Blogs
drorzel | May 6, 2014We had a couple of weeks of unplanned hiatus due to sick kids and day care closures, so the superstitious among you might've thought we would never get to the 13th episode of Encertain Dots. Rhett and I are scientists, though, so we powered through:
Given the time of year, this is mostly about end-of-academic-year stuff: exams, intro course curricula, and undergrad research. The undergraduate research symposium I mention a few times is the Steinmetz Symposium, a Union tradition that will happen for the 24th time this Friday. This cancels a day of classes, which is a little annoying, but it's…
drorzel | April 16, 2014The last couple of days have been ridiculously hectic, but Rhett and I did manage to record another episode of Uncertain Dots, our twelfth:
This time out, we talk about labs, undergrad research, kids doing chores, weather, student course evaluations, and I didn't really rant about superheroes. Relevant to the weather thing, I offer the "featured image" up top, showing last night's snow at Chateau Steelypips. Spring in New England, baby!
drorzel | April 9, 2014No, this isn't another blog post lamenting the fact that music writing gets far more attention than science writing. If anything, it's a bit of an argument that science writing ought to be less like popular music writing.
On Twitter this past weekend Jim Henley, one of the few bloggers I consider "old school" (the name of this blog was influenced by his Unqualified Offerings, though he's mostly stepped back from that) had a long series of tweets about pop-music writing, responding to some arguments that music criticism has degenerated and hardly has anything to do with music any more. Jim…
drorzel | April 8, 2014We took a week off last week because Rhett was away on a Secret Mission, but we're back and better than ever this week. More uncertain! More dotty! Or something!
Topics for this week include oblique references to Rhett's mission, some discussion of the Geocentric Janeway debacle, good and bad places to have a conference, why you shouldn't eat conference center food, why more physicists aren't on Twitter, and blogger gatherings.
Here's a link to the Stealth Creationists and Illinois Nazis story I alluded to. It's from 2007, after the blogging dinosaurs but before the blogging armored sloths.
drorzel | April 4, 2014Yesterday's frat boy post prompted some interesting discussion, one piece of which is a response from Matt "Dean Dad" Reed (also at Inside Higher Ed), who overlapped with me at Williams for a year, but had a very different reaction to the social scene there. His take mirrors mine from the other side, though, which suggests I'm not wildly off base.
The other chunk is a comment exchange on Facebook where some colleagues mentioned the problem of social exclusivity as an issue that I didn't address. And that's true-- as I was at a school without fraternities, where all organizations were formally…
drorzel | March 25, 2014In which we hit double digits, in base ten, anyway. This was mostly about teaching stuff, because I'm between terms, in that weird reflect-on-the-last term/ prep-for-the-next-term space. With a digression about training wheels, which are good as an analogy, but less good for actually learning to ride a bike...
drorzel | March 18, 2014In which Rhett and I chat about the hot new discovery of primordial gravitational waves (maybe) very briefly before segueing into talking about LIGO, and Cosmos, and why "theory" is a terrible word, and the memorization of constants, and standardized tests, and time-lapse videos. You know, as one does.
Miscellaneous items:
-- I'm a little pixellated, as if I'm concealing my identity. I forgot to shut Kate's computer down, so it may have been doing online backups that chewed up bandwidth.
-- The von Neumann quote I butcher at one point is "The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even…
drorzel | March 14, 2014Today is March 14th, 3/14 in the normal American way of writing dates, so you'll find a lot of silliness on the web today talking about "π Day" due to the coincidental similarity with the first three digits of π (see, for example, Rhett's annual post). But, of course, this is an archaic and local convention, and not really suited to the dignity of science.
After all, the defined SI unit of time is the second, so if you're going to do things properly, you really ought to measure time in seconds (like the Qeng Ho in Vernor Vinge's brilliant A Deepness in the Sky). So, a proper celebration of…
drorzel | March 12, 2014I alluded to this on Twitter, and meant to leave that be, but the other thing I was going to blog today didn't come together, and I probably shouldn't leave a cryptic tweet as my only comment. So...
One of the links getting passed around a lot in my social-media circles is this Tumblr post from Ben Lillie on The Humanities of Science Communication, which argues that discussions of the science of communication often seem to ignore the expertise of people who communicate for a living-- playwrights, actors, journalists, etc. This is a good point, but the post as a whole bugged me a bit, because…
drorzel | March 11, 2014In which Rhett and I talk about Cosmos. What, you thought there would be another topic? We have contractual obligations, you know...
Okay, there were some other topics like Battlestar Galactica (both versions), why so much of what's on Discovery Channel and TLC sucks these days, the flawed astrophysics of Firefly, speculation about how those little infrared thermometers work, and why some kinds of labs are hard.
And Cosmos again. Because, really, how could we not?
drorzel | March 4, 2014In which we move out of the original trilogy, and into J.J. Abrams territory. Cue the lens flare!
This week's random assortment of topics includes travel, airports, physics models of loading and unloading planes, uses and abuses of curve fitting, odd stuff we get sent to review, and high-speed video cameras.
Miscellaneous links:
-- Rhett's Atlanta airport post.
-- The airplane loading study I was thinking of is Optimal boarding method for airline passengers, by Jason Steffen, from 2008.
--The Slo Mo Guys, Smarter Every Day, Veritasium.
--Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn by Amanda Gefter.
That'…
drorzel | February 28, 2014I got book edits this week, gave an exam on Thursday, and pre-registration for our spring term classes is just beginning, so I have a parade of students begging to get into this course or that one to deal with. So I have no more time for detailed blogging, but will do a bit of tab-clearing to end the week.
This piece about bimodal exams resonated well with my experiences in intro classes. I see a lot of the same thing, though with less statistical power, given that our maximum class size is 18. But in general, the "well-prepared students are bored, poorly-prepared students hopelessly lost"…
drorzel | February 25, 2014This week's episode of Uncertain Dots is, if anything, even more free-form than previous weeks, including a brief cameo from one of Rhett's kids:
Topic covered include the arrangement of faculty offices, the relative lack of demos for E&M (compared to mechanics, where there are endless videos to analyze, etc.) a little bit about science journalism and sports journalism, how we deal with (or don't) the problem of including background information in our blogs, the need to sometimes bring your kids to campus or cancel classes, teaching while sick, tracking the flu, precision measurement and…
drorzel | February 24, 2014Over at Backreaction, Bee takes up the eternal question of scientists vs. journalists in exactly the manner you would expect from a physicist: she makes a graph. Several of them, in fact.
It's generally a good analysis of the situation, namely that scientists and journalists disagree about how to maximize information transfer within the constraints of readership. That's a very real problem, and one I struggle with in writing the blog and books, as well. Lots of people will read content-free piffle, but if the goal is to convey good, solid science to as many people as possible, well, that's a…
drorzel | February 18, 2014In which Rhett and I talk about color vision, undergraduate research projects, blog networks, outreach activities, and how thermodynamics is a lie.
Things mentioned in the discussion:
The Flame Challenge
My post about looking at computer monitors with a spectrometer
Physics Quest
I'm inadvertently doing a bit of product placement here-- the T-shirt I'm wearing is from Surviving the World, and the water bottle I'm drinking from is from the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo. I expected it to be colder in my office on campus, but it was actually pretty warm, so I took off the other…
drorzel | February 18, 2014About three hours from now, Rhett Allain and I are doing another "Uncertain Dots" Google hangout. We don't have a real clear topic, so if you have any questions about physics, academia, blogs, etc. that you'd like to hear us answer, this would be a great time to ask them, via comments here, email, or tweeting at @rjallain or @orzelc. If you like hashtags, #UncertainDots is a good one, but longer than either of our Twitter names...
drorzel | February 12, 2014I didn't advertise it heavily this time, but Rhett and I did another G+ hangout yesterday, and the video is online now:
We talked for a while about the wonders and importance of VPython coding (including some "Oh, I should totally do that..." moments), where we get post ideas (including a discussion of luge physics), briefly about how we put stuff together for posts, and a bit more about physics education research and why it's really difficult.
I had hoped to throw together a quick post about the luge thing for today, but that's probably not going to happen, so you'll have to settle for the…
drorzel | February 6, 2014A couple of days ago, John Scalzi posted a writing advice open thread, asking people to share the best advice they'd gotten on the craft of writing. There's a lot of good stuff in there, much of it fairly specific to fiction writing-- stuff about plotting, the use of synonyms for "said," how to keep track of who's speaking, etc. As someone who's very much an outsider to that side of the writing business, it's interesting to read, but not that directly useful (I do have long stretches of dialogue in the How-to-Teach books, and occasionally needed to worry about the "said" thing there, but that…
drorzel | February 4, 2014This week's hangout with Rhett Allain, in which we talk about how we got into physics, how we find stuff to read, what we enjoyed on physics blogs this week, what we do and don't like about Twitter, and the revenge of the Sith.
The specific blog posts we mentioned:
Frank Noschese's analysis of gravity in Flappy Birds
Ethan Siegel on Hawking and black holes
Bee at Backreaction on what Hawking really said
Timothy Burke on "administrative bloat" and faculty control
Dr. SkySkull on infinite series
Physics Buzz apologizing for starting the infinite series thing
Matthew Francis on polarization in…
drorzel | February 1, 2014Kameron Hurley did a blog post on what it took her to become a writer, which I ran across via Harry Connolly's follow-up. These are fairly long, but well worth reading for insight into what it means to be a writer-- and they're both very good at what they do. You should buy their books, right now.
As always, reading these made me feel really guilty. Maybe I ought to add "the writing life" articles to the list of topics I just don't read, with "Let's make fun of religious people!" and "The Higgs boson is the greatest thing since sliced bread!" Except unlike those two, which just irritate me,…