In the Media
drorzel | October 9, 2010Via Sheril, Science Friday on NPR needs money:
We at SciFri are facing severe financial difficulties, i.e. raising money. NSF [National Science Foundation] has turned us down for continuing funding, saying they love what we do, we are sorely needed, but it's not their job to fund us. At the same time, NPR has said the same thing, telling us that if we want to stay on the air, etc, we now have to raise all our own money. Despite what listeners may think, NPR only gives us about 10 percent of our funding.
Emmy's suggested solution was "They should have me on to talk about physics. And bunnies…
drorzel | September 7, 2010In chapter 2 of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, there's a footnote about the ubiquity of uncertainty principle analogies in the mass media:
To give you an idea of the breadth of subjects in which this shows up, in June 2008, Google turned up citations of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in (among others) an article from the Vermont Free Press about traffic cameras, a Toronto Star article citing the influence of YouTube on underground artists, and a blog article about the Phoenix Suns of the NBA. Incidentally, all of these articles also use the Uncertainty Principle incorrectly--by the…
drorzel | August 30, 2010There was a deeply silly New York Times article about "Past Life Regression" over the weekend:
In one of his past lives, Dr. Paul DeBell believes, he was a caveman. The gray-haired Cornell-trained psychiatrist has a gentle, serious manner, and his appearance, together with the generic shrink décor of his office -- leather couch, granite-topped coffee table -- makes this pronouncement seem particularly jarring.
In that earlier incarnation, "I was going along, going along, going along, and I got eaten," said Dr. DeBell, who has a private practice on the Upper East Side where he specializes in…
drorzel | August 21, 2010I'm probably about the last person with an interest in such things to get around to watching Phil Plait's (in)famous "Don't Be a Dick" speech, but I finally got around to it, and it's really excellent:
Phil Plait - Don't Be A Dick from JREF on Vimeo.
Phil has posted about the speech itself, online reactions to it, and the in-person response after the talk. His thoughts are well worth reading, to put the whole thing it better context.
I really don't have anything to add, which is fine, because I should spend less time typing blog stuff anyway.
drorzel | August 19, 2010Everybody's favorite science-and-politics blogger has posted a video clip showing part of what's wrong in science communication. It's a clip from the BBC from last December, featuring one of those head-to-head quasi-debates about "Climategate" between Prof. Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia and political consultant Marc Morano, who has made himself a nice little media niche as the go-to guy for climate change denial:
I don't think this is quite as damning as Chris says, but it's pretty bad. What you see here is a competition between a scientist and somebody who knows how the…
drorzel | July 19, 2010I had planned to spend some time this weekend trying to make sense of this new result on topological insulators, and maybe even write up the relevant paper for ResearchBlogging. Family life intervened, though, and I didn't have the time. I get enough of it to understand the basics of what's going on, but there's a whole lot I don't understand about topological insulators generally, so I'd need to do a bunch of reference chasing to get to something I can understand well enough to work back up to this week's Nature paper.
And, to put it bluntly, there just isn't that much reward for the work…
drorzel | July 19, 2010Over at Jeff Vandemeer's blog, Rachel Swirsky has a series ofm guest posts (start here if you prefer direct post links) about the recently completed Launch Pad workshop. this is a NASA funded workshop bringing a group of writers together for six days of lectures on modern astronomy from working astronomers. From the workshop web site:
Launch Pad is a NASA-funded education/public outreach effort supplementing Mike Brotherton's space-based astronomical research. Our budget allows us to provide a workshop that is essentially free to participants. Our primary goal is to teach writers of all…
drorzel | July 14, 2010With the rumors of a Higgs Boson detected at Fermilab now getting the sort of official denial that in politics would mean the rumors were about to be confirmed in spectacular fashion, it's looking like we'll have to wait a little while longer before the next "Holy Grail" of physics gets discovered.
Strictly speaking, the only thing I recall being officially dubbed a "Holy Grail" that's been discovered was Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC), first produced by eventual Nobelists Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell in 1995. Somebody, I think it was Keith Burnett of Oxford, was quoted in the media calling…
drorzel | June 23, 2010I don't remember who pointed me at this transcript of Deepak Chopra interviewing Michio Kaku, but if I remember who it was, I fully intend to hate them.
DC: Is our conversation affecting something in another galaxy right now?
MK: In principle. What we're talking about right is affecting another galaxy far, far beyond the Milky Way Galaxy. Now when the Big Bang took place we think that most of the matter probably was vibrating in unison.
DC: So it was already correlated?
MK: It was already correlated. We call this coherence or correlation. As the universe expanded, we're still correlated, we'…
drorzel | June 20, 2010There's a blog post making the rounds of the science blogosphere titled If Sports Got Reported Like Science, which imagines the effect of applying the perceived restriction on scientific terminology to sports reporting:
HOST: In sports news, Chelsea manager Carlo Ancelotti today heavily criticised a controversial offside decision which denied Didier Drogba a late equaliser, leaving Chelsea with a 1-all draw against Sunderland.
INTERCOM: Wait. Hold it. What was all that sports jargon?
HOST: It's just what's in the script. All I did was read it - I've got no idea what it's really on about.…
drorzel | June 10, 2010The Science Channel debuted a new show last night, Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, with the premier apparently designed by committee to piss off as many Internet types as possible. The overall theme was "Is there a creator?" and it featured physicist-turned-Anglican-priest John Polkinghorne talking about fine-tuning but no atheist rebuttal. It spent a good ten minutes on Garrett Lisi and his E8 theory, making it sound a whole lot more complete than it is. And it got this aggressively stupid review in the Times:
Oh, let's face it: it was hard to concentrate on the first half of the…
drorzel | June 10, 2010One of the questions asked of Neil deGrasse Tyson at the WSF thing last week was "When did you change from a mild-mannered astrophysicist to a rock-star scientist?" (or something close to that phrasing). In his answer, he said that after his first tv interview was edited down to a three-second shot of him wiggling his hips, he made a deliberate effort to practice giving sound bites-- answering questions in 3-4 sentences with a good "hook" for the tv people to work with.
I thought of this when I stumbled across the following YouTube clips, which were shot by TV Ontario when I was at the…
drorzel | June 6, 2010You might not know this, because I've been so shy about mentioning it here, but I'll be signing How to Teach Physics to Your Dog at 1:30 pm today as part of the Authors Alley program at the World Science Festival Street Fair. It's true.
It looks (at least in the tiny patch of sky I can see out our hotel window) like a beautiful day here in Manhattan, so if you're in the area, it would be a great day to come by an outdoor science festival. And given the stuff they were setting up last night, and the atmosphere at the events we've attended so far, it should be plenty festive, even if you're a…
drorzel | June 5, 2010We missed the formal presentaion at the World Science Festival stargazing event last night, and it was cloudy enough to prevent actual stargazing, but the giant mock-up of the James Webb Space Telescope is giant and cool even in the dark. More importantly, Neil deGrasse Tyson is awesome. We got there around 9:30, and he was taking questions from an informal group of people having around where the presentation had been. When we left at 11pm, he was still going strong. More amazingly, I don't recall seeing him drink anything.
He may be a robot. A really awesome robot who is amazingly generous…
drorzel | June 2, 2010Sean Carroll is miffed about a science-and-religion panel at the World Science Festival:
The panelists include two scientists who are Templeton Prize winners -- Francisco Ayala and Paul Davies -- as well as two scholars of religion -- Elaine Pagels and Thupten Jinpa. Nothing in principle wrong with any of those people, but there is a somewhat obvious omission of a certain viewpoint: those of us who think that science and religion are not compatible. And there are a lot of us! Also, we're right. A panel like this does a true disservice to people who are curious about these questions and could…
drorzel | June 1, 2010Two noteworthy events related to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in the next month:
First, and most important, I'm going to be signing books at the Author's Alley portion of the World Science Festival Street Fair. The fair itself is in Washington Square Park in Manhattan, though the name of the signing program is a little misleading-- rather than being in an actual alley, the signings will be on the eighth floor of NYU's Kimmel Center, on the south side of the square. I'm signing at 1:30, and there are plenty of other books and presentations on offer, not to mention festive happenings…
drorzel | May 21, 2010I didn't see it live, but thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can see Tom O'Brian of NIST talking about measurement on the Rachel Maddow show last night:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Tom used to have an office not far from the lab I worked in at NIST, and has a background in laser stuff, so he's got to be a good guy for this. This was in honor of World Metrology Day, celebrating the hundred-and-mumbleth anniversary of the signing of the Convention on the Meter yesterday. Ironically, all the numbers Tom cites are given in English units.
So,…
drorzel | May 18, 2010It's been a very long day, so I'm lying on the couch watching
"Pardon the Interruption" on ESPN. They're having a boring
conversation about baseball, and I'm just drifting off into a pleasant
doze when:
"Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake! Fear! Fire! Foes! Awake!"
I jolt awake. "What are you barking at?!?" I yell at the dog, who
is standing in the middle of the living room, baying at nothing. She
stops.
"Scary things!"
The room is empty. "There's nothing here," I say, and then hear a
car door slam. I look outside, and see the mathematician next door
heading into his house. "Were you barking at Bill? He…
drorzel | May 8, 2010While it's not aprt of the official LaserFest package of stuff, Physics World is marking the 50th anniversary of the laser with a couple of really nice pieces on lasers in science and popular culture:
Where next for the laser interviews six laser experts-- Claire Max of UCSC, Bill Phillips of NIST, Steven Block of Stanford, science writer Jeff Hecht, John Madey of Hawaii's FEL lab, and Eric Gustafson of Caltech and LIGO.-- about the current status of lasers in their areas of science, and the future prospects.
From ray-gun to Blu-Ray is a very nice survey of lasers and laser-like devices in…
drorzel | May 3, 2010While I missed the controversial episode with comments about aliens, I figured I should at least take a look at the Discovery Channel's Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, so I put it on last night after putting SteelyKid to bed. This was the big two-hour "Story of Everything" episode, starting with the Big Bang and describing the whole history of the universe.
I made it through about half an hour, before I gave up and went to bed. This was partly due to it being a really long day (I took SteelyKid shopping and to a playground, did some yard work, and went to a meeting on campus), so I…