Blogs
drorzel | June 20, 2012In which the great blog recap rolls on to probably the most important event of the last ten years: the arrival of SteelyKid. And a bunch of other bloggy stuff.
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There's really no question what should be the featured image for this recap post: Clearly, it needs to be an early photo of SteelyKid, who arrived not quite four years ago, and soon made friends with Appa the stuffed sky-bison. Sadly, we haven't been very good about doing regular pictures of The Pip, mostly because it's so exhausting to keep up with the two of them.
Of course, regular blogging continued as well. This seems…
drorzel | June 19, 2012In which we look back at a very political, perhaps excessively political year on the blog.
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I'm picking up the pace of my recap because I'd like to get through as much as possible before the actual tenth anniversary of the blog this Friday. I won't get through every year, but I'm going to try to do as many as I can.
2007-2008 was a somewhat problematic year for me. On the one hand, there was some pretty good stuff in there, but there were also a number of ugly political squabbles. This was around the time I stopped even trying to read all of ScienceBlogs, and trimmed my RSS…
drorzel | June 13, 2012In which we look at the end of the Steelypips era and the launch of ScienceBlogs.
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Before the Great Upgrade derailed things completely for a month, I was working on a recap of this blog's history, and had gotten up through the end of 2005, which marked the end of my time as an independent blogger.
I was first approached about the idea of ScienceBlogs in late 2005 by Christopher Mims, then at Seed magazine, who later tweeted a secret history of ScienceBlogs. I was initially a little apprehensive about the idea, as I was still pre-tenure at that time, and hadn't attempted to explain…
drorzel | May 31, 2012In which I talk about the common complaint that we teach students physics that "isn't true," and the limits on that statement.
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Frequent commenter Ron sent me an email pointing to this post by David Reed on "What we “know” that t’aint so…. and insist on teaching to kids!":
he science we teach is pretty old. Mostly 19th century ideas about the world around us are taught as “facts” with little but anecdotal data to support it. We teach it via an ontology that replays the history of science, thus the newest and most powerful scientific understandings are viewed as “too advanced”. If…
drorzel | May 30, 2012In which we compare a couple of different systems for evaluating teachers, looking at what's involved in doing a fair assessment of a teacher's performance.
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Another casualty of the great blog upgrade, in the sense of a post that was delayed until the inspiration for it has been forgotten by most of the people who might want to talk about it, was this Grant Wiggins post on accountability systems:
[The Buckingham, Browne, and Nichols prep school where he taught in the 80's] had a state of the art teacher performance appraisal system back in the 80’s (we’ll need current or recent folks…
drorzel | May 23, 2012So, as you may or may not have noticed, ScienceBlogs has gotten a makeover. If you read via RSS, you might not notice anything, but if you come to the blog itself, you'll see a new look. The previous three-column layout is gone, and posts on the front page now show only short excerpts and "featured" images. This makes us look more like the blogs at National Geographic, the new Corporate Masters (for a good while now, actually, but they only just did the redesign). On the back end, we've changed from Movable Type to WordPress, which will take a little getting used to, but which lots of people…
drorzel | May 8, 2012Continuing the blog recap series, we come to the "split year" of 2005-2006. The blog was initially launched in late June, so that's when I'm starting the years for purposes of these recaps, but ScienceBlogs launched in January 2006, so this year was half Steelypips and half ScienceBlogs. This post will cover the Steelypips half, June-January; I'll do the ScienceBlogs stuff in a second post, once I figure out the best way to go through those posts (the ScienceBlogs archives aren't set up well for reading straight through).
In reading through this, I was amused to discover this pan of Seed's…
drorzel | May 1, 2012Delayed again by the need to do actual, you know, work, here's a look back at the third year of this blog's existence. You can also read posts covering year one and year two.
2004-2005 was the last complete year before the move to ScienceBlogs in January of 2006, after which the making of these posts will become more complicated, because my posting rate went way up. For this year, though, I was still sticking to one post a day, and the blog had settled into a pretty decent groove.
The year did feature a brief foray into silly physics-related fiction, which might possibly be called a precursor…
drorzel | April 24, 2012The schedule called for this to appear last Friday, but as I was just back from a funeral, yeah, not so much. I had already gone through and bookmarked a whole slew of old posts, though, so here's a recap of the 2003-2004 blogademic year (starting and ending in late June).
This year saw a few milestones, though not quite as many as the previous year. I got a grant, passed my third-year reappointment review (the first big hurdle on the way to tenure), and we had a visiting speaker from Yale one week who mentioned in passing an idea that became central to my research program.
Probably the most…
drorzel | April 13, 2012As threatened a little while ago, this is the first of ten hopefully weekly posts looking back at the ten years this blog has been in operation. This one covers the period from the very first post on June 22, 2002 to June 21, 2003.
When I started doing this look back, I was more than a little afraid that it would prove cringe-inducing. It's been ten years, after all, and in that time I've gone from a wet-behind-the-ears, recently married assistant professor to a tenured father of two and a published author. That's enough external change that I was expecting my early posts to seem, well,…
drorzel | April 3, 2012June 22, 2012 will mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of this blog. While I would like to one day be famous enough to be able to staple together a collection of loosely related blog posts and call it a book, I'm not there yet. This particular arbitrary numerical signifier does, however, seem worth some commemoration. Also, while I have some idea of how the site has evolved over the last ten years, it's been a slow process, so I thought it would be interesting to troll back through the archives and see how things used to be.
Next Friday, appropriately enough the 13th, will be exactly…
drorzel | March 15, 2012Over at the Scholarly Kitchen, Kent Anderson complains about the uselessness of comments on journals:
Comments in online scientific journals have been notoriously poor -- either too much material of uneven quality or too little discussion to amount to a hill of beans. All too often, commenting has to be shut down because internecine and tiresome debates break out, creating more noise than signal. The best comments are scholarly, and borrow extensively from the form of letters to the editor.
After more than a decade and millions of blogs, it seems one main lesson practitioners are learning --…
drorzel | February 20, 2012This was the title of the group discussion I led at Boskone on Saturday, and since it's probably relevant to the interests of people reading this blog, I figure it's worth posting a quick recap. Of course, between the unfamiliar format and Friday's travel with the Incredible Screaming Pip, I didn't actually make any notes for this, so what follows is my sketchy recollection of what I said; omissions and misstatements are a reflection of my dodgy memory, not an attempt to distort anything.
The title is obviously a little tongue-in-cheek, because the goal is really to not wreck your career with…
drorzel | January 17, 2012The always interesting Timothy Burke has a post that's basically a long links dump pointing to two articles about the state of humanities in academia, which includes a sort of aside that is more interesting to me than either of the linked articles:
This leads me to the second piece I really liked in this past week, at Ian Bogost's blog. Now, look, to some extent this essay is just Bogost being Bogost: whether in tweets, blogs or books, you get the clear sense that he exemplifies the quip about not wanting to be part of any club that would have him as a member. The voice that I've built up on…
drorzel | January 3, 2012I'm a little late to the Most Popular Posts of the Year list party, partly because I wanted to wait until the year was actually over, and partly because Google Analytics was being Difficult, and I had to switch back to the "old" version to get actual numbers out. Having sorted that out, though, here are the top posts to this blog for the calendar year 2011:
Because 4% of the Energy Controls 100% of the Photons, 28607 pageviews
Links for 2011-09-04, 11470 pageviews
The Innumeracy of Educators; or Mark Twain Was Right, 9048 pageviews
Faster Than a Speeding Photon: "Measurement of the neutrino…
drorzel | December 9, 2011Three quick items relating to science in book form:
1) It's that time of year again when every media outlet of any consequence puts out a "Year's Best {Noun}" list, and John Dupuis is checking the lists for science books so you don't have to. It looks like a pretty reasonable year for science in the best non-fiction-book-list world, but you can see for yourself.
2) In the "good books about science coming next year" category, the line-up for The Open Laboratory anthology of outstanding science blogging has been announced. I'm very pleased to report that my write-up of the OPERA preprint was…
drorzel | December 6, 2011A blog run by the Washington Post featured a post on Monday about an adult taking and failing a standardized test, who was later revealed as school board member Rick Roach:
Roach, the father of five children and grandfather of two, was a teacher, counselor and coach in Orange County for 14 years. He was first elected to the board in 1998 and has been reelected three times. A resident of Orange County for three decades, he has a bachelor of science degree in education and two masters degrees: in education and educational psychology. He has trained over 18,000 educators in classroom management…
drorzel | October 20, 2011I've been too busy to really work on the DonorsChoose fundraiser this year, but it's worth taking a little time to mention this opportunity: Starting today and running through Saturday midnight, the DonorsChoose board will match donations to the Science Bloggers for Students fundraiser. thus, a $5 donation becomes $10, $10 becomes $20, and, well, you know how to multiply by two.
So, since you're quick with arithmetic, why not throw a couple of bucks to DonorsChoose, to help the next generation learn to do addition and multiplication, and eventually multivariable calculus? Such as, say, this…
drorzel | October 11, 2011Alternate title: I Have an Overdeveloped Sense of Responsibility, Which Is Going to Get Me in Trouble Someday.
So, it's October, which means the annual DonorsChoose fundraising challenge is upon us. I really don't have time to do a good job of this, but having raised a whole bunch of money for them in the past, I felt bad not participating. So, I planned to do an apologetic blog post saying "I'm too busy, but give to the challenge of one of these other blogs on ScienceBlogs." Only, it turns out, there aren't any ScienceBlogs bloggers signed up.
Then I said, "Well, I'll just steer people to…
drorzel | October 4, 2011The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae." Ethan will presumably have a post with about a gigabyte worth of images in it shortly, or if you prefer your information in book form, you can read Richard Panek's The Four Percent Universe, which has lots of detail about what they did, including the rivalry between the different groups. As a bonus, the UK edition has a blurb from yours truly...
But that's not what you really want to know--…