offered to pay for a course (or more) for you, what would it be? Statistics. Definitely a gap in my knowledge there. Are you satisfied with what you have achieved…

Medium, Message, and Secondary Audiences in Public Speaking

Having just returned from a long trip where I gave three talks, one of the first things I saw when I started following social media closely again was this post on how to do better presentations. The advice is the usual stuff-- more images, less text, don't read your slides, and for God's sake, rehearse the talk before you give it-- and it's generally very good. Given the two very different types of presentation I gave over the last few weeks, though, I think it's important to add one note about the design of the visuals, which is this: when you're putting a talk together, keep the final…

Morality and Political Polarity

Over the weekend, ScienceBlogs was treated to a view of how at least one European views American politics. Archaeologist Martin Rundkvist looked at our spectrum of political belief and compared it to normal politics in his native Sweden. From his perspective, all of American politics is right-wing. Even the Liberal Party, he tells us, is part of the political right in Sweden - and not because they are advocating for things that are all that different than liberals do in America. Lest you think that this is just a European perspective, Australian John Wilkins agrees that the range of…

Best Science Books 2010: BoingBoing

Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure. The list is a compilation of selections from all the different BB editors. I'm also only selecting 2010 books from their lists. How to Teach Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python by Al Sweigart Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks by Ben Goldacre Where Good Ideas Come From: The…

Science and Science Fiction

A few days ago, Peggy and Stephanie asked the blogosphere a few questions about the relationship between science and Science Fiction. They want to use the insights from the responses to run their session - Science Fiction on Science Blogs - at the ScienceOnline09 meeting in January. They got lots of responses - interesting reads for the long holiday weekend: Responses from the SF Writer Point of View Sean Craven @ Renaissance Oaf Simon Haynes @ Spacejock News Arvind Mishra @ Science Fiction in India JesterJoker @ Sa Souvraya Niende Misain Ye Kelly McCullough @ Wyrdsmiths Mike Brotherton…

How to Give a Good PowerPoint Lecture, 2012

My timekeeping course this term is a "Scholars Research Seminar," which means it's supposed to emphasize research and writing skills. Lots of these will include some sort of poster session at the end of the term, but I decided I preferred the idea of doing in-class oral presentations. Having assigned that, of course, I felt I ought to give them a class with advice on how to give an oral presentation. I went looking for advice on this, and found that I wrote a guide to giving good PowerPoint lectures back in 2006 (God, I'm a blogging dinosaur...), which holds up pretty well. So, I dusted that…

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog: A Review Is In

I'm trying not to be Neurotic Author Guy and obsessively check online reviews of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog every fifteen minutes. I've actually been pretty successful at it, so successful that I didn't notice the first posted review at Amazon until my parents mentioned it to me. It's a really good one, though: I'm at the point know where I could answer some of the most basic questions that his dog has, but I remember a time when I couldn't and when the questions the dog asks would've been exactly the questions that I would have had. Pretty much every time a statement by the author…

Ask Ethan: What's so 'spooky' about quantum entanglement? (Synopsis)

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” -Albert Einstein If you create an entangled pair of particles, and stretch them apart as far as you want, the entanglement remains. If you make a measurement of one particle’s quantum state, you immediately -- and this is truly instantaneous -- learn the quantum state of the other. This is true whether the other particle is meters, kilometers, astronomical units or light years away. Schematic of the third Aspect experiment testing quantum non-locality.…

Anonymity and Pseudonymity

Somebody recently asked me whether I had figured out who Female Science Professor is. I truthfully replied that I haven't even tried. That was the first thing that came to mind when some jerk from the National Review revealed the identity of "Publius", kicking off another round of discussion about the etiquette of revealing identities that bloggers have chosen to conceal. This one probably won't be any more revealing than the previous go-rounds. It's worth a tiny bit of effort, though, to fight for correct language in this case. Lots of people, most of them right-wingers, will be referring to…

What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics

A quick check-in from Tuscaloosa, where we're getting ready to head out for the football tailgating. While I've got a minute, though, here are the slides from my public lecture, via SlideShare: What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics View more presentations from Chad Orzel. These are probably less comprehensible that some of my other talks, as I deliberately avoided putting much text on the slides, which I think works better for this kind of presentation. The down side, of course, is that it's not as obvious what some of the slides mean, if you don't know the intended flow of the…

Taking Off for the Great White North

I'm heading to the airport right after my second class today (I'm doing two weeks of our first-year seminar class), to appear at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. This promises to be a good event-- I had a great time at the Science in the 21st Century workshop last fall, and they've got a great program lined up for the festival. I'm most likely going to attend tonight's tv broadcast, and tomorrow's "Quantum Physics in 60 Minutes" lecture (I have a professional interest in seeing how the competition does things), but I'm making the trip in order to appear…

Science Showdown Highlight Reel: Early Play from the Physics Region

PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS | FINAL GAME: Darwin v. HIV What began as a field of 64 highly competitive teams has ended with just Darwin and HIV. With the tournament's Final game currently underway, we look back on a Science Showdown like no other. Some of the best play in the early rounds came from the Physics, or Orbit, Region. Chad Orzel, of Uncertain Principles, caught all the action. It all began with this... Anchor 1 (voiceover): The Showdown begins! Four regions, eight games each, sixty-four top science concepts in a fight to the finish. Anchor 2: In today's Orbit region…

The Blogger SAT Challenge!

The New York Times recently published sample top-scoring essays from the new written component of the SAT test in order to show the type of work that was likely to score highly. Several bloggers, as well as the Times itself, have noted that the writing isn't exactly compelling. In fact, I've been carrying on a bit of a debate with Chad Orzel, of ScienceBlogs' Uncertain Principles on this very subject. Chad argues that it's unfair to put a microscope to the the highschoolers' prose, written in just 25 minutes based on a prompt they had never encountered before. In the comments, I expressed…

You'll Have No Idea How Fast I'm Moving

The preliminary Boskone program has been posted, and I'll soon be adding another tag with a "Participant" ribbon to my Wall of Name. (I have a big collection of nametags from various meetings hanging on a wall in my office.) Excerpts of the schedule will appear below the fold, with scattered commentary, for those who would like to know exactly where I'll be next weekend. Friday Friday 5:00 pm Gardner: Five Things You Should Never Say to Your Favorite Authors When You Meet Them People blurt out the most amazing things when tongue-tied. Here's a chance to think about what to say before you meet…