Pop Culture
drorzel | March 1, 2015Back on Thursday when I was waiting to be annoyed by a speech, one of the ways I passed time was reading stuff on my phone, which included This Grantland piece about Charles Barkley and "advanced stats". In it, Bryan Curtis makes the argument that while Barkley's recent comments disparaging statistical tools seem at first like just the same old innumeracy, it's really a question of ownership.
But Barkley was firing a shot in a second war. Let’s call it Moneyball II. This clash doesn’t pit a blogger versus a newspaperman in a debate over the value of PER. It pits media versus athletes in a…
drorzel | February 27, 2015Yesterday was Founders Day at Union, celebrating the 220th anniversary of the granting of a charter for the college. The name of the event always carries a sort of British-boarding-school air for me, and never fails to earworm me with a very particular rugby song, but really it's just one of those formal-procession-and-big-speaker events that provide local color for academia.
This year's event started, as always, with a classical music performance-- a song by Aaron Copeland, this time, so we've at least caught up to the 20th Century. (I'm not sure I want to live long enough to see a Bob Dylan…
drorzel | February 26, 2015Jon "Men Who Stare at Goats" Ronson has a new book coming out, and has been promoting it with excerpts in major newspapers, most notably the New York Times Magazine and the Guardian. In these, he tracks down people whose lives were wrecked by massive public shaming campaigns over idiotic things they wrote on social media, and talks to them about what happened, and what they've been doing since.
Ronson's whole career is built around profiling unusual and often unpleasant people in a way that is ultimately sympathetic without endorsing their problematic aspects-- it belatedly occurs to me that…
drorzel | February 24, 2015There's a new-ish book review podcast covering pop-science books, BookLab, hosted by Dan Falk and Amanda Gefter, and their latest episode includes my Eureka as the third of three books being discussed (a bit more than 40 minutes in, though their discussion of the other books is also interesting...).
It's sort of an odd experience listening to other people talking about my book; most of the audio I've heard about it is listening to my own interviews, where I'm actively participating (I recorded another radio interview yesterday; not sure when it will air, but I'll post a link). Happily, they…
drorzel | February 20, 2015I didn't see this before yesterday's post about Twitter, but over at SciLogs, Kirk Englehardt gets evangelical, offering a very chipper list of "Ten Reasons for Academic Researchers to Use Social Media." I'll just put the item headers here, though each of these has a more complete description, with links to lots of other stuff:
10. You’re in the Driver’s Seat
9. It’s About the Network
8. It’s Newsy and Trendy
7. Promotion (may) = Citations and Downloads
6. Spreading Your Love of Science
5. Setting the Record Straight
4. Sharing Interesting Things
3. Enhancing Your Research
2. It’s Easy
1. It…
drorzel | February 19, 2015The AAAS annual meeting was last week, which apparently included some sessions on social media use. This, of course, led to the usual flurry of twittering about the awesomeness of Twitter, and how people who don't use Twitter are missing out. I was busy with other stuff, so I mostly let it pass, and of course I can't find representative examples now because Twitter.
The truth is, though, Twitter is kind of useless. Or, rather, it's only useful for certain kinds of things-- it's social media, and much more social than media.
So it's a great medium for talking to people you're not physically…
drorzel | February 19, 2015Over at Quantum Progress there was a recent series of guest posts about a social-justice-in-physics curriculum used by high school teacher Moses Rifkin. I sort of glanced at it, said "Huh, that's sort of interesting," and moved on, but this got picked up by some right-wing sites, and exploded. To the point where the awful people on Fox's awful morning show did a segment hating on it.
The angle of attack is, of course, that this is wasting time that ought to be spent on teaching physics. And, you know, I applaud Fox News's sudden concern for the teaching of physics-- if they'd like to have me…
drorzel | February 15, 2015The final bit of meta-blogging I'll do this weekend is another look at what survives from past years. Unfortunately, when National Geographic took over, they broke our Google Analytics access, so I can't see blog stats from before mid-2012 any more. I do, however, have this old post listing the top posts of 2010, traffic-wise, which serves as a snapshot of what was popular at the time. It's interesting to see how this compares to the current list of top posts from 2010-- the approximate rank of 2010 posts based on traffic in 2014 is in parentheses:
A Lot of Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing (…
drorzel | February 15, 2015Continuing the weekend theme of meta-blogging, one of the questions I've occasionally wondered about in doing top-posts lists for a given year is the problem of a bias against recency-- that is, that posts put up toward the end of the year are inherently at a disadvantage because they've had less time to integrate up the slow trickle of traffic that every page on the Internet gets. Obviously, this isn't a question that can be answered by data from 2014, but I have access to traffic stats back to mid-2012, so I can look at data for 2013. So, these are the top posts I put up in 2013 in terms of…
drorzel | February 14, 2015As a follow-up to yesterday's post about what draws the most traffic here, I went through and pulled out the top 20 posts from the blog (by traffic) for the calendar year 2014 that were first published in 2014. Numbers after the links are the fraction of the total pageviews for the year that each of these drew, according to Google Analytics:
"Earthing" Is a Bunch of Crap 1.03%
Tennis Ball Plus Soccer Ball Equals Blown Minds 0.65%
Impossible Thruster Probably Impossible 0.55%
Quick Interstellar Thoughts 0.54%
What Is Color? 0.52%
The Physics of Crazy Sleds 0.45%
Method and Its Discontents 0.43…
drorzel | February 12, 2015Rhett Allain has a list of 5 Things Every Human Should Know About Light, to tie in with the International Year of Light, and it's a good list with lots of .gifs. Of course, there are some gaps, so let me offer some additional things that everyone ought to know about light:
-- Light Is a Particle
Rhett and I have a long-running argument about the use of photons in introductory physics; he's against them for reasons that make no sense to me. To my mind, it is unquestionably true that light has particle-like properties (and here's a follow-up with some math), and that's a thing that everybody…
drorzel | February 10, 2015No, not the little cover .jpg that I use as the "featured image" to tag these posts promoting Eureka. The post title refers to the Big Picture Science radio show from the SETI insitute. I'm one of the people interviewed in the latest episode, Maria Konnikova (author of Mastermind) and Louis Liebenberg.
This is another interview that was recorded remotely down at WAMC in Albany. They pushed back on my stock answers a little more than usual, which in one sense was fun, but was also pretty exhausting, as I was at the lowest point of the cold I'm just getting over now. I went home right after it…
drorzel | February 8, 2015This was a good week for "Chad bristles at side issues of massively reshared stories," with the Vox and gender bias stories, and also this PBS piece urging parents to tell their kids science stories. That probably seems surprising, given what I do around here, but while I fully endorse the end of that piece, the opening section in which Wendy Thomas Russell explains why she never liked science mostly makes me think that she's an awful person. She attributes her lack of interest in science to bad teaching, and provides a series of examples ending with:
Later, at the University of Nebraska, I…
drorzel | February 2, 2015The ending of last night's Super Bowl couldn't've been more perfect as a demonstration of the point I was making about scientific thinking in football (and, you know, in that book I keep flogging...). First, on the positive side, you have New England's Malcolm Butler making the key play:
"I knew what was going to happen," said Butler, an undrafted free agent out of Western Alabama who said New England was the only team that gave him a chance to reach the NFL. "I don't know how I knew. I just knew. I just beat him to the point and caught the ball."
Perhaps Butler knew because he had seen the…
drorzel | January 30, 2015I wrote up another piece about football for the Conversation, this time drawing on material from Eureka, explaining how great football players are using scientific thinking:
Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman gets called a lot of things. He calls himself the greatest cornerback in the NFL (and Seattle fans tend to agree). Sportswriters and some other players call him a loudmouth and a showboater. Fans of other teams call him a lot of things that shouldn’t see print (even on the internet). One thing you’re not likely to hear anyone on ESPN call Sherman, though, is “scientist.”
And…
drorzel | January 27, 2015I know I said I was done with this story, but this was actually recorded last week: The Daily Planet show on Discovery Channel in Canada contacted me last week when all this deflated-football silliness was exploding, and got a cameraman to come over and record me talking about it. The episode aired Monday night, January 26th, and you can stream it from their archives at the link above (I think it should be episode 216, but when I looked just now, it was just "Episode 16," but the date is correct. My bit is toward the end, starting around the 35:00 mark, but you should totally watch the whole…
drorzel | January 25, 2015I've mentioned in a few places that SteelyKid frequently comes home from school/ camp/ day care singing garbled versions of current pop hits. So for the first time since about 1990, I added a Top 40 station to my car radio presets, so I would know what she was actually trying to sing. This leads to a bunch of seat-dancing and sing-along in the back seat as I drive her to taekwondo and so on, so I give you three of the songs that she's grooving two these days:
First up, we have:
My first reaction to hearing that was "Hey, it's great that Morris Day is getting work..." But, you know, I enjoyed…
drorzel | January 25, 2015The low-level cold I've been nursing for a month now finally exploded into the full unpleasantness of my usual winter illness Saturday, or else I would've been more active following up on my Deflategate article and my ideal gas law post. As it was, for most of the day, I could barely keep on top of clearing comments from moderation.
Anyway, a few things deserve more prominent responses than a comment at the end of a long post, so:
-- I was in bed during the great Bill Belichick press conference, though I saw some mockery of it come across Twitter. While it may not have played well with the…
drorzel | January 23, 2015So, as mentioned yesterday, I got an email asking me about the weird scandal involving the Patriots and underinflated footballs, so I wrote a piece for the Conversation on the subject. since a few people had beaten me to citations of the Ideal Gas Law, though, I decided to bring my own particular set of skills into this, and did an experiment.
[UPDATE: I've added some follow-up/concluding remarks in a separate post from Sunday 1/25. So, if you care about my reaction to Belichick's big press conference, go over there.]
You can see the basic set-up at the link-- I got a couple of footballs from…
drorzel | January 22, 2015One of the cool things about working at Union is that the Communications office gets media requests looking for people to comment on current events, which sometimes get forwarded to me. Yesterday was one of those days, with a request for a scientist to comment on the bizarre sports scandal surrounding the deflated footballs used in the AFC Championship game this past weekend. Which led to me doing an experiment, and writing a short article for The Conversation:
News reports say that 11 of the 12 game balls used by the New England Patriots in their AFC championship game against the…